We have the ability to take on the type of risk that larger companies simply do not. In our team's experience and in my personal experience, we work weekdays and weeknights and weekends. We skip anniversaries and birthdays. This is something that's very tough in large companies, but this is the type of commitment that is required, and that has been required, by every company.
We talk about companies like SpaceX. They started in a very similar capacity in a similar way. They had people sleeping in tents on an island in the middle of the Pacific to launch the Falcon 1 rocket in 2008. We look at the Falcon 9 and say, yes, we want to build medium-lift for Canada, but the reality is that so much came before that point to get SpaceX to what it is now, a trillion-dollar IPO. We talk about the Falcon 9 rocket, for example, and 70% of that rocket launch is Starlink satellites. Their internal cost to launch Starlink is $18 million, but they charge customers like us and the rest of the world $75 million. Starlink runs 66% of SpaceX's actual economics. We think of them as a rocket company, but they're a space telecommunications company. They're a space systems company.
We have to be very realistic about the type of capability we're developing. Small companies are the ones that can take on the risk and build up to a point where we can reach that level.