This article is hilarious with a whole bunch of launch companies in SERIOUS denial.https://t.co/vFrwFOhCAc
— Artificial Gravity Space Stations (@space_stations) September 20, 2026
I used to think maybe I should go to or pay attention to these industry conferences & panels. This is literally anti-signal. You’re dumber if you listen to them than if you don’t. They are afraid to even MENTION SpaceX, which absolutely dominates their industry! https://t.co/elzxdXSlIW
— Robotbeat🗽 ➐ (@Robotbeat) September 20, 2026
[Early-afternoon update]
Loosely translated: “Now that SpaceX has gone off to found a solar system wide civilization we can chop our prices just a bit and people still will prefer our horses and buggies.” https://t.co/zG1TKmtOlS
— Charles A. Lurio (@TheLurioReport) September 20, 2026
Never listen to people that have achieved nothing much tell you that you cannot achieve muchly.
There are some unfortunate choices of words like, “race to the bottom”. SpaceX wasn’t providing an inferior service. Launch prices could go up when Falcon 9 leaves the segment and Starship launches focus on internal customers but this situation wont last.
SpaceX will eventually have spare launch capacity and if the other launch companies are successful with reusability, prices will come down thanks to competition. They will be under pressure from Chinese launchers too.
The article is a little thin. The last few paragraphs focus on driving costs down. It could just be a poorly written article that doesn’t capture what is going on with these companies accurately but it does make Rocket Lab look good without saying anything about them.
And Stoke Space – which also wasn’t there. One wonders if Rocket Lab, Stoke and Relativity were invited to this crack pipe smoke-in and simply decided their time and travel budgets were best used in other ways. I’d like to think so.
The most stunning revelation (to me) in this article was that Nicky Jordan is Director of Global Business Development and Strategy for Space Launch and Missile Defense at Northrop Grumman(!). Wow! She interned for me for the 2005 and 2006 X PRIZE Cup events, and was one of the most determined people I’ve ever met when it came to making it in the space business – starting with a long, difficult process of becoming an American citizen. I am so pleased to see how far she has come, on the strength of her character, intelligence, relentless effort and unparalleled personal appeal. The latter is a high complement on my part. Nicky could network like no one I’ve ever met, and was a genuine delight to be around on every level, from intensely nerdy technical discussions to the most unbridled party time fun imaginable. I lost touch with her after retiring, and now found that I even lost track. Nicky, if you read this, I can only say “Fine job, Jordan. Fine job.”
I’m sure you can find her on LinkedIn.
We’ve been linked for years, but I rarely have occasion to go there any more.
As a side note, after filing for divorce in 2013, I looked up the last girl I dated before getting married on LinkedIn, and sent her a link request (she is a rocket propulsion engineer I dated in the early 1980s). She responded within minutes. We moved in together in 2014, married in 2017, and just completed and are moving into our retirement house in Tennessee. So LinkedIn is useful, when you are looking for a good opportunity.
Awkward wording. I didn’t get married on LinkedIn, I used LinkedIn to look up the last girlfriend I had before I got married to another.
Not long after I divorced my second wife, a coworker asked out to lunch and expressed interested in the vacancy. We’ve been together for 23 years, married for 17 of those.
Um. How rural is this property? Will the neighbors be complaining about the firings from your test stand(s)?
🙂
My nearest neighbors are my great niece and nephew, and they have their own outdoor two-lane gun range. So, no.
Besides which, we are local heros for ensuring that our 97 acres will be never be subdivided by a developer.
I expect there may be a window where F9 is unavailable and Starship slots are uncertain that makes other providers more appealing.
However the Starship steamroller is coming. Yes, internal payloads are their primary target, but they also have existing contracts to fly payloads, and will want to move FH and F9 payloads to Starship as soon as practical.
That being the case, there WILL be Starships with a ‘conventional’ payload bay that can deploy most anything that F9 and FH handle today.
Those ships will RTLS probably within a day, and soon after (depending on realized ‘refurb time’) be ready to fly again. SpaceX will likely want to keep them moving to some extend, so affordable slots will probably become available quickly, and be ongoing.
I haven’t seen nor looked for it, but has there been any indication of what SpaceX plans to do with the Falcons they’ve built? I kind of hope they don’t scrap all of them.
Maybe they will end up in silos
I wonder if there will be a market for launch companies to make F9 compatible second stage vehicles that can be mounted on the existing fleet of F9 boosters. That way, SpaceX could provide low cost boost services without having to make expendable second stages. So they could keep generating modest revenue while squeezing out a bit more productivity from their existing fleet and ground based infrastructure.
Licensing franchisee’s? McSpace? Or maybe SpaceY?
Indeed it seems to me like SpaceX could start to license out MOST of the Falcon 9 Line to someone else capapable (Say Rocket Lab?) while they finish ramping up Starship. As for declaring the age of dropping $/KG launch prices dead, I believe what we have here is and example of Clark’s First Law, to wit:
When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
This seems like serious wishful thinking from much of the Non- SpaceX coterie.
SpaceX isn’t going to license or sell off the Falcons. Licensing deals only make sense when the licensor expects the licensee to be able to make significant bank with the licensed IP going forward. Compared to Starship, SpaceX doesn’t even see itself able to do that with the Falcons.
So the Falcons will be retired for good, likely no more than five years hence. The last Falcon 9 booster ever landed – which will probably be B1067 to complete its run as fleet leader – will, in all likelihood, join the first such in the latter’s long-time job of gate guard and monument at some SpaceX facility. Maybe the visitor center SpaceX is, so far as I know, still planning to build at KSC. If, as I suspect will be the case, SpaceX closes the current Hawthorne Mothership at about that same time, the first-ever-landed F9 booster, which has been doing gate guard duty there for roughly a decade, may join its longest-and-last-serving bookend booster on permanent display somewhere other than CA.
Perhaps a single Falcon Heavy will also survive as a gate guard or monument somewhere too, though that is less likely. The rest of the Falcon fleet will be scrapped and recycled.
That seems likely to be the fate of the Dragons as well, though the most-launched of the Crew Dragons will probably wind up in the Smithsonian’s collection along with other artifacts of the Falcon-Dragon era of manned spaceflight. I’m guessing the “signature walls” from the LC-39A and SLC-40 crew access arms will be cut out and preserved and likely also the tower elevator panels with the top buttons labelled ‘SPACE.”
We disagree on the wisdom of early Falcon retirement. We’ll know in a few years. Just as many are talking about hourly turnarounds on Starship (booster obviously), many used to expect daily turnarounds on Falcon9.
I do agree with you Dick, that once Starship is up and running I don’t see why ride-share couldn’t replace Falcon 9 completely on a cost basis.
To John Hare’s point (he beat me to it) there is Elon time and industry time. Some folks are focused on the gap I suppose.
I for one would love to see some surplus SpaceX hardware on display at the US Space and Rocket Center. I’m sure there are plenty of other museums that would love to have some of their hardware, including Crew Dragon and Cargo Dragon capsules.
john hare,
Not sure we really disagree all that much. I still foresee a role for continuing Falcon 9/H launches of 2nd-party payloads for so long as NASA and/or the War Dept. continue to have payloads needing launch that are less suitable for Starship than for one or the other of the Falcons. That might conceivably run into the very early 2030s but not likely beyond.
In the nearer term I expect the recent cessation of F9 Starlink missions from Canaveral to be followed – quite probably before the current year’s end – by a similar cessation of Starlink launches on F9s from Vandy.
Until recently, I expected the cessation of Starlink launches on Falcon 9 to be at least partly offset by a major new launch buy by Amazon for Amazon LEO. That looks less and less likely as time goes by. Bezos seems determined to brazen it out.
I now wonder if – besides the superior economics of switching Starlink deployments to Starship – the end of Falcon 9 Starlink deployment missions might also be motivated, in part, by a desire to take down 2/3 to 3/4 of the F9 stage 2 production tooling that is currently the largest single user of floor space at the Hawthorne Mothership. Hawthorne makes a lot of Starship bits too, including Raptor engines and the aerodynamic upper and lower flaps for the Starship upper stages. A desire to ramp up production of such things might well be congruent with the imminent hand-off of Starlink deployments from Falcon 9 to Starship V3 and V4. The hulls are built at Starbase, but a lot of the smaller bits are built in Hawthorne.
On the matter of turnaround, the hardest limit on Falcon 9 turnaround was always, and remains, 2nd-stage production cadence. That was expanded to support a nearly-every-other-day launch cadence at its high-water mark. Maintaining a rotating fleet of boosters eliminated booster turnaround as a cadence limiter. Pad turnaround has also been worked down to where it’s now probably at least modestly less a cadence limiter than 2nd-stage production. The Falcon 9 has been a rip-roaring success without ever achieving 24-hour turnaround.
Starship will follow the same path, except for blowing right by the 2nd-stage production bottleneck. Both booster and ship refurb will be a significant thing for awhile but will be worked down over time, I expect, to quite trivial levels. The Starbase, TX and KSC Gigabays and the Starbase Louisiana Terabay will be the buffers that allow this process to begin slowly and work its way down.
The real limiters to Starship’s overall operational launch cadence will be pad availability, pad turnaround and propellant production. Pad availability is being addressed by construction of additional pads. Pad turnaround will be a matter of experience and shoring up of any weaknesses discovered as operational launch cadence ramps up. Propellant production is also being addressed by plans to build out more new air separation capacity and natural gas refining capacity than currently exist in the nation as a whole.
It might take as much as a decade for these processes to reach their asymptotic limits, but the sizable majority of it will be handled in five years or less.
David Spain,
If SpaceX never bothers to gin up anything like the Transporter and Bandwagon rideshare programs for Starship then that niche certainly will be left wide open for others – and nature abhors a vacuum.
The likeliest beneficiary of such a scenario seems to be Stoke Space. Their recently-announced 2nd-generation Nova 2 vehicle looks as though it could pretty much step right into the Transporter/Bandwagon ecological niche with barely a bobble.
Nova 2 is currently planned to fly by 2029 which also seems to be about when SpaceX’s current rideshare program on the F9 is now said to be due to sunset.
With no one-and-done 2nd stages in the picture, Nova 2 could probably allow end-user pricing at least modestly superior even to what SpaceX now offers without sacrificing SpaceX-ian profit margins.
As a new rocket, Nova 2 will take some time to build launch cadence, but SpaceX only runs a handful of Transporter and Bandwagon missions annually even now, so even the new-rocket cadence problem does not seem to be a real showstopper.
Nova 2’s only potential competition, in both the rideshare and constellation deployment markets, is Rocket Lab’s Neutron. How serious that competition could be will depend mostly on how cheaply RL can build the Neutron’s minimal – but still disposable – 2nd stages.
Larry J,
One gigantic factor in favor of retired Falcon hardware potentially winding up a fair number of places for museum/rocket garden display is that all of the Falcon bits are road-transportable. So, assuming SpaceX is willing to turn loose of the things, potential acquiring organizations will not be looking at a repetition of the epic, and expensive, nosebleeds required to get, say a Shuttle orbiter and an external tank from the CA coast to the well-inland location of the California Science Center.
That said, I think SpaceX is likely to hang onto both the original Dragon 1 that has been hanging from the ceiling outside the Hawthorne Mission Control room for well over a decade now, as well as the 1st-ever-landed F9 booster that has been on gate guard duty outside the same building for about a decade too. Other than the last-landed F9 booster, I don’t know what else from the Falcon 9 and Heavy programs SpaceX may elect to keep as family heirlooms. It will be interesting to see.
Interesting thought. My suspicion is that the answer would be ‘no’ as any notional 2nd-provider upper stages would certainly be either methalox or hydrolox and the current Falcon 9 infrastructure does not include tankage or plumbing to supply these fuels to an upper stage. Only, I think, if a prospective 2nd-stage provider agreed to foot the bill for the infrastructure upgrades would such a deal make even marginal sense to SpaceX.
And then there’s the matter of whether SpaceX would even be okay with continuing to use the current F9 pads for F9 launches with or without someone else’s 2nd stages in the picture. It’s entirely possible SpaceX might wish to convert both SLC-40 at Canaveral and SLC-4E at Vandy to Starship pads. If SpaceX completes the conversion of SLC-6 at Vandy to the – so far as I know – still-planned combo F9/FH pad, then SpaceX would retain one such on each coast – at least until the Falcons are finally out of suitable NASA or War Dept. payloads.
It’s the likely greater value to SpaceX of converting all extant Falcon launch infrastructure to Starship facilities, over time, that most strongly militates against any such deal as you propose ever coming to fruition.
Maybe like commuter airlines like Jazz, American Eagle, Delta Connection? But it would be best if the franchisees did the manufacturing. They’d have to be F9 2nd stage compatible (fuel, QDs, software, structural loads. etc., but not necessarily identical.
It could also be an interesting service for companies to get good data on 2nd stage designs, which are notoriously tricky to get to be reliable.
Also, the hypersonic vehicle testing market?
“It’s not all about cost/kg” is what you say when you cannot touch your competitor’s cost/kg.
Agree that the article seems incoherent, any maybe that’s not what was being said.
I’ve said 5-7 years (counting from 2026), depending on when ISS is splashed. Falcon 9/Heavy will not be licensed out because SpaceX wants and needs every competent worker it can get. Falcon Heavy will go as soon as Starship gets some large payload bay doors (not necessarily “Chomper”). I bet no more than 2 years on that, right after LLS is flying well and its team can be reoriented. I think the LEO stations (if any) might get a few of the remaining 50 available Dragon slots, then that’s it. I’m betting crew A&EDL Starship is 100 launches away, maybe 2029ish. And rather than be scrapped the remaining Falcon Cores will wear out first.
I’m in general agreement with you here – especially on the matter of a crew A&EDL Starship.
The HLS Starship design crew will be on the job for awhile as I think the initial HLS design will need to be replaced fairly early-on by a version capable of carrying 25 – 50 crew to match what I anticipate to be the capacity of a 2nd- or 3rd-generation crew A&EDL Starship – all based on V4 technology or whatever may follow that.
The HLS design crew has already designed a much-larger-than-Pez-dispenser cargo door for their baby. So they would be the obvious choices to do likewise for a future cargo-only A&EDL Starship that could hand off its payloads to a corresponding cargo-only lunar lander Starship – assuming the notional cargo-only A&EDL Starship is not also designed to do double duty as a lunar lander as well.
What is the plan for Starship ejecting the variety of payloads that F9’s and FH’s put into orbit now? Everything cannot be ejected via the Pez Dispenser.
The plan is bigger cargo doors on some future version(s) of Starship.
But I think a lot of future payloads will be built to a “PEZ-compatible” form factor. Among other probable advantages to doing so might be SpaceX offering what amount to partial rideshares on missions mainly hauling up Starlink, Starlink Mobile or Starmind birds. A few times a year, as with the schedule of the current dedicated Transporter and Bandwagon F9 missions, SpaceX could allocate maybe 10 – 20% of a Starship’s payload capacity for 2nd-party rideshares capable of PEZ-style deployment.
Not saying this will absolutely happen, but it easily could.
I think the AI constellation is such an enormous bite that between it and Starlink they are running out of capacity in the short term. So leave the little fish and go all in on your big fish. Ten years from now you’ll sit down at a finishers office with a cookie cutter V7 Starship and build it out to suite your needs. He’s building Conestoga wagons, where you go with it will be your business.