Delian Asparouhov on the market selloff, SpaceX Starship complexity, and why Europe rearming is both necessary and risky

Summary

Delian Asparouhov, partner at Founders Fund and CEO of Varda Space, covers three distinct threads: the market selloff, Starship's development challenges, and the risks around Europe rearming.

Market selloff

Asparouhov frames the current volatility as partly seasonal — he cites data suggesting roughly 80% of the steepest S&P 500 drawdowns over the past 50 years have occurred between October and February — and partly a product of the presidential transition, which always introduces uncertainty. He is cautiously bullish, pointing to a website called TrueInflation that he says shows a steep drop in grocery prices over the past 15 months, lending some credibility to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent's "detox" framing.

His sharper read is structural. The S&P has been propped up by heavy foreign inflows, and aggressive U.S. foreign policy is now pushing European capital back toward domestic markets. On the DOGE cuts, he sees the chainsaw-versus-scalpel tension clearly — the NOAA commercial remote sensing team was laid off and then partially rehired within a week — but argues the pace is defensible given that the administration has roughly two years before Congress potentially flips.

Europe rearming

Asparouhov, who is of Eastern European origin, says European rearming is necessary but not without risk. He is direct about Germany specifically: the country has rearmed twice before with well-known consequences, and Elon Musk's vocal support for the AfD makes him uneasy. A sufficiently powerful AfD, he suggests, could push Germany in a direction that looks uncomfortably familiar.

Starship complexity

The core argument is that Falcon 9 was built on decades of aerospace heritage — the metals, engine design, and basic architecture all had proven lineage — and even then it took roughly two years of failed landing attempts and another five years from first successful landing to reliable operations. Starship discards that heritage almost entirely. The shift to a distributed engine architecture, the scale jump, and the reentry requirements all represent genuinely novel engineering, not incremental improvement.

Asparouhov notes that Kiko Dontchev, SpaceX's VP of Launch, posted a detailed response to a fan account hours earlier explaining the slower cadence — pointing to Falcon 9 boosters now flying 12–14 times and new refurbishment challenges emerging, plus difficult sea conditions off Florida. The broader media reaction, Asparouhov argues, reflects Musk's changed public standing rather than any real change in SpaceX's engineering culture. The same rocket explosions that were celebrated as "how progress happens" during the early Falcon 9 era are now treated as failures.

On long-run launch economics, he offers a concrete analogy: the hydrocarbon energy required to get one person to orbit is roughly equal to the fuel used flying them London to New York on a 747. As Starship matures and airframe costs get amortized across thousands of flights, terminal ticket prices to orbit could approach $500–700 — roughly the cost of a transatlantic economy seat.

Launch market consolidation

Asparouhov is blunt about the competitive landscape. SpaceX effectively represents 99% of the commercial launch market, with gross margins he estimates at roughly 50% — the opposite of the 2017 Silicon Valley consensus that launch would be a low-margin commodity with four or five players.

For Varda, signing launch contracts with anyone other than SpaceX is practically impossible. The lead time is roughly two years, and no other provider has demonstrated the repeatability that makes a two-year commitment sensible. His ranking: Rocket Lab is clearly number two, Firefly — which recently landed on the moon — is number three and will likely attract significant investor interest. Relativity Space, once considered number two by funding momentum alone, doesn't register in that conversation anymore.

On Relativity specifically, Asparouhov says Eric Schmidt is funding the company payroll-to-payroll, which he describes as a particularly difficult cultural position — the company faces existential pressure without a clear deadline, combining the worst parts of both well-funded and underfunded environments. His broader advice to billionaires backing startups is to participate alongside venture rounds with milestone-based conditions rather than providing open-ended backstops, which he argues has never produced great outcomes.

China is launching at a pace approaching SpaceX's — 19 launches this year versus SpaceX's 27 at the time of recording — but without any reusability. Asparouhov's assessment is that without SpaceX, China's raw manufacturing throughput would be genuinely alarming. With SpaceX, the U.S. retains a meaningful lead, though that lead rests almost entirely on one company.