SpaceX President and Chief Operating Officer Gwynne Shotwell speaks during a visit by NASA Commercial Crew Program (CCP) astronauts to SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne, California, on Monday, August 13, 2018.
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SpaceX’s No. 2 urged rivals in comments Friday, saying competition is healthy for the company Elon Muskspace company.
Speaking at the 2024 Barron’s Investment Conference in New York, SpaceX President and COO Gwynne Shotwell said: “I hope others will catch up, right? Competition is good for the industry… It keeps us tense and focused.”
“It’s going to be hard to catch us, but I certainly hope people give it a try,” Shotwell added.
SpaceX already dominates the global launch industry, with its semi-reusable Falcon rocket having launched more than 100 times this year and counting. The next closest American rocket company, rocket labhas been launched into orbit 12 times this year, and the other times are only in single digits.
In addition, the 15,000-employee company has won billions of dollars in government contracts from the Department of Defense and NASA, making the latter the only U.S. option for using Dragon capsules to transport astronauts to and from the International Space Station.
Shotwell said SpaceX’s Starlink satellite internet network is currently serving nearly 5 million customers.
Starlink is already having a disruptive impact on existing satellite telecommunications companies. With nearly 7,000 Starlink satellites in orbit, SpaceX has expanded Starlink’s offerings from consumers to the enterprise market, e.g. aviation and navigation.
But Shotwell said the market for satellite broadband was “huge”. Several companies are working on developing Starlink competitors, such as Eutelsat’s OneWeb, Amazon’s Project Kuiper, Telecom Satellite Corporation speed of light and AST space movement.
Billionaire investor Ron Baron, whose eponymous company holds privately held SpaceX shares worth more than $2 billion, noted that about 30% of the world’s 8 billion people don’t have access to broadband.
“I would say … SpaceX will serve everyone, but there will be competition — I think there’s a lot of room in this industry, there’s a lot of room for competition,” Shotwell told Barron’s.
Shotwell pointed out that SpaceX has also been steadily advancing the development of its behemoth Starship rocket recently. Grab the vehicle’s booster This was the first attempt during the fifth test flight last month.
“Starship is really a replacement. It obsolete Falcon 9 and Dragon. Now, we’re not shutting down Falcon 9, we’re not shutting down Dragon – we’re going to keep flying for six to eight years,” she explain.
“But ultimately, people are going to want to fly on Starship: it’s bigger, more comfortable, and cheaper,” Shotwell added.
SpaceX plans to conduct Starship’s sixth flight test as early as Monday, aiming to further improve the rocket’s capabilities through more demonstrations during the mission. The Starship system is designed to be fully reusable and intended to be a new way to transport cargo and people beyond Earth, unlike the Falcon rocket, which only has a reusable booster and nose cone.
“We just completed 400 (total) launches on Falcon, and I wouldn’t be surprised if we do 400 Starship launches in the next four years,” Shotwell said.
