12 thoughts on “Starburst Ventures”

  1. It is an interesting report. It basically dismisses CubeSats so that is a bit strange. The rest of the data seems good but if they are dismissive of one element, it makes me a bit weary of the other points the report makes.

  2. tl;dr there’s a huge overinvestment in launch, and launch is struggling to find customers with low vehicle fill rates across the board.

    Starship hype is just that – there’s no magic of economics to make the most hyperbolic claims happen.

    My takeaway is ( and was before reading the report ) that there’s way more investment that needs to go into actually building the new revenue streams from satellite and other spacecraft applications, than pouring more investment into launchers.

    Funny how when zero interest rate insanity gets peeled back the obvious becomes obvious again

    1. The only solution to the insufficient fill rate are satellite constellations. Without its own constellation, Falcon 9 would have too much launch capacity for the available market. So, the leading launchers can likewise launch constellations. But then they will stiff have to compete with SpaceX’s efficiency which is very challenging to do.

      1. I don’t know if it’s the “only” solution but it’s certainly the most promising avenue currently to actually expand the revenue base that goes into the space industry value chain funnel, yes.

        Everyone across the entire industry should be crossing fingers that _all_ of the proposed constellations become financially viable – that includes OneWeb, Kuiper, Telesats joke, and all the other ones floating about. Otherwise there simply won’t be the required services revenue growth to grow spaceraft manufacturing and launch segments

        It’s also abundantly clear that the free money period is currently over

        1. Gee I can remember the days when SPS’s were supposed to be the means to bootstrap us into a workable space infrastructure ala the High Frontier. How times have changed.

          1. I think SPS is actually in a better shape than ever, Europe committed a credible publicly funded risk reduction and technology maturation program to it – SOLARIS.

            I wish we had more gonads to to similar for other prospective ideas – mining asteroids for example. Yes, everyone knows the ROI for private capital isn’t currently there, the risk factor is way too high. That’s why we should be committing a steady substantial stream of public funding with the explicit goal of removing the high risks for private industry to go in.

            Technically, you could even count things like OSIRIS-REx and Psyche as those risk reduction programs, but it’s way too few and far between, driven by science goals, not technology advancement goals.

          2. That depends. Socialists have yet to prove to me they understand risk/reward well enough not to waste my tax money. Until they can I say keep investment private.

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