> But the lack might also be because no customer wants their service associated with launches in which rocket bodies drop on the heads of China’s residents.
Nah its ITAR / (insert western country export control law here). Sending spacecraft hardware to Chinese launch provider will definitely violate all kinds of export control. Even if its a cubesat made from Raspberry Pis and assembled PCBs from JLCPCB
Nice data !
I'm a bit surprised by the % of flights / mass to orbit that's taken by Starlink actually - 2/3 of the launches and 80% of mass. If I read this correctly, if we exclude Starlink related launches, SpaceX is still big, but not that much bigger than the rest actually.
The title should almost be 'It's a Starlink World' !
This is... interesting but not really the answer to the more interesting question. SpaceX undoubtedly dominates launch capacity today. It's basically the sole success in an industry that seems fundamentally uneconomical and the way it's acheived that is through government subsidy and Elon Musk's unparalleled fund raising. But I don't think that there's much of a moat here, hardware companies find this time after time - by building an incredible product what you're partly doing is training a team of engineers how to build that amazing product and those engineers can and will walk out the door and find a job down the street. Will SpaceX face strong competition within the next 18 months? Nah. 5 years? Probably. 10? Definitely. It's like Tesla, Tesla pioneered electric vehicles, but today it's not alone in the market, it's not even arguably the biggest player anymore.
What I'm far more interested in is... is there an actual market here? So far SpaceX makes money out of government subsidy, and Starlink. So to a large extent it is it's own biggest customer and because it's private it's difficult to really reason about it.
Like yeah, it looks really good for your rocket company if you have a customer that has to fire 1,000 new satelittes into orbit each year, that's going to make a tonne of volume. But it does kind of raise the question: Does that look like a great business from the internet service provider viewpoint?
How much capacity can you provide with these satellites? How often do they need replacing? And whose going to pay for satellite internet service?
Seems like mostly PRC is playing catchup, and if past performance any indicator, it'll take half the time for them to throw up X times more capacity to the point where current SpaceX lead won't mean much at all except politics behind orbit rights. IMO SpaceX more like EVs / shipbuilding, PRC already pretty decent at rocketry from MIC and communications tech - putting up stupid space launch capacity to throw their own mega constellations is a much easier/quicker catchup than commercial aviation or semiconductors that's mired in global geopolitics.
Are there estimates to how much it costs to refurb a falcon 9? It's gotta be at least 2 orders of magnitude cheaper right?
They launch more satellites than everyone else combined, but a big caveat here:
"Over 99% of SpaceX’s 1,986 spacecraft deployed in 2023 were Starlink satellites."
EDIT: oh, I see the confusion. The 99% figure means "of the satellites operated by SpaceX, 99% are Starlink". It's 99% of the ones they operate, not 99% of the ones they launch. (Not sure if I'm using the right nomenclature)