Who will compete with SpaceX? The last two and next two years.

[Space Ghost 1962]

It will be a long time before there's enough excess vehicle performance, proven/evolved vehicle avionics/flight software/operations/experience/contingencies to support casual changes in flight/mission payload(s).

If I live to see it, almost definitely would be coincident with the industrialization of space and routine launch/return/recovery. Please tell me how this might ever happen - didn't believe it pre-Taos Shuttle era then either.

[watermod]

As to who will compete.   
Well complete speculation here but I find it interesting that Gen Mattis returned from Korea to Seattle and spent the day with Bezos.
Any chance Bezos buys ULA with the government's blessing?

[LouScheffer]

Stop thinking of rockets as machines that you tweek performance on at all costs and only fly with nearly a full payload...

Not feasible.  Too much interaction between payload and vehicle.

It's plenty feasible, it's just makes no business sense.  If a company really wanted to accept miscellaneous payloads at the last minute it could be done.  They could do analysis, testing, and qualification over a huge range of payload properties.  They could design payload adapters that help decouple the critical loads, using active compliance if needed.  They could make machines to measure payload masses, moments of inertia and compliance in all axes, then add ballast as needed.  EMI compatibility testing could cover bigger margins, etc.

But right now that's a lot of engineering work and reduced payload for no gain.  The payloads are known well in advance.  It's easier to make the simplest, lightest, and stiffest payload adapter possible, then analyze everything as a combined unit.   Until this combined, coupled-load analysis becomes a limiting factor, and someone is willing to pay for short notice and variable payloads, there is no sense in developing this capability.

[Jim]

Stop thinking of rockets as machines that you tweek performance on at all costs and only fly with nearly a full payload...

Not feasible.  Too much interaction between payload and vehicle.

It's plenty feasible, it's just makes no business sense. 

Not feasible is the same as no business sense.

[Jim]

Stop thinking of rockets as machines that you tweek performance on at all costs and only fly with nearly a full payload...

Not feasible.  Too much interaction between payload and vehicle.

It's plenty feasible, it's just makes no business sense.  If a company really wanted to accept miscellaneous payloads at the last minute it could be done.  They could do analysis, testing, and qualification over a huge range of payload properties.  They could design payload adapters that help decouple the critical loads, using active compliance if needed.

Still doesn't save money.  The payload still has to be test to make sure it falls within the predicted range.

[Space Ghost 1962]

Bezos doesn't want to be encumbered like ULA is. Bezos doesn't need to compete even with SX, he could do "gradatim ferociter" indefinitely.

The more I see this play out, the first one to possibly go head to head (sorta) would be Airbus Safran Launchers, now Ariane Group. And that would be solely out of the need to persist with European spaceflight independence w/o losing too much financial advantage from getting too far behind the competitive curve.

ULA in part needs to (and is) close the gap on launch economics to remain distantly competitive, enough to where the unique launch capabilities it uniquely possesses still retains enough flight frequency to be "a going concern".

Russia/China, to a lesser degree, likewise are on a similar "intercept". (Both are badly positioned to address this.)

But do not mistake this for "compete w/SX", for its not.

Whatever journey SX is on, it is a singular one. When the game pauses, perhaps we'll all get a chance to assess WTF it is, but at the moment that's hard, as you can't tell the real from the potential from the fantasy.

Funding a launch provider is already a complicated and somewhat erratic business (end-end ROI). Now add in all the stuff that Musk adds in, and you've got something that no major firm (or national agency/ministry) would suggest funding.

So how can you have a true, "eyeball to eyeball" competitor, if no one would ever attempt such.

And wandering away from that objective ground truth ... what vague match will suffice in its stead?

People will compete with SX for missions. But there won't be a competitor for what SX (or ULA), does.

[AncientU]

Although I'm not sure about a full-size ITS, the CommX launch requirements could justify a launcher bigger than FH all by itself, should later iterations of the satellites get bigger to concentrate their bandwidth footprint.  The obvious thing that is missing is a far bigger shroud for a much lower density payload.  Big antennae are fluffy, even when folded.

If constellations get popular, you could generalize a bit.  You only need one customer per launch if that customer is attempting to fill most of an orbital ring in one launch.  But I can only think of two possible CommX competitors, OneWeb and the Chinese, and they're obviously going to want their own launchers.  I see a future of three constellations, one American, one European, and one Chinese, each trying to poach customers from the other's continents, each with one or more governments trying to put a thumb on the scale to make their favorite win more business.

Of the three, the Chinese have the largest domestic market.

This is a place that ITSy could play a commercial role.  Constellation sats are a huge step toward commodities -- once you've configured for and launched a load of them, the following loads are bulk deliveries.

There are 20,000 sats proposed in the various constellations today -- not all will fly, of course.  SpaceX LEO constellation of 4,425 sats masses 17,000kg, or about 20 years worth of current annual delivered mass (globally).  With the growth of internet/wifi, this could just be the beginning.

Note: Skyfi could become a trillion dollar market.  Competition will be fierce, and messy, not divided up cleanly by Nations.

[Jcc]

Bezos doesn't want to be encumbered like ULA is. Bezos doesn't need to compete even with SX, he could do "gradatim ferociter" indefinitely.

Ostensibly Bezos has the same goal as Musk, to greatly reduce the cost of space flight by making rockets reusable, thus enabling vastly more applications for space. If he doesn't get there and launch a major share of commercial payloads, plus space tourism, the effort will be pretty meaningless. I don't think any of the other players have dramatically lower cost as goal, if anything it's an existential challenge they would prefer not to have.

That said, a tenfold or hundredfold reduction in cost that Musk wants to see is really hard to accomplish, maybe impossible. But Blue is positioning itself to learn all of SpaceX' lessons and build a launch system that is as efficient or more so than what SpaceX has.

[Coastal Ron]

That said, a tenfold or hundredfold reduction in cost that Musk wants to see is really hard to accomplish, maybe impossible.

I'm not sure that Musk has put a date on that goal, so I view it as a long-term one, not something that will happen next year.

But Blue is positioning itself to learn all of SpaceX' lessons and build a launch system that is as efficient or more so than what SpaceX has.

There are plenty of examples of where the market followers, and not the market leaders, ultimately become dominant.

But Blue Origin has yet to show that they are even a competitor for launching mass to space, so I'd say it's far too early to say that Blue Origin has any advantages, especially when the market leader for reducing the cost to access space (i.e. SpaceX) is still innovating at a pace that appears to be far faster than Blue Origin.

We have to keep in mind that Blue Origin's motto, "gradatim ferociter", means to them "step by step, ferociously". Which is not the same as "step by step, quickly".

However I'm giddy that we have two well funded commercial launch companies that are committed to lowering the cost to access space, and I'm quite happy to let them force the launch industry to try and lower launch prices too.

[Jcc]

The ways in which BO are learning SpaceX lessons:

- VTOL of the booster, landing at the launch site or on a barge. OK, they actually patented the barge (invalid due to prior art) before SpaceX did it, but SpaceX are the ones that actually did it, and showed how.

-  Methalox fueled booster, which is SpaceX next step after lessons learned on Falcon.

- Scale of New Glen to make full reusability possible, lesson learned from Falcon where reusable upper stage was not viable.

[Lar]

I don't think we are at switchout 2 days before launch. But I could see if sat  #4 drops out 2 months early and sat #3 drops out 1 month early, go up with sat #1 and #2 and commsX birds to fill out the manifest.

Jim says there's too much coupling between launcher and payload. Anyone want to take bets that SpaceX won't try to decouple that as much as feasible, for that very (flexibility) reason?

I expect they'll engineer ITSy for being able to reconfigure things. A month seems short now but maybe in the future. Low priced launch is worth changing some things about how things are done.

[Nomadd]

 One advantage of a greatly oversized booster for the job is that you could keep G-loads down. That might make it a lot easier to certify the payloads for the booster. Not sure what you could do for vibration or the relationship between vibration and number/types/throttling of engines.
 But, if they could come up with a service that's significantly lower G loading and vibration intensity in all axes, maybe from a shock absorbing platform, any payload designed for multiple launchers should be happy.
 Lots of things will be easier and faster when they don't always have to chase that last 10 percent performance wise.

[Jim]

One advantage of a greatly oversized booster for the job is that you could keep G-loads down.

unrelated to vehicle size

[gongora]

One advantage of a greatly oversized booster for the job is that you could keep G-loads down.

unrelated to vehicle size

I think the implication was that excess performance could be spent on lower acceleration during ascent / higher gravity losses?  Which would depend on vehicle max performance vs. payload size, not overall vehicle size.

[oldAtlas_Eguy]

One advantage of a greatly oversized booster for the job is that you could keep G-loads down. That might make it a lot easier to certify the payloads for the booster. Not sure what you could do for vibration or the relationship between vibration and number/types/throttling of engines.
 But, if they could come up with a service that's significantly lower G loading and vibration intensity in all axes, maybe from a shock absorbing platform, any payload designed for multiple launchers should be happy.
 Lots of things will be easier and faster when they don't always have to chase that last 10 percent performance wise.

As a refinement about the problems with vibration is that each unique mass/payload has a unique vibration resonance patterns. Change out payloads and the resonance patterns in the payload bay is significantly changed, possibly even to a LOM condition. This is only one of those factors Jim is referring to that makes swapping payloads out very tricky. See the discussion on cargo containers in the SpaceX Mars section. Which covers the methods to be able to reduce the analysis to almost pro-forma because the cargo containers are ballasted out to be agnostic from the standpoint of one container vs another for the LV.

And again we are wandering away from the near term competition discussion and into a tech discussion on a LV that is many years away.

[Lar]

One advantage of a greatly oversized booster for the job is that you could keep G-loads down.

unrelated to vehicle size

I think the implication was that excess performance could be spent on lower acceleration during ascent / higher gravity losses?  Which would depend on vehicle max performance vs. payload size, not overall vehicle size.

That's the way I read it. 

[Jim]

One advantage of a greatly oversized booster for the job is that you could keep G-loads down.

unrelated to vehicle size

I think the implication was that excess performance could be spent on lower acceleration during ascent / higher gravity losses?  Which would depend on vehicle max performance vs. payload size, not overall vehicle size.

Payload size for a given vehicle has little affect on trajectory to LEO

[Space Ghost 1962]

And again we are wandering away from the near term competition discussion and into a tech discussion on a LV that is many years away.

Because it's hard to grapple with the obvious (and what it means), easy to come up with vague, invented differences to avoid/deflect, as well as go halfway into specious technical discussions to either trim the present back to the past, or project to a too far future.

None of which helps with this thread's "last two and next two years", as a discipline.

[gongora]

Really the two year timeline is kinda short for a discussion like this. Existing competition will be unchanged, and only new competition might be small launchers. Every major SpaceX competitor aims to introduce a new launcher in a time period around 3-7 years from now.

[AncientU]

Irrelevant. Comments in this thread try to take us back/forward decades. Clearly the two years is "immediate future" i.e. obvious direction.

The plus/minus two years was set to revive a thread that ended in a stalemate of 'no they can't'/'yes they can'.  I thought two years passing might be sufficient to inform the discussion, which it badly needed, and included the following two years (which ends in six months or so) to see if there were additional activities like landing/re-flying boosters that could change the conclusions going forward.

Typical quote from August 2014:

There is nothing disruptive about Tesla and nothing disruptive (yet) about SpaceX.

I think the two years' hiatus helped to inform against such naysaying... we've come a long way.

What I think -- my opinion only, and I am biased and proud of it (I call it discriminating) -- we now hear far fewer voices that boldly declare 'no they can't' and additional confidence that the path SpaceX is on is challenging the status quo (kinda more ripping it up by the roots IMO).  There is little to nothing 'threatening' coming from the competition.

I propose that as we end the two year period (after the start of the 2018), we make predictions of where this will be a couple years hence, and then lock the thread for a couple more years.