This interview with Tom Mueller (CTO of SpaceX) suggests that competitors have had to go back to the drawing board after seeing SpaceX accomplish wrt their low cost systems.
https://www.reddit.com/r/spacex/comments/6b043z/tom_mueller_...
That rocket is going to be the real game-changer. I would say that the Falcon 9 is evolutionary, you know, a reusable rocket that greatly reduces the cost of access to space. Maybe we can achieve ten reduction in cost over, you know, like what ULA or the Russians or the Chinese are doing, with the Falcon. But we want like a hundred or more reduction in costs; and that’s what the Mars rocket’s gonna do. That’s going to be the revolutionary rocket.
So once we’re flying that, all other rockets will probably be obsolete. Likely Blue Origin is working on a fully-reusable rocket But we’ve really changed this industry that the other guys are really scrambling. It’s pretty funny to watch this, because when we first started the company 15 years ago, my fifteen-year anniversary was Monday, May 1st. Thank you.
We started the company on May 1st, 2002. Well, I started there; I consider—. Elon incorporated the company I think in February, but he didn’t have any employees yet. But I consider when he had his first employees when he had his company. But anyway, over the fifteen years, we’ve gotten, you know, this far; and when I was first hiring people, you know, that’s when I heard money to develop this rocket. And then we built the Falcon 1, which had a single Merlin engine on it, could throw about 1k lbs into LEO; and they said, you guys, you guys were able to build a small rocket. But you’ll never be able to build an EELV-class, EELV-mission class rocket. And so we built the Falcon 9 and started flying it. And they said you’d never be able to reuse it; you’ll never be able to get to the space station. And at some point, you stop listening to it. And I think it’s great, you know, if people think what you’re doing is impossible then you must be doing the right thing. You can still find the YouTube video online where people are critiquing our recovery thing as being photoshopped or CGI’d. That’s pretty high praise, when people don’t actually believe you’re doing.
And you know, we were ridiculed by the other big companies in the launch vehicle business. At first, they ignored us; and then they fought us; and then they— we found out; they found out that they couldn’t really win in a fair fight because we were successful and we were, you know, factors of two or three or probably even five lower costs than what they can do. So then it becomes an unfair fight, where they, you know, try to destroy you politically, and use other means. And then at some point, they figure out that they’ve got to do what you’re doing. So there’s a lot of talk at these other companies about how they’ll make reusable rockets; recover the engines, recover the stages, come up with a much lower-cost rocket so that they can compete. You know, there’s no way that they ULA would have considered buying engines from Blue Origin except for the pressure that SpaceX is putting on them. There’s no way that the French would have quickly abandoned the Ariane 5 and moved to the Ariane 6 design because— except for the pressure we’re putting on.
So we’re really changing the world. The Russians are saying they’re coming up with a rocket that can beat SpaceX, which is entertaining, which is entertaining, because they’ve been working on their Angara rocket for 22 years, and launched it once. And suddenly they’re going to be coming up with a low-cost one.