SpaceX Is Losing a Staggering Amount of Money Every Time One of Its Starships Explodes

Time is ticking for SpaceX's Starship.

Even after nearly ten launches, the behemoth spacecraft has yet to successfully visit space and then come safely back to Earth even a single time — but NASA is nonetheless relying on it to ferry astronauts from the Moon's orbit down to the surface just over two years from now.

Given Starship's track record so far — nine full-scale test flights have ended in explosions shortly after launch, explosions in space, and crashes into the ocean — it's a steep goal.

The company is preparing for its tenth test flight on Sunday evening, once again attempting to get the rocket's booster off the ground and back in one piece. In theory, according to SpaceX, during the flight, Starship will "target multiple in-space objectives, including the deployment of eight Starlink simulators."

It's been an arduous couple of years, riddled with successes and even more setbacks, which have cost the private space company an enormous amount of money.

It's also not cheap. As insider sources told Bloomberg in new reporting, each Starship prototype costs hundreds of millions of dollars to build, highlighting the astronomical costs of SpaceX's unique iterative design approach to developing the world's most powerful rocket.

It's an eye-wateringly expensive process that's so far delivered muted results. The mess is also reportedly starting to affect the company's fundraising efforts, according to Bloomberg, with investors balking at a proposed $500 billion valuation.

To SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, the future of the company is riding on the success of Starship. For many years, the richest man in the world has touted the rocket as a way to deliver humans to Mars as part of his plan to make the human species interplanetary.

The danger is also financial. Musk has warned that SpaceX will face bankruptcy if it can't get the spacecraft working reliably, since the super-heavy launch platform is needed to deliver even more Starlink broadband satellites into low-Earth orbit to build out its main source of revenue.

It's such a big priority, insiders told Bloomberg, that SpaceX may soon be forced to push back Falcon 9-based Starlink launches later this year due to a surge of Falcon engineers being told to work on Starship instead.

It's also endangering SpaceX's obligations to NASA, as well as America's Moon program. The space agency is requiring that the company prove Starship can be refueled more than a dozen times in orbit before it can be certified for NASA's Moon landing mission, an unprecedented feat of engineering.

And according to Bloomberg, Musk's space firm may be stumbling by attempting to speed up the development process through taking design shortcuts.

The philosophy behind the iterative design approach remains the same: each spectacular Starship explosion will provide invaluable data for the next attempt. That line of thinking is so persistent that the company is planning to launch a number of remaining V2 Starship prototypes, despite engineers agreeing behind the scenes that the design is subpar, sources told Bloomberg.

In light of consistent setbacks, NASA and Congress have come up with contingency plans, allocating an additional $4 billion for the space agency and Boeing's massively expensive Space Launch System.

All eyes are on SpaceX as it attempts to successfully launch and land Starship for the first time.

"The number one thing is visible, demonstrable progress," space analytics firm BryceTech founder Carissa Christensen told Bloomberg. "I think that’s going to go a long way toward not creating negative perceptions."

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