Comment by panick21_ | Hacker News Reader

Comment by panick21_ | Hacker News Reader

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I think you are to optimistic, what you say is true in principle, but it will take much longer. Vertical landing isn't really the technical challenge. Many small vehicles have demonstrated this over the years, including before SpaceX.

The challenge with orbital booster reuse is getting them threw the atmosphere intact and ready to land and then be reused quickly. And do that while being optimized enough to carry payload. That is the actual challenge. And that's just the first, then you need to build everything to be able to do this 5-10 times.

Only one other company then SpaceX has achieved getting a booster back at all, and that was by dropping it into an ocean. RocketLab, and they so far as I know have never reflown a complete booster. BlueOrigin has never landed a complete booster. ULA and Arianespace aren't close.

Honda in particular is not a launch competitor and is very unlikely to be one in the future. Japan already has a pet rocket that they support that has low launch rates. Honda isn't just isn't a competitor in the launch sector, and I don't think they are even planning that.

BlueOrigin might emerge as a competitor, but its nothing like Sun (sun was profitable in the first year). BlueOrigin simply has an infinite money glitch, that almost no other company in history had. The amount of money BlueOrigin spent in the last 10 year is actually unbelievable, they at times had the same amount of people as SpaceX, while having near 0 revenue. By any rational evaluation BlueOrigin is completely non-viable as a company, any they are burning billions per year.

RocketLab will likely be a real competitor eventually, but they are pretty clearly positioning themselves at being Nr.2, not aiming for flight rates nearly in SpaceX territory. And they have a lot of technical risk left to clear.

At the moment SpaceX is moving forward faster then anybody else is catching up. Falcon 9/Falcon Heavy still run loops around everybody and nobody will challenge it for another 10 years at least, and that's assuming Falcon 9 operations don't improve.

Starship isn't needed for the launch market, but for their own constellation.

>nobody will challenge it for another 10 years at least, and that's assuming Falcon 9 operations don't improve.

I think the timeline is very difficult to predict here. We've seen countless companies who are leading in technologies who when others see it can be done... -know- it can be done so then can do it. Like the 4 minute mile.

I know it's not simple and no-one else is near SpaceX at the moment, but to ignore reusability has become an extinction-level event for launch providers. Some will learn from the 'break it and learn quickly' mentality that SpaceX followed for getting F9 to reliable reusability and there will be more competition.

Second-stage re-use is clearly the next phase and that's what Starship is targeting (plus massive capacity). I don't know if it scales to smaller rockets, but if it does (and we know that it's physically possible as some of the Starship second-stages have made it back kinda-alive), then it will be revolutionary.

Look at the lead that Tesla has thrown away in the EV market. I remember seeing an interview with Elon Musk talking about BYD EVs - "Yes, but look at their car, it's a joke"... to now having better tech in some ways than Tesla, and an up-to-date product line which looks way better than the staid models that Tesla is producing. Only the charging infra is keeping them ahead in terms of overall usability - and at some point that will be a solved problem for disparate third-party charging providers.

Cybertruck is a child-like anomaly which is not a mass seller. The M3 and MY are dated, and the robotaxi is merely a rehash of those stylistically (as well as completely the wrong thing to be making in terms of the market it's supposed to serve, IMO). I have read that Tesla is stuck in a rut, and their line-up looks like it. The 'highland' refresh and model y are both sticking-plaster makeovers.

When I ask my (mid 20s) kids if they'd buy a Kia EV3, a BYD Dolphin Surf or a Tesla, it's the Kia or the BYD. They look like cool cars, not something that a 50 year old (me!) would like (I prefer the EV3 if I had a choice). I know this is a bit off topic, but I'm just trying to illustrate that it's easy to think you're unassailable, and then the competition not only catches up, but overtakes. And timelines are impossible to predict to that scale, IMO.

> but to ignore reusability has become an extinction-level event for launch providers

But it hasn't, that's just a fact. Neither ULA, nor Arianespace, nor Russia have gone extinct or embraced reuse to any degree at all. Same goes for India and Japan. Because this market simply doesn't operate like typical markets.

ULA and Arianespace have lots of orders. There a complex reason for this, but its still just a reality. Neither Russia or India have made major investments in reusable rockets. China to some degree does but we have little insight.

The only competitors are all new companies that had no position in the market before.

> Like the 4 minute mile.

No amount of believe makes it just happen. You can't just work a bit harder and get there incrementally. That's not how rockets work. Its not like running at all. Runners already existed, they just needed to incrementally improve a little bit, believe can help with that.

But if you don't have the necessary rocket engine or architecture, you can't just incrementally improve to get to the goal. You need to redo the whole architecture from the ground up. No amount of testing and believe turns Ariane 5 into a Falcon 9 competitor. And that's going to cost billions even if everything goes well.

That's why non of the existing competitors have done it. Its new potential competitors coming up that work on it.

> Some will learn from the 'break it and learn quickly' mentality that SpaceX followed for getting F9 to reliable reusability and there will be more competition.

That mentality is almost 20 years old and nobody has embraced it in the same way. There are many reasons for this that I could get into. But its far more then simply a shift in mentality. If your fundamentals are wrong, no amount of mentality shift changes anything.

And even if you embrace that mentality, its still a 10 year journey, see Stoke Space for example.

And many companies that had that mentality have gone bust, see ABL and others.

> Look at the lead that Tesla has thrown away in the EV market.

Tesla lead wasn't really technological. They never had battery technology better then what many other companies can produce. Except maybe their packs, were a bit better in the beginning, but that's about it and that wasn't a huge engineering lift to replicate.

What made them get a lead is the complete believe in the concept, and their ability to raise enough money to make it happen on a large scale, plus proving there is demand.

Also I think drawing parallels between car industry and space industry isn't really relevant at all.

Maintaining access to space is a national security priority for states so they will always subsidize their own launch providers. Russia is not going to shut down Roscosmos and launch everything with SpaceX (and they also can’t even if they wanted to). That’s the reason those companies are still around. In the case of ULA the US government maintains two launch providers available by means of Assured Access to Space directives. That’s ULA and SpaceX share the US government’s space market.

But all national launch providers use to supplement their income with commercial launches and SpaceX has completely sucked the air out of the room in that regard. It’s now more expensive for all these countries to keep these programs operational.

I know, that's why I said the market doesn't work like other markets and they aren't going extinct. And why the person I responded to was wrong on that point.

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