Cthel Ars Praefectus
6y
11,052
Subscriptor
odikweos said:
Wow. Not even one commenter mentioned the possibility of Chinese competition.

The real story here is exactly when cheap Chinese competition completely erodes the global demand for American launch. It's happened in industry after industry, and the state-owned "company" that handles the matter for PRC just succeeded at its first retrieval last month.

And no one apparently even has this on their radar.
That's because the US outlawed launching anything containing a single US-made component (including software) on a Chinese launch vehicle.
https://spacenews.com/u-s-itar-satellite-export-regimes-effects-still-strong-in-europe/

Massive fines tend to make the business model for launching on a Chinese launch vehicle unviable. //

Mdoug1974 Smack-Fu Master, in training
1y
18
The one and only reason SpaceX holds a monopoly as Gwynne Shotwell has stated many manby times is that all the other launch service providers have failed to provide any competition.

SpaceX cannot be blamed for its competitors failures to bring rockets to market in sufficient numbers to make a challenge.
Shotwell has in so many interviews stated that SpaceX welcoms competition because it will force them to work harder, better and smarter.
Nobody has been even able to start being competion yet. and by the time they do starship will be flying, and maybe Falcon 9 will be slowing down.

SpaceX have to fly F9 until the ISS is shutdown as they are contracted to do so, and starship willnever be cleared to ISS unless somebody(Boeing) re-calculates all the stress and mechanical loading of attaching a fully finished Starship to the ISS.

The company that is almost exclusively responsible for the dramatic increase in launch availability in the 2020s has signaled that it intends to wind down Falcon 9 operations as quickly as possible in favor of the larger Starship rocket. Some might see that as a good thing due to Starship’s enormous payload capacity. But there are growing concerns that SpaceX will largely focus on its own payloads—Starlink v3 satellites and orbital data centers—because of their potential to drive far greater profits. The Starship rocket’s PEZ satellite dispenser, optimized for Starlink, is an indication of the company’s priorities.

In financial documents, it’s clear that SpaceX views commercial launch as a rounding error compared to revenues from its own satellites in space. A majority of the company’s revenue ($4.3 billion out of $7.8 billion) during the second quarter of 2026 came from Starlink, whereas less than 12 percent was due to space services, of which commercial launch is but a fraction. This disparity is only likely to widen.

SpaceX has already moved beyond “peak” Falcon 9 operations. The company flew the rocket 165 times last year, and it will probably fly about 20 fewer missions this year. SpaceX is already making ground system changes to reflect these reductions. //

Whether or not these dates stick, it has become clear to commercial satellite operators that they can no longer reliably plan their future around the workhorse Falcon 9 rocket, creating a huge pain point for the commercial space industry in the United States and other Western countries.

This is because of an inescapable reality: Without SpaceX, the Western launch market would have been completely screwed over the last half-decade. //

The Ariane 6 rocket made its debut flight in July 2024 and has had a nice track record. But with a production goal of ten vehicles a year, the rocket won’t make a meaningful dent in the global need for launch capacity.