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- cross-posted to:
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The bond market’s assessment also jibes with SpaceX’s stock. It’s a profitless, non-dividend-paying, one-person-controlled, empire-building project trading at more than 100 times sales, about 30 times the valuation of the S&P 500 Index. That’s the very definition of a junk stock.
Original link: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2026-07-02/spacex-is-junk-that-s-what-the-bond-market-says
The point of manned missions and colonies now is proof of concept for the expansion of human civilization to other worlds, but yes, that’s not a private for profit endeavor but a public interest one.
That said, the research and development done for the Apollo moon shots returned to the economy $14 for every one dollar spent, so it was absolutely a sound investment. Also, those patents were sold to the US government for a dollar each (at most), and so the technology gained like microcircuitry and memory foam, are public domain.
( RANT: The public domain, the creation of a robust one is – according to the Constitution of the United States – the very purpose of the whole temporary monopoly system that is the foundation of intellectual property law.)
I completely agree, and don’t think sending trillions of investment dollars to a private company is going to get us anything like the Apollo program did. Maybe we’ll be wrong and some great inventions will arise from the challenge.
Mining asteroids or the moon seem like the next thing, but the cynic in me thinks it will likely just increase wealth inequality.
Taking a page from the Fourth International–Posadists, I suspect we’re going to have to develop a working socialist / communist society before we will be able to develop a space program robust enough for asteroid mining and offworld colonization.
With the climate-crisis fast approaching critical, we may not make it at all, or may have to wait tens of thousands of years (homo-erectus went through a long stint where there was less than ten-thousand of them), but I don’t think there is a capitalist path.
The market demands EVERYTHING be for profit.