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by somenameforme 18 days ago
Space is the next great frontier and right now every single other company, and even country, remain orders of magnitude behind SpaceX. This could change in the future and viable competitors could emerge, public ownership could ruin SpaceX, or humanity's further entry into the cosmos could be delayed (Americans circa 1969 certainly probably also felt they were on the cusp of something great). But at current trajectories you're looking at something akin to there being one company that made ships better way better than everybody else, right before the Age of Sail kicked off.
1 comments

Bro, they make 99% of the revenue providing internet connection where markets and governments have failed to provide good options. A trillion dollar valuation competing with the commodity cost of running fiber. Supporting off-grid internet is not a trillion dollar industry even combining it with all the revenue from other uses of satellites. It’s the next step in rockets which is more equivalent to better horse shoes than the age of sail.
Yeah, but have you considered that rocket ships are rad af and may even have laser guns?
I think most people, especially in this topic, know essentially nothing about SpaceX and are just going off political stuff. SpaceX have dropped the price to get stuff to space by about two orders of magnitude already, and there's no apparent reason Starship might not succeed in which case you're looking at even more orders of magnitude cost deduction.

Space is not, and cannot be, a frontier when it costs thousands of dollars to get a bottle of water into orbit. That suddenly changes when costs reach a sufficiently low threshold, and SpaceX is not only leading the race there but really the only significant player. Even China, with their vast resources, won't be able to compete unless they can reach near to technical parity with SpaceX. And, for now at least, they don't seem especially close and are, by far, the closest competitor SpaceX has, bro.