You can literally just go threw the list of their launches on Wikipedia an notice that nothing close to even 80% of them are for the government.
And that is outside of their Starship business, that is by now a large part of its revenue.
The numbers you present are ridicoulus, they have easily more money just from human space flight from Polaris and Axiom.
>And that is outside of their Starship business, that is by now a large part of its revenue.
Starship is bringing in investment money, not revenue that I'm aware of. I don't know what revenue it would be bringing without actual launches. Maybe I'm wrong and you can correct me here, but I think you are conflating some business aspects.
Now if you're saying that the private money will be a bigger factor in the future, I agree. That's the whole idea behind govt money being used to foster along nascent industries: the govt props them up early until a viable private enterprise can exist later.
Honestly I don't get your issue. You can just go to wikipedia and look at the list of the launches. So clearly the 98% is wrong, this isn't a question, its not speculation.
The original claim was “US government can't be more than some low double digit percentage”.
Let’s say it’s by “low double digit percentage” we’re generous and say 20%. (I interpreted their stance to be lower, but they didn’t specify).
We can are there is incomplete data but we have reasonably good data on the the govt side: U.S. govt contacts are at least $5.4B, likely higher. So that means we expect the complementary private side to be 5x, or over $22B. The absolute most optimistic Starlink estimates about $2B through 2023. Do you think the other private streams dwarf Starlink by 10x? I just don’t see how we get there given the govt is still there #1 launch customer after Starlink, and this is the most generous interpretation to steelman the case. The only way is true is if there is some unknown customer launching nearly 3x that of the US govt.
The only way the numbers work out is if the govt is the major revenue stream or there’s some secret launch customer that dwarfs the US space agencies.
It’s a claim based on wishful feeling, not on data.
As I just point at elsewhere, you get 4:1 by comparing cummulative contract revenue with an annual Starlink revenue.
To be absolutely explicitly clear: their business model requires using govt contracts/funding/sales early before they can transition to other viable means of revenue. They could not survive as a company without those early govt contracts, but this does not mean they are dependent on govt contracts into perpetuity.
A dependency on govt contracts early and an increasingly private revenue stream can both be true. This isn't bad, but it also isn't the often-lauded ideal of free-market capitalism.
