🚀 SpaceX and the economics of space

Cheaper rockets are only the beginning of the story

My fellow pro-growth/progress/abundance Up Wingers in America and around the world:

A public SpaceX will be a great boon for those intrigued by the economics of space. Elon Musk's rocket company was responsible for more than 80 percent of all mass launched to orbit in 2025 and is a key element of America's long-term space efforts. You can’t study the subject without studying SpaceX, and it will soon be a lot easier.

SpaceX’s new status is also going to give plenty of insight into Musk's artificial-intelligence plans. The Financial Times reports that while SpaceX wants investors to believe in its rockets—especially Starship—they should also focus on chatbots. The $1.8 trillion valuation that Musk is chasing rests on a wager that xAI, its AI arm, can multiply revenues roughly 100-fold by 2030. Goldman Sachs, the lead investment bank, reckons the unit will generate a whopping $322 billion in revenue that year, up from $3.2 billion in 2025. Such arithmetic assumes, according to the FT that xAI addresses a $27 trillion potential market, and that Grok, the unit's family of models, vaults past rivals Anthropic, Google, and OpenAI across coding, security, and agentic tools. (The latter may be more a stunner than the former.)

Good luck, and let’s light that IPO candle!

But let’s also return to the economics of space, which will no doubt play a role in the future prospects of SpaceX, Blue Origin, and other players in the expanding sector. To me, it’s a fascinating topic made less theoretical by SpaceX, as will become clear in the following paragraphs. Some of this quasi-literature review may be familiar to long-time readers, most of it won’t be.