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Comment by dylan604 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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 think the Mars goal helps them a lot with obsoleting their best product. It was obsolete from the start - they knew this one never goes to Mars, it's just a test bed for technologies and a money maker that helps them on the way. While other companies developed their best rocket and then tried to keep it running as long as possible to recoup the investment and make as much money from it as possible, Musk was talking about the next rocket before first Falcon 9 landing.

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.

On the other hand, Elon just fired Tesla’s entire Supercharger team for what appear to be stupid reasons (and is now trying to rebuild from that error.) The unique expertise at SpaceX will be much harder to rebuild if Musk makes a similar mistake in that company. If anything, a massive outpouring of talent is the most likely vector by which the competition quickly catches up and overtakes SpaceX.

> If anything, a massive outpouring of talent is the most likely vector by which the competition quickly catches up and overtakes SpaceX.

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 talent and even many of the ideas came from NASA and old space, while SpaceX has both inspired and created a generation of it, there was always strong engineering talent in rocket science.

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.

There seem to be a lot of things that cannot be explained if we take what you're saying as an assumption. For instance from 2011-2020 (when SpaceX started launching to the ISS) NASA had no way to get crew to the ISS, and relied exclusively on Russia. That can't be dismissed as just risk aversion. Similarly Blue Origin is filled with old space talent, was founded before SpaceX, is funded by Bezos Bucks, and yet can't even manage to achieve an orbital flight. Also SpaceX's early talent included people like Tom Mueller [1] who would go on to work as CTO. Notably he was picked up on SpaceX because of the rocket engines that he was literally building in his garage!

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.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Mueller

The only person more important than Tom Mueller for SpaceX is

Mike Griffin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_D._Griffin

And Gwynne Shotwell, COO of SpaceX.

Mike Griffin has almost no relation to SpaceX. He's a footnote at best.

To be fair, Tom Mueller was also head of liquid engine propulsion at TRW as noted in the wikipedia link, he wasn't exactly an amateur. I had the same initial response to the gp, but I think they got it right: "The primary issue for other companies is culture and institutional ability to foster innovation and take risk." I think SpaceX went after people who knew what they were doing, but were frustrated by the bureaucracy. I get the sense that Blue Origin hired people with experience who were pretty happy with the way traditional aerospace worked, and kept doing exactly the same thing at Blue Origin.

> I think SpaceX went after people who knew what they were doing, but were frustrated by the bureaucracy.

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”.

(I know it’s unpopular these days but) this is where I think Elon has to be given some credit.

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.)

> NASA had no way to get crew to the ISS, and relied exclusively on Russia.

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

Astra is not private yet. The SEC is still reviewing the take-private offer that Astra's board accepted from the group of investors. The take-private move is essentially an acquisition.

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.

s/seize/cease

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