But Quilty and other analysts believe Starship and Starlink will keep it in the red for a while. SpaceX does make money launching commercial and government satellites on its existing rockets. But most analysts agree between launching thousands of satellites to blanket the Earth with internet service and preparing for a visit to Mars, it's losing money.ĬHRIS QUILTY: It's hard to imagine how they could be generating cash with those level investments.īRUMFIEL: Chris Quilty is president of Quilty Space, a company that tracks the space industry. SpaceX is a private company, so its finances aren't known. SpaceX is also building a costly satellite internet service called Starlink. And it's not the company's only big project. And that means that we have a real path here to get humanity to Mars.īRUMFIEL: But making humans an interplanetary species in this economy - that's a lot for SpaceX to take on. MUSK: We're going to solve the issues that are remaining, and we'll get it to orbit, and we'll make it reusable. His longtime dream is that it will travel to Mars. Musk says SpaceX will spend $2 billion on Starship this year alone. It wasn't supposed to work on the first try. Starship is an innovative design, the biggest rocket ever built. But SpaceX's employees didn't seem to mind, nor did the company's founder, Elon Musk.ĮLON MUSK: The outcome was roughly what I expected.īRUMFIEL: That was Musk speaking on Twitter recently about the flight test. (SOUNDBITE OF ROCKET THRUSTERS BELLOWING)īRUMFIEL: They kept cheering as the massive rocket pulverized the concrete under its launch pad, as one of its engines appeared to explode on the way up and even when it began to somersault out of control and disintegrate over the Gulf of Mexico.īRUMFIEL: None of that was supposed to happen. UNIDENTIFIED GROUP: Five, four, three, two, one. When it lifted off last month, SpaceX employees cheered as they watched the video feed. GEOFF BRUMFIEL, BYLINE: The rocket is called Starship, and it is a stainless steel beast of a machine. NPR's Geoff Brumfiel reports on whether the company might be trying to fly too high. Making it work is costing billions of dollars. This project was supported through the Digital Culture Grant Scheme in 2017 with a starting grant the follow-up to the project was supported in 2019.The commercial company SpaceX is trying to build a rocket that can one day take people to the moon and Mars. My goal is for my new game to be a world hit,’ Kaayk says confidently. The game also had its live premiere: during the Netherlands Film Festival. Many streamers and content creators played the game live on YouTube and Twitch, and the trailer was live-streamed during the main programme at E3, the most influential gaming expo in Los Angeles. ‘That's a compliment, because gamers are quite critical people.’ Statistics from online communities such as Steam’s forum additionally showed that 85% of reviews are positive. ‘I'm proud that there are gamers who spend 60 to 100 hours in my storytelling world,’ he says. One is to hold the gaming audience’s attention for a long time. In advance, Kaayk had set a number of practical and content-related goals. This in turn led to a deal that everyone wishes they had: Microsoft took a copy of Next Space Rebels and is offering it through its own subscription service Game Pass. ‘Without the Fund’s starting grant, we would never have been able to do this deal, which allowed an experimental art project to grow into a commercial one,’ says Kaayk. San Francisco-based Humble Games partnered with them and funded the third phase of the project. This was found at the Global Developers Conference (GDC) in the US, where they were able to bring the game to the attention of the network of game publishers. The team also looked for additional funding. Kaayk, as the director with technical knowledge, put together a small team with a large network: Paulien Dresscher, curator of the digital culture programme at the Netherlands Film Festival and Into The Great Wide Open, producer Siuli Ko, two interns from St Joost academy, one of whom, creative gamer Tijmen Meijer, now works permanently at Kaayk’s studio, the experienced programmer Maarten Brouwer who can set up the complex structure and keep it running in a stable way, and a user-interface developer. To realize the project, he gained knowledge from the European Space Agency, but found most of the information online. With this wide-reaching project, Kaayk is treading new ground, although the game fits in seamlessly with his previous successful projects.
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