ddp26A forecast of the fair market value of SpaceX's businesses
> Starship at $170B is pure option value on technology still in advanced testing.
The argument that Starship is somehow an experimental/unproven technology that might fail to materialise was absurd but plausible sounding before flight 1, there were many new technologies simultaneously being deployed to a single launch system in one go.
But after 3 tower catches of the booster demonstrating centimetres of guided precision of the entire stack, this is becoming a tired argument.
I know the author is not making that case at all here, but it seems like one the core reasons to undervalue SpaceX is that Starship might not work out, and this all sounds exactly like how reusability might not work out for the Falcon 9 from 10 years ago.
The question is not even whether or not Starship works. Starship is, in theory, designed with the idea of getting many, many payloads to Mars. However, getting payloads to Mars is not currently something that anyone is paying for; even NASA isn't going to focus on Mars for at least another decade (likely more). And in the meantime, it's not like we don't have rockets capable of getting payloads to Mars (the Saturn V was fully capable of doing so in the 60s). Likewise in the meantime, the Artemis plans that look to require a dozen+ launches for a single moonshot aren't painting Starship in a favorable light.
So what is the near-to-medium-term economic prospect of Starship? That's the question. You can't just say "bigger rocket make more money", because there exists a useful upper to the size of payloads that companies actually want to ship to LEO in practice. To use an analogy, we have jumbo jets, but most flights are not on jumbo jets.
> because there exists a useful upper to the size of payloads that companies actually want to ship to LEO in practice
This is only true because we are so completely beholden to the tyranny of the rocket equation with the current status quo. With the $/kg (and payload volume) that Starship would unlock, the entire ELO/GEO/Interplanetary/Deep Space market looks very different.
Labs in space. Hotels in space. Weapons in space. Much more interesting satellites in space. More government science missions. Privately funded science/research missions. etc
Like imagine how much better the James web could have been with such a large and cheap launch vehicle.
That's not how this works. The JWST was limited by the size of its faring, but increasing the size of the faring doesn't mean they'd ship a less complex telescope with the same functionality; they'd ship an equally-complex telescope with more functionality. Better for science, yes, but that doesn't translate to more expenditure that could be captured by the launch company. And that still relies on a government that gives a damn about funding science, which is not not the direction that the US is heading in.
> that doesn't translate to more expenditure that could be captured by the launch company.
Of course it does. With Starship, SpaceX could've charged NASA/ESA more to launch a bigger JWST than the cost to launch with Ariane 5, with huge profit margins.
On top of that, with a much larger fairing, you could almost certainly simplify the telescope and increase capability. A significant part of the JWST's complexity is the unfolding sequence, which could be simplified with a fairing that is more than double (triple? quadruple?) the volume.