So I slogged through this. It feels like a primarily whole bunch of handwaving at SpaceX being paradigm-shiftingly cheaper, higher cadence, and ultra reliable.

So I slogged through this. It feels like a primarily whole bunch of handwaving at SpaceX being paradigm-shiftingly cheaper, higher cadence, and ultra reliable. There is nothing wrong with "dominance" that is well earned. The moves and shade the article cast mostly look like nothingburgers, or complaining that SpaceX isn't taking normal, obvious cost amortization strategies and thus failing to subsidize other players. Take ride sharing: it's been very openly discussed and recognized for ages that there is zero economic future in small rockets. They're fundamentally far more inefficient then big ones, but historically it could still be worth a premium $/kg to have something dedicated to get into a specific orbit, plus medium or heavy lift were small numbers of launches and customers would want to use every kg. But Falcon 9 has high enough cadence, is cheap enough, and often flexible enough that fitting in an extra few hundred kg is regularly doable, and if you have some patience it'll likely get close to an orbit you launch anyway in a Starlink lift or the like. The marginal cost for SpaceX is very good. Everyone in the industry has known that was going to eat small launch alive, and the trend will only accelerate. Whining about it is ridiculous. Lobbying is something any developed business needs, partly because rival interests (and not merely corporte) are sure as heck going to be lobbying to cripple them in media's favorite horse race style, but also just fundamental good governance. Lawmakers don't necessarily have that clear a view of what rapidly changing industries needs. The FAA and various other bureaucratic infrastructure simply is not built around the kind of volume and speed that's happening. It's not a matter of cutting corners, rather the opposite, making sure regulators can be thorough without artificially holding things up. SpaceX is absolutely justified in watching out for that. The "government subsidy" thing is another common, and stupid trope. Unless you believe the government either shouldn't exist completely or should produce literally everything from raw materials up itself, then of course the government is going to be a customer for services from private companies. Most of us think that's a good thing in many respects. It's not a "subsidy" if the government pays market rate for products and services it wants (taking into account its custom demands, like a big enterprise customer there will often be more customization involved). SpaceX has saved US tax payers billions of dollars already, not a big challenge granted given how incredibly expensive Old Space launch was. Which is really the core thing here: nobody is going to have the same path SpaceX did again. There was a chance for that in the 00s and early 10s, but SpaceX was the only one who actually took it. There was so much fat built into the system that SpaceX could be disruptively competitive long before getting fully polished. It's of course key that they have never rested on the laurels, but have continued to aggressively iterate and seek to get better and better, guided in part by longer term goals and a bigger vision then anyone in space has had in a long time. But that specific economic path is closed because SpaceX is just that much better, they've picked low hanging fruit then medium hanging fruit then high hanging fruit while industry stuck its collective head in the sand, and that's just the competitive environment now. Someday SpaceX may well take its foot off the gas, but probably not for a good long while yet. They're still quite young with plenty of obvious paths ahead. New players will be the ones both arguing for government subsidies (the government may well reasonably want to pay a premium for redundancy and there's nothing inherently wrong with that, but it is definitely a premium) and will need to figure out how to take advantage of a decade and a half improvement in computers, materials, fabrication and so on to try to get into at least medium lift much more cheaply then SpaceX did. And the fact remains there is probably only room for 1-2 other players in launch. Most of the startups here will fail or pivot, we're witnessing a gold rush that isn't really justified. The focus on launch is kinda already outdated imo. What companies should be doing is focusing on building stuff in space around the new cost basis that Starship will create. SpaceX isn't interested in most of that, and on the contrary would be delighted to have more payload partners, sooner.