The SpaceX journey

The SpaceX journey

SpaceX has gone from a scrappy rocket startup to the biggest launch provider on the planet. It’s also a telco giant, an AI player, and the record holder for the most valuable IPO of all time. And it all comes down to one idea: rockets you can fly again and again. So in this Squiz Shortcut, we'll take a look at:

• How reusable rockets changed everything

• What Starlink and Starship actually are

• And why Wall Street thinks SpaceX is worth so much

🙋🏻‍♀️ This newsletter was written by Jonathan Liondis and Larissa Huntington

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Squiz the Shortcut

Why does SpaceX come up in the news so much?
Well, the company is involved in a lot more than just launching rockets. It’s also a telecommunications giant through Starlink, a social platform through X, it runs data centres to power AI, and it’s training its own Grok model. On top of that, it works on military and intelligence projects and manufactures space hardware. And anyone following the career of its founder Elon Musk will know he’s got some super ambitious goals, so the company tends to be in the public eye a lot…

Let’s wind it back a bit… How did it start?
Musk founded SpaceX in 2002 with a mission statement that was true to those ambitious goals: “To make life multiplanetary.” Now, it’s one thing to say that, but quite another to make it happen. The problem he kept coming up against was that getting to space was way too expensive. And that was because most rockets were disposable. 

What happened to them?
They flew once, and the spent booster (the bottom part that powers the first part of the launch) was dumped in the ocean or left drifting around in space. NASA tried to fix this with the Space Shuttle program, which was designed, owned, and operated by the US government, but it was too complex and expensive to achieve true reusability.

How was the problem solved?
SpaceX set out to change that with a rocket called Falcon 9, which first flew in 2010. And in the decade that followed, they started landing the boosters back on Earth, standing upright - something a lot of people in the industry thought was impossible.

So that’s when things really took off for them?
Yep... Falcon 9 is on track to be the most launched rocket in history, with more than 600 flights. It can put a serious amount of cargo into orbit (as in, a whole bus-load), and it carries astronauts to the International Space Station in SpaceX's Dragon capsule. The company is flying more rockets than anyone else, doing it far cheaper, and winning almost all the government and commercial missions. And they've still got spare capacity - and that’s where Starlink comes in… 

What exactly is Starlink?
It’s basically broadband-level internet delivered by satellites… When you buy Starlink, you get a flat panel that works as an antenna which you put on your house, car, boat, or even a plane. That faces up into the sky and connects to a network of more than 11,000 satellites in orbit.

That’s a lot…
It really is… For context, before Starlink came along, there were only around 3,000 satellites orbiting the Earth. They’re launched in a big flatpacked stack and then all move to where they need to go. If you ever look into the night sky in the country, sometimes you can see them all in a row. But some astronomers are critical of Starlink - they argue thousands of satellites in orbit make it harder to study the stars. 

Has it grown?
Yep… Since first launching in 2019, Starlink now has around 12 million subscribers worldwide, and it brought in about A$16 billion in revenue last year. So pretty quickly, it went from being a rocket company to a telecommunications giant. Now SpaceX wants to make getting to space even cheaper. Enter Starship…

Tell me about Starship…
Starship is SpaceX’s next-generation rocket and it’s huge… As in, it's basically a skyscraper (taller than the Statue of Liberty and Big Ben) and it has to be that big because it’s the rocket that's meant to go to the Moon and, eventually, Mars. So the plan is to launch it, refuel it in orbit, and then send it on its way. And unlike Falcon 9, the entire Starship system (so, rocket and spacecraft) is designed to be reused. 

Just explain that system…
The 2 main components are best explained like this: the bottom half is called the Super Heavy. It’s a massive 71m-tall first-stage booster packed with 33 Raptor engines just to get the system off the ground. You might remember the first time SpaceX caught the Super Heavy upright in giant mechanical ‘chopsticks’ in October 2024. It was quite the sight…

What’s the other part?
Then there’s the top half, also confusingly called Starship (or ‘Ship’). This is the actual spacecraft with the pointed nosecone and flaps. It’s the part that goes into orbit in the second stage, carrying cargo or passengers. During a trial run recently, Ship 40 landed in waters off the coast of Western Oz and was towed back to Christmas Island before being retrieved by SpaceX and shipped back to the US.

What will it mean if SpaceX can make Starship work?
It’ll be a readily reusable spacecraft sitting on top of the world's biggest rocket. The cost of launching would come down even further, and the amount it can carry - and how often it can launch - stands to go way up.

Is it operational yet?
Yep… In a nice bit of timing, it flew its first orbital flight this week - on the same day that SpaceX's first rocket, Falcon 1, made orbit back in 2008. But while missions to the Moon and Mars are in plans for its future, its first job is to put more satellites into orbit. And because it’s so big, it can take a lot of them. A single Starship can put up about 10 times the Starlink capacity of a Falcon launch. Eventually, it’ll also carry AI data centres into orbit…

Sounds hev…
Yep… And expensive. This is where the IPO (initial public offering) comes in. Until recently, SpaceX was the world's most valuable private company, but when it listed on the stock market in June, it became the most valuable IPO of all time and turned Musk into a trillionaire on paper overnight. 

Has it maintained its value?
The share price has dropped a fair bit since then, but the company’s valuation reflects how big its ambitions are. Before the IPO happened, X and its AI division, xAI, were folded into SpaceX - the bet being that SpaceX can bring AI computing power online in orbit faster than data centres can be built on the ground.

Why put AI in space?
If you’ve been following the conversation about AI lately, you’ll know there's been a lot of pushback on data centres here on Earth. People are worried about how much power and water they use, and getting planning approval can take years. SpaceX’s idea is that powering AI could eventually happen from space. It says its experience running thousands of satellites could carry over to its AI satellites, which it's calling Starmind, and it wants to start putting them up into orbit as early as next year. 

And Starship will put those up?
Yep… Just as Starlink soaked up Falcon 9’s spare capacity, Starmind is how SpaceX plans to use Starship's. And the scale is huge - Falcon 9 currently launches a bit over 100 times a year. Starship is aiming for thousands of times. 

Where does the Mars goal come in?
SpaceX needs an enormous amount of money to achieve the goal of putting humans on Mars, and that ambition has turned it into a huge business. It’s the biggest rocket company in the world, the biggest satellite internet provider, and it’s building the biggest AI chip factory in the world while being an AI developer/trainer. It’s also building out the infrastructure to support all of that.

So where to next?
From here, you can expect Starship's launch cadence to increase rapidly. It launches out of Texas at the moment, but it’ll probably start blasting off from Cape Canaveral - where Apollo and the Space Shuttle flew from - before the end of the year. And SpaceX is also building 10 more launch pads from scratch in Louisiana.

Will the company retire Falcon altogether?
That’s the plan… It’d see Starlink, Starmind, and even astronauts moved onto Starship. That’s because Starship is also one of the vehicles that will take astronauts back to the Moon's surface under NASA's Artemis program. Then there's the big question of whether Tesla eventually gets folded into SpaceX too… 

How likely is that?
They’re partnering with SpaceX on that record breaking AI chip factory we mentioned (called Terafab) and Tesla’s new robots keep popping up in SpaceX's renderings of what life on Mars might look like, so maybe they’re giving us a clue already. Watch this space…

Onto our Recommendations

Listening: This episode of Josh Szeps' podcast Uncomfortable Conversations with Anthony Colangelo goes into the story of SpaceX in more detail, and covers off what NASA's up to, and how China and the US are racing back to the Moon.

Reading: Space journalist Eric Berger’s book Liftoff, all about the Falcon 1 and the SpaceX team that got it off the ground. 

Watching: The moment SpaceX caught the super heavy booster with mechanical ‘chopsticks’ for the first time in the Starship program back in 2024. It was a huge achievement for the company…

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