Nissan and Chevy are already shipping electric cars. There are other private companies pursuing private space flight. Elon gets the love from the Valley because he's from here, but he's an entrepreneur just trying to make money on what's hot. There's nothing wrong with that, but let's hold off on the deification.
SpaceX is far beyond the competition (Blue Origin, Virgin Galactic), with successful launches and signed contracts.
Tesla started less than a decade ago and has sold out of both the Roadster and the Model S. That's pretty incredible for such a young car company.
I don't think Elon is just "making money on what's hot." Building a car company isn't in fashion, and an energy revolution is a pretty clear vertical right now (see Khosla's invetments). Likewise, building a rocket company isn't very fashionable. If you look at his vision--he's playing a 20-year game--the true market for SpaceX doesn't even exist yet.
I'm in the space business, and there are no other organizations in the world doing space the way Elon is with SpaceX. The framework is entirely different, which is far more important than you might give credit. None of his competitors are doing business in a way that will credibly open up space as an entrepreneurial frontier like we have here in the valley.
Can you elaborate? I used to work in the space industry, but it's been some time.
I spent some time at Orbital at a time when they were trying to launch ORBCOMM. What they were doing seems similar in feel to SpaceX. I also noted that ORBCOMM is one of the first scheduled launches for SpaceX.
Interestingly, Orbital was started by an entrepreneur with a vision of small launch vehicles and he managed to actually pull it off- it was not some huge spinoff of an existing giant. I wonder how much the two are talking.
Friends of mine who worked on the early days of Orbital's Pegasus described a situation that sounded very startup-like to me. (I worked there in the late 90's, but on Hubble, not Orbital's commercial projects).
Orbital had modest success (if an IPO can be considered modest). So it seems not only plausible, but likely that a new approach is what is needed here. Perhaps SpaceX is the next iteration of a leaner approach that will actually scale to the meet the grand vision.
In the quickest summary, SpaceX is structuring their business in such a way as to grow fast, get profitable, and remove the need for external funding. They are using COTS (government funding) in much the same way as a silicon valley company would use a VC to provide capital needed for rapid growth. They've been using that money coming in the door to create a non-government market and to make their technology very cost effective in order to grow the space market. Orbital has structured their COTS approach in such a way that they will be able to meet objectives and stay profitable, but it is not an evolutionary path towards a general space architecture.
You are right. There are other companies working on the same problems as Elon Musk. However, what really impresses me about him is that he invested all the cash he made off of PayPal into the companies he's working on now. He could have stopped after PayPal, but he didn't.
He could have stopped before PayPal after he sold Zip2 for over $300 million in 1999. Elon's incredible and the next 50 years will be amazing because of people like him.
