WHAT GOES up must come down. That was certainly true of dogecoin, a cryptocurrency enthusiastically promoted by Elon Musk. It surged before the weekend after Mr Musk’s latest tweet about it, but slumped after he jokingly called it “a hustle” on “Saturday Night Live” , a fixture of American TV comedy, which he hosted on May 8th.
As with Tesla, complacent incumbents have been trying to respond. United Launch Alliance, a joint venture between Boeing and Lockheed Martin, two aerospace giants, has cut jobs and trimmed costs. In November Tory Bruno, its boss, said prices for its Atlas V rocket were down from $225m per launch to just over $100m. ArianeSpace, a European firm, has also cut prices for its Ariane 5, which is thought to cost around €175m per flight.
But however nifty SpaceX’s technology gets, the launch market, at around $6bn in 2019, is relatively small, says Simon Potter of BryceTech, a firm of analysts and engineers. Many players are shielded from full competition by governments worried about national security. That will limit SpaceX’s market share. Instead, says Adam Jonas, an analyst at Morgan Stanley, SpaceX sees launch as an “enabling technology” for its other plans. The firm’s next target is the telecoms business.
The prototype service is undergoing testing by thousands of people. Most seem pleased, reporting fast and responsive connections. But the satellite-internet business has a poor record. Iridium went bankrupt in 1999, the year after its launch . Intelsat and Speedcast, two established companies, filed for bankruptcy last year, as did OneWeb, a startup with a similar business model to Starlink’s. Intelsat is currently restructuring and SpeedCast is doing business again under new owners.
Such challenges may explain Mr Musk’s uncharacteristic lack of bombast when talking about Starlink. Tesla sells cars with features like “Ludicrous Mode” and “Bioweapon Defense Mode”. Starlink, by contrast, calls its public-test programme the “Better Than Nothing Beta Test”. At a space conference last year Mr Musk said Starlink’s goal, for now, was simply not to go bankrupt.
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