When the costume did not produce instant results, Musk has become jingoisical. A few months earlier, in February 2014, Russia had invaded Ukraine, illegally annexing the Crimean Peninsula and triggering a global wave of condemnation against Moscow. Musk rolled up this wave in his successful push to obtain the Obama congress and administration to finish the use of the signature rocket of the United Launch Alliance, the Atlas V, because it was based on Russian engines RD-180. (The prosecution was finally settled amicably.) The combination helped to break up the grip of ULA on the launches of government space.
Another big jump came in 2017. SpaceX began to reuse its rocket nuclei, which radically dropped the price of the orbit. (Eight years later, his Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy are still the only rockets in their weight classes with reusable nuclei.) But nothing was more important than the continuous development of Mueller of the Merlin de Spacex engine. He has become one of the most lasting in the history of aerospace, even if, as a former employee said to me: “In terms of performance, it’s terrible”. Its power and efficiency are nothing special. “We did not have the resources to do a lot of design and analysis,” he adds. “And so we have just tested the still loving shit of the engine. We have been hot thousands of times. Now they have a super robust engine.”
Today, thanks in part to its nine reusable merlin engines, a Falcon 9 can take a kilogram in low terrestrial orbit for a third of the previous cost; The Falcon Heavy, which uses 27 merlins, drops the cost by half again. Some 85% of Falcon 9 missions go to space with the first steps previously used. In 2022, SpaceX jumped from the thirty launches per year at over 60, and last year it reached 138. The spatial launch of NASA and human exploration efforts are now almost entirely controlled by Musk. A whole new space economy has grown up around him, which relies on his access to cheap space to obtain networks of small spaceships in low terrestrial orbit. Take Planet Labs, the Satellite Imaging Company. Hundreds of its spaceships were transported by Falcon 9.
Really, no one even tries to catch up; They just try to find niches in an ecosystem dominated by musk. The ULA builds optimized rockets to reach geostationary orbits, which are more distant, even if many of its customers follow the example of Musk and keep their satellite constellations closer to the earth. Arrivors like Rocket Lab and Firefly are admired for their ingenuity. But their current operational rockets are tiny In comparison – capable of transporting, at most, a few thousand pounds, against 140,000 for the Falcon Heavy.
“SpaceX is a cornerstone of the space industry. And then there are other cornerstone stones, like Firefly. We are very complementary to SpaceX, ”explains Jason Kim, CEO of Firefly Aerospace. “It’s a bit like air, land and sea. There is no single transport method.” (Kim is not alone in this thought; Firefly has just become public to an evaluation of $ 8.5 billion; Rocket Lab’s market capitalization is around $ 21 billion.)
Jeff Bezos has money to compete with SpaceX. And it was certainly long enough – his rocket company, Blue Origin, started a quarter of a century ago. But he had, we will say, competing priorities. He worked hard on engines; Its Be-4 engine is actually feeding the first stage of the new Ula rocket, quite confused. You may have seen that Blue Origin has a rocket for tourism close to space, the one who recently worn Bezos’ wife, Lauren Sánchez, and Katy Perry Aloft. But the big rocket of the company, that which is supposed to compete with SpaceX, stole exactly once. And when I ask the representative of Blue Origin which makes their rockets better – or, at least, to different musks – from Musk, he says to me: “I have no solid response for you on that one.”
China, which once seemed to be ready to dominate the world’s launch, has struggled to follow Musk’s growing totals, successfully launching between 64 and 68 rockets per year in the past three years. SpaceX does not only start twice more often, it transports more than 10 times the mass reported to the orbit. Stoke Space, founded by Blue Origin Engineers, has aerospace geeks in a frenzy, but he has not yet put a rocket on the cushion. United Launch Alliance, the competitor OG of SpaceX, has a new powerful rocket – more about it in a little – but again, Musk is ahead. He works on a truly massive launcher, probably the biggest ever built. The two stages are supposed to be fully reusable (which means, of course, immense cost savings), while none of the two stages of the Vulcan d’Ula will be fully reusable. And that, according to a new report by SpaceNews Intelligence, could relegate the single monopoly “to niche roles in government or regional and safeguard contracts, assuming that they survive at all”.
II satellites
At the end From May, in its Starbase factory, Texas, Musk was in Evangelist Mars mode. “This is where we are going to develop the technology necessary to take humanity,” he told his employees, “on another planet for the first time in the four billion stories of the earth and a half.”
But as he sketches his picture of this place which exceeds 1,000 huge vessels per year, Musk repeated a more banal truth. No, not the part on the registration of unequal test of the starship. The one on financing. “Starlink Internet is what is used to pay humanity in Mars.”
