The rest of the industry is about 10 years beyond SpaceX. But note that they are where SpaceX was a decade ago, which is not the same thing as “in 10 years they will catch up.” The gap is getting larger year by year, not smaller.

> which is not the same thing as “in 10 years they will catch up."

This is reasonable, unless SpaceX is stagnating for a decade there will still be some gap in 10 years too.

> The gap is getting larger year by year, not smaller

This is where the reasoning fails me. Unless you're making an unstated assumption about SpaceX or the competitors, why would the gap grow? As soon as there's a decent competitor, SpaceX's margins will get slashed. Their advancement will have to be supported by margins that can only shrink.

Followers can even have an easier time catching up because they have a working model in front of them. The leader has not only to execute but constantly innovate just to maintain a constant lead. The challengers "just" have to execute well because they can copy the leader's innovation until they catch up. And some of the competitors are more than willing and capable of extreme measures to copy.

Is there any field where over several decades the gap between the leader and the challengers just grew? It's not my industry but I have the personal impression that your "gap growing forever" opinion will age like milk left in the sun. We'll see.

> The gap is getting larger year by year, not smaller.

Why? Logically it would seem that learning how to do something that's already been done would be easier than discovering it. SpaceX has already done a lot of the work and has shown the others that it's possible and how they do it. Why won't the others catch up? I can't think of any industry that has a market leader that only gets further away from their competition forever.

"The gap is getting larger year by year, not smaller."

You keep saying this—you'll have to explain. Very little in the world has ever worked like this—the opposite has generally been the case.