Salvador Nogueira
In 2024, 2,802 spacecraft were launched in orbit, including satellites and probes, distributed in 259 rocket launches. Spacex was responsible for 152 of these flights and has just under 2,000 of the satellites launched. Statistics reflect a growing rule of Elon Musk’s company, which today launches more useful loads to space than the rest of the combined world.
Looking at these numbers, it doesn’t even seem like mere ten years ago Spacex was filing a lawsuit against the United States Air Force by the right to merely compete for the launch of military satellites. What is the secret of meteoric ascension?
Two actions, both risky and planned bets in advance, were fundamental to create this disruptive movement in the space launches market. The first, and more obvious, was the advent of recovery and reuse of the first stages of launchers.
Falcon 9, the main rocket in operation by the company, whose first release took place in 2010, was not born reusable. Many of its first flights were made in the same regime as all other launchers in the world, disposablely. However, Spacex has always aimed to make it at least partially reusable.
For this, several technologies never seen before have to be created and demonstrated, such as control of the vehicle through aerodynamic forces in reentry and the so -called supersonic retrofession -the ability to light the engines of a rocket in the opposite direction of its movement, a fall whose speed surpasses that of sound.
The first maneuver of this type, demonstrating its viability, was performed by Spacex in September 2013. The first controlled and successful landing of a first stage of Falcon 9 would come just two years later, in December 2015. And technology was only treated as practice, not merely experimental, in January 2017.
From that point, the company had a technology capable of drastically reduced the cost of space launches. After all, in a typical two -stage rocket such as Falcon 9, 90% of the cost of manufacturing is in the first stage. Recovering it and demonstrating the viability of constant reuse, the price of a flight could in principle fall to tenth of what it was cost before.
Detail: The rest of the competition, supported by former disposable launcher development and operation strategies, was already more expensive than the disposable Falcon 9, nor is it talking about its reusable version. While companies like the American Ula (United Launch Alliance) and European Arianespace followed the same prices as always, Spacex could beat them by granting only modest discount, if so much, and increasing the profit margin.
Still, this is not enough to explain the absurd discrepancy between the frequency of Spacex releases and that of its competitors. The company’s big balcony was to see that reuse and cost reduction allowed hitherto economically prohibitive applications.
Creating its own demand
The idea of satellite constellations is not new, but it has always been controversial, in the opposite reason for the number of spaces needed to compose it. It is one thing to have a modest GPS fleet, which operates with 24 satellites, or three equipment in a geostationary orbit that allow you to provide telecommunications (including internet) worldwide. Another is to propose a gigantic fleet to operate in low orbit.
This second option began to become viable with miniaturization and mass manufacturing of components for spacecraft, movement of so -called micro and nanosatellites, which has gained boost in the last decade. Still, having a fleet with thousands of one -company satellites seemed impossible -to reduce the cost of access to space by reuse of rockets.
Realizing this, Spacex jumped ahead launching the Starlink project. The idea is to replace what would be at least the three geostationary satellites located in orbits distant by tens of thousands of smaller, cheaper and lower orbit satellites. The lower the orbit, the fastest the satellite is, which implies that, to have an always flying over our head at any time, you need to launch many of them. Already a single geostationary, by name, orbits at the speed of rotation of the earth and is permanently over the designated region.
To truly make the option for reusable rockets, Spacex had to create its own demand for releases. And in this Starlink was essential. By this time, about 7,000 satellites have been launched, which the company can install in orbit at cost price, and thereby providing fast and low latency internet (short response time, given the short distance between users and low orbit satellites) anywhere in the globe.
With Starlink’s business, the cost of launches is offset by the income obtained with service customers. Not entirely, it’s true. In the current regime, he has even reached a positive balance -which raises per year is slightly higher than what spends, but of course there is a whole liabilities of research and development and the first releases, before the constellation is in commercial operation.
Anyway, with the project, Spacex created its own demand and established a virtuous cycle. The more satellites it launches a year, the more often it is reusing the Falcon 9 rockets annually (essentially the same workforce), which drops the price of releases the more viable to maintain the Starlink system and further cheapen flights, Spacex itself and external customers.
Were it not for national sovereignty and security issues, such the superiority in operations, by this time the company would have already gained a monopoly. Even without characterizing it, its strength already surpasses the rest of the world together, and who wants to fly at the lowest price, without other criteria in the balance, today is forced to choose Spacex.
The balance of power
This is a lot of power in the hands of a single company, and the erratic behavior, to be kind, of Musk, helps nothing to produce any dose of tranquility. The good side is that the revolution is done, the costs of access to space will never return to the prohibitive levels that once had, and now what can give the world more peace of mind is the arrival of the competition.
It will happen, and it should not take so long. Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin also developed its new New Glenn rocket to be reusable. The first flight occurred in January this year, and is a matter of time until it reaches these goals. Amazon, another Bezos company, has a project similar to Starlink, called Kuiper, and New Glenn will give the Chinese have several startups also focused on rocket reuse, as well as purely state initiatives from their space program. And they also have projects for satellite megaconstels.
Europeans and Russians seem lethargic to react, in the false hope that there will be no demand for so many flights and everything can settle and again as before. It won’t happen. And Spacex, still three steps ahead of the competition, already develops its Starship vehicle, which promises to be totally reusable, with both stages, cheaper and more loading than anything before.
If the musk company’s hegemony will still last long, and how long, it is something to be discussed. The fact is that humanity and space will never be the same after rockets start to land back on their platforms.
