Several area ventures, together with Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin, Rocket Lab and the United Launch Alliance — the three way partnership of Lockheed Martin and Boeing — are poised to debut new heavy-lift rockets this yr to compete with SpaceX’s Falcon 9 workhorse. The Pentagon is on the lookout for one other supplier for the profitable enterprise of launching nationwide safety payloads. Boeing is about to lastly launch a crew of astronauts for NASA to the International Space Station, giving NASA, which has relied on SpaceX for the previous 4 years, one other approach for its astronauts to orbit. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)
And whereas SpaceX has dominated the web satellite tv for pc trade by launching some 6,000 Starlink satellites, Amazon, backed by a $10 billion funding, is gearing as much as fly its personal constellation as nicely.
Those developments, nevertheless, could also be too late to pose a severe problem, analysts say, as SpaceX continues to press forward with reserves of cash, momentum and a wartime-like urgency that Musk has infused into the corporate. Its deep ties to NASA and the Pentagon, which have awarded it billions of {dollars} in contracts and elevated it to prime contractor standing, have additionally given it a lead that will likely be troublesome to erode.
And SpaceX continues to function at a blistering tempo, increasing the frontiers of what’s doable. It flew its Falcon 9 rocket almost 100 instances final yr — an unprecedented cadence in an trade that for years flew nearer to a couple of dozen instances a yr. This yr, it’s aiming for almost 150 launches of the booster, which flies again to a touchdown website so it may be reused.
In a report, Morgan Stanley estimated that SpaceX’s income for fiscal yr 2024 ought to attain $13 billion, a 54 p.c enhance over final yr. By 2035, as SpaceX’s Starlink web satellite tv for pc constellation grows, income might attain $100 billion, the agency reported.
In the fourth quarter of final yr, SpaceX lifted greater than 842,000 kilos to orbit in 27 launches, probably the most by any launch firm. China got here in second, hoisting almost 90,000 kilos over 15 launches, in response to BryceTech, an analytics and engineering agency targeted on aerospace.
“At the core, SpaceX’s audacious vision and engineering successes have disrupted satellite launch, have disrupted exploration, have disrupted satellite manufacturing, have disrupted all sorts of submarkets and aspects of the space ecosystem in what I would argue is a positive way: creating pressure for lower prices and enhanced performance to go with those lower prices,” mentioned Carissa Christensen, BryceTech’s CEO. “Now, does that mean I think it is a good idea for SpaceX to be the sole monopoly provider? No, I do not.”
SpaceX has achieved that place by breaking right into a market that for many years had been dominated by the federal government. SpaceX’s success in doing so has additionally opened the door for different industrial area corporations. Without SpaceX, “I don’t think Space Rocket Lab would exist, to be honest with you, because they blazed the path that said space can be commercial and space is investable,” mentioned Peter Beck, Rocket Lab’s CEO.
The option to compete in opposition to SpaceX, Beck mentioned, “is to outsmart them and outwork them. You have to be the mosquito, that is for sure. And you have to be very agile. … The crazy thing about a mosquito is that it’s kind of annoying, but there’s a nonzero chance that you might get bit, get malaria and die,” he mentioned.
Bill Weber, the CEO of Firefly Aerospace, agreed that SpaceX is a troublesome competitor that has upended the market. “You could see a scenario where one provider has such a lead … that it is literally impossible to catch up on the order where there will be true competition,” he mentioned. But regardless of SpaceX’s dominance with its Falcon 9 rocket, he mentioned there’s a nonetheless a marketplace for small satellites for corporations like Firefly, which operates a smaller rocket generally known as Alpha.
“There are customers that want to buy small and medium launches,” he mentioned, particularly in the event that they don’t should be batched with different satellites, which might have an effect on timelines and the orbits the satellites are transported to.
And SpaceX isn’t desperate to cede any territory. “You don’t have to look far for examples of behaviors that are clearly designed to stifle competition,” Beck mentioned. “There’s nothing the matter with pushing hard to create barriers for others to enter, but no monopoly in history ever survives. I think the U.S. government recognizes that along with [the] industry.”
One instance of how SpaceX made it robust on rivals was its transfer just a few years in the past to launch smaller satellites in bunches at very low costs in a “rideshare program” that was seen within the trade as a tactic to focus on smaller launch corporations equivalent to Rocket Lab by taking away prospects. And SpaceX’s perch atop the trade has allowed it to dictate timelines and costs for satellite tv for pc launches that favor its launch cadence and schedule, trade officers mentioned.
“Let me be super clear: We’re not complaining,” Beck mentioned. “We like competition. So all of this is all good.”
Beck additionally mentioned that Musk’s acquisition of Twitter, now X, and his foray into controversial political and cultural points is a possible weak spot that “certainly makes people uncomfortable. At the end of the day, if you’re delivering important national security missions, the buck stops with the CEO.”
“I don’t own a social media company to start with,” he mentioned. “So that’s a bonus. And I reserve my Twitter comments to factual elements of what happened. … I much prefer to just let the engineering and the execution do the talking. At the end of the day, everything else is just kind of hyperbole.”
SpaceX declined to remark.
The U.S. authorities and the industrial sector are desperate to work with an array of area corporations, so there are nonetheless loads of alternatives. The Pentagon, which lately launched a brand new technique designed to raised work with the industrial area sector as a complete, is keen “to harness the remarkable innovation of the commercial space sector to enhance our resilience and strengthen integrated deterrence as a department,” John Plumb, assistant secretary of protection for area coverage, mentioned in unveiling the initiative earlier this month.
The technique itself states that, “integrating commercial space solutions will strengthen resilience by increasing the number of commercial providers, diversifying supply chains, and expanding the variety and number of solutions the department can employ.”
Last week, the U.S. Space Force launched a industrial area technique of its personal, which states that the service would search to keep away from “overreliance on any single provider or solution.”
A current SpaceX rideshare mission generally known as “Bandwagon” raised considerations amongst many within the launch trade as a result of the value was extraordinarily low, in response to trade officers who noticed it as a tactic to take enterprise from rivals. “Competing is one thing, predatory is another,” one trade government mentioned.
Some corporations even complained in regards to the mission to the Pentagon as a result of “there was no business reason to fly that mission at that cost,” in response to the chief, who spoke on the situation of anonymity to debate inside deliberations. “We’ve communicated to them, quietly, that you may want competition, but what do your actions say? Because we can’t compete against that.”
For years, many within the trade hoped Bezos’s Blue Origin would mount a problem to SpaceX. But whereas it has flown vacationers to the sting of area and again, it has struggled to compete. It has but to launch a rocket to orbit and in 2021 misplaced out to SpaceX on a prestigious NASA contract to ferry astronauts to the lunar floor.
This yr, nevertheless, it’s planning, lastly, to launch its New Glenn rocket, which just like the Falcon 9 is meant to have a reusable booster stage, and the corporate is a favourite to develop into a 3rd launch supplier for the Pentagon. Last yr, after dramatically recrafting its proposal, it received a $3.4 billion contract from NASA to fly astronauts to the moon, including to NASA contracts it’s already acquired to construct a industrial area station and photo voltaic cells on the moon.
Bezos additionally lately put in Dave Limp, a former government at Amazon, as CEO of Blue Origin, and has mentioned that the corporate would transfer a lot sooner than it has prior to now. The head of the corporate’s lunar program, John Couluris, mentioned on CBS’s “60 Minutes” that the corporate goals to land a spacecraft on the moon by the center of subsequent yr — a maybe quixotic timeline however one which means it might theoretically beat SpaceX to the lunar floor.
Blue Origin can be reportedly within the operating to buy United Launch Alliance, which might give it the heritage of an trade stalwart, one other new rocket, Vulcan, and launch contracts from the Pentagon in addition to Amazon — which intends to make use of the rocket to hoist its Kuiper satellite tv for pc constellation.
SpaceX’s Starlink system beat Kuiper to the market and already has greater than 2.5 million subscribers, however Kuiper might pose a problem regardless that it has solely launched two prototypes thus far, Christensen, the BryceTech CEO, mentioned.
“One, Amazon is one of the most successful organizations in the world in building long-term relationships with a massive number of consumers,” she mentioned. “Two, Amazon Web Services has varied and deep relationships with so many institutional and individual users around compute and connectivity.”
But it’s dealing with a deadline by the Federal Communications Commission to get half of its 3,236 satellite tv for pc constellation to orbit by the top of July 2026. Pressed for time, Amazon was pressured to rent SpaceX to launch a few of the constellation, regardless that it had initially contracted with just about each different launch supplier. SpaceX additionally has launched different rivals’ satellites, together with Viasat’s. And when a launch of OneWeb’s web satellites on a Russian rocket was canceled after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, SpaceX stepped in to fly missions for the corporate.
“SpaceX is the dominant player in these markets, but they’re not being anti-competitive,” mentioned Todd Harrison, a senior fellow on the American Enterprise Institute. “They helped out a direct competitor that was in a pretty difficult bind, and the same thing is happening with Kuiper.”
“They’re just winning on the basis of how quickly they innovate,” he mentioned.
That consists of Starship, SpaceX’s next-generation rocket. NASA is investing $2.9 billion in it to make use of because the car that will ferry astronauts to the lunar floor as a part of its Artemis program. While SpaceX has not but pulled off a completely profitable orbital flight, it will get nearer with every take a look at. And SpaceX is predicted to fly it once more quickly.
NASA isn’t the one authorities company watching Starship’s progress. The Pentagon is just too. “I think the work that SpaceX has done with Starship is groundbreaking,” Gen. Chance Saltzman, the Space Force’s chief of area operations, mentioned in a speech final month. “We’ve had big rockets before they’ve put heavy payloads on. But now you’re talking about a commercially viable product, which could change the cost for a decision.”
Starship is so huge and highly effective that it could have the power hoist giant quantities of mass to orbit. And if SpaceX is ready to reuse the booster and the spacecraft, that might drive down prices even additional, leaving rivals scrambling as soon as once more to maintain up.