(Op-Ed) Who up launching they rocket? Analysis of the current launch market by someone with no business doing so

      A few days ago, SpaceX launched a double header, successfully launching two full payloads of starlink satellites via Falcon-9 to low earth orbit. That isn't anything noteworthy, and it happens fairly regularly. And yet here we are, not because it was a particularly interesting launch (though we sure thought it was for a little), but because of its mundanity. At no time in history could you reasonably bet that there would be an orbital launch in the upcoming week, until now. I recently spent a summer in Los Angles, and thought to myself "wouldn't it be nice if I could see a rocket launch for the first time?" I saw a launch out of Vandenburg three days later.

     This was no feat of planning, nor a coincidence. The rate of launches is so high that on any given week you can expect at least one, if not more. With very few exceptions, the last time we had a quiet week was a long time ago, and Falcon has proved itself both an incredibly capable and reliable workhorse. This will come as a surprise to absolutely nobody, but Falcon is immensely profitable. SpaceX makes cash hand over fist for each contracted launch they provide, and by amortizing the cost of a booster over several missions, they've cut launch costs by an order of magnitude over their competitors; this allows them to pursue loftier goals, such as Starlink. A constellation of that magnitude could not exist without such low costs, and has allowed them to make even more money as an ISP, acting as a multiplier to the already immensely profitable launch system.

      Their primary competitors exist in Blue Origin’s New Glenn, Rocketlab’s Electron (and maybe Neutron - but that remains to be seen), ULAs Vulcan, and Firefly's Alpha and upcoming MLV These competitors have been doing well enough, but face stiff headwinds to compete with SpaceXs dominance. Notably, saying something like "none of them are in spitting distance of being cost competitive" fails to do justice to just how bad it is. SpaceX charges an industry leading price, but could go far, far, lower, meaning a real competitor would need to sell a comparable payload at a fraction of the current rate. The best time to build a "Falcon killer" was a decade ago. The second best time doesn't exist.

      In the decade it will likely take for a competitor to emerge, Starship will be a mature vehicle, and put the cost bar even further out of reach. Sure, its often completely unjustified to launch a vehicle that big for GlupSat 7, built by club students at the university of Shitto, but they won't have to. Transporter has been immensely successful for both its incredibly low cost to orbit, and the variety of mass payloads it can accommodate. A startup can begin with a 50kg payload for $325,000, and grow all the way to a caketopper mission at 2500kg, with higher masses capable of utilizing a full mission at 22,000kg. This makes booking a launch as easy as selecting a mission, your payload size, and going to checkout. It's exactly like booking a flight (albeit a bit more expensive), and as such it makes little sense for most startups to ever utilize a different vehicle. The hand-holding SpaceX provides from payload adaptability to GSE support at all stages make them attractive for so many reasons that a true cost competitor would likely still lose in expected development costs between a mature and competitor launch infrastructure, and thus, for the time being, no true competitor is likely to emerge.

      I am optimistic that this is not a bad thing. The lack of competition absolutely hurts the industry in some sense ~ competition is what makes capitalism go round and all, but we are lucky in one regard; SpaceX is a private company, and is under no obligation to chase short term shareholder value. They have been remarkably consistent in investing their otherworldly profits into future developments, notably Starlink and Starship. Starlink has radically transformed the internet, allowing access in places previously deemed far too sparsely populated to justify infrastructure developments in high speed networking, not just on the ground, but at sea and in the air as well; Starship even uses it as a primary datalink for livestream and telemetry data. I believe that while the monopoly in industry is not "good" per se, its been put to good use. Starship achieving operational status will cause the cost of launches to fall even more, if not externally, at least internally, which can be leveraged for a generational improvement to what is already the largest megastructure built by humanity (if you use the tooootally justifiable size metric of smallest possible convex bounding geometry ~ Starlink occupies a volume greater than the earth) which carries its own second and third order benefits.

      While being admittedly an extremely first world problem, I regularly drive places that are miles from a cell tower, and the ability to have access to brain rot in 4k at any point on earth would improve my quality of life drastically. More seriously, the ability to transmit live video p2p and high rate data from anywhere to anywhere has implications that I don't think anyone yet fully understands, but in line with past trends in internet access, I think will make the world by and large a better place.

      One day, I hope to see this investment pay off big, a crewed mars mission in my lifetime seems within reach now, something that younger me would've been starstruck over. If you went back to 2017 and told freshman-year-of-high-school-me that in the 2020s a crewed Mars mission was looking less than a decade away, she would have probably said you were full of shit and to hop on Fortnite instead of jerking her chain. 

      I started writing this with the sentiment that nobody could ever compete with the dominance of SpaceX, and while I'm of the opinion this is largely true, for the time being it may serve to usher in a new and wonderful era for humanity.