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

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

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

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

SpaceX has reached a dominant position in the global launch industry as its semi-reusable Falcon rockets have launched more than 100 times this year and counting. The next 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 company 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 delivering crew to and from the International Space Station with its Dragon capsule.

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

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

But the satellite broadband market is “gigantic,” 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 said his eponymous firm’s ownership of privately held SpaceX stock stands at over $2 billion, noted that about 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 will be competition — I think there’s plenty of room in this industry, plenty of room for competition.”

Shotwell noted that SpaceX is also steadily advancing the development of its behemoth Starship rocket, recently catching the vehicle’s booster on the first attempt during its fifth test flight 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 shutting 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 more comfortable, it will be less expensive,” Shotwell added.

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

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