China is going to do it for sure. It doesn't have to be as efficient as SpaceX if it is massively subsidized for defense purposes. And China is pretty good at building things cheap.

On the commercial side Blue Origin has been slow in starting but they are almost ready and will have relatively cheap launches. There are other up and coming private launch competitors too.

The issue is that space launch has some huge economies of scale.

And {world space launch demand} is >> {one country's space launch demand}

The argument for China overcoming SpaceX would be:

- China needs to get within functional (not cost) technological parity with SpaceX ASAP (i.e. which means reusability, albeit for cadence/capacity reasons)

- After that, they need to incentivize global demand to launch on Chinese rockets (likely heavily subsidizing prices to attract demand)

- After that, they need to continue to out-innovate SpaceX on technological and economic fronts

Of those, convincing a substantial portion of global launch demand to use Chinese rockets seems the trickiest bit, give the CCP's relationship with the rule of law.

> On the commercial side Blue Origin has been slow in starting but they are almost ready and will have relatively cheap launches.

[citation needed]

Sure, New Glenn is designed to be a partially reusable rocket.

But it's far from clear that they'll even successfully launch on their debut, not to mention recover the booster.

And even when they've sorted all that out, word on the street is that the rocket was not designed to be inexpensively manufactured. It's not clear to me just now low reuse can help drive down their launch price.

Nothing is impossible but it takes time.

Based on current disclosed plan, they will have same number of LEOs as SpaceX have today by ~2030; and SpaceX is not slowing down either.

China is very good at copying things but this is one they'll have trouble with given the strict employment requirements.