Post by Alain FournierYou do understand that SpaceX is a very profitable company.
The bigger picture:
Should Twitter/X go Chapter 11, it remains to be seen whether Melon Husk
will wish to keep control and invest more of his money to pay off the
$13b debt he saddled Twitter with, or whether he will dilote his
onwership and get the $13b creditors to become shareholders and oust
Melon Husk as master of ceremonies at company.
Being opaque, we don't know how SpaceX is funding its pet projects,
whether it is Musk&friends investing a lot of their own cash into the
venture or whether it is nearly self sufficient.
Should Melon have to redirect some of his cash towards bailing out
X/Twitter to keep control of it, it might force SpaceX to slow the pace
of devcelopment of Starship and reduce launch rate for Starlink. At
this stage of development, I have to wonder about financial advantages
of launching each 50 new satellites since the Earth already has coverage
and it is the number of base stations that dictate total system capacity.
From the moon point of view, Husk had pitched Starship as a done deal to
NASA, but it seems to me that it is far from it. There is still a lot of
development needed to get to a point where NASA would even let a human
board the thing, let alone fly it and land it on Moon.
Lets assume for a second that "Gateway" is cancelled and Artemis is
limited to weekend camping trips on the surface (Apollo V2). How
feasible would it be for Starship to dock to Orion to pickup passengers,
land on moon, take off from moon, dock to Orion to drop off passengers
and then also return to Earth and land so it could be re-used instead of
left in Moon orbit forever?
If fuel needed for return to Earth very significant?