No. Space is not lucrative or profitable. The SpaceX profit story rests entirely on Starlink. Starlink has a plausible moat servicing ships at sea and extreme remote areas. The big problem for Starlink is that they are trying to grow into a shrinking TAM, as terrestrial wireless expands with ever cheaper equipment ever farther into the countryside that Starlink is counting on for their TAM.
Elon's visions border on self parody. If I told you that humanoid robots were going to be digging tunnels for the Boring Company you'd have to stop and think if I was pulling your leg.
> No. Space is not lucrative or profitable
Yet.
To be clear, I don't support SpaceX specifically, but the amount of resources available to us from beyond our planet are quite literally infinite, only bounded by our ability to move fast enough to get it.
Comets that routinely pass by our planet have rare-earth metals in quantities that we don't even have on the planet at all. Hell, that's where our rare earth metals came from in the first place. Getting access to 100 million tonnes of platinum could totally change how we use the metal, right now it's most effective use is probably within catalytic converters to reduce emissions from cars.
Helium-3 and Deuterium in high quantities can be used as clean fusion fuel, basically clean atomic energy.
I struggle to see how these can't be lucrative in the long term.
I can't improve on how unlikely it is that any of that happens. Space is for exploration and the advancement of science, and to a certain extent engineering, if you don't mind the inefficiency of obtaining those advancements in engineering.
How many decades ago were people hyping space manufacturing? Where are the space factories? Where are the profits?
How does 100M tons of platinum safely deorbit? Is the idea to let it crash into the sea?
bit by bit, and one of the major useful properties of platinum itself is that it's so heat resistant and inert.
It's also useful to have some heavy metals off world for further expansion.