Re-pinning this: Congressional Budget Office analysis of satellite constellations in GEO/MEO/LEO relative pros&cons. "GEO and MEO satellites cost more individually, but (...) their constellation costs are lower over the long run."

Contrary to popular belief, Space cooperation historically is a consequence of improving diplomatic relations, hardly a catalyst for it. A good read.

Whem we get to the Q2 update of our Launch events database LEAT we will also estimate the total mass at launch for this. Probably confirming the very low fill rate.

Super interesting view of Transporter-8 stack with identifcation of payloads. Also worth noting how de-optimised transporter missions are (in terms of fill ratio), as they are leaving so much empty space under fairing. I still believe that SpaceX is not maing any profit on these.

Hello @PixxelSpace I see that your annual report is available, but...

The dataset is very much affected by a few very large players that are crushing the figures. Such as SpaceX, Blue Origin, Oneweb. Once these 3 are removed the landscape is a bit different with only 27B$ of funds raised (56%) and 33k employees (63% of the total). 6/end

Currently my 'bust' list counts 70 companies, worth 1100 employees laid off and 1,2B$ lost in the wasteland of bad investment. No surprise: launch is the most affected segment. 5/

Some #newspace segments exhibit higher risk, either due to overcrowding (small launch, spacecraft propulsion e.g.), or due to structural underfunding (new constellation projects e.g.). 4/

The rythm of company creation has slowed down very significantly since the peak of 2018. There is still a large risk of overcapacity breeding, and I would bet that Virgin Orbit's fate will befall other companies in the coming years. 3/

The data can be filtered by region. See here the status for Europe (ESA & EU countries) and North America (USA & Canada). Europe: 372 companies - 9,5B$ funding - 8k employees. North America: 404 companies - 32,7B$ funding - 37k employees. 2/

The Eurospace observatory of the #newspace now counts more than 1000 active companies in the space and transportation infrastructure domains (no downstream included). Total funds raised: 48B$, total employment: 52k. 1/

@thesheetztweetz @CNBCPro Growing doubts about the @RivadaNetworks ‘contract’ maybe?

For no other reason but my having opened Excel to benchmark launch data from a (very bad) report, I am happy to share the full historic perspective of global launch events since 1957. The USSR still holds the World historic record for annual launch events, but for how long?

Eurospace recently published a short educational video: "5 misconceptions about newspace in Europe"

The fun fact of this piece is that every statement that confirms how bad space investments have been in the past is actually true, and every other statement trying to paint a rosy picture for the future is so fake that it hurts my eyes and brain. 16/

In summary, I think that this @barronsonline piece is just another example of uninformed journalism (if it is journalism at all). I am quite surprised that they offer this media as a paid subscription. Why would you pay for this? 17/end

Similarly @Rocketlab has a very tough business case, and even though the company is pivoting to new markets (satellite platforms and equipment), it still accumulates losses year on year. The thesis that spacecraft will yield more profit than launch is still undemonstrated. 15/

After that, the paper turns into a sales pitch for two stocks, namely @RocketLab and @planet. What they don't say though is that Planet is bleeding cash like crazy, and for some unknown reason still spends about 1$ in R&D plus 1$ in SG&A for each $ it makes in revenue. 14/

My understanding of that remark is more in the line that without public financial statements companies could fabricate a better narrative of their economic perspectives, and make it easier to raise funds to pad their fragile economic model, like SpaceX e.g. 13/

Then we have the return of the 2040 Trillion space economy valuation by @MorganStanley quoted by @seraphim_space, disregarding the fact that most of the value in that forecast is not from space infrastructure, and is made up of 'second order impacts'. 11/

Further down, after recalling how bad space stocks and companies have performed, there is this bizarre comment that the businesses "might have done better without the scrutiny of public markets" - as if economic performance was impaired by financial transparency. 12/

Especially since the @Globalstar ARPU did not improve over time, quite the contrary, and high ARPU users have not soared either. 10/

That $3,17B was inclusive of all assets including gateways and other facilities (maybe 25% of the total?), so I'd guess each Gen1 satellite was about 49M$, to be compared to the 500/17=29M$ cited in the article. I wouldn't call this multiple, if correct, a very big deal. 9/

Then we have quotes from @Globalstar ExecChair, about how prices for bulding the next gen constellation have dropped by 'a multiple'. Let me salute the high precision of that statement, and let me recall that in 2001, the carrying value of the Globalstar system was $3,17B. 8/

This is absolutely not true. The cubesat fleets deployed by @planet or @SpireGlobal usually cost 2-300k$ per satellite (plus launch). The cheapest estimate for Starlink satellites is about 250-300k$ each (taking @elonmusk statements at face value). 7/