Comment by tavavex
18 hours ago
> The gap is getting larger year by year, not smaller.
Why? Logically it would seem that learning how to do something that's already been done would be easier than discovering it. SpaceX has already done a lot of the work and has shown the others that it's possible and how they do it. Why won't the others catch up? I can't think of any industry that has a market leader that only gets further away from their competition forever.
>I can't think of any industry that has a market leader that only gets further away from their competition forever.
You're on Hacker News and you can't think of silicon fabrication? What brand new players do you think are about to catch up to TSMC or Samsung? Or what about advanced jet turbine engines, why is China still having such trouble matching the performance of existing leaders after decades of work? Or operating systems, it's been Apple, BSD, Google, Linux, and Microsoft (or derivatives of these) for a long time. Or web browser engined. Or...
Some things are just really hard and involve enormous amounts of specifics, sunk costs and so on. Even if you know it's possible the implementation is everything, the idea that everything is trivially RE'd/cloned seems to have its limits in the real world.
But I wasn't talking about things that are just hard to replicate. I was talking about companies that keep getting further away from anyone matching them, forever. No one can match ASML's prowess, but do you think that China today is further from catching up to them than they were 10 years ago? Going from nothing to modern silicon fabrication is a lot harder than going from existing knowledge but no expertise/technology to implement it, to actually making it happen. That's my point.
You have a valid point about ecosystems though - that is a rare exception where first movers can keep holding onto their advantage that I hadn't thought of. However, it's not really applicable when talking about a commodity like space launches.
> You're on Hacker News and you can't think of silicon fabrication?
Ugh... past performance doesn't predict future performance. Why do you think that SpaceX's or ASML's advantages cannot be overcome by competitors? Some are very motivated and will not hold back from any method to get any industrial secrets from the current leaders. If one person can think of it, so can another, eventually.
A decade ago Tesla was the king of EVs.
Because SpaceX moves faster. I’m telling you an empirical fact: three years ago the rest of the industry was 8 years behind SpaceX. This year they are ten years beyond. The gap is widening not shrinking.