Whether or not the rift between US President Donald Trump and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk is closed, the questions raised by the president’s threat to cancel SpaceX’s contracts remain important: Why is the US (and the space industry in NATO countries) so dependent on SpaceX’s fleet of reusable rockets?
Natural monopoly: Scott Pace, the longtime policy hand who served as executive secretary for the National Space Council in Trump’s first term, used to say that heavy lift rockets were national assets like aircraft carriers.
Typically, a successful rocket design lasts:
- Russia is still reliant on the nearly six-decade-old Soyuz family;
- China has been building on Long March heritage since the 1970s;
- Before SpaceX, the US had a launch monopoly, based on Cold War missile designs, in United Launch Alliance.
Think different: If you’re reading this newsletter, you already know that SpaceX broke that mold with its reusable Falcon 9 rocket. The marriage of NASA funding and technology development with SpaceX’s Silicon Valley culture created a low-cost, highly capable launch vehicle.
The multi-billion dollar question: Why can’t anyone else do that?
It took the rocket industry time to even realize they had to compete: As late as 2015, Arianespace CEO Stephane Israël was saying things like, “It would be a mistake to consider reuse the alpha and omega of breaking innovation in the field of launchers.” Today, many launchers are trying to replicate SpaceX’s model of reusability.
US officials, however, understood that they needed SpaceX to have competition. They’ve invested big bucks to encourage new development: In October 2018, the Pentagon split $2.3B in development funding between Blue Origin, United Launch Alliance, and Northrop Grumman. The two rockets ultimately developed with that funding—and subsequent delivery contracts worth $5.4B to ULA for Vulcan and $2.4B to Blue Origin for New Glenn—have flown three times combined.
The private sector has kicked in too: Private investors in the US, EU, and Oceania have pumped tens of billions into launch vehicle companies—as examples, more than $10B for Blue Origin, $1.2B into Rocket Lab, $2.4B for Relativity Space, $700 million into Firefly, $500M into Stoke Space, and $483M into Isar Aerospace. (As an aside, the cost of developing the expendable Falcon 9 was $400M; you can add $100M or so on to cover SpaceX’s investment in Falcon 1.)
Come on Jeff: For a long time, the great hope for a SpaceX competitor came from Blue Origin, where Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos committed to building reusable space vehicles.
In 2017, then-CEO Bob Smith—brought in to transform the company from an R&D lab to an executing organization—said of the company’s New Glenn orbital rocket that “we don’t have a lot of things where we really need to go experiment, all of those things are well-understood … it’s a matter of, ‘Can we marshal the resources?’ as opposed to, ‘Is there some Nobel prize winning technology that I need?’”
It finally launched for the first time seven years later. Today, Blue Origin CEO Dave Limp—brought in to transform the company from an R&D lab to an executing organization—will be lucky to launch it for the second time later this summer.
Culture vultures: If the problems aren’t capital, they’re probably culture: Taking on the right amount of risk is more intuition than a skill that can be taught. The one space company that thus far has seemed capable of catching up with SpaceX is Rocket Lab, which flies its small Electron rocket on a regular cadence and is racing to debut a Falcon 9 competitor by the end of this year.
“Great engineers want to work with great engineers; as long as you’ve got great engineers, then you can always attract great engineers,” CEO Peter Beck told Payload of the company’s culture last year. “We will hire somebody with a far less of a grade that has actually done something than somebody who has straight A’s.”
Outlook ahead: US officials reportedly rang up Rocket Lab, Blue Origin and Stoke—the three newest entrants to the military’s national security launch program—to see if they’re ready to go yet. The answer is no, for now.
As for ULA’s Vulcan, despite being certified for national security missions, it is still waiting to clear a mishap investigation from its second launch, and has a backlog to work through.
One thing is clear—the next company to get a low-cost orbital rocket flying stands to find a lot of customers.
