Here’s part of an interesting interview with Rocket Lab’s Peter Beck on ArsTechnica.
What do you think about the competition? SpaceX is entering the smallsat launch market. There are dozens of companies trying to build vehicles like Electron.
Ultimately, I think an increase in launch opportunities is good for everybody. It stimulates more opportunities, and it enables people to get on orbit more often. The limitation for SpaceX, obviously, is that they’re flying once a year to one particular orbit. Generally, the kind of customer that’s flying on Electron is not looking to rideshare—they’re looking for a dedicated service and all of the massive advantages that gives you. So, you know, from Rocket Lab’s perspective, we don’t see any challenge or impact to our business. It’s a very different customer that will fly on us versus a Falcon 9.
But what I would say is there are quite a lot of launch vehicles in the 1,000kg payload range that are under development at the moment, and I think that’s going to be a real challenge for those guys. Basically their model is rideshare, and when you’re going head-to-head with an established player like SpaceX, you know, that has proven flight credibility and opportunities, that will be a real challenge…
I lost count, personally, at 114 small-launch vehicle companies. I was told this morning that it was announced at this conference that there are now 130.
One of the great things about the proliferation of small launch vehicle companies is that it is usually associated with diversity of form. It isn’t just the high competition for profits and survival that help push the envelope on capabilities and lowering costs. There are also spillovers of information between firms and researchers that are fundamentally different than spillovers captured within a large firm.
Ideas are hard to keep bottled up, and the free flow of learned information between separate teams with their own specialization, biases, and culture helps explore the tradespace quickly.
It is imaginable that if the barriers to entry are low enough, and 130 companies seem to think so, then some of these start ups might find themselves on an S-curve of progress that is steeper than at United Launch Alliance, or potentially even SpaceX.
Estimates seem to be that the space industry will triple or maybe even 10x in the next ten years. But we really just don’t know. What is the Total Accessible Market (TAM) for space? If we get “unanticipated” innovation, it could be much bigger than expected.
Or perhaps it might just be the consumer reaction that is hard to judge. No one would have thought social media would be such a large market 10 years ago. The market was created.
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