SpaceX: A scaleup snapshot
Spacecraft and satellites and super-heavy lift launch, oh my
This week I’m writing a scale-up snapshot about the world’s most valuable privately held aerospace company: SpaceX!
Love ‘em or hate ‘em, SpaceX is a remarkable institution, and the preparations for Starship Flight 8 inspired me to write this.
It’s worth noting that SpaceX is a very very large growth-stage company — in fact, it’s one of the most valuable privately held firms in the world. I’m still organizing this loosely along my early-stage snapshot lines, because it’s a framework I’m comfortable using to structure my thoughts on a company.
Problem
The problem SpaceX was founded to solve is to make humanity a multiplanetary species.
This is a remarkably terse problem statement for what has become the most valuable privately held startup in the world.
Solution
The firm was founded on March 14, 2002, right in the middle of the Space Shuttle era. Access to space required launch vehicles designed and operated to government standards and price points.
To execute on SpaceX’s goal of getting to Mars, the firm had to get to space first.
Once a spacecraft gets into orbit, it’s half way to anywhere. Sending a human crew to Mars requires getting a lot of “stuff” to orbit. So SpaceX designed and flew the Falcon 1, which was a testbed.
Then it built the Falcon 9. It’s notable as the first privately funded, partially reusable, orbital rocket, as well as the first privately funded orbital rocket with a crewed payload. It’s also the most-flown active launch vehicle in the world.
SpaceX also created a larger architecture called the Falcon Heavy, and worked out all the engineering kinks in the design — but flies it rarely compared to the Falcon 9.
Falcon Heavy still isn’t big enough to support crewed missions to Mars, so SpaceX is building a totally new architecture called Starship. It’s thought that this will be big enough to send crews to Mars.
In order to send people to Mars, it is also necessary to keep the crew alive in space. SpaceX got into the cargo transport business with Dragon spacecraft.
Then it iterated on the design to produce Crew Dragon, which could transport both cargo and personnel to space.
SpaceX also operates more satellites than literally any other institution on planet Earth, as part of its Starlink internet megaconstellation. Frankly, I’m still working through what purpose these spacecraft have in the “make humanity multiplanetary” vision — the architecture doesn’t seem right to me for interplanetary communications. However, it sounds like Starlink is providing cash flow at this point, and SpaceX’s R&D is probably pretty expensive.
Leadership
The leadership team is always an essential question when considering a company — it doesn’t matter the stage.
Elon Musk needs no introduction. He is a member of the “Paypal Mafia”, a prolific poster on social media, and perhaps the most polarizing corporate leader in the world today. He’s currently running two multi-billion dollar companies in addition to SpaceX — where he is the CEO and Chief Engineer. I think that he is quite likely:
the best fundraiser of our generation
the best hirer and motivator of engineers of our generation
Gwynne Shotwell is the President and COO of SpaceX. She seems to have played a particular role in the firm’s early business development efforts before moving into the more general COO role.
Markets
Launch
SpaceX is clearly a leader in the launch services market; it’s become a provider of choice for the US national security community, as well as the provider of choice for many commercial institutions. In 2023, the firm performed almost 85% of all American space launches.
Fortune Business says that the global space launch service market was $4.28 billion in 2023, and is expected to grow to $10.98 billion by 2032, a CAGR of 10.6%. The US market was about 40% of the 2023 market, and is expected to grow in importance over this time period.
The Business Research Company thinks launch services globally were worth about $10.3 billion in 2024, will be worth around $11.9 billion in 2025, and will grow at a CAGR of 16.8% to be worth about $22.1 billion by 2029.
Markets and Markets has an even more optimistic view. It sees the global market as having been worth $16.9 billion in 2022, and think it’ll grow to $29.6 billion by 2027 — a CAGR greater than 15%!
Clearly the launch services market is venture scale, and SpaceX’s success itself is a sort of proof of that.
These CAGRs seem particularly high if vehicles like Starship continue to lower the cost of access to space. They’re implicitly suggesting that the lowered launch costs will lead to an explosion of spaceflight operators of some sort. I’m confident that the CAGR will be greater than the GDP growth rate over the period, but that’s a different type of prediction altogether.
For month-to-month tracking of what’s actually going to space, I suggest reading Planetocracy.
Internet
Market Research Future thinks the satellite internet market is worth $13.5 billion in 2025, and that it’ll grow to about $186 billion by 2034 — a CAGR of 33.9%!
Fact.MR says the market was only worth $8.4 billion in 2024, and anticipates a CAGR of 13.5% through 2034. Their prediction for the market size as the end of the period is almost $30 billion.
As of 2023, 46% of the global population was unconnected to the internet — though there’s a real question about this segment’s ability to pay for it. Moreover, only about 1% of the internet accesses the web via satellite. Whatever the specific numbers look like, there’s lots of room for growth here.
Valuation History
Space exploration is always capital intensive.
Here’s SpaceX’s post-money valuation according to Pitchbook.
Notably, not every data point here is from a VC round — some are from secondary transactions, when already-existing shares of the firm (owned by early investors, employees, etc) change hands.
There’s been a massive spike in the firm’s value basically over the past year, from around $175 billion to $350 billion. We don’t know exactly what caused it, but there are two significant first-time achievements over this timeframe:
relighting a Raptor rocket engine in space
catching a Starship booster using a “chop sticks” gantry
I’m skeptical that either accomplishment on its own, or even both taken together, actually justifies a doubling in the firm’s value. The zero-g Raptor relight (which is far more difficult than it sounds) is absolutely critical to Starship living up to Elon’s vision for a Mars-capable spacecraft. But the company is already capable of slinging smaller payloads there. This is certainly a massive incremental improvement in capability, but it’s just that — an incremental improvement. The first stage recovery is critical lowering the costs of each Starship flight, but not actually essential to the success of the flight itself.
Selected Competition
There are no true comparable companies in terms of the breadth of technical capabilities, but there are quite a few firms that do one, or a few, things that SpaceX does.
Blue Origin is the most similar company in terms of aspirational goals and planned breadth
It is notoriously quiet about…most things…so it’s hard to consider relative performance quantitatively using growth-stage company metrics
It seems to be more Moon-focused in its long-term plans
Rocket Lab is a broadly similar company in terms of operations in small-lift launch and satellite manufacturing — but hasn’t declared its intention to launch crewed spacecraft or build rockets that are quite as big as SpaceX
It is publicly traded, and on March 6, 2025 had a closing market capitalization of $9.34 billion, and a PE ratio of -50.48.
The firm is interested in Mars as part of its long-term strategy
Firefly Aerospace is really positioning itself more to compete with Blue Origin in the sense that it’s working on launch vehicles and Moon missions
Firefly’s Blue Ghost probe landed on the Moon earlier this week
Eutelsat is a French telecommunications satellite operator that competes with Starlink
Broadly, any telecommunications satellite operator with assets in geostationary orbit competes with Starlink, as the technologies are complementary
Eutelsat merged with OneWeb, so it now has a small megaconstellation of satellites to provide internet as well
It is publicly traded and on March 6, 2025 had a closing market capitalization of €3.28 billion ($3.55 billion).
Project Kuiper is a division of Amazon, but as a standalone business unit, it competes directly with Starlink
Amazon is publicly traded, but as Project Kuiper is neither providing connectivity yet, nor the major business of Amazon, the market cap isn’t useful.
Technology
SpaceX provides a remarkable number of goods and services internally, and to other institutions in the space sector:
Launch services
Small payloads through rideshare programs like Transporter and Bandwagon
Medium payloads through dedicated Falcon 9 missions
Heavy payloads through dedicated Falcon Heavy missions
Crewed spacecraft through Crew Dragon services
Spacesuit manufacturing
Small satellite manufacturing
Internet ground terminal manufacturing
Internet services
Spacecraft flight operations
Enterprise Resource Planning software (which in programmatic complexity I think is nearly comparable to building a rocket)
I think that’s everything.
SpaceX has made the decision to favor vertical integration, which should come as a surprise to absolutely nobody given Musk’s reported obsession with the Idiot Index.
Frankly, the number of competencies this firm has is remarkable — especially considering how many of them are safety-critical to their users. That doesn’t mean I don’t like the approach, but it’s a notable institutional decision that has risk.
Progress
SpaceX has built and flown operational missions on several different types of launch vehicle — one of which has been human-rated, and is the most-flown launch vehicle active today. I’d put down a number of how many missions they’ve flown, but it’ll probably be out of date between when I write this on Tuesday evening and when it gets read on or after Friday.
Space Capital has an excellent report on Starship that I recommend to anybody looking to understand in more detail why it matters. This post is concerned with it mostly as the tool to get to Mars, but there’s plenty of other reasons why progress on it should be of interest to people in and around the space community.
SpaceX has also built and flown operational missions on two different types of human-rated spacecraft, one of which is certified to take people to and from space.
Starlink contains, as of February, about 7,000 spacecraft on orbit. It’s thought that the service generated around $8 billion in revenue last year. The 2025 projections are even brighter — $12 billion in revenue is possible, and free cash flow could grow to around $2 billion.
This isn’t a startup anymore.
Key Open Questions
What exactly does an exit look like?
How sensitive is the valuation to flight anomalies?
Final Thoughts
SpaceX is responsible for some of the most impressive engineering achievements of the past twenty years. It has operationalized medium-lift launch in ways that NASA tried, and failed, to do. It’s also enabled American crewed spaceflight again.
Perhaps most importantly, the firm has inspired a generation of engineers, scientists, and technologists.
Sheryl Sandberg, the former COO at Meta, is known to say:
If you're offered a seat on a rocket ship, don't ask what seat. Just get on.
Who am I to argue with that?
But just because somebody offers you a ride on a rocket ship, and you’re ready to get onboard…doesn’t mean you shouldn’t ask about the ticket price.
I’m in awe of SpaceX’s engineers and their ongoing technical accomplishments. I’m also very impressed by the recent growth in SpaceX’s valuation. I just wish I understood what justifies it better.