Europe and China are both working on reusable rockets. Blue Origin is doing the same.
Access to space is a national security thing so all big countries will fund their own alternatives.
Assuming the US continues to alienate its allies, I assume spaceX will be limited to the domestic market in 5-10 years. Why buy from the US when you can buy from more reliable players
> Europe and China are both working on reusable rockets. Blue Origin is doing the same
China and Blue Origin are Europe may be funding the research, but Arianespace ensures it's more than a decade away from matching today's Falcon Heavy.
> Assuming the US continues to alienate its allies, I assume spaceX will be limited to the domestic market in 5-10 years. Why buy from the US when you can buy from more reliable players
The thing is that you can't put a price tag on national security. For example Ukraine got F16s. Good plane. However after a spat between Zelensky a Trump, Ukrainian F16 got no new updates to their jammers, which temporarily degraded the plane performance and Ukrainians needed to pull them out of frontlines.
Sometimes it is just better to fly on a plane which is not the top performer, but which you can control and manufacture or which a neighbor with same geopolitical problems like you can control and manufacture - i.e. Swedish SAAB JAS39
Same with space launches. Furthermore SpaceX is US company, so US government will want to know everything about the payload, probably down to the schematics and software, which is a big no-no for national security, but even for IP protection - what is stopping US government to supplying your IP to your US competitor? Nothing.
Of course you can. It costs more, but a finite amount more.
Your argument is it'sz worth paying that cost. I agree. But those cases are limited, both by the customer base and that additional cost.
SpaceX is not launching non-U.S. national security payloads. That's not great for American power. But it's a rounding error for a launch provider putting mass in orbit over three times a week [1].
Reusable rockets aren't magic. There is a long distance between 'reusable' and reusing something many 100s of times to reach scale.
Blue Origin is losing billions every year, its not hobby of the richest person in the world, not true competitor. Remember rockets are small markets and everybody other then SpaceX is losing money.
Europe and China has literally 0 shot at breaking into the places SpaceX dominates. Europe will take another 10 years before they get a reusable rocket and even then, launching something like Starship wouldn't happen for another long time after that.
China simply can't compete in these markets by law, in the US. Them having reusable rockets doesn't matter for SpaceX. I don't think China will have Starlink competitor that can compete globally anytime soon. But that might be a real competitor eventually.
Kupiter is arguable a more real competitor.
> Assuming the US continues to alienate its allies, I assume spaceX will be limited to the domestic market in 5-10 years.
That's a gigantic, gigantic, huge and absurdly large assumption.
A lot would need to happen for all current US allies to block all SpaceX products.
Not to suggest that 61x multiple is justified, but your counter argument doesn't really work.
I think the better argument against the 61x multiple is that the overall market simply isn't big enough. SpaceX would have to break into many other markets and how to do that is difficult to say for a number of reasons.
> Assuming the US continues to alienate its allies
I wouldn’t make business or investment decisions based on any assumptions about “alienation.” I was just in Tokyo for a week of meetings with various business professionals, and there was zero sign of any “alienation.” I was expecting to spend most of the time talking about tariffs and nobody even about them. Everyone instead was focused on the new Prime Minister’s faux pas commenting on the security of Taiwan.
Just one set of data points, of course, but consider whether this concept of alienation is real or a creation of US media.
I dunno, I've noticed quite a bit of hesitancy. Like they want to figure out "which kind" of American you are before they will even nudge the topic of US politics.
Europe and China are both working on reusable rockets. Blue Origin is doing the same.
Access to space is a national security thing so all big countries will fund their own alternatives.
Assuming the US continues to alienate its allies, I assume spaceX will be limited to the domestic market in 5-10 years. Why buy from the US when you can buy from more reliable players