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SpaceX President and Chief Operation Officer Gwynne Shotwell speaks during the NASA Commercial Crew Program (CCP) astronaut visit at the SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne, California, U.S., on Monday, Aug. 13, 2018. Bloomberg | Bloomberg | Getty Images SpaceX’s second-in-command urged on rivals in comments Friday, describing competition as healthy for Elon Musk’s space company. “I hope others can catch up, right? Competition is good for industries. … It keeps us tight; it keeps us very focused,” SpaceX President and COO Gwynne Shotwell said, speaking at the 2024 Baron Investment Conference in New York. “It’s going to be hard to catch us, but I certainly hope people try,” Shotwell added. SpaceX has reached a dominant position in the global launch industry as its semi-reusable Falcon rockets have launched more than 100 times this year and counting. The next closest U.S. rocket company, Rocket Lab, has launched to orbit 12 times this year, with others in the single digits. Additionally, the 15,000-person company has won billions of dollars in government contracts from the Department of Defense and NASA, serving the latter as the sole U.S. option for delivering crew to and from the International Space Station with its Dragon capsule. And SpaceX’s Starlink satellite internet network is now serving almost 5 million customers, Shotwell said. Starlink has become disruptive to incumbent satellite telecommunications companies. With nearly 7,000 Starlink satellites in orbit, SpaceX has expanded Starlink’s product offerings from consumers into enterprise markets such as aviation and maritime. Read more CNBC space news But the satellite broadband market is “gigantic,” Shotwell said. Several companies are working on competitors to Starlink, such as Eutelsat’s OneWeb, Amazon’s Project Kuiper, Telesat’s Lightspeed and AST SpaceMobile. Billionaire investor Ron Baron, who said his eponymous firm’s ownership of privately held SpaceX stock stands at over $2 billion, noted…

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Filed under: News - @ November 15, 2024 5:20 pm