reminder that spaceX has an entire team dedicated to stopping musk meddling in the real work
Wait really? I wanna a link for that
My only hope is that Musk's bullshit doesn't drag SpaceX down. Shotwell has that company running well.
It should be nationalised. SpaceX is providing critical infrastructure for the US/NATO. Having it run by a private, for-profit entity is a security risk. Musk has already proven this by cutting off Starlink access for Ukrainian offensive operations.
Musk did a lot worse than that. When he used Starlink to interfere with the operation of the drones directly he committed an act of war. That act is a weaponization of a space-based array to attack a military asset if done by a government would be met with immediate retaliation, but a private citizen somehow amasses the ability to be the most intolerable 60's Bond villain of all time and what, we are all supposed to be hunky-dory with it?
Ok, now what % of that was Starlink satellites?
Great question! It sent me into a Google frenzy and here is what I found.
Q3 to me means three month period from 1st July to 30th September. During this time, there were 20 Starlink 'V2 mini' and 2 'V1.5' launches. Each 'V2 mini' mission contained 21-23 satellites, which I averaged to 22, and ~50 in each 'V1.5' mission. Further, each 'V1.5' satellite weighs in at 306kg and each 'V2 mini' weighs in at 800kg.
Phew! With all that out of the way, putting all that together ((20×800×22)+(2×306×50)), we arrive at a figure of 382,600kg. Uncannily, this is almost exactly the same as the figure reported in the graphic,
and of course there were a lot more Falcon 9 launches in the intervening period, leading me to believe the reported tonnage figure excludes Starlink satellites. See edit below.This is all napkin maths done in the middle of the night, please feel free to (gently!) correct me if needed.
Inevitable correction: Q3 (as defined above) saw only one non-Starlink related Falcon 9 launch (source), therefore ~99.6% of reported tonnage was Starlink related!
I see 5 non-Starlink launches, only 1 of which is a Falcon Heavy.
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7/1 Euclid (2160 kg)
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7/29 Jupiter-3 (9200 kg)
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8/3 Galaxy 37 (5063 kg)
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8/26 Crew 7 (13000 kg)
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9/2 SDA Tranche 0B (mass not listed)
Via https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Falcon_9_and_Falcon_Heavy_launches
So, that's more like 9-10% of their Q3 total, and still more than CASC or Roscosmos.
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SpaceX became dominant in the launch market the same wat Amazon became dominant in the delivery market.
By using massive investor capital to undercut the competition by operating under cost.
It's not really amazing at all, it's perfectly predictably. The other parties need to turn a profit, SpaceX/Starlink doesn't, so they're cheaper.
Step one of enshittification.
This strategy can also be called "investing".
If their internal Falcon 9 launch cost is $20 something million, they do pretty well on a lot of commercial launches. They're also starting to get cash flow positive on Starlink.
It's actually still quite amazing that this model works with literal fucking space travel.
Probably shouldn't be commenting on a 3-month-old post on a memes forum, but this seems highly inaccurate to me. Do you have a source for it?
It's pretty simple.
1 - SpaceX baaaarely made a profit in q1 2023, if they did better in q2, we don't know (yet).
2 - SpaceX main customer is Starlink, making up 62 of the 96 launches.
3 - launching a falcon 9 costs 67m (if you're a third party, but I'm assuming for the sake of this post this is a healthy pricepoint).
4 - Starlink has a 2.6m subscribers, which (if they have expensive subscriptions), can pay for 23 launches per year assuming zero other costs.
So, at the absolute minimum, Starlink bought 39 launches, totalling 2.6 billion, using investor capital. So at the very least, that's 2.6 billion dollars SpaceX burned and would have had to get elsewhere.
Note that those are minimum numbers. The real numbers are probably an order of magnitude higher, since Starlink also has to pay for terrestrial bandwidth for 2.6m people. It's far more likely every single one of those 62 Starlink launches is venture capital. And despite selling 62 launches to that way, SpaceX barely made a profit.
In other words, without this free cash, they would need to massive up their prices, probably somewhere to the level of Rocketlab, which does need make money.
