SpaceX has raised $337.4 million in equity financing, the company announced in a regulatory filing on Wednesday.
The investment is part of the rocket company’s push to raise more money for both its satellite internet, Starlink and rocket transport services. SpaceX founder Elon Musk said in June that Starlink will need as much as $30 billion to execute its satellite tasks and steer the company to a profitable business.
In October, SPaceX hit $100 billion in valuation after a secondary share sale. The latest funding round is a major revenue boost to the space company, which has been competing with Amazon’s Blue Origin and billionaire Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic in the space industry.
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The burgeoning constellation and space travels have seen an uptick in the number of investors. Google’s parent company, Alphabet and Fidelity Investments are among companies who have bet their money on SpaceX.
Earlier in the year, Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin joined SpaceX in launching successful civilian trips to space, kicking off the multi-billion dollar commercial rocket industry. The space economy is estimated to be worth $1 trillion by 2040, according to Morgan Stanley.
Each of the companies have been competing to grab enough share of the estimated economy. In October, Blue Origin and Sierra Space announced plans for Orbital Reef, a “commercially developed, owned, and operated space station” that will be built in low Earth orbit. The station will start operating in the second half of this decade.
The idea is backed by space industry leaders and teammates including Boeing, Redwire Space, Genesis Engineering Solutions, and Arizona State University; and is expected to open multiple new markets in space.
SpaceX on the other hand, is planning to launch its Starship rockets, which is designed to put as many civilians as possible on Mars, before 2030. Musk’s company still leads others, having launched numerous cargo payloads and astronauts into orbit. It has been the first choice of the U.S. ‘s National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), in space transport and contracts.
SpaceX is the only company among the three offering orbital services, which is key to many of the contracts it has won from NASA.
While the companies are carving out a niche, luxury space trips, which is rapidly becoming a thing, remains key to the space industry’s economy. The cost of trips per a seat to space on Blue Origin’s New Shepard and Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo is typically $250,000 to $500,000. This is because they are suborbital transport systems – 15-minute rides from the earth.
For SpaceX’s orbital transport, the cost starts from $50 million. This price per seat is considered cheap because NASA used to pay Russia nearly $90 million per seat on the Russian Soyuz spacecraft.