A friend that previously sold payload delivery for SpaceX and now does so for a competitor recently shared perspective on the Starlink venture. SpaceX sells payload delivery to telecom companies. Starlink is a current competitor to some of these companies and potentially increasingly so (whether through Starlink or other SpaceX ventures) in the future. The most effective way to sell payload delivery against SpaceX is to invoke the fear of further vertical integration and competition from them; SpaceX is otherwise the obvious choice on cost, options, and track record. Not dissimilar from retailers deciding whether to embrace Amazon as a distribution channel or not.
> Not dissimilar from retailers deciding whether to embrace Amazon as a distribution channel or not.
Honestly, I wonder if Tesla will be similar. They just won the charging standard war. Watching the battery presentation a while back, they're chipping away at battery technology, and every % adds up.
The ICE car companies have "embraced" EVs, but are losing money on every car right now. Will tesla start making their cars cheaper and cheaper while the other companies eventually try to buy their way out via tesla batteries?
Nobody “won” the charging standard war except for the consumer. Tesla had a great connector and a huge charging network, but it was closed and proprietary with a non-interoperable digital protocol. Government and the rest of the industry demanded an open standard with an interoperable digital protocol that allowed for payments. Tesla thus faced the choice of having everyone adopt the inferior (open) CCS connector, making their current cars basically obsolete; or else releasing their excellent physical connector and opening their chargers to the whole world and adopting the existing CCS digital protocol. They rationally chose the latter and all of North America moved onto it. This is certainly “winning” in the sense that Tesla chose the option that wasn’t a total disaster for Tesla and their customers, and the world got to benefit from an excellent open standard.
ETA: If believing that this is “winning” causes Tesla folks to encourage further positive-sum behavior, ignore everything I said: Tesla kicked everyone’s ass. Rah.
Tesla didn't "win" the charging standard war. They finally made it possible to make a standard based on their connector and most manufacturers agreed to use it in the US. But then Elon fired the supercharger team in a temper tantrum and spooked the industry.
It's also not true that all other manufacturers are losing money on EVs. BMW and VW notably have been profitable on theirs.
Lastly stop giving so much credence to what Tesla claims in presentation and start paying attention to what they actually sell. So far they have sold 4680 cells in two cars and both have had disappointing charging curves. Not impressive at the moment especially compared to what Chinese companies are offering.
"Their service is so much better than us, that if you keep using them we'll go out of business and you'll have to use them, and they're a direct competitor to you." That's enough to make a business think about their strategic interest, not just about the current expense.
Will anybody catch up to SpaceX? As an outsider it seems they are impossibly far ahead of the competition.
Blue Origin still has only achieved sub-orbital flight, a far cry away from reusable super heavy orbital flight. Meanwhile SpaceX is launching satellite constellations and Starship is looking increasingly real.
What is the path to victory for other space companies?
Something we lose track of in the software world is that information isn't the alpha and omega in the real world. Everybody from Boeing to China would love to clone what SpaceX is doing, and China is actively trying to do so. And there are no real huge hardware secrets, yet somehow, even with effectively endless resources, these countries/competitors are not only failing to clone SpaceX tech - but aren't even remotely close to parity.
Blue Origin, for instance, not only has Bezos Bucks behind it (while SpaceX was started when Musk was 'only' had millions), but it was also started before SpaceX! And of course Boeing has been around since the dawn of spaceflight. And on a smaller scale lots of brilliant people, including John Carmack, have tried their hand at aerospace, and failed. No idea what SpaceX is doing so well, but whatever it is - it seems extremely difficult to replicate.
The problem for China is that they already had a large state agency doing this stuff. And they did it in a Soviet inspired way. They invest lots of money but their budget is tied up in many long term programs.
They can't just say 'well lets start from zero and copy SpaceX'. They have space station program that needs to continue and they can't wait until they have a next generation reusable rocket. Just like NASA they also do other things, like moon landers and so on.
And despite what people think, China can't infinitely invest in everything and don't. I'm sure the battles for money within China budgeting process are not that different from US congress.
Looking at ESA, getting budget for a new rocket is incredibly hard and ESA member states are richer then China.
Also I think its wrong to say there is no hardware secrets. Developing a very advanced rocket engine is really fucking hard, and to build one and be able to 'mass' produce it like SpaceX does is incredibly hard. Getting there took SpaceX a decade, and government run engine programs are nowhere near as fast usually.
The exact details of the heat shield and reentery of something like Starship also isn't exactly easy to replicate. Doable, but would still require quite a bit of reverse engineering.
SpaceX Starship production line isn't about 'one big secret' but about iteratively improving each part to make it cheaper and better over time. And you can''t replicate that without doing the same.
Aerospace companies have been trying to clone the Lockheed Skunkworks for generations now, with no success whatsoever. The trouble they have is they decide to clone it, and cannot resist "fixing" it in the process. The fixes destroy it. They simply don't have the guts to do what Kelly Johnson did.
>Blue Origin, for instance, not only has Bezos Bucks behind it (while SpaceX was started when Musk was 'only' had millions), but it was also started before SpaceX!
Indeed. SpaceX didn't have infinite amounts of capital during the years it developed Falcon 9 and Dragon. Until Tesla's market cap blew up during the COVID-19 era, Elon Musk had a "mere" few tens of billions of dollars. Boeing/ULA's pockets were and are gigantic, too.
Jeff Bezos has been among the world's wealthiest men for far, far longer than Musk's entry into that group. Let me paraphrase an excellent comment I saw on Reddit, in response to one of the usual lies about how the only reason SpaceX is a decade ahead of the rest of the world is that it got zillions in subsidies from the US government:
>If large amounts of funding is the only thing required to succeed, Blue Origin would now have a nuclear-powered spacecraft orbiting Pluto.
At some point in the past, I'm sure the same question was asked of IBM, Boeing, or several other large companies. At some point, the big company gets complacent or it gets so large it is bogged down in bureaucratic red tape or any other negative thing attributed to bigCorp loss of leadership in markets from the past. Then, as this sector likes to say "it's ripe for disruption." Sometimes, it takes decades though, and many competitors fall by the way side. At some point, Bezos might bore of his glorified Estes rocket hobby and decide to do something else with his money.
> At some point, the big company gets complacent or it gets so large it is bogged down in bureaucratic red tape or any other negative thing attributed to bigCorp loss of leadership in markets from the past. Then, as this sector likes to say "it's ripe for disruption."
I think it's inevitable that that's SpaceX's fate in the fullness of time.
But it seems like it'll be a while for them. They aren't indulging in typical market-leader behavior. They have kept their prices low - the market leader there by a substantial margin (based on $/kg to LEO). And they clearly have no problem making their best product obsolete via internal innovation. From what I recall, those are the 2 big pitfalls that entrenched market leaders tend to indulge in.
I’m less worried about that with SpaceX than I am about most companies, because Elon has shown a willingness to just fire a large percentage of a company’s employees with the massive Twitter layoffs.
Waiting for a rot in competition rather than upping one's own game seems a bad strategy. Sure, Spacex will seize to exist at some time. But so will everything else.
Disruption can come from any direction. I don’t think Spin launch has better than 5% odds of success, but it could drastically undercut SpaceX in terms of $/kg to orbit and there’s a few others willing to face SpaceX head on. Or China, US military, etc may decide to heavily subsidize a competitor for strategic reasons outside of economics.
Starlink is becoming a core component of their business model which presents its own issues. The service is attractive today, but cellular or wired connections have inherent advantages in most situations and could seriously eat into their customer base fairly quickly. T-Mobile/Verizon/etc 5G wireless home internet for example is generally a better choice for most people.
Which isn’t to say SpaceX is in any kind of imminent danger, rather the company has significant long term risks.
It’s possible, but the whole reason Starlink has a userbase is because there’s large areas where traditional telecom companies either never had enough interest to set up infrastructure or let what had already been set up rot. If that were to change meaningfully it’d require a significant shift in strategy from Verizon, AT&T, etc.
> T-Mobile 5G wireless home internet for example is generally a better choice for most people.
I was speaking with someone from US Cellular at a conference recently and they were saying their whole advantage over T-Mobile was spectrum in rural areas. Which explains why they were bought out by T-Mobile.
T-Mobile is also in the process of rolling out fiber home internet to compete with AT&T because 5G isn't that great.
T-Mobile's network might be good enough in suburban areas but it's lacking in rural areas. This is where Starlink is competitive, and also places like the middle of the ocean.
Spin launch doesn't even have 0.005% odds of success. 5% is an absurd number frankly.
The $/kg doesn't matter that much in practice in the real world. Maybe in the future where people are launching only fuel. But not now.
The reality is Spin launch requires people to build sats 'for' launching on Spin launch. And that's simply not happening. No major consumer is gone do that.
The answer is SpaceX is being held at a low headcount strategically. Turns out, if you‘re an engineering company you don‘t need a lot of top brass, DEI committees, artificial diversity hires, inner-company minority peer groups and bloated HR departments. You instead reduce friction as much as possible.
I hate to say it, but maybe Musk is onto something. SpaceX hires top people who work a lot, efficiently. This seems to work for them. Duh, I guess?
The closest competitor is Peter Beck's Rocket Lab. That's why SpaceX is using their monopoly position to attack them.[0] As I said in a different post, Beck is a combo of Musk and Tom Mueller.[1] The "only" things that Rocket Lab is missing is first-mover advantage, and billions of investment.
I don't think you can call Rocket Lab a competitor of SpaceX by any metric. Besides, look at the comments in the link you posted, it's pretty obvious that SpaceX isn't attacking them.
At some point SpaceX will reach the limits of how efficient they can get as dictated by physics. Their competitors will get there eventually, maybe decades later. But eventually the market will mature and they will become competitive. Same as any other industries, smart phones, electric cars, etc.
It's not about physical efficiency of the rockets so much as it is about their reuse. When you launch a rocket, fuel costs are basically a rounding error - well under a million dollars in general. Nearly all of your costs come from the rocket itself. And before SpaceX we were simply throwing away these rockets after a single use. Well technically the Space Shuttle was "reusable" but the refurbishment required was so extensive that they may as well have been rebuilding it from scratch after each launch. This is why SpaceX's audacious initial goal of reducing space flight costs by orders of magnitude was completely viable.
I think companies will have difficulty competing against SpaceX, so long as SpaceX is ideologically motivated. Right now their goal isn't to make a ton of money, but to create a stable civilization on Mars. So once we start headed to Mars them making next to no profit on launches, beyond what's needed for development and basic sustainability, would be perfectly fine. So you not only need to hit technological parity, but then somehow also go well beyond them in terms of cost reductions - at least if your motivation is profit.
I’m always deeply skeptical of appeals to the “laws of physics”. Yes, there are some hard constraints there, no, it doesn’t account for bright ideas for how to make those less important; the laws of physics stop us shrinking vacuum tubes small enough to fit billions on a chip, but it turns out that that doesn’t actually matter
The cost to develop in the first place may be too high, except for maybe nation states.
Falcon 9 funded Starship. Now there is little funding for a competitor, ignoring the fact that Starship will sink that even closer to 0 with such low launch costs.
You believe conventional turbo boosted rockets are the end game of space travel?
There is a lot more to come I can tell. at least 200 years of development if not more with current knowledge.
What will ultimately limit SpaceX, and launch in general, is deposition of water (either water in the rocket exhaust, or water from later oxidation of unburned fuel in the rocket exhaust) in the upper atmosphere. The stratosphere and mesosphere are extremely dry, so this limit is lower than you might think.
PRC has several commercial reusables on the way and IIRC 3 seperate mega constellations planned for short/medium term. If there's sustained demand, there's no reason they can't do to space launch what they did to ship building. At 30-40 F9s, IMO people are conflating SpaceX's reusable "capability" lead for actual scale. If other sectors any indication, would not be out of question for PRC to economy of scale 100s of F9 tier launch vehicles and eclipse SpaceX in aggregate payload in a few years of buildup if there's business/strategic case for it.
China is broke, like dead broke. It will follow Soviet Union's footstep of space race with the US in 1960 and collapse of Soviet Union.
Ship building is not the same technology level as spacecraft. China famously exclaimed in 2019 that they will be able to duplicate EUV in a few years, when dutch introduced EUV restrictions in China in 2019. Still nothing from China on EUV. Still nothing from China in terms of plane engines. Their new carrier in 2024 is still just a "demo" carrier, not to be used in real combat.
With the 50-70% youth unemployment [1], private enterprises dying [2], and dictatorship in China, scientists will either become disillusioned with work and lay flat, or flee to other countries.
They currently rely heavily on small hypergolic rockets. It's really hard to tell just how scared people should be of China's rocket program. On the one hand, they undoubtedly have a lot of very smart people. And they don't seem to fall in love with boondoggles like SLS/Orion. But on the other hand, they seem to be really stuck in the past for a country with so much advanced space tech.
We are witnessing rail road tycoon, but for the solar system. The foundations set in the next 50-100 years will be the foundation of the human solar empire. Spacex has no competition for the foreseeable future. And anyone who uses them as a service provider will be quickly subsumed if they’re successful, as the present article indicates.
I don't see anyone catching up to SpaceX anytime soon. There are several possibilities on the horizon to catch up to Falcon 9, if Starship gets delayed for a number of years for example, but that seems unlikely. Competitors can continue to hang on via just the threat of SpaceX taking over the entire launch industry though but they'll basically stay minority players. That is until the cost advantages of SpaceX become too great and companies become large via using SpaceX to push their own business models.
The Griffin connections go back to SpaceX's founding (they examined ICBMs together in Russia and even presented together at Mars Society). SpaceX was founded months after SDI's main barrier, the ABMT Treaty, was withdrawn from by the U.S. The first contracts by SpaceX were part of Prompt Global Strike (DARPA Falcon Project) which was a proposed hypersonic delivery system for boost-phase interceptors.
> Satellites positioned closer to Earth in LEO can swiftly target and track objects on the ground, providing both low-latency communication and high-resolution sensing capabilities. They also hold the potential for offensive actions, such as deploying interceptors to shoot down rockets or ICBMs during their vulnerable boost phase.
How much is this going to cost? Considering this system can be beaten by scheduling a regular ICBM test and pretending until it's too late and the missiles split into dozens of warheads and destroy an equal number of cities.
When I first heard of hundreds of billions going unaccounted for in pentagon spending each year, that was 30 years ago and the images of f-117s bombing Serbia (and getting shot down) still fresh, that-s where I believed that money went to. I was around 12 back then, so don't me judge to harshly on my naivete.
The typical 'its all government conspiracy' nonsense.
As usual the government isn't actually as smart as people pretend.
And contrary what people like to believe. The government is not the only organization that has a brain. The idea of having many sats and having constellations has not only occurred to the government. So the idea 'constellation' therefore its invented by the government, is brain dead dumb. Its a logically idea based on the physics of the situation.
And Griffin in these stories is way more involved and fundamental then he actually was. He was doing some consulting but he and Musk frequently clashed and didn't get along. Before modern SpaceX really got of the ground he had left. And after that he was not that favorable towards SpaceX. And today Griffin is giving talks how the government should be giving SpaceX money for Starship.
It was absolutely not Griffin that pushed for the Commercial Crew, that came out of other parts of NASA. Griffin wasn't the driver of it. Neither was he much involved with Commercial Crew.
Starlink happened literally more then a decade later with no involvement from Griffin. And Starlink primary revenue is from consumers, not from the military. And it was primarily funded by private funding rounds that SpaceX did.
The reality is Musk achieved something nobody thought was actually gone happen. And once he did the government was like 'oh shit we should jump on this'. Just as they did with reusable rockets.Yes Starlink/Starshield will make money from governments in the future. But that doesn't actually validate this story.
The idea that the US government had a long term coherent plan is utterly delusional if you understand anything about the history of SpaceX and space flight in the US.
The main evidence seems to be 'Mike Griffin' was vaguely involved in various ways.
So the whole narrative is just nonsense and doesn't even remotely hold up.
The continued goal of realizing SDI is not secret, nor a conspiracy. Heritage Foundation is quite open about it since proposing the original idea to Ronald Reagan. Griffin is a very influential member. He just pulled a team of SpaceX people (from the Starshield group) to build hypersonic warheads to implement the interceptor part of an SDI "at scale": https://www.castelion.com/team
As someone else said, follow what these people DO, not the self-serving narratives they/Elon gives biographers.
No it isn't. Starlink was funded completely with private funding until well into its operation when it started getting a few small government contracts.
I've very recently seen numerous posts starting to show up on both reddit and various websites as well as anonymous wikipedia editors pushing this conspiracy theory. They all repeat the same thing. They'll claim Griffin as basically a founder of SpaceX (who in reality had almost no involvement with starting SpaceX) and they'll claim Griffin basically "gave" SpaceX its first government contracts even though NASA administrators have almost no sway over where contracts go (that'd be illegal). They'll also claim other things like that Starlink is somehow developing weapons to be put in orbit to reproduce SDI.
According to Mike Griffin (referring to the first decade of the company), "[SpaceX] will have received approximately $1.2 billion in government money from the collective programs. I’m rounding, but with this recent $400-plus million award under CCiCap [Commercial Crew integrated Capability], that brings the total SpaceX funding to something around $1.2 billion, maybe a little more.
That’s—I will only say in my view—excessive, especially since in testimony last year the SpaceX founder, Elon Musk, indicated that the private funding involved was not more than $200 million. $100 million of his own money that he had brought in from a prior enterprise, and then he alluded to the fact—I’m trying to recall the testimony on an ad hoc basis, but the point is that there’s less than $200 million of private capital in SpaceX and $1.2 billion of government capital."
"In early 2002 he met entrepreneur Elon Musk and accompanied him on a trip to Russia where they attempted to purchase ICBMs. The unsuccessful trip is credited as directly leading to the formation of SpaceX.[7] Musk offered Griffin the title of Chief Engineer at the company,[8] but Griffin instead became president and COO of In-Q-Tel, a private enterprise funded by the CIA to identify and invest in companies developing cutting-edge technologies that serve national security interests.[9]"
In 2005, he was appointed NASA Administrator where he pushed for commercial cargo and crew transportation services that saved the company from bankruptcy.
"In February 2018, Griffin was appointed as Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering by Donald Trump. One of his first actions was to create the Space Development Agency.[13][14] The organization was tasked with procuring a proliferated constellation of low Earth orbit satellites to detect Chinese and Russian hypersonic weapons. Commercial contracts for the constellation were given to L3Harris and SpaceX."
Man I've been saying this for years that it felt like SpaceX was just a way for the government to side-step the rot of entrenched companies like Boeing and Lockmart.
One thing that is missing for explaining SpaceX success is its proximity with Tesla: with them, they have access to automotive electronic units (on-board computer, sensors, motors ...). Without this, SpaceX would not be able to produce sats for such a low price
I wonder why Starlink is not working in countries with heavily censored internet like China or Russia. Given Elon's passion for free speech and interest in crypto that would be a super product.
Because they must license the electromagnetic spectrum from those countries. It would also be trivial for those authoritarian governments to track people using those dishes and punish them.
1) What is the penalty if they don't license spectrum? Will Russia and China shoot down Starlink satellites? Or impose sanctions and disrupt their supply chain?
2) We all know that Ukrainian sea drones are using Starlink. They wouldn't do it if it was that easy to detect.
Readit News
Honestly, I wonder if Tesla will be similar. They just won the charging standard war. Watching the battery presentation a while back, they're chipping away at battery technology, and every % adds up.
The ICE car companies have "embraced" EVs, but are losing money on every car right now. Will tesla start making their cars cheaper and cheaper while the other companies eventually try to buy their way out via tesla batteries?
ETA: If believing that this is “winning” causes Tesla folks to encourage further positive-sum behavior, ignore everything I said: Tesla kicked everyone’s ass. Rah.
Tesla gets most of their battery technology from either Panasonic [1] or CATL.[2] This allows those companies to operate in the US to avoid tariffs.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/alanohnsman/2022/07/13/teslas-l...
[2] https://www.electrive.com/2024/03/25/catl-and-tesla-launch-c...
It's also not true that all other manufacturers are losing money on EVs. BMW and VW notably have been profitable on theirs.
Lastly stop giving so much credence to what Tesla claims in presentation and start paying attention to what they actually sell. So far they have sold 4680 cells in two cars and both have had disappointing charging curves. Not impressive at the moment especially compared to what Chinese companies are offering.
Not just money, but data also
"...so they're better than you?"
"Their service is so much better than us, that if you keep using them we'll go out of business and you'll have to use them, and they're a direct competitor to you." That's enough to make a business think about their strategic interest, not just about the current expense.
Blue Origin still has only achieved sub-orbital flight, a far cry away from reusable super heavy orbital flight. Meanwhile SpaceX is launching satellite constellations and Starship is looking increasingly real.
What is the path to victory for other space companies?
Blue Origin, for instance, not only has Bezos Bucks behind it (while SpaceX was started when Musk was 'only' had millions), but it was also started before SpaceX! And of course Boeing has been around since the dawn of spaceflight. And on a smaller scale lots of brilliant people, including John Carmack, have tried their hand at aerospace, and failed. No idea what SpaceX is doing so well, but whatever it is - it seems extremely difficult to replicate.
They can't just say 'well lets start from zero and copy SpaceX'. They have space station program that needs to continue and they can't wait until they have a next generation reusable rocket. Just like NASA they also do other things, like moon landers and so on.
And despite what people think, China can't infinitely invest in everything and don't. I'm sure the battles for money within China budgeting process are not that different from US congress.
Looking at ESA, getting budget for a new rocket is incredibly hard and ESA member states are richer then China.
Also I think its wrong to say there is no hardware secrets. Developing a very advanced rocket engine is really fucking hard, and to build one and be able to 'mass' produce it like SpaceX does is incredibly hard. Getting there took SpaceX a decade, and government run engine programs are nowhere near as fast usually.
The exact details of the heat shield and reentery of something like Starship also isn't exactly easy to replicate. Doable, but would still require quite a bit of reverse engineering.
SpaceX Starship production line isn't about 'one big secret' but about iteratively improving each part to make it cheaper and better over time. And you can''t replicate that without doing the same.
Indeed. SpaceX didn't have infinite amounts of capital during the years it developed Falcon 9 and Dragon. Until Tesla's market cap blew up during the COVID-19 era, Elon Musk had a "mere" few tens of billions of dollars. Boeing/ULA's pockets were and are gigantic, too.
Jeff Bezos has been among the world's wealthiest men for far, far longer than Musk's entry into that group. Let me paraphrase an excellent comment I saw on Reddit, in response to one of the usual lies about how the only reason SpaceX is a decade ahead of the rest of the world is that it got zillions in subsidies from the US government:
>If large amounts of funding is the only thing required to succeed, Blue Origin would now have a nuclear-powered spacecraft orbiting Pluto.
I’d say that it wasn’t a failure at all, and more impressive than just about anyone else’s side project I can think of offhand.
I think it's inevitable that that's SpaceX's fate in the fullness of time.
But it seems like it'll be a while for them. They aren't indulging in typical market-leader behavior. They have kept their prices low - the market leader there by a substantial margin (based on $/kg to LEO). And they clearly have no problem making their best product obsolete via internal innovation. From what I recall, those are the 2 big pitfalls that entrenched market leaders tend to indulge in.
Starlink is becoming a core component of their business model which presents its own issues. The service is attractive today, but cellular or wired connections have inherent advantages in most situations and could seriously eat into their customer base fairly quickly. T-Mobile/Verizon/etc 5G wireless home internet for example is generally a better choice for most people.
Which isn’t to say SpaceX is in any kind of imminent danger, rather the company has significant long term risks.
I was speaking with someone from US Cellular at a conference recently and they were saying their whole advantage over T-Mobile was spectrum in rural areas. Which explains why they were bought out by T-Mobile.
T-Mobile is also in the process of rolling out fiber home internet to compete with AT&T because 5G isn't that great.
T-Mobile's network might be good enough in suburban areas but it's lacking in rural areas. This is where Starlink is competitive, and also places like the middle of the ocean.
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The $/kg doesn't matter that much in practice in the real world. Maybe in the future where people are launching only fuel. But not now.
The reality is Spin launch requires people to build sats 'for' launching on Spin launch. And that's simply not happening. No major consumer is gone do that.
Spin launch is borderline a grift.
I hate to say it, but maybe Musk is onto something. SpaceX hires top people who work a lot, efficiently. This seems to work for them. Duh, I guess?
The closest competitor is Peter Beck's Rocket Lab. That's why SpaceX is using their monopoly position to attack them.[0] As I said in a different post, Beck is a combo of Musk and Tom Mueller.[1] The "only" things that Rocket Lab is missing is first-mover advantage, and billions of investment.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40512353
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40518286
I think companies will have difficulty competing against SpaceX, so long as SpaceX is ideologically motivated. Right now their goal isn't to make a ton of money, but to create a stable civilization on Mars. So once we start headed to Mars them making next to no profit on launches, beyond what's needed for development and basic sustainability, would be perfectly fine. So you not only need to hit technological parity, but then somehow also go well beyond them in terms of cost reductions - at least if your motivation is profit.
Falcon 9 funded Starship. Now there is little funding for a competitor, ignoring the fact that Starship will sink that even closer to 0 with such low launch costs.
Deleted Comment
Ship building is not the same technology level as spacecraft. China famously exclaimed in 2019 that they will be able to duplicate EUV in a few years, when dutch introduced EUV restrictions in China in 2019. Still nothing from China on EUV. Still nothing from China in terms of plane engines. Their new carrier in 2024 is still just a "demo" carrier, not to be used in real combat.
With the 50-70% youth unemployment [1], private enterprises dying [2], and dictatorship in China, scientists will either become disillusioned with work and lay flat, or flee to other countries.
[1] Chinese professor says youth jobless rate might have hit 46.5% (2023) https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSL4N3960Z5/
[2] https://www.barrons.com/articles/chinas-private-sector-is-lo...
They currently rely heavily on small hypergolic rockets. It's really hard to tell just how scared people should be of China's rocket program. On the one hand, they undoubtedly have a lot of very smart people. And they don't seem to fall in love with boondoggles like SLS/Orion. But on the other hand, they seem to be really stuck in the past for a country with so much advanced space tech.
Dead Comment
Hopefully there isn't one. We need a Pepsi here, not an Amazon.
Starlink’s future is enhanced by contracts rooted in the SDI. Its history has little to do with it.
> Satellites positioned closer to Earth in LEO can swiftly target and track objects on the ground, providing both low-latency communication and high-resolution sensing capabilities. They also hold the potential for offensive actions, such as deploying interceptors to shoot down rockets or ICBMs during their vulnerable boost phase.
How much is this going to cost? Considering this system can be beaten by scheduling a regular ICBM test and pretending until it's too late and the missiles split into dozens of warheads and destroy an equal number of cities.
When I first heard of hundreds of billions going unaccounted for in pentagon spending each year, that was 30 years ago and the images of f-117s bombing Serbia (and getting shot down) still fresh, that-s where I believed that money went to. I was around 12 back then, so don't me judge to harshly on my naivete.
It would seem Musk doesn't mind.
As usual the government isn't actually as smart as people pretend.
And contrary what people like to believe. The government is not the only organization that has a brain. The idea of having many sats and having constellations has not only occurred to the government. So the idea 'constellation' therefore its invented by the government, is brain dead dumb. Its a logically idea based on the physics of the situation.
And Griffin in these stories is way more involved and fundamental then he actually was. He was doing some consulting but he and Musk frequently clashed and didn't get along. Before modern SpaceX really got of the ground he had left. And after that he was not that favorable towards SpaceX. And today Griffin is giving talks how the government should be giving SpaceX money for Starship.
It was absolutely not Griffin that pushed for the Commercial Crew, that came out of other parts of NASA. Griffin wasn't the driver of it. Neither was he much involved with Commercial Crew.
Starlink happened literally more then a decade later with no involvement from Griffin. And Starlink primary revenue is from consumers, not from the military. And it was primarily funded by private funding rounds that SpaceX did.
The reality is Musk achieved something nobody thought was actually gone happen. And once he did the government was like 'oh shit we should jump on this'. Just as they did with reusable rockets.Yes Starlink/Starshield will make money from governments in the future. But that doesn't actually validate this story.
The idea that the US government had a long term coherent plan is utterly delusional if you understand anything about the history of SpaceX and space flight in the US.
The main evidence seems to be 'Mike Griffin' was vaguely involved in various ways.
So the whole narrative is just nonsense and doesn't even remotely hold up.
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I've very recently seen numerous posts starting to show up on both reddit and various websites as well as anonymous wikipedia editors pushing this conspiracy theory. They all repeat the same thing. They'll claim Griffin as basically a founder of SpaceX (who in reality had almost no involvement with starting SpaceX) and they'll claim Griffin basically "gave" SpaceX its first government contracts even though NASA administrators have almost no sway over where contracts go (that'd be illegal). They'll also claim other things like that Starlink is somehow developing weapons to be put in orbit to reproduce SDI.
That’s—I will only say in my view—excessive, especially since in testimony last year the SpaceX founder, Elon Musk, indicated that the private funding involved was not more than $200 million. $100 million of his own money that he had brought in from a prior enterprise, and then he alluded to the fact—I’m trying to recall the testimony on an ad hoc basis, but the point is that there’s less than $200 million of private capital in SpaceX and $1.2 billion of government capital."
https://historycollection.jsc.nasa.gov/JSCHistoryPortal/hist...
Also recent funding for LEO-based missile interception, mostly Republican led,
- https://www.science.org/content/article/decades-after-reagan...
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=79e8Y2Mgq-0
> recent funding for LEO-based missile interception
This has nothing to do with SpaceX.
In 2005, he was appointed NASA Administrator where he pushed for commercial cargo and crew transportation services that saved the company from bankruptcy.
"In February 2018, Griffin was appointed as Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering by Donald Trump. One of his first actions was to create the Space Development Agency.[13][14] The organization was tasked with procuring a proliferated constellation of low Earth orbit satellites to detect Chinese and Russian hypersonic weapons. Commercial contracts for the constellation were given to L3Harris and SpaceX."
It's pretty cool to be vindicated by this.
COTS was designed to complement the majors. Few pre-2010 thought of replacement.
COTS was a massive risk that most thought was absolutely crazy.
2) We all know that Ukrainian sea drones are using Starlink. They wouldn't do it if it was that easy to detect.
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