How does this pump up the balance sheet? SpaceX takes in $1 million in a rideshare deposit, and now has a corresponding and equal liability to provide the service (hopefully for $1mm or less in costs) at a future point in time.

It helps the cash balance, sure.

Well, there are whispers today that SpaceX is going to try to spin off Starlink and IPO. Seems odd, considering Musk has spent 2 years railing against the public markets. If that's the case when will get to see the financials.

We'd only get to see the financials of Starlink, not of SpaceX (that's a big motivation of spinning it off).

Falcon fleet sitting in the Cape warehouse is paid for. It's just opex for each launch at this point. They're optimizing for revenue traditionally ignored by launch service providers.

> It's just opex for each launch at this point.

Almost...the 2nd stage is one use only. I saw a post on Reddit that estimated that each 2nd stage costs SpaceX about $10M...which is peanuts.

There was an internal SpaceX presentation video which was leaked to r/SpaceX that stated their launch cost to be $30 million per launch. The video was taken down later that day, but that's the currently best known number for how much a fully loaded reusable Falcon 9 launch costs.

Thanks for the reference, I missed that.

I know one way or another that SpaceX's internal launch costs are a lot lower than the others. Good stuff.

They're not amortizing the costs of the rockets over the launches? I thought that was the whole point of making them reusable in the first place.

The first launch of a Falcon9 pays for the rocket in full (manufacturing costs, not development costs).

If you buy a laptop to build software on, you can pay for the laptop with what you earn in a year, but that doesn't stop you amortising the cost over three. (It just increases your year one profit at the expense of years two and three, making the books more consistent.)