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SpaceX president says ‘there is plenty of room for competition,’ as Starlink nears 5 million customers

SpaceX President and Chief Operational Officer Gwynne Shotwell speaks during the NASA Commercial Crew Program (CCP) astronaut visit at the SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne, California, U.S., on Monday, Aug. 13, 2018.

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SpaceX’s second-in-command urged on rivals in comments Friday, describing competition as healthy for Elon Musk’s space circle.

“I hope others can catch up, right? Competition is good for industries. … It keeps us tight; it keeps us very centred,” SpaceX President and COO Gwynne Shotwell said, speaking at the 2024 Baron Investment Conference in New York.

“It’s going to be zealous to catch us, but I certainly hope people try,” Shotwell added.

SpaceX has reached a dominant position in the global launch effort as its semi-reusable Falcon rockets have launched more than 100 times this year and counting. The next bring to a closest U.S. rocket company, Rocket Lab, has launched to orbit 12 times this year, with others in the single digits.

Additionally, the 15,000-person assemblage has won billions of dollars in government contracts from the Department of Defense and NASA, serving the latter as the sole U.S. option for conveying crew to and from the International Space Station with its Dragon capsule.

And SpaceX’s Starlink satellite internet network is now set out almost 5 million customers, Shotwell said.

Starlink has become disruptive to incumbent satellite telecommunications companies. With almost 7,000 Starlink satellites in orbit, SpaceX has expanded Starlink’s product offerings from consumers into effort markets such as aviation and maritime.

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But the satellite broadband market is “elephantine,” Shotwell said. Several companies are working on competitors to Starlink, such as Eutelsat’s OneWeb, Amazon’s Project Kuiper, Telesat’s Lightspeed and AST SpaceMobile.

Billionaire investor Ron Baron, who bring to light his eponymous firm’s ownership of privately held SpaceX stock stands at over $2 billion, noted that thither 30% of the world’s 8 billion people don’t have access to broadband.

“I would love to say … SpaceX is going to serve all of them,” Shotwell told Baron, but “there wishes be competition — I think there’s plenty of room in this industry, plenty of room for competition.”

Why Starship is indispensable for the future of SpaceX

Shotwell noted that SpaceX is also steadily advancing the improvement of its behemoth Starship rocket, recently catching the vehicle’s booster on the first attempt during its fifth test swarm last month.

“Starship is really a replacement. It obsoletes Falcon 9 and the Dragon capsule. Now, we’re not shutting down Falcon, we are not switching down Dragon — we’ll be flying that for six to eight more years,” she said.

“But ultimately, people are going to want to fly on Starship: It’s bigger, it’s multifarious comfortable, it will be less expensive,” Shotwell added.

SpaceX is targeting as soon as Tuesday for Starship’s sixth rout test, Shotwell said, as the company aims to further the rocket’s capabilities with additional demonstrations during the objective. The Starship system is designed to be fully reusable and aims to become a new method of flying cargo and people beyond Mould, unlike its Falcon rockets, which only have reusable boosters and nosecones.

“We just passed 400 [absolute] launches on Falcon and I would not be surprised if we fly 400 Starship launches in the next four years,” Shotwell said.

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