Although it is a major consideration for most customers, price is not the only consideration or form of competition.

ULA emphasizes that they are the most reliable. Several military and government renascence customers desire this over a lower price, because their payloads are precious — expensive, unique, and hard or impossible to replace.

Arianespace is emphasizing schedule and availability. This is desirable for companies that want or need their communication satellites (or other revenue satellites) online sooner rather than later.

However, SpaceX seems to be eager to improve both of these business attributes, as well as lower the price. I suspect that for the next decade or so the competition from SpaceX will motivate other companies to also improve their cost, quality, and schedule performances. We have already seen this with announcements that some companies are researching ways to reduce their prices by reusing launch hardware, such as the expensive engines.

Red Adair said something like, “I can do it fast; I can do it well; I can do it cheap. Choose two.” However, he was able to improve all three of these attributes over time, but for any given job one or two of the three had to be sacrificed. The same is true in most or all businesses, but the space business seems to be on the verge of improving all three due to the heating up of the competition. Launch providers that cannot adapt to the improving conditions will find themselves out of the business; those that do may become the next industry leader — the one to beat.

Generally, though, I agree with Blair. For two or three decades, Arianespace has been the “go-to” launch provider for many satellite operators, but SpaceX could be taking that privilege away from them, if only for the next decade or so.

They won’t.

There are limits to the lifting capacity that SpaceX has, as some rockets can lift heavier payloads than Falcon. SpaceX is not yet competing for those payloads. Some payloads are too light for SpaceX to be cost competitive, which is why the article has the comments about Arianespace’s Vega launch vehicle.

Arianespace bragged about their cadence. They clearly believe that SpaceX does not have the ability to launch more than a dozen payloads in a year, since their own record is 12 launches. Even if SpaceX is the low price company, Arianespace may be counting on being the alternate provider for those who can’t wait in a long line for a Falcon to become available.

However, a few years ago, SpaceX placed a rocket on a pad, and within 24 hours had it fueled and completed a practice countdown. Since most rockets spend weeks sitting on a pad before launch, this suggests to me that SpaceX is hoping to eventually be able to launch several rockets each month from each of its pads.

The next few weeks will tell us whether the stresses have left the Falcon structure and its engines in a condition to be used again. If so, then the other companies will soon be scrambling to catch up. If not, then SpaceX’s test firing of the engines will tell us whether the company has found an easy way to recover the expensive engines for reuse. If so, then the other companies will still be scrambling to catch up.

I hope that no company is taking the competitive threat lightly, and several have announced ideas, plans, or test articles for improving costs and reusability — if only to reuse the expensive engines. However, Arianespace is structured so that too many cooks are in the kitchen, and getting changes is a process of design-by-committee to approve which countries benefit and which lose from design or process changes. They are not currently structured to be competitive but to satisfy the contradictory political needs of several countries. Resting on their laurels risks much in today’s version of the space race.