>>14038439>>14038456Neutron can't compete with Super Heavy or Starship and that's fine, but it can compete with Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy (potentially) to an extent. More importantly, its being designed for the first stage to be reusable, which would compete with SpaceX, Blue Origin, EU's Arriane 6/Next, and China's equivalent options.
Literally NOTHING can compete with Starship if it succeeds, because most companies on the planet are still thinking orbit and a few humans on the Moon with a 30-50 year road map to convert a few humans to like 50 humans. SpaceX on the other hand is thinking "we want around a 100 people on the martian surface by 2030 and we want to ramp that up to 10,000 people or 100,000 people (realistically) by 2050." Elon wants 1 million people on Mars by 2050, but if Raptors are bottlenecks, I don't see that happening till 2075 or 2080. If somehow, the Raptor production bottleneck is addressed and they can produce each engine at a cost of $1-200k that can go through the same assembly line like Tesla gigafactories do, then getting gigatons of payload to Moon/Mars becomes relatively trivial even with potential booster/cargoship losses.
Even NASA is only thinking of a flyby on Mars with 2-3 people in 2030, and Musk is basically operating at a scale that's 30-50x that.
>>14038462I meant more along the lines that under legal paradigm, natural monopolies are allowed by the anti-trust laws in place as long as the leading brand isn't engaging in anti-competitive behavior, price fixing, or engaging in contractual structures that can prevent a competitor rising to the challenge. Tesla and SpaceX are first movers, so they've incidentally locked up most of the easy and relatively inexpensive material sourcing options, making it more difficult for others to enter the market; but that's not illegal, as others did not act out of arrogance not because they couldn't.
>>14038483Give it 5 years. Supply shortages is fucking everyone, esp. R&D.
