Musk will happily trigger Kessler syndrome to prevent competition.
China will be blamed, of course.
Great, pretty soon every regional power will launch thousands of satellites to pretend to build their own satellite internet.
Fun fact: The aluminium from satellite parts burning up in the atmosphere kills the ozone layer.
@yogthos And then the upper stage blew up, creating a debris field of more than 700 objects that now threatens satellites in the same orbit:
reuters.com/technology/space/c…
China has a really bad track record with their stages. They have launch sites where they drop the first stages on land - sometimes hitting or almost hitting villages (which is really bad as many of these stages use toxic propellants). Their upper stages re-enter the atmosphere in an uncontrolled way (most other rocket launchers do this in a controlled way and let them re-enter at “Point Nemo”).
It looks like they haven’t launched any yet? It’ll be interesting to see if they can since they don’t have a cheap launch vehicle.
A bunch of Chinese companies are already working on launch vehicles comparable to Falcon 9. It’s not gonna be long before parity is reached.
Yeah, I’d guess about 10 years, since that’s about how long it took SpaceX to get cheap falcon 9.
First of all, it always takes longer to do something the first time because you don’t know what the best way to do it is. That means having to do a lot of experimentation, and having false starts. Once a particular approach is proven, it takes much less time for competitors to follow it. This has been a constant with every type of technology out there.
Second, it’s not like Chinese companies are just starting today. There are already plenty of companies that have functioning prototypes of reusable rockets that are actively being tested today. Here are a couple of examples for you:
- https://spacenews.com/chinas-landspace-conducts-first-vtvl-test-for-reusable-stainless-steel-rocket/
- https://www.space.com/chinese-company-vertical-rocket-landing-tests-video
You’d think people would learn from the way Chinese companies were able to dominate in areas like solar panels, EVs, battery tech, and are now catching up in chip manufacturing. In every one of these cases, exact same arguments were made, and China shocked westerners by how rapidly it was able to develop these technologies.