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Elon Musk is now saying FH launches by November. I'm going to go mark my calendar for late December...

In all seriousness, this will be awesome to see finally fly and even more awesome if it flies in November!

I don't want to jinx it, but...

Spoiler

Last year they were saying October. Then Amos happened. Please, physics! Don't be RUDe to us!

 

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9 hours ago, Scotius said:

That rising curve looks pretty amazing :) Hopefully more people will want to make money in space.


That rising curve is very pretty, but it's the stock market's estimation of value - which may or may not bear any relationship to reality or the amount of money a company is making.  It's the numbers in the next panel down which are interesting - SpaceX is still eating capital at a frightening rate.  A company that's making money in any significant amount doesn't need massive ongoing infusions of capital.

https://www.axios.com/founders-fund-partner-leaves-to-launch-spacex-focused-fund-2466277199.html - the backstory here, if we ever hear it, will be interesting.   But the tl;dr version is simple enough, SpaceX needs so much funding that someone is founding a company dedicated to supplying that need (and siphoning off their share via commissions).

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11 hours ago, _Augustus_ said:

"Space Exploration Technologies is a space transport startup"

Startup?

Effectively yes, they still require capital from investors and haven't stabilized into a profitable company. The valuation is just an estimate of future value of the company (it's more nuanced than that but it's the basic idea). They're probably more profitable than Tesla which still has a net loss and also a ridiculously high valuation. To me, the biggest difference between Tesla and SpaceX is that the launch market isn't saturated while automotive is definitely saturated and mature. The auto companies are very streamlined in their process, development, procurement, etc. to reduce their costs.

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15 hours ago, CatastrophicFailure said:

As long as it's still going up... they'll call that a win. :confused:

What percentage of the airframe are we talking about here? :)

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2 hours ago, Racescort666 said:

Effectively yes, they still require capital from investors and haven't stabilized into a profitable company. The valuation is just an estimate of future value of the company (it's more nuanced than that but it's the basic idea). They're probably more profitable than Tesla which still has a net loss and also a ridiculously high valuation. To me, the biggest difference between Tesla and SpaceX is that the launch market isn't saturated while automotive is definitely saturated and mature. The auto companies are very streamlined in their process, development, procurement, etc. to reduce their costs.

Presumably if they had enough warning from investors they could drastically raise prices and still have a "mostly full" manifest.  I'd assume that they aren't charging "enough" money in order to get the volumes they want (while building a rocket has to be at least a $30M proposition, *designing* a rocket is in the billions.  Additional volume isn't terribly expensive).  Presumably this follows from Musk's strategic perspective.

I'm still shocked that they keep prices so low if they are still losing money.  I'd expect ULA to be all over them (or not.  They probably don't want to admit just how much they are charging the federal government).

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17 minutes ago, StupidAndy said:

why was the Falcon Heavy launch pushed back to November?

Probably something related to all that "this is going to be really hard and it's likely to explode (sic)" talk from Elon a few weeks back. :wink: It's been speculated by those running the numbers that a pushback to at least November was likely anyway. 

The question is, have they been putting this range-mandated down time to good use at 39b?

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Just now, CatastrophicFailure said:

The question is, have they been putting this range-mandated down time to good use at 39b?

well 39b is still controlled by nasa, but i don't know what they would do besides take down that shuttle thing on the tower at 39a,

wait i know where something is!

From the SpaceX subreddit thing:

it looks like they almost got the thing down!

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24 minutes ago, StupidAndy said:

why was the Falcon Heavy launch pushed back to November?

It's been this way for a long time. Months ago we knew it would be August before SLC-40 was repaired, and we've been told that getting 39A ready for FH would take about 60 days after the crews finished 40. That got it at best as mid October, but also fitting with the rest of the schedule.

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16 hours ago, tater said:

It's been this way for a long time. Months ago we knew it would be August before SLC-40 was repaired, and we've been told that getting 39A ready for FH would take about 60 days after the crews finished 40. That got it at best as mid October, but also fitting with the rest of the schedule.

It's also worth noting that the last launch on LC-39A is listed as OTV-5 on September 7th according to SpaceFlight Now and the rest of the F9 flights don't have a pad listed for the east coast launches.

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