By
Bena Ilyas
April 23rd, 2024
SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rocket, the most powerful vehicle flying today, just launched its first-ever mission for a paying customer. It was also the first time SpaceX managed to land all three rocket boosters after launch.
This was the second flight for Falcon Heavy, which became the most powerful rocket in use in the world after SpaceX’s successful test flight in February 2018. That launch was purely demonstration — Thursday represents the first revenue-generating flight, during which SpaceX managed to land all three of its Falcon Heavy rocket boosters.
Falcon Heavy’s side boosters land on Landing Zones 1 and 2 pic.twitter.com/nJCCaVHOeo
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) April 12, 2019
At moments, the 2018 launch seemed like a lengthy advertisement for the ambitions of Elon Musk, SpaceX’s founder and chief executive. It carried a spacesuit-wearing mannequin, nicknamed Starman, seated in the driver’s seat of a red Roadster built by Mr. Musk’s other company, Tesla. The sports car and its driver streamed video back to Earth of their journey out into the solar system.
This time, the Falcon Heavy’s cargo was more mundane, but also more useful: Arabsat-6A, a Saudi Arabian communications satellite which will relay television, internet and mobile phone signals to the Middle East, Africa and Europe. Falcon Heavy has already been chosen for a few contracts, including a $130 million contract to launch a US Air Force satellite, which was awarded just four months after its inaugural flight in February 2018.
The Falcons have landed pic.twitter.com/BGQRNuYMVH
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 11, 2019
Lockheed Martin built the satellite, along with a second one, for Arabsat as part of a batch of contracts worth $650 million. When Arabsat announced the contracts in 2015, it said at the time that it planned to launch the Arabsat 6A satellite aboard Falcon Heavy.
Investing in Space Can Be Profitable
SpaceX is known for investing heavily to fly people to space via crewed flights of U.S. astronauts. Called by UBS “more ambitious than most,” SpaceX this month sent the unmanned Crew Dragon to the international space station and is working on sending a manned mission.
Also, in September last year, Yusaku Maezawa, the billionaire founder and CEO of online fashion retailer Zozo, paid an undisclosed sum for all the seats aboard the first lunar flight of Elon Musk’s SpaceX rocket, scheduled in 2023.
SpaceX is one of the largest private aerospace manufacturers with a valuation of over $31 billion in 2019. Now, long-term believers in the company can purchase shares as tokens through a secondary market.
Ambisafe, blockchain infrastructure provider, in partnership with US Capital Global, has allowed retail investors to own economic interest in Elon Musk’s SpaceX. Ambisafe’s partner, US Capital Global, will be signing a contract creating the fund which will allow for profit-sharing. The shares are then recreated on-chain as security tokens. They will be traded on Orderbook and other trading platforms.
Once SpaceX goes public, the equity fund will sell the underlying shares and all token holders will receive the proceeds as a payment.
Since the company’s shares are not traded on the public exchanges like NYSE or NASDAQ, those who want to acquire them have to wait for the next round of investment or buy shares from their current owners by spending several hundred thousand dollars and a lot of time for paperwork.
There is also an option to wait until the company becomes public and its securities are available on the mainstream exchanges. Making the company public, though, may not be ever planned by Elon Musk. The owner of Tesla expressed regret that he had made the company public and even thought about making it private again.
There are several reasons for this: the complexity of management and communication with a large number of investors, as well as increasing speculation with participants reselling securities at a higher price.
USPX token that represents a share in the fund, will be distributed through Orderbook, a specially-designed decentralized platform with integrated KYC verification. As stated on the Orderbook website, token holders are expected to get financial returns, equivalent to what owners of the shares get.
Each USPX token represents a fraction of SpaceX stock, with 10 USPX tokens representing one full share. Every time the company valuation increases, token holders would be able to trade their tokens at the new price. Once SpaceX goes public, the fund will sell underlying shares and distribute proceeds among token holder cryptocurrency wallets.
From Ambisafe they told something important Coin Speaker what should be considered:
“Our regulatory aware protocol complies with securities law regarding trading but does not relate to SpaceX’s policy.”
However, because SpaceX shares are restricted securities and cannot be traded on public exchanges, UPSX aims to expand liquidity by offering these tokens on secondary markets. In effect, they are bringing SpaceX shares to a greater number of people.
As Ambisafe states, administration and legality of the process are supported by the Regulatory Aware Protocol (RAP) which allows the fund to comply with legislation in various jurisdictions without any contradiction with SpaceX’ policy.