I'm also curious as to what the moat really is?

It's 24 years old with 16 billion revenue. Suppose you had a warchest and had the option to buy SpaceX at 1750 billion, or to spend a fraction of that to replicate its technology. Could you?

I've seen estimates that SpaceX spent less than $50-60 billion in cash during its lifetime. That's in the range of its cumulative revenue + capital raised, too.

I just don't really see how this couldn't be replicated, if the market was big enough. But it seems to me that Space isn't that useful yet, and the market isn't that big yet, to the point that it doesn't warrant lots of competitors like the thinking on AI.

Profitable remains to be seen, but it is undoubted that the potential resources in the solar system are (pun intended) astronomically valuable. Getting at them is "just" an engineering problem.

You could argue that space is highly useful for creating profitable narratives. You could even argue that this is the whole game.

As long as we don't find a new it energy to get stuff up, I don't think so.