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Will anybody catch up to SpaceX? As an outsider it seems they are impossibly far ahead of the competition. Blue Origin still has only achieved sub-orbital flig

Will anybody catch up to SpaceX? As an outsider it seems they are impossibly far ahead of the competition. 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?

imtringued 2y ago
Slow and steady wins the race. Boeing is only slow by the way.
le-mark 2y ago
We are witnessing rail road tycoon, but for the solar system. The foundations set in the next 50-100 years will be the foundation of the human solar empire. Spacex has no competition for the foreseeable future. And anyone who uses them as a service provider will be quickly subsumed if they’re successful, as the present article indicates.
- localfirst 2y ago
  [flagged]
- 1oooqooq 2y ago
  so invest in the first company to launch bars and whorehouses along their orbital construction sites?
  - baq 2y ago
    Air and water providers first, probably. Your picks are obvious next ones, though. Source: The Expanse.
markdown 2y ago
> What is the path to victory Hopefully there isn't one. We need a Pepsi here, not an Amazon.
- enriquec 2y ago
  I'll take AWS over... ?
dylan604 2y ago
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.
- pjscott 2y ago
  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.
  - matthewdgreen 2y ago
    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.
    - nordsieck 2y ago
      > 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.
    - manquer 2y ago
      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. --- 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.
Retric 2y ago
Disruption can come from any direction. I don’t think Spin launch has better than 5% odds of success, but it could drastically undercut SpaceX in terms of $/kg to orbit and there’s a few others willing to face SpaceX head on. Or China, US military, etc may decide to heavily subsidize a competitor for strategic reasons outside of economics. 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.
- jwells89 2y ago
  It’s possible, but the whole reason Starlink has a userbase is because there’s large areas where traditional telecom companies either never had enough interest to set up infrastructure or let what had already been set up rot. If that were to change meaningfully it’d require a significant shift in strategy from Verizon, AT&T, etc.
  - MeImCounting 2y ago
    Yeah land based networking just makes less and less sense when you look at it from first principles, wireless is fast enough for most connections it has enough bandwidth if distributed and being in orbit makes widely distributed networks trivial compared to doing it on earth. 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
    - Retric 2y ago
      Unless you on a boat being in land is a huge advantage. 5G only needs ~10,000 towers to cover most people on the US. From there you scale density based on where people actually live. 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.
mlindner 2y ago
I don't see anyone catching up to SpaceX anytime soon. There are several possibilities on the horizon to catch up to Falcon 9, if Starship gets delayed for a number of years for example, but that seems unlikely. Competitors can continue to hang on via just the threat of SpaceX taking over the entire launch industry though but they'll basically stay minority players. That is until the cost advantages of SpaceX become too great and companies become large via using SpaceX to push their own business models.
maxglute 2y ago
PRC has several commercial reusables on the way and IIRC 3 seperate mega constellations planned for short/medium term. If there's sustained demand, there's no reason they can't do to space launch what they did to ship building. At 30-40 F9s, IMO people are conflating SpaceX's reusable "capability" lead for actual scale. If other sectors any indication, would not be out of question for PRC to economy of scale 100s of F9 tier launch vehicles and eclipse SpaceX in aggregate payload in a few years of buildup if there's business/strategic case for it.
- nordsieck 2y ago
  > PRC has several commercial reusables on the way 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.
  - maxglute 2y ago
    They're moving away from inland hypergolics, to coastal cryogenics, especially for commercial. TLDR history is PRC space program really exploded in last 15 years. Before that, budget/development poverty tier. Most of payload considerations since are urgent military (ISR), so prudent/expedient to use existing hypergolic infra (legacy/synergy of strategic missiles) to maintain launch tempo because they don't want boondoggles when it comes to getting military space infra up reliably. Cryogenic LM6/LM7 first test only in mid 2015s. They'll switch over eventually, but right now priority is still military launch. IIRC all the current reusable efforts are cryogenic fuel.
- wholemodern 2y ago
  China is broke, like dead broke. It will follow Soviet Union's footstep of space race with the US in 1960 and collapse of Soviet Union. 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/ https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSL4N3960Z5/ [2] https://www.barrons.com/articles/chinas-private-sector-is-losing-ground-the-state-is-gobbling-market-share-3cae2a93 https://www.barrons.com/articles/chinas-private-sector-is-lo...
consumer451 2y ago
SpaceX is a true marvel. 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. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40512353 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40512353 [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40518286 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40518286
- alsodumb 2y ago
  I don't think you can call Rocket Lab a competitor of SpaceX by any metric. Besides, look at the comments in the link you posted, it's pretty obvious that SpaceX isn't attacking them.
omikun 2y ago
At some point SpaceX will reach the limits of how efficient they can get as dictated by physics. Their competitors will get there eventually, maybe decades later. But eventually the market will mature and they will become competitive. Same as any other industries, smart phones, electric cars, etc.
- gibolt 2y ago
  The cost to develop in the first place may be too high, except for maybe nation states. 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.
  - panick21_ 2y ago
    BlueOrigin is not making money but investing more then most nation states. In fact, Bezos is single outspending Europe in terms of rocket investment. Bezos invested way more in New Gleen then Europe in Ariane 6. Not to mention outspending India whole space budget.
    - gibolt 2y ago
      This only strengthens my point. Given all that spending, they still are seemingly nowhere close to a Starship competitor.
- petesergeant 2y ago
  I’m always deeply skeptical of appeals to the “laws of physics”. Yes, there are some hard constraints there, no, it doesn’t account for bright ideas for how to make those less important; the laws of physics stop us shrinking vacuum tubes small enough to fit billions on a chip, but it turns out that that doesn’t actually matter
  - baq 2y ago
    There’s no working around the rocket equation unless you invent antigravity, which I personally think is a harder problem than transistors.
somenameforme 2y ago
Something we lose track of in the software world is that information isn't the alpha and omega in the real world. Everybody from Boeing to China would love to clone what SpaceX is doing, and China is actively trying to do so. And there are no real huge hardware secrets, yet somehow, even with effectively endless resources, these countries/competitors are not only failing to clone SpaceX tech - but aren't even remotely close to parity. 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.
- AlchemistCamp 2y ago
  Carmack made reusable, vertically landing rockets before SpaceX did, albeit on a much smaller scale. 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.
  - andsoitis 2y ago
    They also went out of business, which seems like a reasonable characterization of something that failed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armadillo_Aerospace https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armadillo_Aerospace
    - burnished 2y ago
      If profit is your sole motivator and guide then you may not be fit for a discussion about rockets.
      - WalterBright 2y ago
        The profit motive has proved, over and over, to be a more effective motivator than anything else, including getting whipped and/or shot for failure. 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.
selfmodruntime 2y ago
The answer is SpaceX is being held at a low headcount strategically. Turns out, if you‘re an engineering company you don‘t need a lot of top brass, DEI committees, artificial diversity hires, inner-company minority peer groups and bloated HR departments. You instead reduce friction as much as possible. 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?
mbesto 2y ago
Amazon Kuiper should go into beta later this year: https://www.satelliteinternet.com/providers/project-kuiper/ https://www.satelliteinternet.com/providers/project-kuiper/
- inemesitaffia 2y ago
  That's not possible this year
Gud 2y ago
There is also Rocket Lab with rocket nerd Peter Beck at the helm.

imtringued 2y ago

Slow and steady wins the race. Boeing is only slow by the way.

le-mark 2y ago

We are witnessing rail road tycoon, but for the solar system. The foundations set in the next 50-100 years will be the foundation of the human solar empire. Spacex has no competition for the foreseeable future. And anyone who uses them as a service provider will be quickly subsumed if they’re successful, as the present article indicates.

localfirst 2y ago
[flagged]
1oooqooq 2y ago
so invest in the first company to launch bars and whorehouses along their orbital construction sites?
- baq 2y ago
  Air and water providers first, probably. Your picks are obvious next ones, though. Source: The Expanse.

markdown 2y ago

> What is the path to victory Hopefully there isn't one. We need a Pepsi here, not an Amazon.

enriquec 2y ago
I'll take AWS over... ?

dylan604 2y ago

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.

pjscott 2y ago
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.
- matthewdgreen 2y ago
  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.
  - nordsieck 2y ago
    > 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.
  - manquer 2y ago
    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. --- 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.

Retric 2y ago

Disruption can come from any direction. I don’t think Spin launch has better than 5% odds of success, but it could drastically undercut SpaceX in terms of $/kg to orbit and there’s a few others willing to face SpaceX head on. Or China, US military, etc may decide to heavily subsidize a competitor for strategic reasons outside of economics. 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.

jwells89 2y ago
It’s possible, but the whole reason Starlink has a userbase is because there’s large areas where traditional telecom companies either never had enough interest to set up infrastructure or let what had already been set up rot. If that were to change meaningfully it’d require a significant shift in strategy from Verizon, AT&T, etc.
- MeImCounting 2y ago
  Yeah land based networking just makes less and less sense when you look at it from first principles, wireless is fast enough for most connections it has enough bandwidth if distributed and being in orbit makes widely distributed networks trivial compared to doing it on earth. 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
  - Retric 2y ago
    Unless you on a boat being in land is a huge advantage. 5G only needs ~10,000 towers to cover most people on the US. From there you scale density based on where people actually live. 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.

mlindner 2y ago

I don't see anyone catching up to SpaceX anytime soon. There are several possibilities on the horizon to catch up to Falcon 9, if Starship gets delayed for a number of years for example, but that seems unlikely. Competitors can continue to hang on via just the threat of SpaceX taking over the entire launch industry though but they'll basically stay minority players. That is until the cost advantages of SpaceX become too great and companies become large via using SpaceX to push their own business models.

maxglute 2y ago

PRC has several commercial reusables on the way and IIRC 3 seperate mega constellations planned for short/medium term. If there's sustained demand, there's no reason they can't do to space launch what they did to ship building. At 30-40 F9s, IMO people are conflating SpaceX's reusable "capability" lead for actual scale. If other sectors any indication, would not be out of question for PRC to economy of scale 100s of F9 tier launch vehicles and eclipse SpaceX in aggregate payload in a few years of buildup if there's business/strategic case for it.

nordsieck 2y ago
> PRC has several commercial reusables on the way 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.
- maxglute 2y ago
  They're moving away from inland hypergolics, to coastal cryogenics, especially for commercial. TLDR history is PRC space program really exploded in last 15 years. Before that, budget/development poverty tier. Most of payload considerations since are urgent military (ISR), so prudent/expedient to use existing hypergolic infra (legacy/synergy of strategic missiles) to maintain launch tempo because they don't want boondoggles when it comes to getting military space infra up reliably. Cryogenic LM6/LM7 first test only in mid 2015s. They'll switch over eventually, but right now priority is still military launch. IIRC all the current reusable efforts are cryogenic fuel.
wholemodern 2y ago
China is broke, like dead broke. It will follow Soviet Union's footstep of space race with the US in 1960 and collapse of Soviet Union. 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/ https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSL4N3960Z5/ [2] https://www.barrons.com/articles/chinas-private-sector-is-losing-ground-the-state-is-gobbling-market-share-3cae2a93 https://www.barrons.com/articles/chinas-private-sector-is-lo...

consumer451 2y ago

SpaceX is a true marvel. 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. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40512353 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40512353 [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40518286 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40518286

alsodumb 2y ago
I don't think you can call Rocket Lab a competitor of SpaceX by any metric. Besides, look at the comments in the link you posted, it's pretty obvious that SpaceX isn't attacking them.

omikun 2y ago

At some point SpaceX will reach the limits of how efficient they can get as dictated by physics. Their competitors will get there eventually, maybe decades later. But eventually the market will mature and they will become competitive. Same as any other industries, smart phones, electric cars, etc.

gibolt 2y ago
The cost to develop in the first place may be too high, except for maybe nation states. 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.
- panick21_ 2y ago
  BlueOrigin is not making money but investing more then most nation states. In fact, Bezos is single outspending Europe in terms of rocket investment. Bezos invested way more in New Gleen then Europe in Ariane 6. Not to mention outspending India whole space budget.
  - gibolt 2y ago
    This only strengthens my point. Given all that spending, they still are seemingly nowhere close to a Starship competitor.
petesergeant 2y ago
I’m always deeply skeptical of appeals to the “laws of physics”. Yes, there are some hard constraints there, no, it doesn’t account for bright ideas for how to make those less important; the laws of physics stop us shrinking vacuum tubes small enough to fit billions on a chip, but it turns out that that doesn’t actually matter
- baq 2y ago
  There’s no working around the rocket equation unless you invent antigravity, which I personally think is a harder problem than transistors.

somenameforme 2y ago

Something we lose track of in the software world is that information isn't the alpha and omega in the real world. Everybody from Boeing to China would love to clone what SpaceX is doing, and China is actively trying to do so. And there are no real huge hardware secrets, yet somehow, even with effectively endless resources, these countries/competitors are not only failing to clone SpaceX tech - but aren't even remotely close to parity. 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.

AlchemistCamp 2y ago
Carmack made reusable, vertically landing rockets before SpaceX did, albeit on a much smaller scale. 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.
- andsoitis 2y ago
  They also went out of business, which seems like a reasonable characterization of something that failed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armadillo_Aerospace https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armadillo_Aerospace
  - burnished 2y ago
    If profit is your sole motivator and guide then you may not be fit for a discussion about rockets.
    - WalterBright 2y ago
      The profit motive has proved, over and over, to be a more effective motivator than anything else, including getting whipped and/or shot for failure. 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.

selfmodruntime 2y ago

The answer is SpaceX is being held at a low headcount strategically. Turns out, if you‘re an engineering company you don‘t need a lot of top brass, DEI committees, artificial diversity hires, inner-company minority peer groups and bloated HR departments. You instead reduce friction as much as possible. 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?

mbesto 2y ago

Amazon Kuiper should go into beta later this year: https://www.satelliteinternet.com/providers/project-kuiper/ https://www.satelliteinternet.com/providers/project-kuiper/

inemesitaffia 2y ago
That's not possible this year

Gud 2y ago

There is also Rocket Lab with rocket nerd Peter Beck at the helm.