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Comment by soheil | Hacker News Reader

Where is the Lyft of SpaceX? When Uber came along many people assumed only the first to market will be able to take the cake, but as we saw Lyft was able to come in after Uber and play a great complimentary role. Now that SpaceX has proven reusability is possible why can't a couple of engineers there start their own company and compete against SpaceX on these lucrative Nasa and other commercial contracts? The capital required shouldn't exceed what Musk had to put in in early days of SpaceX, roughly equal to Series B of a random uninspiring SV start up [0].

[0] https://news.crunchbase.com/news/segment-raises-175m-for-big...

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The person trying to do what you say also owns Amazon, and he’s utterly failing at it.

Maybe space service and taxi cabs are not directly comparible.

Is Blue Origin failing? Utterly so? Do you mind expanding on what makes you say this. I have no information as to whether they're doing good or bad - I assumed they were doing fine but at a slower and less public pace - but your usage of a clear, non ambiguous critique makes me wonder.

Blue Origin seems to be targeting a slightly different market. I'm not sure exactly what that market is yet, but its public goals have always seemed to lean further toward crewed vehicles than SpaceX's have.

I think it's still too early to be able have an interesting discussion comparing the two companies.

Their New Shepard seems very tourist friendly small and cheap because it's only doing a suborbital hop.

It's been in development longer, and will not carry tourists to space before SpaceX has tourists in orbit.

BO's development pace is glacial.

Well New Shepard isn't ever going to bring tourist to orbit but it'll still be much more popular once it comes out because it will be significantly cheaper than the SpaceX offering.

Their launcher is only suborbital which is much simpler and smaller than an orbital vehicle. They have plans for a larger orbital reusable rocket but because they're less public so it's hard to know if it's anything beyond an engineering drawing at this point.

There’s enough public info to know that New Glenn is not vaporware. The engine, BE-4, has already been delivered to ULA for their Vulcan rocket.

Pic of BE-4 engines: https://twitter.com/julia_bergeron/status/136060893745692263...

Peak inside the building where they are building things: https://twitter.com/julia_bergeron/status/136030816885784576...

I didn't really mean that it was never coming out just that it was still extremely early in development, lots of steps left between engine and a landing rocket.

The reality is no one is even close to SpaceX, SpaceX went from launching it's first orbital rocket, the Falcon 1 in 2008 to launching the first Dragon capsule into orbit on the Falcon 9 and recovering it in 2010. No launch company iterates or advances like that, no one. There simply is no Lyft to SpaceX's Uber.

The closest private competitor to SpaceX right now IMO is Rocket Lab. They are the only company that has an orbital rocket that has a path forward for reusing the first stage right now. Rocket Lab's rockets are already pretty cheap for launching small sats and when they start reusing their first stages they might be able to get their cost per Kg to orbit close to what SpaceX can offer right now. But Rocket Lab's rocket is tiny compared to the Falcon 9, even SpaceX's first rocket, the Falcon 1 could put more payload into orbit than Rocket Lab's Electron rocket. It's not clear if Rocket Lab has any plans for making a bigger rocket.

Blue Origin is the only other company (besides the Chinese) that is currently building reusable first stages. Blue Origin's BE-4 engine also looks really promising and was designed from the beginning to be reusable. I think a lot of people are giving up on Blue Origin because they have yet to launch anything into orbit and they've been around longer than SpaceX. If Blue Origin does get it's New Glenn rocket off the ground and can recover and reuse the first stage they have a good chance of being cost competitive with the Falcon 9/Falcon Heavy.

The reality though is if SpaceX is successful with their Starship/Superheavy project they will be so far ahead in the cost/reusability department it will take a competitor a decade or more to catch up. Keep in mind part of what makes Starship even possible is the Raptor engine which SpaceX started developing in 2009. It's likely SpaceX has spent hundreds of millions of dollars just developing the Raptor, the Air Force chipped in over $40 million to the Raptor program at one point and SpaceX has built over 30 Raptors already at a cost of about $1 million a piece.

Rocketlab is trying to carve a niche with smaller payloads -quicker to orbit clients. This is why their rocket is smaller. If you have a small payload and you don't want to wait for a ride on a Falcon 9, you go to them.

Designing and flying a Falcon 9 competitor is a very risky proposition. They would start heavily behind SpaceX and with Falcon 9 proven record, it's doubtful they could ever win that fight.

Are there many companies that tried to do what SpaceX did but failed? I think the current incumbents are more like Sidecar and GetAround than Lyft tbh.

There were predecessors that failed at various approaches to space launch. Otrag, Beal, Kistler, Rocketplane, Rotary Rocket, Space Services Inc.

(This is not intended to be an exhaustive list.)

Blue Origin is working on New Glenn, but no news recently on when there’re aiming to launch it.

Rocket Lab is aiming for reusability on their Electron.

Probably others I haven’t heard of.

Exactly. The author of the comment you're replying to doesn't seem to be familiar at all with the commercial launch industry, which, even putting SpaceX aside, has more innovation and competition than ever before.

Groups working on reusable rockets:

Blue Origin (New Glenn), Rocketlab (Electron), China Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology (Long March 8), Shanghai Academy of Spaceflight Technology (Long March 6), Landscape (Zhuque-2), iSpace (Hyperbola-2), Roscosmos (Amur), ArianeGroup (Themis), United Launch Alliance (Vulcan Centaur, reusable engines only), Indian Space Research Organisation (RLV, aiming for two stages and a winged shuttle)

I might still be missing a few. SpaceX has a head start but absolutely everyone else is looking at them and thinking "If we don't catch up to that, SpaceX is going to eat this market."

SpaceX IS the Lyft of orbital spaceflight, and currently have about 25% of the global launches and ~60% of US launches

There are about a dozen companies with rockets. The big dogs are:

United Launch Alliance (lockheed/Boeing) -USA

Northrop Grumman -USA

ArianeGroup (airbus) -EU

Mistsubishi -Japan

Khrunichev -Russia

If you measure by amount of space craft or tons to orbit, SpaceX is so utterly dominate its not even funny. More then 50% global tons to orbit and SpaceX themselves are already the largest operate of satellites.

Not only are they the largest sat operator, they are also growing faster then anybody.

Amount of launches is a terrible metric because is counts a 200kg RocketLab launch the same as a 20 ton SpaceX launch.

Don’t forget China Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology and China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation

https://spacelaunchnow.me/launch/long-march-5-change-5

good point, I was trying to stick to private companies but if I included Khrunichev, I should probably include them too.

Drawing the line between private/public/government is kinda tricky. The way I understand CALT and CASTC is that they are government owned enterprises as opposed to a government agency like NASA. Maybe its a distinction without a difference, especially when their contracts are all government and presumably their "profits" go back to government as the owner?

I agree. The point I was hoping to get at is that most people misconstrue Spacex being the first “private” rocket company as the first non governmental manufacturer. ULA is public in the sense you can buy stock, not that it is run by federal servants.

Maybe the difference is mostly marketing in that SpaceX seems to make more of its non-governmental identity than many other US companies and within the US other companies, if thought of at all, are thought as part of their linguistic or national heritage. Like Arianespace "is" French or any *cosmos "is" Russian.

I was thinking that SpaceX seems more private because they have a seemingly valid consumer market with StarLink, but how different is that from Hughes, HughesNet, EchoStar and Dish Network? Ok, Hughes didn't build their own rockets but they still had to pay for them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hughes_Network_Systems

SpaceX is neither the first nor the last entity to build reusable rockets. It's the most successful one, by far, but now that's it's shown to be commercially doable every launch provider on the planet has a roadmap to (partial) reusability. It's going to be a very crowded space.

They are so many years ahead that it is a totally different league (and will stay this way for many years).

By the time other launch providers get to reusability SpaceX will probably be already flying Starship, decreasing price even further along with other advancements.

RocketLab is getting pretty close. It’s a different size class, but they seem to be getting close.

https://twitter.com/RocketLab/status/1362116590863409152?s=2...

A great thing rocket lab has done is demonstrate the feasibility of electric fuel pumps which dramatically simplify rocket engine design. Raptor is a breakthrough work of art obviously but the Rutherford engine lowers the barrier to entry for at least beginning the propulsion conversation.

The idea of electric fuel pumps is certainly interesting and I guess it works for Rocket Lab, but the idea of tossing out batteries as you gain altitude [0] just feels wrong. Maybe batteries are an intermediate step to decoupling the fuel pump from the turbo part, like the M-B F1 tech [1]?

0. https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/24570/what-was-eje...

1. https://www.thedrive.com/news/34152/how-mercedes-amg-will-us...

The CEO of RocketLab has stated explicitly that they can't compete with SpaceX on price for SpaceX's rideshare launches.

Between NASA, SpaceX, and various other space initiatives, there probably aren’t enough skilled people available to do the work. It’s literally rocket science.

Building rockets that work is incredibly hard. Building rockets that work and land is that X 100.

Cost of entry. But wait until hardware gets cheaper

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