my IB business management IA · an analysis of SpaceX
SpaceX is mid-metamorphosis.
Since its June 2026 IPO the group runs three businesses at once: Connectivity (Starlink), Space (launch), and AI (compute, after absorbing xAI). $18.7B of revenue — and a $2.6B net loss, because everything is being rebuilt at the same time.
Two enormous changes are underway at the same time.
Retire Falcon 9. Bet everything on Starship.
Falcon 9 passed 650 flights at >99% success — the most reliable rocket ever flown — then SpaceX closed its order book beyond 2028. Starship carries 25–30× the Starlink capacity per flight, and the new V3 satellites are too big for anything else. But its Block 3 booster has never been caught.
Put the data centres in space.
SpaceX has asked regulators for up to one million AI-compute satellites and unveiled the first, AI1, in June 2026. Deployment "as early as 2028." Alphabet and Anthropic are already paying $2.2B a month for the ground-based compute that precedes it.
both programmes have already started · the open question is not whether — it's pace
3d · earth: nasa blue marble · falcon 9: fac-tory-o via wikimedia commons (cc by-sa 4.0) · starship: built to public dimensions
the two questions the paper answers
Should SpaceX accelerate its change from Falcon 9 to Starship as its primary launch vehicle by 2028?
Should SpaceX extend that change into AI compute by deploying orbital data centres from 2028?
key concept: change · organization: Space Exploration Technologies Corp. · answered as an IB Business Management IA — available on request
Back to portfolio