Comment by perihelions | Hacker News Reader

Comment by perihelions | Hacker News Reader

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There's a large number of very well-capitalized startups in China trying to build reusable rockets, in competition to SpaceX. It's a significant national security priority for them. I'm pretty sure one of them will succeed soon. I don't understand your argument why they must all fail—I'm not clear if you've articulated such an argument, really, beyond "many people have failed, so it's probably impossible".

But SpaceX itself is existence proof that it's possible to do the things SpaceX does. And: the market in China is still wide-open for the taking, since SpaceX itself can't sell there.

Chinese newspace seems to be at an inflection point at this moment. I think there's five different private-sector teams that will attempt their first orbital booster recovery, either in this year or in 2026. That's: Deep Blue (Nebula-2); Landspace (Zhuque-3); Space Pioneer (Tianlong-3); iSpace (Hyperbola-3); Galactic (Pallas-1). Four of those five startups have already launched to orbit—Landscape even beat SpaceX (and Blue Origin) to the first orbital methane/oxygen rocket. (Not that you'd have heard about that on a Western-focused place like HN[0]. China's space startups are a blindspot for us, and, I think we're going to end up blindsided by them very soon, in the same way we were blindsided by Huawei, by DeepSeek, by BYD. We just ignore all the fast-moving developments there right up to the point they're impossible to ignore...)

[0] https://hn.algolia.com/?q=zhuque-2 (0 comments)

Basically. Last year spaceX had fleet of 18 F9s doing more than 50% of global launches, 80% including starlink.

SpaceX stans wank over 50% and 80%, but ignore that 18 is rookie numbers.

7/145 US space launches in 2024 was Non SpaceX.

That means US in aggregate build 25 rockets.

Versus PRC 68 (wanted 100 which was kind of reach).

Next 5-10 year projection need to account for # launch vehicles once PRC figures out reusable. Bearing in mind that PRC already producing ~2.5x launch vehicles, just not reusable.

To add, PRC didn't take reusable seriously until UKR war, and now they likely have multiple viable candidates due end of year. "Seriously" as in they proposed years prior to squat megaconstellation orbital rights but development wasn't urgent. Frankly no reason PRC won't have 50-100 reusables fleet _IF_ demand justifies it. And then like with all PRC catchup, they'll put more than SpaceX lifetime aggregate payload in a few years, and then it won't even be close.

The fundemental reality is, despite having ~10 year headstart, SpaceX is still an American company operating at American scale. US space launch lead is not particularly durable / sustainable.

If future of space is anything like EV, there's potential for several PRC rivals with fleets larger than SpaceX if there's demand for it. TBH only short/medium term demand is militarization of space (including isr megaconstellations). I expected PRC to only modestly eclipse SpaceX by factor of 2 in medium term. But with US murmuring about Brilliant Swarm, probably more and quicker, because technically it going to be faster for PRC to build 1000s of rival space interceptors than proliferate 1000s of nukes for parity (enrichment limitations > launch tempo).

Note that each of the 138 SpaceX launches required producing a second stage, something your numbers aren't really accounting for.

And that it seems like SpaceX is close (within a year or so) to full reusability, while rivals are still trying to work out how to reuse the first stage.

2nd stage 1/6 weight with simple merlin engine. Early F9 used 9 merlin = ~15 more rockets. ~60% of PRC though we don't know full industrial capacity of either, i.e. SpaceX could be boeing tier and do 600+ frames per year, or PRC can brrt their reusable like shipbuilding at 200x whatever US is per year. I think Starship is big caveate, it could work or it could not. It's much more complicated / not conservative project vs F9 and has borderline Vanguard / Atlas tier failure rate granted one could argue that's move fast break things by design. But push comes to shove, comes to hammering industry to fill strategic need, I wouldn't be confident SpaceX can maintain lead for long enough to matter. Especially if space weaponization on the horizon.

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