How much could SpaceX, the fast-moving private-rocket company founded by Elon Musk, actually be worth?
After SpaceX's successful launch of 60 experimental Starlink internet satellites in May, CNBC reported the company's estimated value was about $33.3 billion. This barely eclipsed the valuation of Tesla, the electric-car company Musk heads. This was a roughly $10 billion jump in valuation compared with estimates from 2017.
But a new report by Morgan Stanley Research sees a lot more potential for disruption of the internet industry with SpaceX's planned constellation of nearly 12,000 Starlink satellites.
Titled "SpaceX, Starlink and Tesla: Moving into Orbit?" and sent to Business Insider on Tuesday, the document gives SpaceX a base valuation of $52 billion — an increase of more than 50% compared with the latest reported number.
"This assumes that expanding access to the internet drives broadband penetration from 50% to 75% of the global population, with SpaceX able to capture ~10% of the incremental broadband subscribers," the analysts wrote.
However, that's just the middle-of-the-road estimate: The firm's range in value for SpaceX is roughly a hundredfold.
Read more: Europe's space agency says it dodged a SpaceX satellite because the company wouldn't move it out of the way. Buggy software may be to blame.
If you're a pessimist, and Starlink either struggles to turn its first few hundred satellites into a working internet service or fails to get many customers, the analysts said their "bear case" for SpaceX is just $5 billion. Their "bull case," on the other hand, is a staggering $120 billion.
If that rosy scenario pans out for SpaceX, the company may be pulling in as much as General Electric, Verizon, Fannie Mae, and even JPMorgan Chase.
The analysts shared their summary and methodology ahead of the second annual Morgan Stanley Space Summit in New York on December 10.
Why Starlink could be so disruptive — and make SpaceX and Musk a lot of money
An illustration of SpaceX's Starlink satellite internet constellation in orbit around Earth. SpaceX
Traditional satellite internet relies on spacecraft that are larger, older, more expensive, and about 22,236 miles away from Earth. This limits coverage and bandwidth while making for laggy connections. Starlink, meanwhile, would hug Earth at hundreds to 1,000 miles away with a larger number of newer satellites. What's more, they'll link together into a floating internet backbone, providing a faster alternative to fiber-optic cables that span the world.
According to current government documents, Starlink may consist of nearly 12,000 satellites by the end of 2027. If that happens, SpaceX may own and operate more than six times the number of all operational spacecraft in orbit.
The goal is to cover Earth with high-speed, low-latency, and affordable internet access. Even partial deployment of Starlink would benefit the financial sector and bring pervasive broadband internet to rural and remote areas.
Completing the project may cost $10 billion or more, Gwynne Shotwell, the president and chief operating officer of SpaceX, said in May 2018. That gambit — launching thousands of custom-built desk-sized satellites sent into space, 60 at a time, with perhaps 200 different Falcon 9 rocket missions — could be massive. Musk said during a call with reporters on May 15 that it could net the company perhaps $30 billion to $50 billion per year.
An astronomer in the Netherlands captured the Starlink train zooming across the sky shortly after its launch. Vimeo/SatTrackCam Leiden But SpaceX plans to get a robust Starlink service up and running much sooner than 2027, perhaps by 2020 or 2021.
"For the system to be economically viable, it's really on the order of 1,000 satellites," Musk said in May, "which is obviously a lot of satellites, but it's way less than 10,000 or 12,000."
He added: "I think within a year and a half, maybe two years — if things go well — SpaceX will probably have more satellites in orbit than all other satellites combined."
Read more: Elon Musk just revealed new details about Starlink, a plan to surround Earth with 12,000 high-speed internet satellites. Here's how it might work.
More recently, SpaceX asked the US government to spread out its Starlink satellites to cover more of Earth's surface sooner, Eric Berger at Ars Technica first reported.
SpaceX does have competition from other companies that are launching or planning to launch global satellite-internet constellations, such as OneWeb and Amazon's forthcoming Project Kuiper.
But Mark Handley, a computer-networking researcher at University College London who's studied Starlink, previously told Business Insider that SpaceX's "is the most exciting new network we've seen in a long time," adding that the project could affect the lives of everybody.
One thing Morgan Stanley Research's report does not seem to account for, though, is SpaceX's planned Starship launch system. If realized, according to Musk, it may reduce the cost of access to space by 100 to 1,000 times by being fully reusable. Mass estimates also suggest the towering 400-foot-tall system could launch hundreds of Starlink satellites into orbit at a time.
Dhalphir on September 18th, 2019 at 04:16 UTC »
If Bond movies have taught me anything, the purpose of this satellite network will actually be to block out the sun for ransom.
MayOverexplain on September 18th, 2019 at 01:04 UTC »
I’m watching this so very eagerly as someone whose options are either Hughesnet satellite (crap) and 3G Verizon hotspot (lower latency crap). Technically it’s a LTE hotspot, but data rate and signal strength here means we get 3G.
EDIT:
Thank you so much everyone for the advice!
WISP/Microwave unfortunately isn't an option for us thanks to us not having line-of-sight to the one tower in the area. We've even looked into elevating an antenna.
There's a lot of recommendations for trying signal boosters/repeaters so I'm going to look more into those, my concern is that even when I'm in town and getting 3-4 bars of LTE, we still get lousy data here (functionally 3G speeds anyways). As it typically gets even worse at certain times of day, I suspect the network is just overloaded. I've complained to Verizon, but that seems to be just farting in the wind - no other network owns a tower with coverage.
OCCULTISTFORTUNATE on September 17th, 2019 at 21:20 UTC »
With having internet everywhere, would it remove the need of a cell coverage provider? Or eventually replace them? If so would other companies try and put their own satellite internet in space or would spacex have a monopoly on that service?