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.
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 remember an earthquake in LA caused a freeway interchange to collapse. The government offered an incentive of something like a million bucks for every day the rebuild was completed ahead of schedule. The contractor got it done in a stupendously short time.
Which is still something that CA sometimes does, with apparently good results: https://www.ktvu.com/news/california-contractor-earns-8m-bon...
The USSR and it's space program would argue differently.
I am also not launching rockets. It seems like I am launching exactly as many rockets as Carmack, thus by simple math I am just as successful/good at launching rockets at Carmack.
No, he didn't, or perhaps more generously "much smaller scale" is doing a LOT of work in your sentence. The core challenge of real rockets is all about scale/speed, and in particular getting to orbit which is where the vast majority of the value starts. The Rocket Equation and material science makes that a completely different scale of challenge to do at all, let alone with a sufficiently useful mass fraction, let alone with reuse, vs anything suborbital. Neither Armadillo nor the DC-X were going to orbit. Hobbies are neat but going from that to something real represents a huge huge amount of work and skill.
His co-founder at Oculus, Palmer Luckey, talked about how he did on the Arthi and Sriram podcast (both hosts with considerable big tech experience and VCs at A16Z). He said the company was
> "very successful, probably the most successful (rocket) company in its time in it's budget range. They were doing better things than companies spending 100x more money. They moved very fast, building a vertical take-off and landing rocket, actually long before SpaceX did."
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.
I worked in a project where an architecture was very flawed initially and took almost a decade to move away from it.
So often management pushes for incremental updates on an outdated architecture because the risks are too high since the new architecture might have all new problems of its own.
Both traditional US aerospace and European launch curry political favor by spreading work around to subcontractors. This can't help but slow things way down and make it more expensive.
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.
Paying for a product is not a subsidy any more than you buying a Ford car is giving Ford a subsidy.
I do not disagree.
I'm skeptical.
Like Amazon, SpaceX is a fountain of ex-employees who have tired of the required workload. I don't see a few extra on top of the current constant exodus changing much.
The primary issue for other companies is culture and institutional ability to foster innovation and take risk.
The old space organizations like ULA or Boeing et al and government funded are extremely risk averse and are also optimized for other priorities like having presence in as many states as possible or using old designs/ components to keep jobs funded and so on which limits them.
The new space companies do not have the resources to be as aggressive or fast although they are trying, they do not have free cash flow of SpaceX or extremely wealth and committed sponsor. Blue Origin+Amazon(Kuiper is theirs not BO) have resources but are not fast or aggressive and most likely chance to compete if they can get their culture sorted.
Private rocket companies were not successful businesses before SpaceX for a reason, its success has inspired capital inflows but problems are the same.
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Astra, Rocket Labs, Relativity and Firefly are the only ones with some track record of orbital launching vehicles, Astra went private at 99% down round for just 11M in March-24 and are probably going to be either acquired or shutdown.
Firefly has no immediate reuse plans. Terran R and Neutron are the realistic contenders for reusable vehicles if successful(big IF) then will have Falcon 9 equivalent competitor commercially available by end of the decade (13 years after Falcon 9 landed regularly in 2017). Starship will be active well before 2030 and be a generation ahead again. SpaceX when Starship launches commercially say in 2025 are at least 20 years ahead of everyone else and currently 10 years ahead with Falcon 9.
The last time space industry had this kind of disparity were the few years after Sputnik and other soviet first launches, to catch up the federal government spent multiple % of GDP and made it the national priority and employed 400,000 people to do it. SpaceX is not Soviet Russia it is a domestic company NASA and Space Force benefits from and Trump/Biden are not Kennedy so that is not going to repeat.
Realistically next 40-50 years will be dominated by SpaceX in both satellites and rocket vehicles, even if they stop innovating soon.
I have no claim to knowing what SpaceX's secret sauce is, because the problem I think you run into immediately is that any sort of logical explanation then bumps into issues like the ones I'm mentioning here.
Mike Griffin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_D._Griffin
Legend had it Musk hired Mueller after meeting him and seeing a liquid biprop engine he was building in his garage. That sounds exactly like the type of person you describe. “I can’t do the cool shit I want to do at work because of forms/approvals so I’ll just do it myself at home”.
He set an implausible but interesting ’mission’ from early on. He set the culture of the company from the start such that the concept (borrowed from the tech world) of failing and iterating fast actually happened (rather than just being talked about in corporate presentations). He brought naive but effective ‘first principles’ thinking to many of the questions or problems which probably helped avoid the conservatism of ‘old space’. He brought enough money to start, but it was little enough that they had to be scrappy and lean for survival, which probably fed into the culture and built a great team further. And (by luck or judgment) he hired the right people, like Tom Mueller, who was already a rocket engineer, but was frustrated by his previous industry experience.
(And of course, back then he didn’t have the baggage he has now, which made these things easier to achieve.)
The reason NASA was doing that was because of risk aversion and lack of innovation!
The shuttle was shut down because NASA couldn’t afford another disaster like Columbia and there had been absolutely no meaningful progress to replace it .
Without spacex, that would still be the case , Dreamliner is still not done a demo flight and Boeing would have held NASA by the balls and renegotiated from fixed price to cost plus contract as they have been doing for decades.
SpaceX forced the hand by delivering on commercial crew (CCS)
The shuttle had bunch of older parts designed for other programs and was 30 years old in 2010.
SLS flies on engines that are decades old from shuttle era with no plan for new engines and still costs in multiple billions per launch !
If not for spaceX we would be cheering BO for successfully delivering the Vulcan engines and being proud of that as pinnacle of private space .
BO official Moro is step by step ferociously. They were always culturally tuned to be risk averse and careful
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 dont know if it will be starlink but I do expect(hope) ground based telecom to go the way of floppy disks in the coming decades
Satellites however move so you need to accept the network sucks in moderate density areas or you have vastly more coverage in low density areas than you need.
Wired connections inherently provide a lot more bandwidth, and in dense urban environments the last mile isn’t a mile it’s within a building.
Some of that is provided for free when covering higher density areas which satellite networks like Starlink simply can’t handle at any kind of reasonable constellation size.
A quick search suggests that the range of a 5G tower, operating only at low/mid-band spectrum (so in other words, below peak speed - but at higher range) can only operate in the 1 to 3 mile range. [1] We'll say 2. That's an area of pi*2^2 = ~12.5 square miles, we'll say 13. The area of the US is 3.8 million square miles. So your number would provide coverage for (10,000 * 13) / 3.8 million = 3.4% of the US. That maybe enough to cover the most exceptionally dense urban locations, but you're missing a lot of people there.
And, again, this is just for the low/mid-band stuff. And then you need to regularly maintain those towers. While you could get global coverage with relatively few satellites that can just be trivially remotely launched/decommissioned. A quick search there [2] turns up a current practical (not peak/theoretic) bandwidth for Starlink in the 100+ Mbps range + ~50ms latency. I have difficulty seeing a logical argument for ground based telecom, beside as a hedge against WW3 when probably the first thing that will happen is a huge chunk of all satellites going poof.
[1] - https://dgtlinfra.com/cell-tower-range-how-far-reach/
[2] - https://www.pcmag.com/news/starlink-speed-tests-2023-vs-2022
Before you ask if 10,000 * 2,000 = 20 million square miles is high, handoffs require you to be in range of multiple towers so there’s a lot of overlap and hills, ocean, etc that reduce useful range.
Ultimately there’s 142,100 cell towers in the US, but that’s including density from urban areas and redundancy from multiple cell networks. Anyway, the point I was making was that Starlink is targeting low density areas by necessity they simply can’t target NYC density for any reasonable constellation size. However, if you’re a cellphone company and you’re already covering anywhere in the US with 50+people per square mile extending that to anywhere with 5+ or even 0.5+ people per square mile and killing Starlink just doesn’t take that may towers.
https://www.benton.org/headlines/us-cell-towers-and-small-ce...*
Each upgrade with telecoms entails a sacrifice. You can have really fast signals that can't go far and have difficulty penetrating obstacles like walls/buildings/hills/etc, or you can have really far reaching and high penetrating signals that can't go fast. So for instance Verizon's max speed towers can only reach 1500 feet [1], so I think my estimate of ~2 miles was a pretty reasonable meet in the middle.
All that said I agree with you in principle. Obviously space based telecoms are much better for less populated areas than heavily populated, but I'd argue that that space based can scale much more easily. The ground based telecoms aren't just those 140k towers, but also the other 450k nodes on top. And that's to cover a pretty small geographic area. And each of those nodes not only needs land and construction permits, but they also need to be be regularly maintained, and so on. It's a pretty big deal. For space based coverage, you can just launch your satellites from Texas and have them providing coverage on the other side of the world in a matter of minutes.
Put another way - imagine we were creating a civilization from scratch and these technologies were all 'unlocked.' I don't think we'd be using ground based stuff much at all. In the present when the infrastructure already exists, there's no reason not to take advantage of it, but in general it just doesn't scale so well.
[1] - https://www.verizon.com/about/news/how-far-does-5g-reach
The thing about high density places with a ton of infrastructure is that wired will always be the best because you have close access to infrastructure and its likely to already be built in. For rural areas or even suburban areas the equation starts to tip to orbital wireless for the reasons you state above and also geographic realities make ground based wireless unreliable in places where there are mountains valleys canyons etc.
There’s a 4 orders of magnitude difference between high density areas and low density ones. So no you don’t need millimeter wave everywhere. You can increase bandwidth per tower, but you can also the number of cell sites.
Further every frequency you add removes users from other frequencies. IE: At 10 miles you can use a subset of frequencies, but those frequencies don’t need to cover for people 100m from the cell tower because those are on 5G.
Thus double the number of cell sites means there’s an extra circle of people on mm wave frequencies around the new towers. Thus you more than double effective bandwidth in low density areas when you double the number of towers.
Meanwhile the reverse happens with satellites. For a given number of satellites there’s some areas where you have sufficient capacity for the density at those area. Suppose you have enough satellites for ships and aircraft over the ocean, add new satellites to handle higher density and the time those satellites are over the ocean isn’t getting you new customers. IE the percentage of time the average satellite is at 90+% capacity drops when you add more satellites.
You can’t just put 50 satellites next to each other over a suburb and call it a day you need a ring(s) of satellites circling the entire globe to reach whatever your target density is along their full orbit. Unfortunately, most land has really low density North Dakota only averages 11 people per square mile, while Florida a mostly empty state sits at 422.
Target 10 people per square mile (adjusting for household size and rates percentage of people signing up) and just about all your satellites are useful across the entire US.
But Pick 100 people per square mile 90% of your time over North Dakota is wasted. Worse large chunks of Florida are also nearly empty as most of its population is along the coastline in places like Sweetwater where 8,800 people per square mile live. So your wasteful 100 people per square mile in ND still only covers a small fraction of the population in Florida.
Cellular is the reverse the first 10k towers are largely “dead weight” that cover few people per tower, but the rest of the 130k are really useful because you optimize locations for density. Swap that to satellites initially the constellation has very high utilization, but the ratio keeps getting worse as you add more satellites.
PS: Starlink could try to vary speeds or prices more based on density, but people really want predictable results for their money.
By contrast SpaceX: build satellites, launch satellites, done. They can launch tens (and soon hundreds if not thousands) from their base in Texas with a single launch. There's still some bureaucrazy they have to deal with, but this is overall just a many orders of magnitude greater difference in terms of scalability and overall ease. And when satellites start hitting end-of-life - no problem, just deorbit them and continue expanding the swarm.
That's not really a problem, and is already the case over most of the world (particularly oceans.)
So, for any square mile of land, you can have at most some small number of subscribers. Sure, you can cover a huge surface, but only with a very low density. Conversely, the vast majority of the world's population lives in huge clumps in small areas.
Starlink should (annd perhaps anlready do) approach commercial high rises with a single uplink for the building, shared through the building network. Even as a backup data system, still very valuable system.
Starlink has ~1 million customers in the US from ~6,000 satellites so you’d think they could do 10x that with 10x the number of satellites. But much of the US is low enough density that their current constellation is already sufficient and effective bandwidth per satellite is maximum bandwidth * percentage of orbit in useful locations. Which means 10x satellites are closer to 3x useful bandwidth and it gets much worse the higher density you’re aiming for.
Ahh you might think just offer lower bandwidth per customer in urban areas, but people will pay less as the bandwidth drops and Starlink is already fairly slow.
Outside the US there is major major FTTH rollout going on everywhere. UK will get to ~90%+ penetration within a few years (it's at 66% now, 83% if you include HFC DOCSIS3.1 and growing at ~1% a month, including some very very rural areas).
All of Europe is basically like this, and will have/already has overwhelming FTTH coverage. The same is happening in Asia and even in the more developed parts of Africa.
So every month the addressable market for Starlink IMO declines. There will of course be places that are extremely rural that won't get FTTH for a long time (but I think they will eventually), and underdeveloped countries will struggle to roll it out for a long time too - but there is a lack of capacity in these underdeveloped places to pay for starlink.
What Starlink as actually amazing at is bringing the price of fixed line connections down. A lot of countries have ridiculously high fixed line/mobile data costs (I would assume some level of corruption is happening to keep competition out). Starlink will push those prices down and force providers to offer unlimited data packages in those areas. However, I'm not convinced Starlink will see the benefit of a lot of that.
Don't get me wrong - Starlink is an awesome service that really benefits humanity. However, I think the long term economics for it are poor for it to grow substantially more (this may be ok as I believe it is EBITDA positive now). And I think churn will be a problem in developed countries as more and more of them get FTTH.
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.
The issue is it’s rolling out enough places to start hurting Starlink because speeds are generally higher and it costs 50$ vs 120$ / month.
I probably would have been fired if I said that out loud in front of the client.
They are just one of many hopefuls in the industry.
There's a big difference. Virtually all rocket startups are doomed regardless of whether their rockets succeed or fail because of the competition from fully reusable Starship and/or Terran R and/or Stoke.
Relativity and Stoke actually have a chance of success. It's small, but non-zero.
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.
A cellphone experiences higher peak acceleration when hitting a floor when falling off a table but they are generally fine. So yes some sats would need modifications, but not necessarily significant ones and you can trivially test those conditions prior to launch. A Starlink competitor would happily design for such if it reduced their launch costs by 90%.
This simply isn't something that anybody would do unless there is a huge benefit to it. Spin Launch still requires a rocket, and one that will likely not be reusable one anytime soon. So the idea that its going to massively reduce cost is a fantasy.
To even have any cost saving at all they need a huge number of launches. There simply isn't a market for that many tiny sats. There is a reason all the constellations have moved to larger sats that are not SpinLaunch compatible. Micro launch is a tiny market and companies like SpinLaunch are just lying to their investors, just like Astra did.
If we are looking at things like consumables, it would take 500 SpinLaunch launches and that doesn't even match a single Starship launch. How anybody could think this would be cheaper is beyond me.
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.
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.
Or "Space Travel is Utter Bilge"[0], as they say
0: https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2003AAS...203.2801Y/abstra...
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.
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.
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...
Nevertheless they’ve got their asses kicked by Starlink so I’m sure they’re trying to figure out how to make their own.
Source: The Expanse.
Hopefully there isn't one. We need a Pepsi here, not an Amazon.