Something we lose track of in the software world is that information isn't the alpha and omega in the real world. Everybody from Boeing to China would love to clone what SpaceX is doing, and China is actively trying to do so. And there are no real huge hardware secrets, yet somehow, even with effectively endless resources, these countries/competitors are not only failing to clone SpaceX tech - but aren't even remotely close to parity.
Blue Origin, for instance, not only has Bezos Bucks behind it (while SpaceX was started when Musk was 'only' had millions), but it was also started before SpaceX! And of course Boeing has been around since the dawn of spaceflight. And on a smaller scale lots of brilliant people, including John Carmack, have tried their hand at aerospace, and failed. No idea what SpaceX is doing so well, but whatever it is - it seems extremely difficult to replicate.
The problem for China is that they already had a large state agency doing this stuff. And they did it in a Soviet inspired way. They invest lots of money but their budget is tied up in many long term programs.
They can't just say 'well lets start from zero and copy SpaceX'. They have space station program that needs to continue and they can't wait until they have a next generation reusable rocket. Just like NASA they also do other things, like moon landers and so on.
And despite what people think, China can't infinitely invest in everything and don't. I'm sure the battles for money within China budgeting process are not that different from US congress.
Looking at ESA, getting budget for a new rocket is incredibly hard and ESA member states are richer then China.
Also I think its wrong to say there is no hardware secrets. Developing a very advanced rocket engine is really fucking hard, and to build one and be able to 'mass' produce it like SpaceX does is incredibly hard. Getting there took SpaceX a decade, and government run engine programs are nowhere near as fast usually.
The exact details of the heat shield and reentery of something like Starship also isn't exactly easy to replicate. Doable, but would still require quite a bit of reverse engineering.
SpaceX Starship production line isn't about 'one big secret' but about iteratively improving each part to make it cheaper and better over time. And you can''t replicate that without doing the same.
Supporting old architecture takes A LOT of engineering effort for complex physical devices, creating new architectures from scratch with the learnings from the old architectures often costs too much (and you still need to support the old systems for a long time anyway).
I worked in a project where an architecture was very flawed initially and took almost a decade to move away from it.
So often management pushes for incremental updates on an outdated architecture because the risks are too high since the new architecture might have all new problems of its own.
SpaceX also benefits from vertical integration. They discovered huge costs from trying to use aerospace subcontractors (and had one launch failure because of a subcontractor.)
Both traditional US aerospace and European launch curry political favor by spreading work around to subcontractors. This can't help but slow things way down and make it more expensive.
Aerospace companies have been trying to clone the Lockheed Skunkworks for generations now, with no success whatsoever. The trouble they have is they decide to clone it, and cannot resist "fixing" it in the process. The fixes destroy it. They simply don't have the guts to do what Kelly Johnson did.
>Blue Origin, for instance, not only has Bezos Bucks behind it (while SpaceX was started when Musk was 'only' had millions), but it was also started before SpaceX!
Indeed. SpaceX didn't have infinite amounts of capital during the years it developed Falcon 9 and Dragon. Until Tesla's market cap blew up during the COVID-19 era, Elon Musk had a "mere" few tens of billions of dollars. Boeing/ULA's pockets were and are gigantic, too.
Jeff Bezos has been among the world's wealthiest men for far, far longer than Musk's entry into that group. Let me paraphrase an excellent comment I saw on Reddit, in response to one of the usual lies about how the only reason SpaceX is a decade ahead of the rest of the world is that it got zillions in subsidies from the US government:
>If large amounts of funding is the only thing required to succeed, Blue Origin would now have a nuclear-powered spacecraft orbiting Pluto.
>Carmack made reusable, vertically landing rockets before SpaceX did, albeit on a much smaller scale.
No, he didn't, or perhaps more generously "much smaller scale" is doing a LOT of work in your sentence. The core challenge of real rockets is all about scale/speed, and in particular getting to orbit which is where the vast majority of the value starts. The Rocket Equation and material science makes that a completely different scale of challenge to do at all, let alone with a sufficiently useful mass fraction, let alone with reuse, vs anything suborbital. Neither Armadillo nor the DC-X were going to orbit. Hobbies are neat but going from that to something real represents a huge huge amount of work and skill.
His co-founder at Oculus, Palmer Luckey, talked about how he did on the Arthi and Sriram podcast (both hosts with considerable big tech experience and VCs at A16Z). He said the company was
> "very successful, probably the most successful (rocket) company in its time in it's budget range. They were doing better things than companies spending 100x more money. They moved very fast, building a vertical take-off and landing rocket, actually long before SpaceX did."
The profit motive has proved, over and over, to be a more effective motivator than anything else, including getting whipped and/or shot for failure.
I remember an earthquake in LA caused a freeway interchange to collapse. The government offered an incentive of something like a million bucks for every day the rebuild was completed ahead of schedule. The contractor got it done in a stupendously short time.
How so? NASA wasn't motivated by the profit motive in the 1960s, either. And SpaceX has completely trounced NASA and the Russians in rocket technology.
If you can't even break even then your entire venture stops. Stopping development and launches is by definition failure. This seems pretty obvious.
I am also not launching rockets. It seems like I am launching exactly as many rockets as Carmack, thus by simple math I am just as successful/good at launching rockets at Carmack.
DC-X predates Carmack and SpaceX both. The actual challenge is to produce an economically viable product that can survive beyond grants and investors. This is important, as it determines whether the system continues to operate or not. Falcon 9, and not the DC-X, flies today.
I think doing it with booster capable of actually putting things into orbit must be a challenging aspect of the problem too. DC-X and Carmack weren't doing this part.
It is what is driving spacex. They also embrace failure. It is where they learn what went wrong and fix it. At one point they were 4 rockets away from going out of business. I think they got down to the last 1 or 2 and they worked and spacex got to stay around and do cool stuff. Without money that company would not exist. They are now forcing the whole industry to re-think what it means to fire a rocket off. They have shifted everyone into thinking reuse is the best way forward. Where as before everything was mostly a one off special one time build. That profit is what is making them sustainable instead of the whims of some senator from whatever state decides to spike your program in favor of his buddies program.
Blue Origin, for instance, not only has Bezos Bucks behind it (while SpaceX was started when Musk was 'only' had millions), but it was also started before SpaceX! And of course Boeing has been around since the dawn of spaceflight. And on a smaller scale lots of brilliant people, including John Carmack, have tried their hand at aerospace, and failed. No idea what SpaceX is doing so well, but whatever it is - it seems extremely difficult to replicate.