SpaceX Faces Competition From Blue Origin, Rocket Lab And Itself

But after several years atop the space industry, rivaled only by nation states such as China, Elon Musk's space venture may finally be facing a space industry that has grown in its wake and is poised to challenge SpaceX on a number of fronts.

Several space ventures, including Jeff Bezos's Blue Origin, Rocket Lab and the United Launch Alliance — the joint venture of Lockheed Martin and Boeing — are poised to debut new heavy-lift rockets this year to compete with SpaceX's Falcon 9 workhorse. The Pentagon is looking for another provider for the lucrative business of launching national security payloads. Boeing is set to finally launch a crew of astronauts for NASA to the International Space Station, giving NASA, which has relied on SpaceX for the past four years, another way for its astronauts to orbit. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)

And while SpaceX has dominated the internet satellite industry by launching some 6,000 Starlink satellites, Amazon, backed by a $10 billion investment, is gearing up to fly its own constellation as well.

Those developments, however, may be too late to pose a serious challenge, analysts say, as SpaceX continues to press ahead with reserves of money, momentum and a wartime-like urgency that Musk has infused into the company. Its deep ties to NASA and the Pentagon, which have awarded it billions of dollars in contracts and elevated it to prime contractor status, have also given it a lead that will be difficult to erode.

And SpaceX continues to operate at a blistering pace, expanding the frontiers of what is possible. It flew its Falcon 9 rocket nearly 100 times last year — an unprecedented cadence in an industry that for years flew closer to about a dozen times a year. This year, it's aiming for nearly 150 launches of the booster, which flies back to a landing site so it can be reused.

In a report, Morgan Stanley estimated that SpaceX's revenue for fiscal year 2024 should reach $13 billion, a 54 percent increase over last year. By 2035, as SpaceX's Starlink internet satellite constellation grows, revenue could reach $100 billion, the firm reported.

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