Recently, I saw an article online titled "SpaceX's 'Age of Exploration': A Former Executive's Perspective on Rockets, AI, and Musk" (see reference link for details).

This article describes the experience of a former SpaceX executive joining SpaceX and participating in a series of significant processes within the company. The story showcases the unimaginable hardships faced by SpaceX through numerous brilliant and touching details, revealing the blood and tears behind the SpaceX miracle.

The article does not dwell extensively on SpaceX's commercial value, but two details left a deep impression on me. These two details made me think of a grander future and wider investment opportunities that might emerge from SpaceX.

- "Most of this group of entrepreneurs come from within SpaceX, in their twenties and thirties, with strong engineering capabilities and a unique understanding of the industry's underlying logic. Hong Lide refers to them as the 'SpaceX Mafia'."

This statement conveys that, through the difficult growth process of SpaceX and Musk's "extreme" management style, a group of highly capable and uniquely insightful employees has been cultivated. Many of these employees have started their own entrepreneurial journeys after leaving SpaceX.

There is a very famous saying in Silicon Valley known as the "PayPal Mafia."

It refers to the fact that after PayPal was acquired by eBay in 2002, most of the founding team and early executives left, but they maintained close contact, invested in each other, recommended talent, and shared resources, forming a powerful community of shared interests.

This group of individuals is hailed as the most successful entrepreneurial cohort in Silicon Valley, having founded or invested in several world-changing technology companies. Notable figures include:

Elon Musk: Co-founder of SpaceX, Tesla, and Neuralink;

Peter Thiel: Founder of Palantir, partner at Founders Fund, and the first external investor in Facebook;

Reid Hoffman: Founder of LinkedIn;

Chad Hurley and Steve Chen: Co-founders of YouTube;

Max Levchin: Founder of the fintech company Affirm;

Jeremy Stoppelman: Founder of Yelp.

Investing in companies is often about investing in people.

Individuals with strong entrepreneurial backgrounds may achieve further brilliance in the future. The history of the "PayPal Mafia" after leaving PayPal is a vivid testament to this.

In my view, SpaceX is a far greater company than PayPal. Employees emerging from such a company are highly likely to create miracles again.

The protagonist described in the article, Hong Lide, already has a fund that is investing in companies founded by former SpaceX employees.

This is also a point worth noting and paying attention to for other investors when looking at projects.

- "Hong Lide divides the aerospace industry chain into three layers:

Upstream: Construction and launch of rockets, satellites, and space stations;

Midstream: Satellite control and data transmission;

Downstream: Application layer, with Starlink being the most obvious case.

The investment logic of their fund is to find entrepreneurs along the 'SpaceX chain' and the 'Android chain.'

The former complements the SpaceX platform, while the latter develops independently in the market opened by SpaceX."

Upon seeing this, I thought of some currently hyped A-share companies, as they are part of the SpaceX supply chain. However, they only occupy a small proportion within SpaceX's industrial chain.

The industry chain presented by the author is much more comprehensive, detailed, and specific.

Additionally, the article mentioned another detail:

The Falcon 9 has reduced the cost of payload sent into space from $10,000 to $20,000 per kilogram to $3,000. Recent information shows that the Falcon Heavy rocket has further reduced this cost to $1,500.

Meanwhile, the goal of Starship is to bring the payload cost down to below $100 per kilogram.

I believe that the possibility of this goal being achieved is very high given enough time.

If launch costs drop to this level, setting aside the commercial value of SpaceX itself, the opportunities that a whole new physical world—the space world—can nurture would be captivating.

At that time, building factories and assembling facilities in space will no longer be a mythical story.

What are the benefits of building factories and assembling facilities in space?

Let’s list some of the most common examples:

Space is in a vacuum state, space has microgravity, there is an inexhaustible source of solar energy in space. Just these conditions can allow humans to construct factories and manufacturing processes in space that are completely different from those on Earth.

This will completely reshape all manufacturing on Earth and restart the industrial revolution in space.

Reference link:

https://x.com/vista8/status/2069807440732844510?s=20

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