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Comment by renewiltord | Hacker News Reader

The funny thing is that Elon Musk promised us Mars and gave us orbit for cheaper than ever before. Boeing in its various incarnations has promised us orbit and given us nothing for just as expensive as before. Some people like to optimize for delta between promise and delivery. I think I like it when just delivery is optimized. There's really only one space company in the US today, and perhaps if there were other people like Elon Musk around there'd be more.

Instead, the experts who have been doing this for half a century suck balls while the newcomer from a software engineering background who didn't stay in his lane made it.

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> There's really only one space company in the US today

Rocket Lab ([1]) is very decent and has a rapid launch cadence ([2]), even though their rockets are smaller than Falcon 9 (for now). They launched 8 rockets in 2023, 5 rockets in 2024 so far and plan to launch another 15 rockets this year.

1. https://www.rocketlabusa.com/

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Electron_launches

SpaceX may be by far the most prominent of the new space companies, but many smaller companies, especially Rocketlab are also punching above their weight relative to the old guard.

The issue was that all the incentives for Boeing were to stagnate. The government would happily sign blank checks to them as long as they kept saying "space is hard, it can't be made cheaper, outsiders wouldn't understand". It took SpaceX coming around and showing results to prove that while space is hard, it isn't as difficult and slow as old space would have liked us to continue believing.

>> "space is hard, it can't be made cheaper, outsiders wouldn't understand"

There's a fantastic clip out there where Gwynne Shotwell is asked by someone (I think in congress) how they are able to launch so cheap. Her answer was approximately "I don't know how to build a four hundred million dollar rocket."

> There's really only one space company in the US today

This is just categorically false. There are many space companies. Launch isn't the only thing that happening in space.

But yes, SpaceX in terms of launch and operational sats dwarfs everybody to a degree that is unprecedented.

But there is a lot of money flowing in and many former SpaceXers have created lots of companies. Rocket companies, RocketLab, Firefly, Relativity, ABL. Lunar companies like Astrobotics. Transport companies like Impulse Space.

I don’t think that’s really a fair assessment. Yes Space-X has had the most launches and gets the most press, but the US has a very healthy launch industry.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/12/top-us-launch-compan...

The thing is, it's not even remotely close.

SpaceX had 98 launches in 2023.

ULA, the closest competitor, had 3.

For all of these others, considering that this article is from 2022, how many of them even still exist?

Don't get me wrong, I hope SpaceX gets some stiff competition because I believe that competition breeds innovation. At the moment, however, I have no idea where that is going to come from or when it might reasonably come.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Electron_launches ?

Maybe he meant "copetitors at the same scale"- At oleast thats how I read it.

> I hope SpaceX gets some stiff competition because I believe that competition breeds innovation

They are the competition and the innovation. I don't see them slacking off until they get to Mars at least.

So you didn't click the link? Because ULA wasn't second, rocket labs had 9 launches last year and 24 scheduled this year.

As I said, the launch industry in the US is robust.

When/if SpaceX gets Starship operational, small outfits like Rocket Lab won't be able to compete. ULA will probably survive in some form though either due to being a well established in Washington (read: old trusted corruption), or through a merger with Blue Origin (read: bailed out by Bezos.)

I did?

No. 1: SpaceX

No. 2: United Launch Alliance

From TFA

Even if you're right, having 1 company with 10x of the #2 is not what I would describe as healthy.

> the US has a very healthy launch industry.

What would a healthy launch industry look like? I don't think that 2022 article necessarily describes one. There is the long bet that won (SpaceX, reuse), the dino (ULA), a NZ transplant still mostly launching outside the US (RocketLab), some hopeful looking startups and always over the horizon Blue Origin.

This is a much better situation than the EU caught between the unpalatable antique (Soyuz) and the sailboat waiting for a cargo (Ariane 6).

However, it doesn't seem as healthy as the Chinese launch industry, which seems to have many providers launching and iterating with differentiated designs [0], bread-and-butter heavy launches from Long Marches (48 in 2023) [1] and continued work with the Tiangong space station [2]. It doesn't quite compute for me that commies don't have everything under proletarian central control, but they sure seem to be letting a hundred flowers bloom for now.

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_space_program#List_of_...

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Long_March_launches_(2...

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiangong_space_station

3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hundred_Flowers_Campaign

I'd rather hate Elon Musk on Mars than love Boeing on Earth.

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