How? That's the key question. SpaceX needs customers. Who is going to fork over the trillions of dollars that would make SpaceX into the Mars company or even just the 3X Saudi Aramco cash cow? Who wants to do stuff in space that much and what will they be doing there? I'm not asking for actual answers because all we have today are science fiction fantasies. I want to know what specific companies will be able to finance specific projects in space to make money for themselves and, incidentally, for SpaceX as a launch provider? Hopium doesn't pay bills.
I don't know the financials, but Starlink is looking pretty good as a revenue generator. Presumably it pencils out at some scale where, like most (all?) capital intensive businesses, the financials flip from burning cash like crazy, to generating cash and profit like crazy.
One thing I am really confident of with Elon is that he's not just technically brilliant - the real brilliance (MHO) is that he puts the best of business insight into the technology and understands that everything he does (that anybody does) has to be economic. By best of business insight, he doesn't have the financial engineering and quarterly focus common with MBA grads - he understands cash flow, financing, fiscal efficiency, margins, etc.. all in service of providing a product or service that people want badly. Lower prices make it accessible to more and more people in a highly non-linear fashion, so lower prices are always going to benefit the business (as long as costs are going down at the same time). He uses the financial knowledge to build "forever businesses" (my term) rather than businesses that look good in the quarter, or maybe a year or 2.
SpaceX isn't pursuing Starlink out of the goodness of its heart, though Elon does an amazing job of identifying opportunities that can satisfy many needs / desires / wants simultaneously, all including stuff that benefits humanity. Such as high quality internet anywhere you can see the sky. Starlink is being pursued because the economics can support some really big scale space launch capacity - capacity that is needed for other space activities. Its funding the later stuff, and its doing it by being profitable.
I personally don't see space tourism as that much of a business for a couple of decades. It'll grow in that direction with deca-millionaires and up buying rides. But that's a small population, and thus small numbers of units. My marker for space tourism turning into a big business is when there is a Four Seasons (or similar) in orbit with scheduled service (weekly?). When companies are solving the problem of how to get the hotel help into space to serve the needs of the tourists -- then we've got a real business
Maybe there's some scale manufacturing that space makes possible, and along with that there are mining opportunities in space. Again a few decades, and not going to pay the bills in the meantime.
High quality internet readily available - that's a business with legs, that is well past Hopium. Could the whole point to point launch and land idea (a faster airline than aircraft) get off the ground? Maybe. I tend to think no, but its at least better than science fiction.
Would launch and land 20 miles out at sea be enough to mitigate the launch noise? Something within an hour by boat (or undersea tube!) so its say 3h from being dropped at the curb at the departure terminal (on land), to being dropped off at the terminal (on land) on the other end - there is a non-trivial volume of that kind of travel that takes a LOT longer right now. Plus that's the sort of step change in functionality that creates new business. Including a decent amount of space tourism - I'd pay $20k for an out and back to Australia with 10 or 15 minutes of coasting through space each way, whether I actually spent time snorkeling while I was in Australia or not. Heck - whether I left the terminal or not (pesky customs).
I think we're seeing something similar about state of the space industry, though some differences in details. I view the crew and supplies deliveries to the ISS as commercial business rather than government. But I'm ok arguing it either way.
Regardless the only company that I see as having a view into the space activities and economics to create a significant change to what humans do in space is SpaceX. Whatever those details and businesses actually turn out to be over the next few decades, today I see the world as SpaceX and powerpoint engineering. And yes, today, that includes providing launch services to the government on fixed price contracts.
I see cost-plus contracting as a core financial impediment to significant change to our access to space, and what we can do there. It creates the wrong financial incentives for doing things like Elon is talking about doing, where driving cost out of the system is always necessary to increasing access and volume of the service.
