SpaceX President Says 2023 Will Be a Year of Profitability for Satellite-Internet Businesses

During a presentation about how key parts of the privately held company are doing, a top executive at SpaceX spoke about how key business lines are making money.

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SpaceX's president, Gwynne Shotwell, who has led the company alongside Elon Musk for several years, said this week that one of its main rocket-launch services that the National Aeronautics and Space Administration relies on has become a revenue generator for the company as a result.

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The company's satellite-enabled high-speed broadband division, Starlink, is also expected to begin making money this year with the development of its satellite-enabled broadband services. As of 2022, she stated that Starlink, excluding the launch-related costs, had a positive cash flow quarter.

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During her discussion of these businesses, Ms. Shotwell provides some information regarding the financial position of the company. In contrast to companies that have their shares publicly traded, Space Exploration Technologies Corp., the formal name for Musk’s Hawthorne, Calif.-based company, does not release financial statements or operational details in the same way that companies with publicly traded shares do.

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After reviewing internal company documents, Trade Algo previously reported that the company had made small operating profits in 2013 and 2014, but it lost money in 2015 after one of its cargo-carrying rockets exploded.

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During the last few years, the company has increased its pace of launch operations and developed Starlink into a business with more than one million subscribers, which is the largest in the industry.

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Under a NASA contract it won in 2021, SpaceX's Starship is to land astronauts on the moon and eventually attempt a mission to Mars that Musk has long discussed.

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Known as Super Heavy, it consists of a 230-foot-tall booster that will launch 164-foot-tall spacecraft, also known as Starship, into orbit. This latter type of spacecraft is designed to transport cargo and crew to a variety of locations in space. Mr. Musk announced in a tweet that SpaceX had performed a major engine test on Thursday in which all but two of the booster's 33 engines were able to fire.

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Several significant investments have been made by the company to develop the vehicle, including investments in staff, a new engine, production facilities, and ground infrastructure to support the launch of the vehicle.

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There have been multiple times in the past few years when SpaceX has turned to outside investors to help support its growth plans. With the company's valuation soaring, SpaceX recently decided to raise it to approximately $140 billion through the sale of employee stock as part of an employee stock incentive program.

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It has also been reported that SpaceX has been investing in Starlink and has been building a new Starlink-related manufacturing facility outside of Austin, Texas, according to local officials.

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As Ms. Shotwell pointed out on Wednesday, a part of Starlink's challenge has been the simultaneous development of both Starship and Starlink, and that has been a challenge. Keeping up with that work at the same time requires "a great deal of money every year," she explained.

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She said that as a preliminary step ahead of handling the moon landing with NASA astronauts on board, SpaceX must put Starship through its paces first. Starship is going to be used by the company to deploy Starlink satellites before any human flight is conducted, she added.

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“There is a lot of work to be done on that machine,” she said. “We do not want the 15th flight to be carrying people on board."

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In addition to making money for the company that Ms. Shotwell mentioned through the combination of the Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon spacecraft, she also mentioned that NASA heavily uses the Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon spacecraft for the transportation of astronauts and equipment to the International Space Station.

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A NASA contract worth more than $4.9 billion was awarded to SpaceX last year for additional crewed flights to the space station using those vehicles. There have also been instances in which SpaceX has used its Falcon 9 spacecraft and Dragon spacecraft on private flights, such as a four-person trip funded by a technology entrepreneur in 2021.