SpaceX's Starship launching to orbit for first time ever today
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Unofficial Hacker News client; not affiliated with Y Combinator.
SpaceX's Starship launching to orbit for first time ever today
Unofficial Hacker News client; not affiliated with Y Combinator.
paulus_magnus2 · · focus · HN ↗
-- they have an orbital launcher with the largest diameter cargo bay
-- larger sats have bigger antennas and bigger PV area and more bus power. this scales as diam^2
-- 26 x Starlink v3 ~40-65 tons to LEO
-- every launch generates revenue, locks out the orbit for competitors.
-- they can launch more volume, more mass and cheaper than anyone else by a large margin
-- the design is validated - things will work
-- there is technical debt, issues but the rocket did the job
Caveats
-- timelines for full reusability are optimistic etc
-- there will be other issues in scaling to launching gigawats into orbit
-- cooling will have to be
-- Musk might go Full Villan mode before the thing works
[meta] I really didn't like that other negative comment getting voted to the top. Looks like it's made by someone who never worked in a bigco. For every bigco I worked, at any time there were hundreds if not thousands of open issues. You could list them and try arguing the company is about to fail and you'd scare people who don't know better.
It's the judgement of the severity of the issue that matters not #no_of_issues. And if there were 0 issues would our job exist?
[edit] getting the formatting right is very hard, maybe we could get a preview / TinyMCE ?
trencedamp · · focus · HN ↗
jfoster · · focus · HN ↗
They push them to the limits in testing/development to make them reliable in production.
Starship still in testing/development.
spwa4 · · focus · HN ↗
People here act like SpaceX is the only or the best rocket startup. That trial-and-error is somehow the superior design strategy and that that is responsible for SpaceX's success.
In reality, of course, SpaceX's only real distinguishing feature is how much they blow up and how they keep getting funding despite financial analysis after financial analysis saying "this will never work, it's a loss". But no worries! Starlink will fix it! Except ... when calculating Starlink profits they're ... also negative. Starlink caused a huge boost in SpaceX funding, while losing money. How do you do that?
In my personal experience, creating a company that runs at a loss results in losing money. I guess SpaceX makes it up on volume?
SpaceX's secret is dollars. Investor dollars. The amount of money Musk has (frequently literally) more than the funding of EVERY other private rocket startup COMBINED.
jve · · focus · HN ↗
No.
Starlink profits are positive since 2023: <a href="https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1720098480037773658" rel="nofollow">https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1720098480037773658
Their growth is insane. The operating income (not revenue which is double digits, but irrelevant) in 2025 was 4,4B and with the growth they have, they are profiting multiple billions a year.
spwa4 · · focus · HN ↗
First "breakeven cash flow" does not equal profit. But that's just Musk, as the CEO (and thus accountable for financial statements he makes to the SEC), cannot actually say profit.
More generally, never believe any kind of financial engineer when they say this. It's bullshit. Guaranteed. Why? Simple: if it was true, they would never tell you. They would take a shovel and put their own money in, they would charge large banks to let them put their money in (yes, seriously). They'd literally charge other rich people money to let them put their money in ... You would hear about it 20 years after the fact in an interview done after retirement, and only then.
Specifically, what's wrong here Starlink pays for it's own launches in stock (they pay by issuing stock to SpaceX). If you think about it, that's creating money out of nothing:
SpaceX holds Starlink debt, and counts that as assets (as a positive amount)
Starlink issues and "succesfully" sells shares to SpaceX, and counts that as income (as a positive amount)
So you see what's happening here: these are two positive numbers, but ... obviously have to sum to zero! After all if I buy an ice cream from you for 5$ the change in my assets and the change in your assets has to sum to zero (-5$ for me, +5$ for you = 0$ for both of us together). Not for SpaceX and Starlink. SpaceX gives rocket launches to Starlink and the sum of both their assets is billions!
If you look at actual cash flow, Starlink's last quarter was 4.4B operating income, minus 2.4B depreciation and amortization, minus 4.17B capital expenditures. How do you calculate the company worth? Easy capital expenditures are zero (because they "convert" capital to goods, which can be resold, except of course they can't really).
So for "total assets" on the financial statements that's 4.4B - 2.4B PLUS 4.17B per year.
For actual cash or resources, it's obviously 4.4B - 2.4B - 4.17B or MINUS 2 billion per year.
Which one is true depends on whether SpaceX can succesfully sell Starlink's shares at the internal valuation they're using. Obviously the safe accounting value is the one with the minus sign. Or to put it differently: Starlink has "increased in value" by 2 billion, so investors (for now SpaceX) need to give it 2 billion to continue operating.