SpaceX Closes out 2021 with $1.85 BILLION in New Funding

SEC records show that SpaceX has raised another $337 million on the eve of the end of the year, bringing the total investment raised this year to almost $1.85 billion.

According to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) seen by Reuters on Tuesday, SpaceX has received $1.9 billion in additional investment. Bloomberg had previously reported that SpaceX was in the midst of raising money, putting the company’s post-money worth at $46 billion.

The new funding for SpaceX, which is still private, is not surprising; the Elon Musk-led private launch company has been seeking funding since early this year, but Bloomberg reported last week that it had increased the size of the investment it was seeking due to strong demand from the investment community.

While evidence suggests that SpaceX’s Falcon and Dragon launch businesses are lucrative on their own, the corporation has been working on a next-generation rocket (Starship) as well as an unprecedentedly ambitious broadband satellite network (Starlink) for at least the last 5-6 years.

Additionally, at a cost of at least $1-2 billion, SpaceX created Falcon booster reusability and Falcon Heavy on its own. In sum, rocket development is prohibitively expensive, and the addition of a far more ambitious rocket and a massive satellite constellation to the mix has produced an insatiable desire for new funds.

Over the previous six years, investors have been willing to meet that demand, literally salivating at the bit to acquire SpaceX shares or debt. The round was allegedly oversubscribed, while little information on who participated is now available (Bloomberg’s article indicated Fidelity Investments was one of the largest players, but they could not confirm).

Given its recent spate of high-profile accomplishments, SpaceX may be in a better position than ever to seek additional funding from investors. Completing the first-ever private human spaceflight mission from American soil is one of them.

Demo-2 launched from Florida in May and returned to Earth with the astronauts it carried earlier this month following a two-month stay at the International Space Station. Its completion means SpaceX can now provide transportation to and from the ISS on a regular basis, bringing them closer than ever to commercial spaceflight services for private visitors, researchers, and others.

SpaceX has also made significant progress on its Starlink spacecraft development program, with a successful brief test flight of the prototype earlier this month, and it has been awarded various multi-year launch service contracts from NASA and the US government this year.

It’s also in the midst of installing Starlink, a gigantic satellite constellation that it will own and control and that will deliver commercial and residential broadband internet services to users in hard-to-reach places once it’s operational, which might explain the round’s magnitude.

SpaceX launched 58 more Starlink satellites this morning, but it will need to launch many more before achieving its goal of worldwide coverage. Starship continues to make progress toward its maiden spaceflight and orbital-velocity launch attempt, which might happen in the first half of 2022, despite being behind its CEO’s optimistic predictions.

SpaceX’s Starbase factory continues to churn out Starship, Super Heavy rocket, and test tank prototypes with aid from its Hawthorne, CA headquarters and looks to be ramping back up after six or so months of relative calm.

After creating about 150 Raptor 1 and Raptor 1.5 engines in the previous two years, Hawthorne is now focusing on ramping up production of the Raptor 2 – an enhanced engine version capable of providing up to 25% more thrust while being, in theory, significantly less expensive to construct.

In less than a year, SpaceX has also created – from the ground up – an orbital launchpad that is nearly ready to host the first test flights of the world’s biggest, heaviest, and most powerful rocket. SpaceX has virtually finished the largest cryogenic tank farm ever built for a launch site and partially filled at least four or five of its seven cryogenic storage tanks to support the enormous rocket.

Along with the tank farm, the business has nearly finished a skyscraper-sized launch tower with three massive, moving arms, two of which are meant to stack Starship atop Super Heavy and, perhaps one day, capture ships and rockets in mid-flight.

SpaceX’s financial stability might be highly contingent on the successful commencement and extension of Raptor 2 manufacturing, allowing Starship to begin launching new and much-improved Starlink V2.0 satellites, according to a company-wide communication recently sent by CEO Elon Musk but later downplayed on Twitter.

Those satellites are several times larger than V1.0 or V1.5 spacecraft, making cost-effective launches by Falcon 9 difficult or impossible. In addition to completing the first phase of orbital Starship development, ramping up Raptor 2 production, starting to build a fleet of operational Starships and Super Heavy boosters, continuing Falcon 9 Starlink V1.5 launches, and simultaneously building or completing no less than three orbital Starship launch sites in Florida and Texas, SpaceX appears to also require a new factory.

A significant chunk of SpaceX’s 2021 funding – particularly the $337 million obtained in the last two weeks – will most certainly go toward supporting some of those development efforts in the coming year.

According to CNBC, the corporation raised new capital at a price of $419.99 per share. That price is just a cent below $420 per share, which could be a reference to Elon Musk’s infamous tweet in 2018, in which he joked about taking Tesla TSLA -0.4 percent private for $420 with “funding secured.”

According to Forbes’ estimations, Musk—who is the world’s second-richest person, behind Amazon AMZN -0.7 percent CEO Jeff Bezos—owned around 48 percent of SpaceX before to this recent fundraising round. It’s unclear whether Musk’s shareholding was diluted as a result of the latest investment.

According to Forbes, if he managed to keep all of his 48 percent, his investment would now be worth almost $32 billion, up from around $20 billion previously. Musk’s net worth would increase by $12 billion as a result of this, but it’s still not enough for him to pass Bezos and reclaim the title of world’s richest person.

According to Forbes, he is worth $173.4 billion as of Tuesday, February 16th’s market close. The majority of his fortune comes from his ownership in Tesla, an electric car business whose stock has more than doubled in value in the last year. Musk is also the CEO of Tesla.

In an August 2020 financing round, SpaceX was valued at $46 billion. However, several Wall Street institutions had placed a higher value on it: A Morgan Stanley MS -0.2% analyst gave SpaceX a bullish estimate of $100 billion in October, more than double what investors thought it was worth in August.

The current round of funding comes as Starship and Starlink, two capital-intensive projects, near completion. Starship is SpaceX’s long-term spacecraft project, which will eventually replace the company’s Falcon 9 rockets and Dragon spacecraft.

The project’s goal is to create a fully reusable launch vehicle that will be able to transport cargo and, eventually, passengers into space at a lower cost than existing spacecraft.

According to CNBC, in addition to raising funds for its large-scale initiatives, SpaceX executives and investors were allowed to sell an extra $750 million worth of shares in a secondary deal. Thank you for sticking with me to the end; comment down below. What do you think SpaceX would do with all this money?

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Thanks for reading till the end.

SpaceX Closes out 2021 with $1.85 BILLION in New Funding

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