this post was submitted on 15 Jul 2026
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It's almost like things are fundamentally different now from "historically." Historically, we (I'm in the launch vehicle industry) didn't have reusable launch vehicles. Even 10 years ago the launch community was hugely skeptical of being able to successfully refurbish a rocket and maintain mission assurance.
My point is that most of the launches being performed now are not state sponsored or for scientific discovery. You are looking at it from the lens of a period when there were only two providers and only a few customers. With tons of commercial companies interested in proliferated LEO programs, there is a lot of profit in launch.
However, that STILL only gives the stock a value of around $8/share.
If you took the state funding out of Space X how much money do they make?
NASA flies roughly 3 missions per year. DoD/DoW launches around 12 missions per year. NRO launches around 5 per year. That is a total of around 20 government missions per year. SpaceX launches roughly 150 missions per year, so removing state funding would only take out about 13% of their $18 billion annual revenue. 100 of those launches are Starlink, which gets funded by both commercial, private users, and government users.