China and other competitors have other ideas, even if you're not aware of them.

When your whole pitch is that you're commoditising a technology, don't be surprised when you get a commoditised market.

adastra22 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

China (and others, e.g. Blue Origin and Rocket Lab) are rushing to catch up to where SoaceX was 10 years ago. They are moving faster than anyone in aerospace has ever moved before, but SpaceX is still accelerating faster than that. By the time they catch up, the game will have again changed.

SpaceX and NVIDIA share this trait. They out-innovate, and know only one speed: the speed of light. The tortoise can only beat the hare if the hare takes a nap, and nobody is napping at SpaceX.

I’m not a fanboy. I have criticisms of SpaceX. But you are pattern matching to the common story of startups getting complacent and being surpassed by up-comers in China and elsewhere. But the innovators dilemma only applies if the innovator stops innovating. Two decades on, SoaceX is still innovating as much as they always have.

	▲	ben_w 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> They are moving faster than anyone in aerospace has ever moved before, but SpaceX is still accelerating faster than that. By the time they catch up, the game will have again changed. That was a believable pitch up to around 2020 or so. In 2018 they announced they were going to send a private crewed mission around the moon in 2023. Now we have the benefit of hindsight, it's 2026 and the vessel they were going to use has not yet had one circularised orbit. Not to put too fine a point on it, but at this point Starship development is currently going slower than both the historical analogs, the Saturn V and the Space Shuttle.

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small_model 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Their lead is insurmountable, might bleed 1/2% to china but they own launch market and will do for the next century.

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SideQuark 4 hours ago | parent [-]

You’re claiming in 10 years they made something others won’t for another century? This has no historical precedent.

China is going to eat them, just like they ate Teslas insurmountable lead in a few short years.

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small_model 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Whats the best selling car in the world? Model Y at 4x the price of number 2. So nope, your claim died on first hurdle. Try harder

	▲	ben_w 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		No, the best selling car in the world is the Toyota RAV4: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota_RAV4 The best selling EV brand in the world is BYD: https://cleantechnica.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/2026-03... The best selling EV model in the world is the Model Y. Saying "Oh but the Model Y" is like how when the original iMac came out, Apple turned out to be selling the single most popular model of retail PC in the US despite Apple also having 3% of the world market. Putting a lot of wood behind few arrows does make those arrows look bigger.

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panick21_ 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

You clearly don't know the market. China is no competition just on geopolitical terms. And I am very aware of the competition and have followed each competitor basically since its founding. It will take many years before competitors will be fully read and even then their launch rates will be tiny in comparison. And by then SpaceX will have moved on.

But of course this is all dwarfed by AI stuff financially so its basically irrelevant. SpaceX could stop all launch sales tomorrow with zero impact on its financials.