SpaceX 'Failure' Makes Big Bank — $200 Million in the First Year

Have we decided it's officially EDS — Elon Derangement Syndrome — yet, or is MDS still a candidate?

As I'm sure every PJ reader knows, along with most of the rest of the world, SpaceX launched Starship Flight 14 on Monday, successfully achieving orbit and delivering 26 of the new, much higher-capacity Starlink v3 satellites to orbit, in spite of an engine failure in the Ship itself on the way to orbit.

Of course, that achievement was not uncontroversial, at least in the press.

You don’t hate the legacy media enough. pic.twitter.com/sc3Ask29a9
— DogeDesigner (@cb_doge) September 29, 2026

There were actually a lot of people with long memories.

How it started vs How it's going pic.twitter.com/LEIMSeOE5o
— BlackApple (@BlackApple) September 29, 2026

There were also a number of other people who were spreading mayonnaise and salt on their words as they prepared to eat them. I got one above, and I'll resist the urge to observe that one famous space YouTuber posted that Starship wasn't going to go into orbit shortly before Starship entered orbit. At least by name.

There was a surprising number of people who had been insisting that Starship would never reach orbit who were defending that opinion even after Starship reached orbit. I have no idea how to explain that.

But as I discussed in my Sunday Supplement column, and Steve Green expanded yesterday, the problem has to be Musk-blindness. Observe.

What we have is this: the rocket that flew Flight 14 is the largest and most powerful ever launched; that has been true of Starship since the first integrated flights, and Block 3 (the current version) made the gap wider.

What's more, carrying only 50% capacity, Flight 14 delivered the second-highest useful payload to orbit ever, exceeded only by Skylab.

#	Mission	Year	Vehicle	Mass left	Notes
1	Skylab	1973	Saturn V (2-stage)	~76.5–77 t	Largest single object left in LEO. Spent S-II also reached orbit and decayed later.
2	Starship Flight 14	2026	Starship / Super Heavy	~50 t	26 operational Starlink V3s. First Starship orbital cargo.
3	Tianhe (CSS core)	2021	Long March 5B	22.5 t	Still in orbit as part of Tiangong.
4	Mir core module	1986	Proton	20.4 t
5	Salyut 7	1982	Proton	~19.8 t
6	Zarya (ISS FGB)	1998	Proton	19.3 t
7	Falcon 9 Starlink (max batch)	2024–	Falcon 9	~17.5 t	24 V2 Mini satellites; typical heavy F9 LEO load.

That's the top 7. Notice that number 3 is less than half this delivery. It's also the biggest commercial delivery by a long way.

Line	Estimate
Super Heavy B21 + Ship 41 (built, written off; ocean landings, no tower catch)	~$250 million (Mach33 stack assignment)
Mission operations (range, pad, recovery — Mach33 add-on)	~$5.6 million
Launch hardware + ops	~$256 million
26 Starlink V3s at ~$1.2M build each	~$31 million
All-in, this flight (working figure)	~$285–300 million

So, now for the moment, let's assume no reusability — certainly neither booster nor Starship will be reused this time. In other words, assume it was the NASA/ULA/Roscosmos model — one launch, one payload, once. And let's be really conservative and say the total was a round $300 million, and for that $300 million, SpaceX got 26 one-terabyte-per-second shiny new Starlink version 3 to add to its network.

In return, SpaceX gets an annuity that pays around $500 million per year for the five-year life of the satellites. That is, it pays off the investment — rocket, payload, fuel, and services in about May 2027, and delivers $2.3-$2.5 billion in total revenue over those same five years.

What this means is that Flight 14 did what a Saturn V or an SLS does on purpose: expend the vehicle, deliver 50 tonnes of payload behind, ready to create revenue.

NASA doesn't consider Artemis I a failure because the rocket was expended, and Skylab wasn't a failure because the Saturn V didn't come home. Starship's first orbital flight was also its first commercial cargo flight, and that one flight is bringing home a pile of money.