The Silicon Graybeard

In the World of the High Tech Redneck, the Graybeard is the old guy who earned his gray by making all the mistakes, and tries to keep the young 'uns from repeating them. Silicon Graybeard is my term for an old hardware engineer; a circuit designer. The focus of this blog is on doing things, from radio to home machine shops and making all kinds of things, along with comments from a retired radio engineer, that run from tech, science or space news to economics; from firearms to world events.

Wednesday, May 20, 2026

Trying to find out if tomorrow's big story is what I think it is

As the launch day has moved further out as the week went by, it has reduced my confidence that flight 12 is going to launch when promised. Currently, everything I can find is saying launch will be Thursday 5/21 at 6:30 PM EDT, which was first talked about Monday.

The reason for my reduced confidence is that around noon EDT, I noticed that another Wet Dress Rehearsal was scheduled and opened the NASA Spaceflight live coverage to see it. I started watching with about 1 hour, 35 minutes on the timer (1:35:00) and they appeared to be in the process of cancelling the test for the day. I didn't spend the rest of the afternoon watching the live stream continuously.

So the real question is simply if they're going to launch Thursday at 6:30 PM EDT? I have no idea. All I can see is still saying yes, but there have been times where schedule changes don't show up until the next morning.

The other big story is that the long-talked about IPO for SpaceX suddenly got more understandable now that they've released a bunch of pretty closely guarded financial records. The one that stood out to me was in the 9th paragraph. Everyone knows that Elon Musk is a billionaire, right? Everyone knows he's practically drowning in money. Get a load of this:

Musk’s salary in 2025 was $54,080, a value tied to California’s minimum salary for exempt employees. Gwynne Shotwell, president and chief operating officer of the company, received a salary of $1.08 million in 2025, but including stock awards, her total compensation was valued at $85.8 million.

Total salary of $54k/year? That's $26/hour. Not even remotely an upper tier income. Gwynne Shotwell at just over $1 million/year is almost 20x Musk's pay, or $519.23/hr. Salary alone, not stock awards and other compensation. The $85.8 million works out to be $41,250/hr.

There's no real breakdown of the costs for a Falcon 9 mission. The industry reporters quote a base public price of $74 million but estimate it really costs in the neighborhood of $15 million. With approximately 660 Falcon 9 missions, they probably have a pretty good set of numbers on the expenses for launches as the vehicles age, and that appears to be closely guarded. On a different note, I'm sure those numbers don't exist for Starship since it's still in development.

The numbers that professional buyers will probably be concentrating on are the total size of the SpaceX business - the Total Addressable Market or TAM.

SpaceX projects a “total addressable market,” or TAM, of $28.5 trillion across its present and future offerings in space, data, and AI services. However, of this amount, only about $2 trillion is directly related to space or the company’s Starlink network. The remaining $26.5 billion is believed to come from AI, largely from enterprise applications.

“We believe we have identified the largest TAM in human history,” the company states on page 171 of the filing. “We believe our next trillion-dollar market is AI compute, which we contemplate will leverage our rockets and satellites for massive orbital deployment.”