Boeing vs SpaceX |
It’s not even a competition.
SpaceX is set to go public this week. The company is seeking $75 billion from the offering, while demand has already hit $150 billion. The firm's expected value after the formal public offering is $1.5 trillion or higher. People with very straight faces talk about future valuations of the company in the tens of trillions of dollars.
It’s hard to believe that the first (Neil Armstrong, Apollo 11) and last (Gene Cernan, Apollo 17) men to set foot on the Moon attacked NASA’s reliance on smaller firms for getting things into space. While I am sure they both would today praise SpaceX for its incredible performance, in 2011, their view was that NASA and the big boys like Boeing should be left to do a man’s job. The others were too small and thus potentially too dangerous.
Let’s take a look at some of SpaceX’s accomplishments:
Year of Incorporation: 2002
Number of Employees: ~22,000
Number of Vehicle Types: 3 (Falcon, Falcon Heavy, and Starship in development)
Number of Launches: Over 650 as of the end of 2025, with 165 in 2025 alone.
Number of Upright Landings: Over 600 for Falcon and Falcon Heavy
Number of Caught Rockets: 4 rockets with Mechazilla
Number of Satellites Delivered: Over 12,000, with 10,500 active in Starlink
Number of Crewed Flights: 18 (11 for NASA and 7 private)
SpaceX has put up more satellites than all other players combined. It has made rocket launches routine, something that NASA promised with the Space Shuttle but never delivered. The upright and caught landings are revolutionary. I remember the character of Calculus in Herge’s Tintin landing his rocket on the Moon upright and thinking that it was so silly: The big boosters are jettisoned into the ocean, and nobody lands like he took off. But Elon Musk, and later Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin, do just that. It saves tens of millions of dollars by requiring the refurbishment of an existing........