Picture an early board meeting where the stated odds of SpaceX ever launching anything profitable sat below 10 percent. The meter hovers near zero, grounded in basic engineering reality.
Next milestone arrives with the first successful recovery. The needle jumps as outside capital pours in, treating reusable rockets like proven tech rather than expensive prototypes on their tenth attempt.
Valuations climb into the hundreds of billions. The dial now reads “inevitable global dominance,” even though orbital economics remain the same stubborn math they always were.
At the $2 trillion mark the reading pegs hard into fantasy. An unlikely company has been rebranded as an unstoppable juggernaut whose every delay gets spun as strategic genius.
The final tick arrives when the story itself gets told as inspiration rather than survivorship bias dressed in carbon fiber. No one pauses to ask what the meter would read if any single test flight had gone differently.
