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0 pointsbryanlarsen1y ago0 comments

> when compared to falcon 9’s costs which are sitting around 100m/launch right now largely due to inflation.

SpaceX's financial situation argues very differently. They have raised relatively little money for a company that is spending multiple billions on two very expensive development programs (Starship and Starlink).

If Falcon cost $100M per launch the 134 launches this year would have bankrupted the company. The $1.7B they raised in spring 2022 was their last major capital injection, and have been self funded since.

If Falcon cost substantially more than $20M to launch SpaceX would need to be getting external money from somewhere. They aren't. Their revenue is well understood and is around $10B per year, and salary costs fot 13,000 people are going to consume most of that. What NASA and the Space Force pay is public knowledge, what they charge for a private launch is known, and the number of Starlink subscribers has been revealed.

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Retric1y ago

SpaceX has several million Starlink customers providing around 6.6 Billion dollars of revenue in 2024. It not clear if it’s profitable yet, but it’s been stated to kick off 100’s of millions in positive cash flow.

As to the salaries of its employees, that’s a major component of launch costs. You can’t point to it and say launch costs must be cheap because they are paying all these people when a large fraction of them are directly or indirectly working on launches.

They are spending ~2 billion per year on Spaceship, but what they charge per launch varies widely. 5 crewed falcon 9 flight cost the government ~260 million each, and the 2 ISS missions where 145 million each. https://payloadspace.com/predicting-spacexs-2024-revenue/

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