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 Musk’s space company.
Speaking at the 2024 Barron’s Investment Conference in New York, SpaceX President and Chief Operating Officer Gwynne Shotwell said: “I hope others can catch up, right? Competition is good for the industry… It keeps us nervous and keeps us very focused.
“It’s going to be hard to catch up with 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 network is currently serving nearly 5 million customers.
Starlink is already having a disruptive impact on existing satellite telecommunications companies. SpaceX has nearly 7,000 Starlink satellites in orbit and has expanded Starlink’s product range from consumers to enterprise markets such as aviation and navigation.
But Shotwell said the satellite broadband market was “huge”. Several companies are working on developing Starlink competitors, such as Eutelsat’s OneWeb, Amazon’s Kuiper Project, Telesat’s 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 lack 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 noted that SpaceX has also been steadily advancing development of its massive Starship rocket, recently capturing the rocket’s boosters on its first attempt during its 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.
Shotwell said SpaceX is targeting Starship’s sixth flight test as early as Tuesday, and the company aims to further improve the rocket’s capabilities with additional 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.
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