As with Tesla, complacent incumbents have been trying to respond to SpaceX's challenge
It was the latest piece of good news for SpaceX, a rocketry firm founded in 2002 by Mr Musk, who is perhaps better known as the chief executive of Tesla, an electric-car pioneer. Like Tesla, SpaceX has taken an unloved technology and made drastic improvements, shaking up a complacent industry. While Tesla’s mission—“accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable energy”—is grand, SpaceX’s is even grander.
As with Tesla, complacent incumbents have been trying to respond. United Launch Alliance, a joint venture between Boeing and Lockheed Martin, two aerospace giants, has cut jobs and trimmed costs. In November Tory Bruno, its boss, said prices for its Atlas V rocket were down from $225m per launch to just over $100m. Arianespace, a European firm, has also cut prices for its Ariane 5, which is thought to cost around €175m per flight.
However nifty SpaceX’s technology gets, the launch market, at around $6bn in 2019, is relatively small, says Simon Potter of BryceTech, a firm of analysts and engineers. Many players are shielded from full competition by governments worried about national security. That will limit SpaceX’s market share. Instead, says Adam Jonas, an analyst at Morgan Stanley, SpaceX sees launch as an “enabling technology” for its other plans. The firm’s next target is the telecoms business.
Economics, a consultancy. One is that most of Starlink’s potential customers are people ill-served by terrestrial internet firms. They tend to live in relatively poor rural areas. Starlink’s price of $99 per month is not cheap even for rich-country users. The other is the cost of the high-tech satellite dishes needed to make the system work: 23-inch antennas that attach to roofs or walls. Since Starlink’s satellites are in low orbits, they zip quickly across the sky.
Starlink’s test programme is currently available in only a handful of rich countries. Yet the firm said on May 5th that it had collected half a million pre-orders. It has requested regulatory permission for up to 5m users in America alone. In December SpaceX won $886m from America’s government to provide broadband in rural areas; it is said to be in similar talks in Britain.
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