The New Space Race

NASA is listed as one of the competitors, but really, NASA is also driving a great deal of this innovation through contracting rocket use (for ISS refueling, etc.) to private companies. They are creating the market.

A real question is: what is a viable business model that will necessitate these rockets? Aside from space tourism and placing satellites, what successful business ventures might exist at lower $/orbit capabilities? Even free access to orbit might not result in ancillary profitable businesses.

This article has a bunch of problems and is fairly typical of mass-media reporting in this area.

Suborbital vehicles such as SpaceShipTwo, New Shepard, and Lynx are lumped together with orbital launch systems. I do not think the distinction is made adequately clear in the text either; it would be very easy for a layperson to be seriously misled.

Falcon 9 isn't described separately, just as a note on the Falcon Heavy. Though the Falcon Heavy has a great deal of commonality with the Falcon 9 there are substantial differences in capabilities and economics that go far beyond mere diffrent configurations of a single vehicle. This is very odd considering the outsize influence the Falcon 9 is having on the launch industry right now. Even with the Falcon Heavy flying in the near future, the Falcon 9 is capable of lifting most payloads and will continue to be the core offering from SpaceX in the near future. It's kind of important.

Dragon and Crew Dragon are lumped together. One has been delivering cargo to the ISS since 2012, the other is slated for its first launch next year. They are different vehicles with different capabilities, designed for different purposes; albeit not without considerable commonalites.

Antares has been flying since 2013, so evidently this article isn't just about designs which are in development, experimental, or have yet to reach operation. In which case, it is strange not to compare the listed rockets to Atlas V, Delta IV, Ariane 5 and Proton.

Ariane 6 certainly deserves a mention in its own right. In most respects it is comparable to Vulcan, including plans for partial reusability (in response to SpaceX) and is of enormous political importance to the EU, ESA, and France in particular.

Someone is always talking about high-speed transport. Either rich people who really need to do london-new york in under an hour, or packages that for whatever reasons cannot wait for the Fedex truck.

If SpaceX really can cut costs by 99+% (imho they cannot) then rapid delivery of people/packages might be viable.

I mean, technically spacex vertically landed a rocket in 2014 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZwwS4YOTbbw

Nobody here is mentioning ISRO. ISRO might not have the most advanced technology, true, but their cost effectiveness compensates for that.

They're also catching up very quickly.