next 18 months? Nah. 5 years? Probably. 10? Definitely. It's like Tesla, Tesla pioneered electric vehicles, but today it's not alone in the market, it's not even arguably the biggest player anymore.
PRC has multiple private space companies with reusable vehicles on the way, a few look like they can do Falcon9 capabilities in 3-5 years. And if they decide to hit the overcapacity brrrt button, I imagine all the current wanking over SpaceX launch capacity will look very premature. There's ~40 falcon 9s doing concurrent missions, that's really not much in grand scheme of things. About "American" scale. I imagine once PRC tech is passable they'll scale to point to eclipse aggregate spaceX payloads rapidly fast with their own mega constellations, and magnitude more (like ship building) if there's ACTUAL case for sustaining that level of space launch demand. Which I hope there is... outside of militarization efforts.
Comments
PRC has multiple private space companies with reusable vehicles on the way, a few look like they can do Falcon9 capabilities in 3-5 years. And if they decide to hit the overcapacity brrrt button, I imagine all the current wanking over SpaceX launch capacity will look very premature. There's ~40 falcon 9s doing concurrent missions, that's really not much in grand scheme of things. About "American" scale. I imagine once PRC tech is passable they'll scale to point to eclipse aggregate spaceX payloads rapidly fast with their own mega constellations, and magnitude more (like ship building) if there's ACTUAL case for sustaining that level of space launch demand. Which I hope there is... outside of militarization efforts.