this post was submitted on 13 Jun 2026
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me_irl
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I mean they are literally the most successful space company ever and have revolutioned launch systems and completely revitalised the industry.
NASA also benefits from contracts as they don't have to pay billions to develop the rocket that would have to justify it's existence every 4 years, get reworked and design requirements changed constantly and most likely get cut 80% if the way through development and can instead just spend money on the actual missions.
That's all because of government de-funding of NASA and billionaires siphoning away so much money from the economy that they have the capital available to start vanity space companies. Even still, SpaceX's biggest commercial success story is Starlink, which could easily be outclassed by terrestrial internet if ISPs bothered, and is a maintenance nightmare that requires launching a whole bunch of satellites every five years or so. The rest of their money is from government contracts which is the continued siphoning of public money into private hands. If NASA was tasked with making reusable rockets, it'd be cheaper in the long run and the public would benefit from shared research, but again, it's intentionally made inefficient for political purposes.
Even with all of these advantages, the vast majority of SpaceX's valuation comes from their AI story, thanks to the AI bubble, which is currently so much of a money drain that it has more than wiped out all profits from their space activities.
No, SpaceX biggest success story is the Falcon9. The most flown launch system in history by a huge margin, most reliable launch system in history by a wide margin, and absurdly cheap thanks to the integrated supply chain and reusablitly, launches booked out years and years in advance.
And you're massively downplaying starlink. It's biggest use cases are things like ships and planes that cannot possibly use terrestrial broadband. Then even with rural users it's a game changer as ISP arent going to spend millions rolling out high speed connection to the middle of nowhere. It's just not economical for them.
Based on past NASA projects it would be so much more expensive for them to develop them themselves even without the inevitable constantly shifting budgets and mission requirements. You can blame that on whatever you want, but it's still the reality.
None of that matters when SpaceX is bleeding money like crazy thanks to the AI that is supposed to justify its trillion dollar valuation.