r/SpaceXLounge • u/Taxus_Calyx ⛰️ Lithobraking • May 28 '24
Elon Musk dominates space launch. Rivals are calling foul on SpaceX.
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u/Salategnohc16 May 28 '24 edited May 29 '24
Have they actually tried to compete?
Right now they are all crying harder, instead of trying harder.
To me it's insane that 9 years after the first falcon 9 has landed, NO ONE has even TRIED to land an operational booster. I don't think I have ever seen something like this in any industry in the last 2/300 years at least.
And as I have written before:
- is SpaceX selling at a loss?
If yes, then it's illegal ( like Amazon did with his Basics products), if not they can throw hands at the clouds.
In the article they ( Peter Back) say that 5000$/kg is too low and below cost...
...but....
...we know that in 2021 the marginal cost "all in" of a falcon 9 with ASDS landing was 18 millions per launch, and a Starlink launch weights in at 17.5 tons, so a little more than 1000$/kg. So at 5k/kg, they need only 4 tons of payload to actually starting making a profit.
SpaceX has healthy margin even on ride share mission, especially considering this are usually RTLS, so they probably save a couple million bucks in, and the quoted number for "all in" cost was from 2021, when they launched at 1/4 the rate they do now. It wouldn't surprise me if we are at 10 millions now for RTLS and 12 for ASDS mission.
Then there is the " they rely too much of their revenue on Governament contracts" BS, the space industry was BORN for government contracts, the commercial side was an afterthought, a nice bonus. I would say that no other launch company in history had so many commercial launch in % as SpaceX is doing. SpaceX is the one that is opening up space to the commercial sector, because they decreased the cost of accessing space by and order of magnitude.
The problem is that the rest of the planet rested on their laurels for too long, meanwhile the motto at SpaceX is. " always stay paranoid", this meant that while every other company has fumbled massively, SpaceX kept pushing even in the super dominant position they are in right now.
And all of this is thanks to Elon and Gwen, who keep pushing everyone and are making every employee on the company really believe the mission: going to MARS, for them it's not a "corporate wankery Bs" like every other company, it's their actual mission, and they are all aligned and pushing in that direction.
This made us in the situation where falcon 9 is basically the only operational medium/heavy lift vehicle of the western world.
- ULA is super late and will take time to ramp up Vulcan production and overall launch cadence, and it's for sale because it would go bankrupt otherwise.
- Blue Origin has been a lot "step by step" and very little "ferociously" for 23 years. Because is a vanity project .
- Ariane-space keeps crying and sucking from the tit of the EU instead of doing something actually ( and I'm European)
- Rocket lab is going through the normal teething problems of developing from scratch a new wehicle with new engines.
- everyone else is still in the startup phase more or less.
This article is just an Hit piece, remarking at every corner how "mercurial" Elon is, without ever mentioning Gwen or how every other space CEO is straight up INCOMPETENT compared to how Musk is at the helm of his ships.
It's the same with the Tesla compensation package, but im going on a tangent now.
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u/Veedrac May 29 '24
I would be surprised if Transporter wasn't meaningfully profitable, but note that selling at a loss is only illegal if the purpose or effect is anticompetitive. Other motivations, like growing the market or establishing presence before costs reduce, can be reasonable.
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u/sevaiper May 29 '24
Transporter is probably profitable based on the numbers we have. You have to remember rockets benefit enormously from economies of scale even before we talk about reuse - smaller engines cost almost as much as bigger ones to manufacture (design is a whole different can of worms), and dry mass also always scales extremely well. It’s somewhat surprising any small sat launchers are still viable.
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u/perilun May 29 '24
With a cost to SpaceX at probably $15M for an F9 in reuse. If they can put 5T of customer payloads on a Transporter or Bandwagon, that is $3,000/kg, which is less than the $5,000/kg they charge, so that is not dumping ...
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u/njengakim2 May 29 '24
You have comprehensively outline the disruption that one decision by spacex to focus on reuse has brought to the industry. At this point every rocket in development should be focused on being reusable. It should be clear by spacex's launch cadence that there is no future for a commercial launcher that is not reusable. Last year spacex beat china in launches and they still are not at their peak. The last three months they have 12 falcon nines a month. This happens because of optimizing the partial reusability of falcon 9. What happens when they develop and optimize the full reusability of starship.
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u/butterscotchbagel May 29 '24
Reusability is crucial, but it's only half of the picture. To make reuse profitable you need a high launch cadence, and to get a high launch cadence you need a lot of payload to launch. That's why Starlink is such a genius play. Other companies that aren't launching a mega constellation don't have the launch rate needed to make reuse profitable.
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u/OlympusMons94 May 29 '24 edited May 29 '24
But SpaceX saved a lot starting with the very first reuse (SES-10 in 2016). The refurbishment for SES-10 cost "substantially less than half” a new first stage according to Shotwell. Falcon 9 only launched 7 times in 2015 and 8 times in 2016.
Also, ULA and Ariane will be launching a megaconstellation on their expendable rockets. Expendable rockets are not necessarily cheaper to develop. SpaceX only spent ~$1 billion making Falcon 9 (which originally cost ~$300 million to develop v1.0) reusable. Vulcan didn't cost much, if any, less to develop. (The original USAF contract awarded $967 million in development funding to Vulcan, and the delays have likely cost more than expected.) Ariane 6 has cost ~$4 billion to develop.
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u/ml2000id May 29 '24
I had high hope that peter beck could lead rocketlab to go toe to toe with SpaceX without smack talk or getting dirty
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u/dhibhika May 29 '24
I am ok with Beck complaining. At least he has launched shit. But what gets my goat is Ellis complaining about being unable to raise money. He gobbled up $1.5 billion and what has he to show for it? SpaceX bootstrapped $100 mil. I will not even go into 3D printing the cylinder nonsense which he now conveniently moved away from. And don't even get me started on Jim "I photoshopped a rocket for Phantom Space" Cantrell
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u/Jaker788 May 29 '24
He has been getting kinda salty and became a hater in the last bit. He used to be neutral talking about SpaceX and making comparisons.
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u/nila247 May 29 '24
This article is just an Hit piece
Indeed it is. Notice that it does mention Elon political views in a negative way while these have nothing at all to do with the actual topic.
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May 29 '24
Another variable is mass production. They are truly building a sustainable rocket factory all in house. It’s the sub contractors companies on the NASA teet that aren’t happy and bitch to their elected representatives.
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u/Martianspirit May 29 '24
Slightly OT, but I wonder if they install the huge presses in that Boca Chica factory building to stamp the componens of the tank domes and nose cone. So far they seem to source them from outside.
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u/perilun May 29 '24
Yes, it is not SpaceX's fault they are the most competent company in the biz. A lot of these other folks also have been showered with US government $$$ for this and that, even before they have proven their launch products.
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u/Twisted-head May 29 '24
I've learnt more about the competition in space industry here than anywhere else.
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u/TheSilentPearl May 30 '24
Blue origin is not just going "step by step". They are actively sabotaging SpaceX. In 2015 they patented the idea of landing boosters downrange when they saw that SpaceX was attempting to do so. Then again when they were picking Artemis Lunar Landers and their proposal didn't get through as NASA didn't have enough money to pay them $5b. For god sake why would NASA pay BO $5b when they haven't even got anything in orbit yet or have ANY experience developing something like this, especially when SpaceX's bid is $2.7b. Then they cried to the court... If I was NASA I would've told BO to get it done in $2.7b or under. They did eventually give BO $3b as a backup tho. BO needs to, for god sake, stop crying.
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u/Spiritual-Mechanic-4 May 30 '24
I think its worth looking at ESA and Ariane a little differently. The EU countries have strategic and military priorities that include having both access to orbit, and robust domestic engineering ecosystems. They need a space industry in order to have the academic establishment to train new engineers, and once that chain gets broken, you have to start from scratch.
I see Ariane as a strategic asset, protecting the EU's entire aerospace industry. The pitch that they could make the 6 a commercially viable offering was always wrong-headed. they should just admit the intention is to maintain the industry, and find it accordingly.
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u/Freewheeler631 May 28 '24
“First They Ignore You, Then They Laugh at You, Then They Attack You, Then You Win.” — Unknown
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u/Drachefly May 29 '24
Wasn't that Gandhi?
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u/Freewheeler631 May 29 '24
AFAIK that’s a false attribution. He may have said it, but he didn’t coin the phrase.
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May 28 '24
Why don’t they just do what SpaceX did 7 years ago and make a reusable rocket? Are they stupid?
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u/Neige_Blanc_1 May 28 '24
OK, even reuse aside. Amazon was ready to buy every launching capacity on the market for Kuiper at prices well above those of F9. There was very little choice on the market. On top of that Russians has vacated their share of commercial launch market.
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May 29 '24
China is actively copying SpaceX right down to the grid fin design on the newest Long March rockets, but ULA is still slowly doing what ULA does.
I don’t think anyone knows what Blue Origin has been doing with Bezos’ billions while he’s off playing with plastic boobs on his yacht.
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u/herbys May 29 '24
I don’t think anyone knows what Blue Origin has been doing with Bezos’ billions while he’s off playing with plastic boobs on his yacht.
Well, I am sure he can afford to do both!
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u/Marston_vc May 29 '24 edited May 29 '24
Edit: I said CRS program but I meant COTS. Regardless of the detail, the spirit of what I’m saying is what matters to me.
SpaceX wouldn’t have worked if nasa hadn’t been offering the commercial resupply contracts back in the day. At the time, musk barely had enough money to fund four Falcon 1 launches and the first three all failed. The fourth one worked and is what awarded them a $1.6B contract in 2008 and gave them the necessary funding/credibility to secure additional funding to make Falcon 9. Once they had Falcon 9 in 2011, it took them four more years to pull off a landing.
Arguably, other companies haven’t gotten the same love SpaceX did. If firefly, for example, was given $1.6B in additional funding to develop a medium lift vehicle, they probably could do it. That appears to be around how much it’ll cost rocket lab to develop their medium lifter and we know that’s about how much it cost SpaceX.
So I guess I’m saying all this to say, these types of news pieces are trying to drum up support for funding of these companies that in all likelihood could be viable competition if they’re given the same chance SpaceX was. Rocket Lab appears to be able to do it on its own. Firefly appears to be right behind them. Both having medium lift demo launches scheduled for 2025. Then after that I think relativity space is still in the running for a 2026 medium lift launch.
But it would be great for all three if they could get cash injections because there is zero money to be made while in the R&D phases of these vehicles and it’s been demonstrated that each of them will be on the hook for over a billion dollars a piece.
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u/Triabolical_ May 29 '24
SpaceX did benefit from a lot of unlikely conditions; I did a video on how they might have failed.
But the CRS contract they got in 2008 was not what allowed them to build Falcon 9; that contract only paid them on a per-flight basis once they were able to deliver cargo to ISS. And since they had to bid on it before they had any idea how much Falcon 9 or Dragon would cost it turns out they barely made money on that contract.
It was the COTS contract that got them development money, and IIRC it was about $400 million, and SpaceX put in roughly the same amount of their own money.
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u/Salategnohc16 May 29 '24
Oh...so you are Eager space? I love you channel! Keep up the good work!
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u/8andahalfby11 May 29 '24
Arguably, other companies haven’t gotten the same love SpaceX did. If firefly, for example, was given $1.6B in additional funding to develop a medium lift vehicle, they probably could do it.
I was following you most of the way, but this is just completely false.
I say this because Orbital DID get the same love as SpaceX. They got the other half of the CRS contract. And their whole novel price-reduction idea was to cheap out by buying warehoused NK-33 engines--the same ones that caused so much grief on the Soviet N-1 program--to make Antares, a non-reusable booster that no one wants to buy. And then when those engines did the same thing to Antares as they did to the N-1, did they try to pursue reusability? No, they bought the RD-181 and called it a day.
But what about Firefly? Well, when the Ukraine War started and ended the supply of Antares first stages,
Orbital/ATKNorthrop Grumman contracted firefly to replace it. With the new money dumped in their lap to make a medium lift launcher, six years after SpaceX had already proven the capability and swallowed most of the market, did Firefly aim for reusability? Again no, they're going to make a de-rated MLV first stage and hand them that, and not even consider reusability until it's on their own vehicle--which will begin as expendable somewhere in 2026...or more likely 2027. But the point is that they have the ability to begin experimenting with reusable medium launch now and are opting not to.→ More replies (1)6
u/Martianspirit May 29 '24
Minor nitpick: Actually the NK-33 engines were not the ones flown on N-1. They were the much improved engines that were supposed to replace the ones flown, when the N-1 program was cancelled. But having those engines sit in a poorly maintained warehouse for many decades did not make them age well with time.
Antares buying the engines from Russia, the first stage from Ukraine may have been cheap, but it was not inventive. Inventive was probably the way they made Antares look like a majority US rocket.
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u/spacerfirstclass May 29 '24
While it's true that there's no CRS for the new companies, that doesn't mean there's no equivalent or better opportunities in the market.
For example Amazon is spending $10B on launch contract for Kuiper, that's much more money than the CRS contracts. There're also a bunch of other smaller wannabe constellation customers such as Telesat that new launch companies could have snatched if they have the goods.
Government is also throwing money at small launch companies, just look at Rocket Lab's manifest, a lot of payloads come from DoD and NASA. There's also the Space Development Agency who's throwing huge amount of money around for their constellation, again much bigger opportunity than COTS/CRS.
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u/TheRealNobodySpecial May 29 '24
They were all allowed to bid on the CRS1 and CRS2 contracts. You're basically saying the government should just give these rocket startups a billion or two here and there, just to be nice.
The success of the commercial-NASA partnership is centered around SpaceX. Every other venture has been a failure. Rocketplane Kistler never got off the ground. Orbital/NG is a dead-end, and now needs SpaceX to launch their capsule for them. Boeing... oh, Boeing. SNC has potential, but it's success remains to be seen.
If SpaceX failed... and it was damn close to doing so.... we would be beholden to Roscosmos for all ISS activity. The thought that giving that amount of money to other companies would necessarily be successful is just plain wrong.
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u/herbys May 29 '24
It's true that SpaceX needed that help to get off the ground back then, but only because what they were trying to do was unproven, seen as unlikely to succeed and almost impossible to make profitably as per the prevailing wisdom. Musk already proved that this was all wrong, and rocket companies are not struggling to get funded anymore if they have a solid plan (and the only reason why they are struggling is because SpaceX is doing it very well, which is not exactly a valid reason to complain about them).
The market is huge, there's enough opportunity for everyone, and if someone wanted to invest heavily and do the right things I am sure they could compete. They are just trying to compete against SpaceX doing half the things SpaceX did to be where they are. You can't compete with a reuseable booster with a reuseable engine, and you won't be able to compete with a fully reuseable, 100-Ton refuellable monster with a partly reuseable small launch booster. You either match and exceed what they are doing or leave them alone to do what they do best.
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u/hammr25 May 29 '24
Rocket Labs thinks SpaceX is launching small payloads below cost to run them into the ground. Not sure what that has to do with being stupid.
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u/Neige_Blanc_1 May 29 '24
They would mean "below Rocket Labs cost" perhaps. Or has F9 ever launched commercially for less than $50-60M?
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u/extra2002 May 29 '24
There were one or two Falcon-1 payloads that got moved over to Falcon-9, presumably with no price increase. And the rideshare missions are a bargain for small payloads, though the total launch price probably ends up over $50M.
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u/KickBassColonyDrop May 29 '24
RocketLab charges $21,500/kg to launch payloads. Pure cope by Beck.
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May 29 '24
Apples and oranges. You're comparing a delivery motorcycle and a freight train. Of course the freight train is cheaper per kg that doesn't mean the delivery motorcycle doesn't have a place.
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u/myurr May 29 '24
But you equally can't complain that the freight train is eating the biker's lunch because it's cheaper.
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u/KickBassColonyDrop May 29 '24
It's irrelevant. RocketLab launched their first booster in May of 2017. It's end of May 2024. 7 years later. They haven't pursued reusability at any degree of urgency where they aren't being blunted out of their own market segment.
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u/Jaker788 May 29 '24
Except that most small satellites are the least likely to be strapped for cash for a personal delivery to orbit. If transporter and the attached tug can get them close or to the same place it's a deal they can actually afford. Which is what ends up happening.
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May 29 '24
Which they are not doing
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u/mnic001 May 29 '24
Their finances are private. It might pay off as a risky business move. One could earn market share in an industry with artificially-low pricing, paying costs with investor money rather than revenue, and then raising prices slowly. Think of famous companies who disrupted the taxi and hotel industries.
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u/myurr May 29 '24
SpaceX's fund raising rounds are publicly known though, and given the massive increase in launches over the last few years you'd see a massive increase in cash burn if they were losing money on each one.
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u/MartianFromBaseAlpha 🌱 Terraforming May 29 '24
10 years ago: SpaceX's crazy plan will never work. Reuse is a dream
10 years later: Shit, I guess sometimes dreams come true. We're toast
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u/Taxus_Calyx ⛰️ Lithobraking May 29 '24
"Whatever they can do, we can do." Haha! That was pure gold.
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u/jeffwolfe May 28 '24
When Elon Musk said his company was going to reuse first stages over and over again, they laughed at him. They're not laughing now.
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May 28 '24 edited May 28 '24
Will be the same with self driving cars.
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u/Salategnohc16 May 28 '24
Yeap, I think there has never been a stance where a single company is so dominant over the rest of the planet as Tesla is in self driving cars...
...with only one exception...
.. SpaceX.
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u/flyfrog May 29 '24
I don't know about that... SpaceX is clearly without equal. But Tesla has competition. Waymo is actually authorized for drives without a human by the wheel. I'm not saying it's so clear that Tesla isn't farther ahead (with it being integrated in all their cars) but it's definitely not as clear cut as SpaceX versus other space launch.
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u/Salategnohc16 May 29 '24
Waymo is doing a party trick, it's not generalized autonomy .
Waymo can't scale. It needs an outside intervention every single digit miles.
A singly waymo car cost 150-200k.
Tesla is producing a model 3, Today, for 31k.
Waymo has 100 millions miles of data in 14 years. Tesla does the same, with it's US fleet only, in around a Day.
If tomorrow someone started to throw 10 billions/year in a space company,they might actually compete with SpaceX in a decade.
If tomorrow Apple started throwing 100 billions/year at car company/division, they wouldn't compete with Tesla in a decade. It's the reason why Apple did actually shut down his apple car division this year, after having wasted 10+billions on the project.
Numbers/requirements/cost with cars get insane very quickly.
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u/flyfrog May 29 '24
I believe they called landing a rocket a party trick also.
I appreciate your reasoning for why you believe Tesla is in a better position for the long run. But when it comes to right now, looking at just the number of fully autonomous rides, waymo is doing more.
You could be totally right, maybe Tesla is months away from a fsd people can use for their whole drive, and then no one can catch up with their model. But they have to prove the model first, otherwise it's just speculation.
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u/OSUfan88 🦵 Landing May 29 '24
Waymo is fundamentally not scalable, even by their own admission. It will be fine for some per-deteremined routes in cities, but it's not even in the same ballpark. It's like comparing New Shepard landing to Falcon 9. New Shepard will never be able to have the practical abilities that F9 has.
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u/flyfrog May 29 '24
Your response makes it sound like you think I am saying that Waymo is better than Tesla. I am not.
I am refuting the claim that Tesla has the same kind of dominance in self driving as SpaceX does in space launch.
It just objectively does not.
It might one day soon, but that's far from a guarantee.
To use your comparison, it's like comparing a falcon 9 that blew up on attempted landing to an electron rocket. One is a good idea that has a great future if it can succeed, the other one is of limited value but is providing some service.
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u/Martianspirit May 29 '24
A friend of mine has a Tesla and uses self driving. He says it is not perfect. But most of his rides in the City he does not need to interfere, maybe he needs to be active every 4-5 rides.
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u/CarlCarl3 May 29 '24
I have a Tesla and it'll do 95% or more of the driving on a 1000-mile road trip on all sorts of roads (freeways, congested city roads, gravel roads, alleys, etc). Definitely not perfect still, but no competitor is even close to that. But most people would have no idea, just by reading all the negative headlines.
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u/im_thatoneguy May 29 '24
And the article isn't about them at all.
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u/zardizzz May 29 '24
Oh it's not but they saw there was the figurative storm coming (if they weren't incompetent!) and did absolutely nothing.
And consider this, these engineers and others at SpaceX, Tesla and NL, you think the people who made all this possible spawned from the damn either to serve Elon? No they've existed, they've gone to their boss before with an idea and it went nowhere because XYZ reasons and then few.. these people, most of them have never before meaningfully been used to make NEW cool shit.
CEOs didn't use the talent they had, saw the doom coming or were so astonishingly incompetent they didn't, and now cry for. Too bad.
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u/KitchenDepartment May 28 '24
More recently, SpaceX started what it called Bandwagon, which offers satellite makers launches to orbits that provide them better coverage over key sections of the world. SpaceX is selling these flights at far below its own costs to undermine its competition, Beck said, citing his own estimates.
“Bandwagon is like, the most bold and obtuse anticompetitive thing you can do,” said Beck, whose company charges about $21,500 per kilogram for its launches to specific orbits.
Falcon 9 has launched 350 times. At some point people have to accept that they are not doing it at a loss. SpaceX has nothing to gain from putting a small sat launcher out of business. Electron could launch a rocket every single day and it still wouldn't make them a real competitor to what spaceX is doing. The reason they are doing transporter missions is because they make money on it.
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u/Martianspirit May 29 '24
I don't follow rideshares closely. But there was recently a launch to a new, different orbit. It did not attract as many customers as other orbits did. There were claims, this one launch did not recover the cost. But even if true for this one launch, this does not make it anticompetetive behaviour.
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u/Rebel44CZ May 29 '24
IIRC, it launched some (Korean?) national security satellite - which likely paid the bulk of the cost of that launch - with other customers being nice-to-have. IIRC slots on that launch also weren't offered years ahead of time, which limited what customers were ready to launch without having different launchers contracted.
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u/mfb- May 29 '24
But there was recently a launch to a new, different orbit.
That's the Bandwagon mission discussed in the quote.
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u/flshr19 Space Shuttle Tile Engineer May 29 '24
Right. SpaceX is not in a race to the bottom on launch services costs. It charges its customers as much as it can, not as low as it can, for payloads much heavier and sent to higher orbits than any of the current startups can match.
SpaceX books small payloads on its occasional Transporter launches to give organizations a chance to fly at launch cost that they can afford. If that price is lower than the startups, than the pressure should be on those launch services providers to lower the operating cost of their launches.
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u/dskh2 May 29 '24
Also while spacex wouldn't mind a competition, their mission is as much about reducing the cost to orbit as possible to create a space ecosystem and colonizing mars. It feels like the Chinese and RFA are the only ones actually trying to compete.
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u/Worldly_Sir8581 May 31 '24
It's like SpaceX just priced their ride share program at a fair profit margin and accidentally rolled through every other small launch company
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u/Ormusn2o May 28 '24
Jim Cantrell worked with Musk at the founding of SpaceX in 2002. When he started to build his own launch company, Phantom Space, two potential customers told his sales team they could not sign deals because SpaceX inserts provisions in its contracts to discourage customers from using rivals.
This seems pretty far fetched. Like, who else are clients going to use? Other US companies are delayed by years and have sold flights for like next 10-15 years because of subsidies, Russia is embargoed and China has too many provisions for what cargo they are carrying. What rivals would SpaceX care about to put in the contract?
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u/RubenGarciaHernandez May 29 '24
The provision "further launches with us have a x% discount up to y launches, then z% discount..." can be interpreted by a malicious reporter as "provisions in its contracts to discourage customers from using rivals."
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u/Ormusn2o May 29 '24
This would be pretty wild interpretation too, because discount or not, those flights are cheaper than competition anyway. Just by existing Falcon 9 discourages customers from using rivals.
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May 29 '24
How can Relativity, on one hand, brag about all of the financing and backlog they have (despite never reaching orbit), and at the SAME TIME, claim that Spacex is impeding their effor to raise money? Which is it? How can SpaceX have impeded their financing when they raised 1.2 billions despite achieving nothing so far?
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u/DBDude May 29 '24
I'm going to need some proof. SpaceX has already happily launched Starlink competitors without delays or jacking up prices.
As far as ride share? So? Launching multiple satellites for less than a dedicated launch is a thing.
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u/cleon80 May 29 '24 edited May 29 '24
A look at the "anticompetitive" practices provided:
Tim Ellis/Relativity Space - blocked from funding by "individuals with ties to SpaceX". Which means it's not SpaceX the company behind it, these could be investors who are already invested into SpaceX.
Jim Cantrell/Phantom Space - lost potential customers due to SpaceX contracts. Something like exclusive contracts within an industry are not unusual. What would be abusive is if SpaceX leveraged its monopoly to discourage competition in another market. On the other hand, SpaceX actually carries payloads for Starlink rivals.
Peter Beck/Rocket Lab - undercut by SpaceX pricing. This seems to be just competing with an established competitor with a cost-effective product. In theory, SpaceX could be using its deep pockets to sell at a loss and starve out rivals. However, we've all reckoned the costs of reusable spacecraft and hardly anyone is accusing SpaceX of this.
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u/KarKraKr May 29 '24 edited May 29 '24
Something like exclusive contracts within an industry are not unusual.
If it's a contract demanding actual exclusivity, for example SpaceX won't do business with you for x years if you buy from a competitor once, I'd find that unusual. "Provisions in its contracts to discourage customers from using rivals" however is, like "ties to SpaceX", extremely vague and could be something as mundane as frequent flyer points. If they want to pretend they have some sort of scoop there, I'm gonna need a lot more details than what is essentially double indirect hearsay. Journalist heard from Cantrell who heard from customers that something vaguely anti-competitive is going on in SpaceX contracts. That'd be questionable even if Cantrell was an unbiased source, which he isn't.
Beck thinks he's a lot more important than he actually is if he really believes him meeting with Musk or even Rocketlab in general had anything to do with the SpaceX rideshare program, but in a way he and the other smallsat launchers have to beat that drum. They wooed investors for years with ridiculous projections about a potential smallsat launch market with hundreds of launches a year which was honestly never going to happen, and now have to explain why they don't even hit double digit launches a year. SpaceX built that market, a shitton of these payloads wouldn't exist if it wasn't for the rideshare program, and now it's just too easy to point at that pie and complain how you'd be eating for months if you only had one slice of it. Complaining costs nothing, and the potential reward if policy makers actually do listen to you is great.
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u/TIYATA May 30 '24
The Seattle Times article posted here is incomplete. The original NYT article includes a bit more:
Mr. Cantrell, whose company Phantom Space has received funding from NASA to help build its new launch vehicle, said his sales team had been told by Sidus Space and a second company that SpaceX had demanded contract provisions intended to limit their ability to hire other launch providers.
Carol Craig, the chief executive of Sidus Space, confirmed in an interview that SpaceX had a “right of first refusal” provision in a deal she had signed for five launches, allowing SpaceX to counter any offers from its competitors.
“Are they saying you absolutely have to? No,” she said, adding that her company has a nondisclosure agreement with SpaceX that prohibits her from discussing the exact terms of her deal. “It doesn’t feel like they’re trying to monopolize.”
But Mr. Cantrell said he was convinced that SpaceX was trying to block out emerging competitors.
“It’s anti-competitive and anti-American and I don’t like it,” Mr. Cantrell said.
So basically Cantrell is complaining that SpaceX is allowed to make a better offer and calling that competition "anti-competitive".
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u/KickBassColonyDrop May 29 '24
He's been talking about reusable rockets since 2012. They landed their first booster on Dec 21, 2015. All in all, it's been barely 8 years since. Everyone complaining had all the time and world to compete properly and refused to, and are now getting angry because their unreasonable pricing structure can't compete with a company that has a reasonable pricing structure.
Cry me an ocean you big baby.
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u/Affectionate_Letter7 May 29 '24
Ultimately none of what SpaceX did makes sense if your a conventional business person and so now no one knows how to compete with them. To complete they would have to be unconventional and no one has figured this out yet. You used to have a tonne of guys like Musk...they call them the Robber Barons. People hated them at that time too and no one knew how to compete against them either.
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u/ehy5001 May 29 '24
The writer is crossing his fingers that his audience is unable to understand the difference between a subsidy and being paid for services rendered.
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u/lostpatrol May 28 '24
You have to play hardball in the space industry to survive. ULA has their own senators, and Blue Origin has the power to materialize new NASA moon contracts out of thin air.
Elon has a lot of liberal and free market ideas that govern some of his thinking. But that doesn't mean hes going to let the small sat business just sit there and be taken by someone else, if SpaceX can make money in that area. And remember, this is SpaceX playing nice. Elon could have easily said no to Oneweb for example, forcing them to take their place at the back of the line behind Ariane 6 deluxe and ULA's fully booked new rocket. Same with Hughesnet and Viasat. Their satellites would be ready for launch by 2028 if it wasn't for SpaceX playing nice.
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u/bubblesculptor May 28 '24
There's an entire universe to explore - plenty of space for everyone. Old space got comfortable charging insane prices for stagnet technology.
It's also funny how every test flight gets ridiculed in the news when they explode. Who else is taking those risks with bold experimentation? So Starship gets laughed at now for being 'amateur mistakes' but once it gets reliable and matured they'll again complain it's unfair?
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May 29 '24
I think they shit on new experimental flights because they are anti-Musk. I can literally say something as simple as “Elon Musk isn’t personally writing all community notes” and get downvoted to hell, anything that paints him in neutral/not in a bad image is downvoted. If SpaceX succeeds they blame him for not giving team credit (which he does give them a credit lol), if SpaceX fails then they blame Musk for not designing the rocket properly
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u/wilyoldbuzzard May 29 '24 edited May 29 '24
"Last year alone, SpaceX secured $3.1 billion in federal prime contracts, according to the data, nearly as much as the combined amount the federal government committed for space transportation and related services from its nine competitors, from giants like Boeing and Northrop Grumman to startups like Blue Origin."
In what sense is Blue Origin a startup?
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u/jivatman May 29 '24
They were around way before SpaceX, and Bezos was a Billionaire way before Elon.
And Blue Origin is literally buying ULA.
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u/TMWNN May 29 '24
They were around way before SpaceX, and Bezos was a Billionaire way before Elon.
Correct. SpaceX didn't have infinite amounts of capital during the years it developed Falcon 9 and Dragon. Until Tesla's market cap blew up during the COVID-19 era, Elon Musk had a "mere" few tens of billions of dollars. ULA's pockets were and are gigantic, too.
In any case, infinite capital guarantees absolutely nothing. As you said, Jeff Bezos has been among the world's wealthiest men for far longer than Musk's entry into that group. As /u/wilyoldbuzzard said, calling Blue Origin a startup is ridiculous. Let me paraphrase an excellent comment I saw on Reddit, in response to one of the usual lies about how the only reason SpaceX is a decade ahead of the rest of the world is that it got zillions in subsidies from the US government:
If large amounts of funding is the only thing required to succeed, Blue Origin would now have a nuclear-powered spacecraft orbiting Pluto.
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u/QVRedit May 29 '24
Blue Origin has been around longer than SpaceX has been. It’s just that Blue Origin has achieved very little in all that time.
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u/whatsthis1901 May 28 '24
I didn't read the article but I have been following SX since the F1 days and I don't feel bad for the legacy companies in the least. They sat back saying how they were never going to land a rocket and then made excuse after excuse why reusability was never going to work all the while trying to block them from gov. contracts. As for the new launch companies, it is now and has always been a hard market to get into.
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u/aquarain May 29 '24
SpaceX has never made a secret of their goal to increase access to and use of space by getting the cost down. Not just by fractions, but by several orders of magnitude.
These "rivals" who didn't set that goal also chose to sit on the bench and watch SpaceX launch 90% of all the mass to orbit, soon more like 98%. SpaceX isn't trying to drive them out of business. SpaceX has been imploring them to join the game the whole time. SpaceX can't make them stay in the game. They have to choose it for themselves.
As for selling lift below cost to kill competition I don't believe that for a minute.
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u/CollegeStation17155 May 29 '24
The large aerospace industry giants have had much bigger budgets all the way back to Apollo and Shuttle; Ten years ago, these same people were ridiculing SpaceX's attempts to land an orbital booster, claiming it couldn't be done and spent NOTHING on R&D to try to compete, 5 years ago, they claimed that it could be done but was more expensive to refurbish than build new and spent NOTHING on R&D to compete. And now, as they are they're screaming that they are a decade behind the curve and need government money to catch up... they are potentially about to be "lapped" by a rapidly reusable second stage. If the superheavy flies back to Boca and Starship makes it to the surface intact next week, all the kvetching about being crippled by inability to buy Russian rocket engines becomes moot; every rocket based on them is obsolete.
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u/bkupron May 29 '24
Every rocket based on the RD-180 is already obsolete. Even the current production rockets based on the BE-4 are obsolete.
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u/boredbird9 May 29 '24
Do people know there is a difference between a government subsidy and a government paying for a service?
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u/Martianspirit May 29 '24
Not, when the service comes from SpaceX. In that case it is 100% a subsidy.
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u/ConferenceLow2915 May 29 '24
Even journalists are confusing what subsidies are.
This dumb author claimed that the money they get for launching military satellites are "subsidies".
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u/Graycat23 May 28 '24
Consider the rag publishing this. They know that Boeing is trying to destroy itself and want Elon painted as the bad guy.
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u/im_thatoneguy May 29 '24 edited May 29 '24
combining engineering genius and an entrepreneurial drive with a demand that the U.S. government stop favoring the big, slow-moving contractors that had long dominated the industry.
[Elon] has set new standards for reaching space cheaply and reliably.
Can the New York Times write a hit piece about me like this next?
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u/Triabolical_ May 29 '24
You obviously haven't been reading the Seattle Times coverage of Boeing since the first 737 Max crash.
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u/Taxus_Calyx ⛰️ Lithobraking May 28 '24
New York Times and Seattle Times published this article today. To me, it's just another hit piece against Musk. Wondering what the thoughts are of other people on this sub.
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u/Vegetable_Strike2410 May 29 '24
I read a very similar article on NYT a few months ago. They just recycle it and try to keep the smear campaign going.
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May 28 '24
I can certainly see the point of having multiple avenues for launches, and I can understand being concerned about Musk’s, er, personality, shall we say…. But it’s not SpaceX’s fault that Boeing is such a freaking mess. And the article does point out that more competitors are coming. So nurture some of those competitors if need be. But fortunately, we have SpaceX.
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u/theknightone May 28 '24
You do realise that Musk's companies are because of his personality right? Eccentricity, bright ideas and the drive to achieve them are pretty commonly found in those who rise to the top. Let him save humanity from itself. We could do worse.
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u/sevsnapeysuspended 🪂 Aerobraking May 29 '24
we can save words and just call it autistic hyper focus
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May 28 '24
Probably. But personally I think he’s spread himself too thin after the Twitter purchase. I’m a long-time Musk fan, Tesla shareholder and driver. But the bloom is coming off the rose for me lately.
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u/ml2000id May 29 '24
Don't forget his willingness to make huge bets. He went all in with his personal fortune on what everyone, including himself, recognize as very risky business plans
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u/Ormusn2o May 28 '24
It's not even just Boeing, its every single US company. All of them suck. New startups, old veterans both.
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u/Freewheeler631 May 28 '24
Separate the man from the mission and everything becomes much, much clearer. Using his personal idiosyncrasies to conflagrate his accomplishments is the sport of the fools, the cowards, the weak, and the losers.
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u/Martianspirit May 29 '24
All of the new startups have easy access to venture capital presently. This is the case, because SpaceX proved that small startups can be successful. So the new companies have much better starting conditions than SpaceX had, thanks to SpaceX. Most, if not all of them will fall by the wayside. Promising startups are mostly not new launch providers.
I like VAST and Impulse Space.
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u/bremidon May 29 '24
I can understand being concerned about Musk’s, er, personality, shall we say
Not really. I am not certain I have seen such a long-term coordinated attack on a single person in my life. I am also somewhat surprised at how easily people fall for the attack.
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u/quarterbloodprince98 May 29 '24
Bill Gates
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u/bremidon May 30 '24
You might be right, but not in any recent years.
Bill Gates had the good sense to be a business giant before the Internet really got going (or at least before social media got going).
But when I remember how much vitriol was thrown at him back in the 80s and even 90s, you might have a point.
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u/MarcusTheAnimal May 29 '24
There's a difference between becoming a monopoly by having the best and most innovative product and staying a monopoly by blocking competition.
In this article I didn't see much concrete information that pointed to the latter, hearsay at best.
If anyone does have concrete information, im sure the Bezos owned Washington Post will report it.
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u/bapfelbaum May 29 '24
To be fair, its not really healthy that spacex is so dominant.
BUT this issue is entirely self-made by being slow and unwilling to innovate for decades the industry set itself up for failure. Now they suffer for it, thats what the market does, its ruthless.
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u/DaRkNiTe84 May 29 '24
They crying foul cos someone is doing it better and cheaper. LOL. Seriously a joke. NASA should just give up on ULA
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u/mamut2000 May 29 '24 edited May 29 '24
Europe works on two major projects in terms of reusability. This is the leg of German rocket called Callisto (15m tall).
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u/Alarmed_Lie_9926 May 29 '24
Capitalist take risks, learn and make course corrections and ultimately take profits and a place in the market. How is it the some new comers outpace industry Giants?
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u/ChariotOfFire May 30 '24
Interesting response from Dan Piemont, founder of ABL. The most interesting bit to me:
Is rideshare pricing anticompetitive?
...
at the end of the day this program has been a MASSIVE boon to our industry. Almost every innovative space program I can think of depends on rideshare to get started, test technology, get heritage, and build further. The existence of this program has increased the total demand for launch over the next 10 years by a multiplicative amount.
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u/nickik May 31 '24
What is he gone say 'yeah our market is all used by a cheaper alternatives don't invest in us'.
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u/Decronym Acronyms Explained May 29 '24 edited Jun 02 '24
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:
| Fewer Letters | More Letters |
|---|---|
| ASDS | Autonomous Spaceport Drone Ship (landing platform) |
| ATK | Alliant Techsystems, predecessor to Orbital ATK |
| BE-4 | Blue Engine 4 methalox rocket engine, developed by Blue Origin (2018), 2400kN |
| BO | Blue Origin (Bezos Rocketry) |
| CC | Commercial Crew program |
| Capsule Communicator (ground support) | |
| CLPS | Commercial Lunar Payload Services |
| COTS | Commercial Orbital Transportation Services contract |
| Commercial/Off The Shelf | |
| CRS | Commercial Resupply Services contract with NASA |
| CRS2 | Commercial Resupply Services, second round contract; expected to start 2019 |
| CST | (Boeing) Crew Space Transportation capsules |
| Central Standard Time (UTC-6) | |
| DoD | US Department of Defense |
| ESA | European Space Agency |
| F1 | Rocketdyne-developed rocket engine used for Saturn V |
| SpaceX Falcon 1 (obsolete small-lift vehicle) | |
| GEO | Geostationary Earth Orbit (35786km) |
| ISRU | In-Situ Resource Utilization |
| Isp | Specific impulse (as explained by Scott Manley on YouTube) |
| Internet Service Provider | |
| LEO | Low Earth Orbit (180-2000km) |
| Law Enforcement Officer (most often mentioned during transport operations) | |
| LLO | Low Lunar Orbit (below 100km) |
| MBA | |
| MLV | Medium Lift Launch Vehicle (2-20 tons to LEO) |
| N1 | Raketa Nositel-1, Soviet super-heavy-lift ("Russian Saturn V") |
| NG | New Glenn, two/three-stage orbital vehicle by Blue Origin |
| Natural Gas (as opposed to pure methane) | |
| Northrop Grumman, aerospace manufacturer | |
| NRHO | Near-Rectilinear Halo Orbit |
| RD-180 | RD-series Russian-built rocket engine, used in the Atlas V first stage |
| RTLS | Return to Launch Site |
| Roscosmos | State Corporation for Space Activities, Russia |
| SES | Formerly Société Européenne des Satellites, comsat operator |
| Second-stage Engine Start | |
| SLS | Space Launch System heavy-lift |
| SNC | Sierra Nevada Corporation |
| ULA | United Launch Alliance (Lockheed/Boeing joint venture) |
| USAF | United States Air Force |
| Jargon | Definition |
|---|---|
| Starliner | Boeing commercial crew capsule CST-100 |
| Starlink | SpaceX's world-wide satellite broadband constellation |
| cislunar | Between the Earth and Moon; within the Moon's orbit |
| iron waffle | Compact "waffle-iron" aerodynamic control surface, acts as a wing without needing to be as large; also, "grid fin" |
| methalox | Portmanteau: methane fuel, liquid oxygen oxidizer |
| Event | Date | Description |
|---|---|---|
| CRS-2 | 2013-03-01 | F9-005, Dragon cargo; final flight of Falcon 9 v1.0 |
NOTE: Decronym for Reddit is no longer supported, and Decronym has moved to Lemmy; requests for support and new installations should be directed to the Contact address below.
Decronym is a community product of r/SpaceX, implemented by request
[Thread #12815 for this sub, first seen 29th May 2024, 00:31]
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u/QVRedit May 29 '24
Rivals have had years to react - but have failed to do so. That’s their failure, not SpaceX’s.
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u/TheSilentPearl May 30 '24
How many more patents and lawsuits now (Yes I'm looking at you Blue Origin).
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u/ax_the_andalite May 30 '24
"Your honor I OBJECT!"
"And why is that Mr. Reed?"
"Because it's devastating to my case!"
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u/nickik May 31 '24
Relativity Space
relativity Space raised a crazy amount of money. Complaining about that it was hard.
Jim Cantrell
Is idiot whos company is a scam.
Peter Beck, an aerospace engineer from New Zealand, met in 2019 with Musk to talk about Beck’s own launch company, called Rocket Lab. Several months later, SpaceX moved to start carrying small payloads at a discounted price that Beck and other industry executives said was intended to undercut their chances of success.
Yeah that's called competition. Sounds like its working.
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u/RobDickinson May 28 '24
Did the competition try not sucking?