Elon Musk’s SpaceX launched 61 rockets in 2022. 27 of them are for third-party clients. The Wall Street Journal writes about it.
According to the magazine, SpaceX has become a monopoly in the commercial rocket launch market. The company sends NASA astronauts to the ISS, launches several types of satellites, including for the Starlink network, and “dominates in every aspect of the competition.”
For comparison: SpaceX’s closest competitor is the American and New Zealand company Rocket Lab. Over the past year, it has carried out only nine launches for external clients, three times fewer than Musk’s company. WSJ notes that SpaceX owes its success to sanctions against Russia. Many Western customers can no longer use the Russian Soyuz rockets.
Additionally, the company has a “proven fleet of reusable rockets” that outperforms competing rockets in terms of speed and cost. In 2023, Elon Musk’s corporation hopes to increase the number of launches to 100. SpaceX also begins to increase the prices of its services; in particular, putting a kilogram of payload into orbit costs $6,500 (versus $5,000 two years ago).
Elon Musk was previously named the richest man in the world. The entrepreneur’s capital amounted to 247 billion dollars. We talk about it in more detail here.
