Tyler Crowe

They've been trying to get Starship off the ground, its heavy lift rocket.

And I think it's done like 11 tests.

And, you know, wouldn't you know, they're actually scheduled for their 12th test flight, I think, later today.

So I'm sure that's a little bit of a cherry on top for the S1 to have a successful Starship launch.

Fingers crossed with all that.

And aside from like this mammoth amount of money they've been putting into Starship in the past, I want to say like a year, year and a half for development, that business is...

more or less profitable.

You saw this very large ramp in R&D spending specifically to Starship in this most recent quarter, most recent year.

Aside from that, just using Falcon Heavy, Falcon 9 launches, it does appear to be profitable.

from bringing in outside customers.

You know, it's not like amazing margins, but it's something which goes a long way in the space industry because this was an industry that was dominated by one company, United Launch Alliance, like 15, 20 years ago.

And now, you know, for fractions of the cost, we're actually eking out operational profits on this.

Now,

That revenue has slowed down and I'm not gonna like try to hand wave that away.

And I would like to see why in the coming quarters.

I would like to know whether that was some sort of like pricing competition because Rocket Lab is starting to do

launches.

Ariane 6, which is the Europeans, Ariane Group, their European space agency, they're launching for Amazon this year, as well as starting to see some other companies going into Blue Origin as well.

So maybe it's pricing competition.

Maybe it was SpaceX deliberately putting more of their own satellites into orbit on its rockets that was a higher cost burden that kind of brought down the profitability.