The point of a guidebook is that it survives contact with a company you have never heard of. So here is the whole book compressed into questions you can ask in a first meeting.
1. What orbit, and why that one? Altitude and plane determine drag, dose, sink temperature and serviceability simultaneously. A company that has not thought hard about this has not designed a spacecraft. (Chapters 4, 6, 8, 15) 2. What temperature does your radiator run at? Rejection scales as T⁴. This one number tells you more about their mass budget than their whole deck. (Chapter 5) 3. What does your power hardware cost per watt, and is that a quote or a slide? The least-examined number in the sector. (Chapter 8) 4. What does the spacecraft cost per kilogram to build, at what production volume? The variable that decides the business. (Chapter 18) 5. How do you move heat from the chip to the panel above 500 kW? If the answer is “pumped two-phase,” ask what has flown. (Chapters 5, 11) 6. What is your hardware refresh strategy, and what does your model assume about revenue per rack in year four? (Chapters 8, 15) 7. Is your constellation co-planar? If not, it can never be serviced economically. (Chapter 15) 8. Is the ground segment in your cost per GPU-hour? It usually is not. (Chapters 7, 14) 9. What is your cross-sectional area, and what have you budgeted for debris and insurance? (Chapter 16) 10. Who is the premium buyer, and what premium do they pay? At commodity GPU prices this business does not clear. If the answer is “hyperscalers,” they have not read their own model. (Chapter 18) 11. What cost of capital does your model assume, and can you actually raise at it? Second most important input in the sector and almost never stated. (Chapter 18) 12. What could SpaceX announce next quarter that would erase you? If there is no good answer, there is no moat. (Chapters 9, 13) And one question to ask yourself rather than them: which of the eight falsifiers in Chapter 21 has moved since I last looked?