Contrary Research Rundown #107
SpaceX made history with a 397-foot rocket and a pair of “chopsticks,” plus new memos on Character.AI, Citizen, and more.
Research Rundown
SpaceX turned science fiction into science fact last week after the rocket manufacturer successfully launched its 397-foot Starship spacecraft into the atmosphere, and, seven minutes later, caught the rocket’s Super Heavy booster with “chopsticks” on its launch tower.
The difficulty of this feat can’t be overstated: SpaceX caught an 11 million pound, 226-foot-tall tower that was hurtling out of the sky with a pair of “chopsticks”. Two days after the launch Musk said early in 2025, the company hoped to “catch the ship too,” referring to the Starship spacecraft itself. Successfully catching the Super Heavy rocket was a huge step toward SpaceX’s ambitions of flying humans to the Moon, Mars, and even from city to city on Earth — the company claims it could fly passengers from London to New York on its Starship in 29 minutes.
The reason why it was so important? The ability to reuse its rockets allows SpaceX to lower launch costs.
One of the biggest hurdles to expanding space travel has long been cost. Payload Space estimates that the Starship costs $90 million to manufacture, including $1 million for each of its 39 Raptor engines. Single-use rockets would make space travel too expensive for all but the wealthiest parties, such as billionaires and governments, but reusable rockets have allowed SpaceX to lower its prices, making space travel a viable opportunity.
While SpaceX hopes that Starship will eventually lead missions to the Moon and Mars, the company has already both saved and disrupted the US space industry with the success of its Falcon rockets.
At the turn of the 21st century, space exploration was on its deathbed. In 1966, three years before Neil Armstrong took “one small step for man,” NASA’s budget was $5.9 billion ($55.7 billion in 2023 dollars), or 4.41% of the entire federal budget.
By 2001, that number had declined to just 0.76% of the federal budget or $24.2 billion in 2023 dollars. This budget decline was accompanied by a decline in launches into space: In 1969, America launched 62 objects into space. In 2001, that number was just 34.
One reason for this, as Musk realized before founding SpaceX in 2002, was that launch costs for single-use rockets were too expensive. The price per pound to take a payload to low Earth orbit on one of NASA’s shuttles (which were retired in 2011) was $30K in 2021 dollars. After failing to secure a rocket from Russia in 2001, Musk set out to build his own reusable rockets from scratch, starting with the Falcon 1.
Designed to be a low-cost alternative to satellite launch vehicles from public companies like Lockheed Martin and Boeing, the Falcon 1 became the first privately funded and developed launch vehicle to go into orbit when it carried a dummy payload into low Earth orbit in 2008.
Following the retirement of the partly recoverable Falcon 1 in 2009, SpaceX focused on improved reusability in its next model, the Falcon 9. Ultimately, the company succeeded, with the Falcon 9 rocket boasting a two-stage design with a fully reusable first stage that decreased launch prices to as low as $1.2K per pound in 2022 – an almost 30x reduction.
These cost reductions have coincided with a SpaceX-driven space renaissance over the last 20 years. In 2003, the US sent just 28 objects into space (out of 88 total around the world). In 2023, the US launched 2,166 objects into space – more than the rest of the world combined. Now, SpaceX hopes to build on this momentum with its Starship by accelerating the number of people that the US sends to space.
If you want to read more about SpaceX’s founding story, cosmic ambitions, product evolution, and market opportunities, read our full memo on the company here.
Character.AI is an AI-powered entertainment and companionship platform. To learn more, read our full memo here and check out some open roles below:
Staff Data Engineer (Analytics) - Menlo Park, CA
Software Engineer (Core Product) - Menlo Park, CA
Citizen is a digital safety network that leverages real-time information on crimes to increase the public’s awareness of safety issues. To learn more, read our full memo here and check out some open roles below:
There are no open roles at the moment. Check here for updates.
We’re thrilled to be hosting our first NYC Tech Talk of the year featuring eng leads and founders from Ramp, Warp, Railway, Together AI & Moment. It's an evening built by engineers for engineers — each company will live demo their latest product innovations for leading builders in NYC. Register here for a chance to join.
At Contrary Research, we’re building the best starting place to understand private tech companies. We can't do it alone, nor would we want to. We focus on bringing together a variety of different perspectives.
That's why we're opening applications for our Research Fellowship. In the past, we've worked with software engineers, product managers, investors, and more. If you're interested in researching and writing about tech companies, apply here!
Check out some standout roles from this week.
Lightyear | London, England - Product Manager, Data Analyst
Vitalize Care | San Francisco, CA - Full-Stack Engineer, Integrations Engineer
Armada | Remote and Bellevue, WA - AI Engineer, Backend Developer (Commerce), Creative Director, Front End Developer, Senior Product Manager
Eight Sleep | Remote and San Francisco, CA - ML Data Engineer, Full Stack Engineer (Web), Senior Backend Engineer, Data Scientist (R&D)
Workato | Barcelona, Spain - Senior Infrastructure Engineer (MLOps), Senior Backend Developer (Engine team), Senior Software Engineer (SDK)
Airwallex | San Francisco, CA - Software Engineer II (DevX), Global Head of Solutions Engineering, Senior Software Engineer (Mobile)
Supabase | Remote - Site Reliability Engineer (Postgres), Storage Engineer, Cloud Platform / Site Reliability Engineer
The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) filed a complaint against Apple, accusing it of restricting workers' use of Slack and other social media platforms. This action followed claims that Apple fired an employee for advocating workplace changes via Slack.
The New York Times (NYT) issued a cease and desist letter to Perplexity, demanding that the AI company stop using content from its website to train its models. NYT is suing OpenAI and Microsoft over allegedly illegally training models on its content as well.
REMspace, a sleep technology startup, achieved a milestone by facilitating the first-ever dream-based chat exchange using its sensor technology.
ByteDance’s TikTok set aside $1 billion to cover future European data privacy fines.
OpenAI introduced MLE-benchmark, a new open-source tool designed to assess the real-world machine learning capabilities of AI agents.
Brex and Navan partnered to combine the accessibility of Brex cards with the global capabilities of the Navan travel platform enabling 100% reconciliation on all travel-related payments.
Lightmatter, a startup building photonic supercomputing products, announced a $400 million Series D raise at a $4.4 billion valuation.
Flock Safety acquired Aerodome to leverage its advanced drone software, aiming to strengthen Flock Safety’s mission of enhancing community safety through technology solutions for law enforcement.
Amazon & Google plan to fuel their data centers with nuclear power by investing in small nuclear reactors due to seeking new resources of carbon-free electricity to meet surging demand from data centers and AI.
Mercury introduced a new feature: expense reimbursements for employees. This allows its customers to review, approve, and process expenses from the Mercury dashboard.
SpaceX's Falcon Heavy launched NASA's Europa Clipper from Kennedy Space Center, marking the first mission to study Jupiter's moon Europa for potential habitability.
Anduril Industries and Impulse Space are partnering to enhance autonomous in-space mobility for key national security missions. By integrating Impulse Space's Mira vehicle with Anduril's Lattice AI platform, the partnership aims to deliver next-generation capabilities in Rendezvous and Proximity Operations (RPO), Space Control, and Space Domain Awareness (SDA).
Meta’s Chief AI Scientist, Yann LeCun, believes the power of AI is being overstated by experts and argues it is still far from surpassing even the intelligence of pets.
The US is considering capping chip exports from NVIDIA & AMD to 40 countries across the Middle East, Africa, and Asia.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei wrote an essay discussing his views on the upsides of the future of AI such as how it can improve the quality of human life from physical health through economic development.
Praxis raised $525 million with the goal of building “the next great city,” which it says “will be designed to attract entrepreneurs and foster breakthroughs in AI, crypto, biotech, energy, and advanced manufacturing.”
Perplexity launched Perplexity for Finance which includes real-time stock quotes, historical earnings reports, industry peer comparisons, and analysis of company financials.
Klarna is selling most of its UK "buy now, pay later" loans to US hedge fund Elliott, which could make up to £30 billion available for new lending, though the terms of the deal are undisclosed.