Thursday, June 11, 2026

11: SpaceX

Deep Dive: SpaceX SpaceX lowered the cost of reaching orbit by 20x, then used that advantage to build Starlink. The next question is whether the same route can unlock something even larger: broadband, AI compute, & ...

SpaceX has opened the lowest-cost route into space, and that the largest opportunities are still ahead.

................. For centuries, spices reached Europe over land, via routes controlled by Arab and Venetian middlemen. By the time pepper arrived, the price had been marked up 20-30 times......... Vasco da Gama, a Portuguese mariner and explorer, found a sea path around the Cape of Good Hope, bypassing every middleman on that land route entirely. ........... And that single move collapsed the entire cost structure of the trade. The companies that controlled the new maritime trade became some of the most valuable in history. .............. England chartered the East India Company in 1600 to sail the route itself. The Dutch followed with the Dutch East India Company (VOC) in 1602........... At its peak in 1720, the VOC’s market capitalization reached roughly a third of the Dutch Republic’s entire annual economic output, a share that dwarfs every company in existence today, including Nvidia and Apple. ............

SpaceX is changing the economics of reaching space the way Vasco da Gama changed the economics of reaching Asia.

.............. Connectivity. Most of the world’s internet still depends on physical cables, and those cables do not reach everywhere. Starlink can beam broadband from orbit to anyone, anywhere. ................ Compute. AI data centers on Earth are hitting a power wall. A new data center needs a grid connection that takes years to permit, and electricity is getting scarcer and more expensive. Space offers the potential of abundant solar power without the same land, grid, and permitting constraints that data centers face on Earth. .................... Critical minerals. The rare earth elements that AI chips and energy storage depend on are largely controlled by China. The Moon and the asteroid belt hold reserves that dwarf anything on Earth, outside any single country’s supply chain. ................

one barrier: the cost of reaching orbit.

............. NASA’s Space Shuttle cost $54,500 per kilogram to reach low Earth orbit. SpaceX drove that number down to $2,720, a 20x reduction ................ Starlink turned access to orbit into $11.4B of recurring broadband revenue in 2025. ................ Starlink: the satellite business posting software-grade margins inside an aerospace company

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