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Jan 04 2019

KSA Financial Report 2018 & Donation Information

While I did not create a comprehensive report such as this after summarizing the years of 2016/17, this past year has been full of so many red fields atop the monthly sheets I felt it was necessary to explain to anyone who reads our public reports that the Kerbal Space Agency is not currently in serious financial trouble. First, if you have not yet seen it, our end of year summary for 2018 is available here. I will admit, this is not a pretty picture! We are now almost a quarter of the way into our third year of operations and as the Total Net Income field shows we have lost 203,558 funds from our original capital of 250,000. This is not unexpected, given that we are trying to create an entirely new industry – the commercial support remains nascent at best as we attempt to adapt our current technologies to be able to carry out missions clients want today while at the same time working to advance our technology to meet their needs in the years to come as both air and space become more accessible. Lots of profits is not something we will see much of in the near future.

Still, we managed marginal yearly profits our first two years in operation so what happened? Thankfully, a large portion of our losses stemmed from external events that were entirely out of our control. Being shut down and unable to conduct operations twice in one year easily amounted to tens of thousands of lost funds. We were unable to accrue any income at all in March thanks to the legal injunction. Even with our limited operations during the Monolith EM field, when you average out our income for all months we still managed 37k per month. Now also take into consideration the expensive infrastructure improvements to KSC, which do not happen often: the runway and the expanded Administration Complex. The Monolith EM field also incurred significant expense when working to complete the Dhumla in an off-site facility. Remove all these factors and our loss for the year was only around 43k instead of nearly 430k! That’s almost breaking even if we had been able to put in only an average month’s work in March. The entire time of lost operations has also held back our ability to satisfy greater contracts since we could not develop increasingly capable technologies without conducting missions to test them.

Also worrisome may be the fact that we spent 78k more in overall expenses this year over last year. But a full review of all our expenses has shown this was mainly due to continuing to push forwards in our advancements to space and fixed-wing flight, not because we wasted it on needless activities and disastrous missions. It’s a hard lesson for many people to grasp, but you have to spend lots of money to make money and our spending was on-point this past year to put us in a good position, with the possibility of 3rd party satellites being lofted into space on the Progeny Mk6 or placed into orbit by the Ascension Mk1. The Dhumla is also our first serious contender against the airship cargo industry and C7 Aerospace has already lined up several very interested customers should the aircraft flight trials pan out. This could be the year all our various investments really finally pay off!

Or – maybe it won’t be. Maybe we have yet another year of financial struggle ahead of us, thanks to external strife or poor mission execution and vehicle engineering. It’s worth noting that our published financials are for just our operational budget – which I like to say means you won’t ever know how much we spend on toilet paper until we need it on a mission. If this budget were to run fully into the red that doesn’t mean the KSA would go bankrupt, but we would be seriously crippled in our ability to create more income. Thus, I have spoken with our Operations Director and gotten approval to open up two avenues through which the public can donate funds to the KSA. They both accept payments in Universal Specie Denomination and the current exchange rate is 1USD = 1000Funds. On the left you have an option for regular monthly donations, on the right is an easy option for a one-time donation (no account needed, PayPal accepted) that does not charge us a cut.

Perhaps the generosity of donors will help get us through any hard times ahead, perhaps not. Nonetheless, we have turned away offers in the past and would now like to give anyone the chance to help support us if they so wish. Anyone who makes a donation will get recognized in our monthly financial reports, where we will also disclose any earnings made through donations. We all here at KSA are thankful for any help that is given.

Mortimer Kerman
Head of Finances