The "BYD Moment" of Commercial Spaceflight
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The "BYD Moment" of Commercial Spaceflight
So close yet so beautiful, weekend on Mars.
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insightsAuthor: Zuo Ye
Since the law of universal gravitation, no invention has shaped the fate of entire civilizations as decisively as the rocket, allowing humans to gaze upon Armstrong and Buzz on the moon, briefly becoming an interplanetary species, only to be abandoned before the dawn of a new era.
The dilemma stems from the fading passion of the Cold War; post-Cold War humanity lacks the courage to move towards the future.
The call by Silicon Valley right-wing figures like Musk for a "Republic of Technology" traces back to America's decades-long guidance of national projects through industrial policy; the reimagination by technocrats after the failure of a certain ideology, reconstructing the red imagery of national and commercial entities from new energy and artificial intelligence to commercial aerospace.
The new energy race is decided, the AI battle is in full swing, and commercial aerospace eagerly awaits becoming the new high ground.
Deconstructing this practice, "BYD" drives the establishment of production chains, leading to extreme specialization of labor, resulting in localized overcapacity, followed by "Xiaomi" entering the market to drive a second growth curve, ultimately producing the miracle of DeepSeek—a non-consensus, counter-cyclical pure technology exploration.
When the world was young, humanity was filled with desire for new frontiers, only that the ship of time has sailed around the last cape of its prime, and now it's time for the rocket payload competition.
The rocket's exhaust will burn away all ignorance.
The Tide of Reusability Through a Turbulent Half-Life
Once spring ends, beauty fades; flowers fall, people perish, neither knowing the other.
The rocket enterprise belongs to all humanity; this is not anthropocentrism at play, but rather how scientific principles and engineering practices have always been intertwined.
Britain's Newton contributed the mathematical principles of the universe, Russia's Tsiolkovsky derived the chemical rocket equation accordingly, Germany's Nazi engineer von Braun first launched the V2 to illuminate Britain's sky, America's von Kármán took away the V2 engineers, and the Soviet Union's Korolev witnessed the physical marvel of the V2.
Von Kármán's Chinese students Qian Xuesen and Guo Yonghuai made significant contributions to the "upper critical Mach number," laying the theoretical foundation for hypersonic and suborbital vehicles. After Qian Xuesen returned to China to serve as director of the Institute of Mechanics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and president of the Fifth Academy of the Ministry of National Defense, he single-handedly built the framework for China's aerospace research and engineering.
Meanwhile, the United States absorbed von Braun as the backbone to counter the Soviet space program. Sputnik became Earth's morning star, and Yuri Gagarin became a hero for all humanity, the second major evolutionary moment after lungfish crawled onto land.
Behind the roar of the Saturn V was NASA accounting for 4.5% of U.S. government expenditure. In 1962, Qian Xuesen wrote "Introduction to Interstellar Navigation," envisioning an engineering route for humanity to sail towards Alpha Centauri. Reusable rockets are merely mountains in an era of impoverished imagination; the moon is the natural and ideal interplanetary station, while Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto could serve as interstellar navigation stations.
Let's assemble reusable rockets using 1960s technology routes. Don't think this is lowering the difficulty; on the contrary, it's playing at the highest level. After the moon landing, von Braun planned to use 1000 Saturn V rockets to sail to Mars, using nuclear power to drive reusable spacecraft.
A man's nature values roaming freely, but ascending to heaven and descending to earth is always difficult.
Forward is thrust, backward is drag, upward is lift, downward is gravity.
If thrust > drag, you can move forward; if lift > gravity (weight), you can fly into the sky. The human history we know is merely differences in how work is done, but the essence is the practice of mechanics.
Don't be afraid; we won't expand on Newtonian mechanics and Tsiolkovsky's formulas. Just remember two points:
- Pressure difference is the fundamental driving force for sailboats, airplanes, and rockets, most typically like the interstellar express delivering Yun Tianming's brain in "The Three-Body Problem"—light sail with pressure.
- Pressure difference comes from the磨合 of propellant, structure, and ratio. Without knowing the linear solution to chaotic systems, humans can only rely on "alchemy" for simulation.
Alchemy is literally manual parameter tuning. From wind tunnel experiments of aircraft to the asteroid detection of "Tianwen-2," it requires an iterative process of "collecting data—modeling analysis—conducting experiments." This is fundamentally different from Einstein's prediction of gravitational waves—LIGO's detection discovery. In other words, human spacecraft are all empirical products.
This is also the significant meaning of SpaceX reviving reusable rockets. Empirical products need continuous experimentation to improve. But don't forget Tsiolkovsky's chemical rocket formula. In a sense, chemical rockets depict the prospect of human travel within the solar system (interplanetary), at the cost of locking away all possibilities for humanity to sail to the stars.
Before setting dreams free, first define what is achievable.
Image Caption: Orbit and Spacecraft Classification
Image Source: @zuoyeweb3
Like a mayfly in heaven and earth, a grain in the vast sea.
According to common orbit divisions, they can be categorized into suborbital (below 100KM), LEO (Low Earth Orbit) between 160KM and 2000KM, MEO (Medium Earth Orbit) between 2000KM and 35786 KM, and GEO (Geostationary Earth Orbit) at 35786 KM.
GEO, as the name implies, is synchronized with Earth's rotation, appearing motionless from Earth, suitable as positioning points for navigation satellites. For example, three satellites of the BeiDou system are in this orbit. MEO is relatively higher, covering a larger Earth surface area, where the main part of the BeiDou satellites resides.
In fact, the world's four major navigation satellite systems—America's GPS, China's BeiDou, Russia's GLONASS, and Europe's Galileo—are all located in MEO and GEO orbits.
As for LEO below 2000KM, the communication coverage of a single satellite is further limited, so various national constellations (like Iridium, Starlink, OneWeb, StarNet, Qianfan) are competing for resources here. It's estimated that LEO's total capacity is around 60,000 satellites. Currently, Starlink already occupies 10,000 orbital resources and plans for 42,000, leaving little time for the Chinese team.
The higher the orbit, the fewer satellites needed to cover the globe. Theoretically, only 3 GEO satellites are needed for global coverage. But for communication, GEO satellite communication delay is above 500ms, MEO above 27ms, and LEO above 2ms.
On January 2nd, SpaceX chose to lower 4400 Starlink satellites to a height of 480 kilometers, not solely for orbital safety but also to reduce latency.
However, high-orbit resources beyond LEO, especially Musk's Mars exploration and settlement, will only be commercial fantasies within the next 10 years. Lacking commercial demand traction similar to Starlink, even International Space Station contracts are far from covering Falcon 9's costs, let alone Starship.
Without being placed in the vast universe, it's hard to glimpse our insignificance. The theories of Newton and Tsiolkovsky have lifted us to take the first step towards the stars and oceans, but unfortunately, it's really just the first step.
Since we are destined to be trapped within the solar system, human engineers face two common problems:
- How to increase crawling speed: either increase thrust per unit propellant (specific impulse) or load more propellant.
- How to reduce crawling cost: manufacturing optimization under chemical rocket structures (reusability) or developing non-chemical rockets.
Gravity originates from object mass; one can only enhance one's own energy to obtain acceleration. This is the essence of Newton's first and second cosmic velocities. Unfortunately, most commercial aerospace won't use the third cosmic velocity within 100 years; we will probably forever crawl around the sun.
In fact, the latter halves of these two problems are not practical. Non-chemical rockets are theoretically feasible, but potential orbital pollution caused by nuclear fission rockets cannot be completely avoided. Nuclear fusion rockets still need to overcome two major hurdles: practicality and miniaturization. The eternal 50-year law is still in effect.
As for RTG (isotope), electric propulsion, light sails, or even antimatter propulsion, they all face problems of too little thrust or engineering challenges. Even if nuclear fusion practicality could be solved, the remaining problems could naturally be solved. Conversely, if even nuclear fusion can't be mastered, then just fantasize about Orion's nuclear pulse propulsion.
Confined within the chemical rocket framework, further excluding more propellant options, the unexpanded Tsiolkovsky formula tells us that the relationship between rocket propellant and thrust grows logarithmically, meaning fuel mass needs to increase exponentially to achieve linear speed improvement. Generally, rocket propellant can account for 85%-95% of the rocket's total weight; increasing further would make it impossible to escape Earth.
Therefore, the dream Musk depicts is a system of "stainless steel, serial stage stacking + liquid oxygen methane (liquid hydrogen) + engine parallel clustering + full reusability," not simply recoverability. The difference between these two is very important.
Only by fully achieving all the above aspects is it a truly fully reusable rocket.
Both Qian Xuesen and von Braun envisioned recoverable rockets, or rather, they thought more. In 1949, Qian Xuesen at JPL envisioned a space shuttle concept with vertical takeoff and glide landing, then in 1962 considered liquid fluorine power and first-stage recovery. In 1969, von Braun envisioned a nuclear-powered shuttle + Saturn V reusable network. Ultimately, Nixon approved the Space Shuttle program based on this blueprint, while China embarked on the Shenzhou spacecraft route.
In 1981, the Space Shuttle Columbia's first successful flight became the first reusable space project in human history. In 1993, McDonnell Douglas' DC-X rocket first achieved rocket vertical landing. In 1995, Apollo Program Director George Muller joined Kistler Aerospace to design the K-1 reusable commercial launch vehicle.
Finally, in 2015, SpaceX's Falcon 9 successfully landed on land, becoming the world's first reusable orbital-class rocket. But note:
- Not fully reusable: only the first stage is "reusable." SpaceX's true fully reusable rocket is "Starship."
- Not stainless steel: still an aluminum alloy body. SpaceX's true stainless steel rocket is "Starship."
- Not natural gas: still liquid oxygen kerosene. SpaceX's true liquid oxygen methane rocket is "Starship."
Compared to methane (natural gas) rockets, liquid oxygen liquid hydrogen has higher specific impulse, but hydrogen is harder to store. Kerosene is easy to store, but carbon deposit problems are hard to handle; single-use disposal is fine, but multiple uses require thorough cleaning.
In SpaceX's practice, commonality is pushed to the limit. Engines are only divided into two major categories: Merlin and Raptor, increasing or decreasing the number of parallel clusters according to mission requirements.
In fact, the Soviet N-1 rocket, contemporary with the Saturn V, chose the parallel engine route, but limited by落后的 engineering capabilities, the crown of parallel rocket king was ultimately taken by Musk.
Commonality can also be simplified. First-stage engines account for over 50% of the rocket's total cost. Full reusability is too difficult to achieve; achieving first-stage recovery + improving specific impulse is most effective. Thrust can be supplemented by stacking engines.
Overall, the "recoverable rockets" you can see now, except for Musk's Starship, the rest are "flavored recoverable," most appropriately called semi-reusable.
Image Caption: Main Commercial Aerospace Engine Parameters
Image Source: @zuoyeweb3
For the core first-stage engines of most recoverable rockets, a sea-level specific impulse value of 300s will be the passing line. The debate between methane, kerosene, and liquid hydrogen routes is more about different paths of engineering optimization. For example, LandSpace building its own methane launch site in Jiuquan is comparable to Musk's insistence on the vision scheme for Tesla.
Beyond that, the closest to completion is LandSpace's Zhuque-3, using a first-stage stainless steel body + methane power, while the second stage still uses aluminum alloy. Compared to SpaceX's main Falcon 9's aluminum alloy + kerosene power, it already shows latecomer advantages.
Thus, a fully reusable stainless steel chemical liquid hydrogen rocket can be simplified to a first-stage reusable methane/kerosene rocket. Those who can achieve the latter can be considered to have entered the recoverable rocket club.
But this is not the whole story. To reach for the stars, one must also prevail in the chaos of reality, thus opening the complex game between Musk and national projects, and the joys and troubles of Eastern counterparts.
Industrial Policy Towards Silicon Valley
On Earth too there is a Milky Way; with a smile, one gracefully travels with wine.
Since its founding, the United States has long implemented industrial policies and market access systems. On the contrary, the laissez-faire policies since Reagan in the 1980s are the anomaly, leading to our impression of America becoming the stereotype of Silicon Valley tech elites and Wall Street financial giants.
This is not the whole truth, at least for the internet and commercial aerospace, which follow the syllogism of "national investment—laboratory development—civilian application." The aerospace field was completely in NASA's hands from the beginning.
At this time, although American companies participated in national projects like the moon landing, they were clearly in a complete buyer's market, with all intellectual property and order allocation belonging to NASA's one-man rule.
From the beginning, the American aerospace industry had private enterprise participation, but one cannot say America's private commercial aerospace started here. At this time, aerospace was in the initial B2G stage, completely different from Starlink providing B2C communication services to individuals.
Moderately speaking, the transition from B2G to B2B, B2B2C, then to B2C and future C2C is inseparable from the intentional guidance of the U.S. government, even a living fossil of American industrial policy.
Image Caption: Subsidies for Musk's Companies
Image Source: @washingtonpost
Even for Musk personally, his multiple industries have gradually grown through subsidies, not relying on venture capital or market demand. Tesla and SpaceX are precisely the main recipients of subsidies.
In other words, Musk converts the money he receives into production capacity growth, while Silicon Valley right-wing peers like Palantir and Anduril lack industrial production capacity. Old industrial systems like Boeing and Lockheed Martin are already thoroughly rotten and beyond saving.
SpaceX is a joint product of American industrial policy and capital, containing the ruthless replacement of complacent "old aerospace" like Boeing and Lockheed Martin, and also acting as the leader in the tortoise-and-hare race with Blue Origin and Rocket Lab.
At the same time, we must see that SpaceX has truly run out a real commercial scenario, just like Tesla entering China playing the complex role of both a catfish and a shark. Although Musk竭力 avoids binding with NASA and往来 with the U.S. military, hoping to build a space Tesla in a purely market-oriented way.
But the sensitivity of space and America's complex political-business relations determine that the U.S. government remains Musk's largest single customer, only participating in the role of investor or regulator. AT&T could not avoid being拆分, and Starlink cannot avoid being used.
Image Caption: SpaceX's Long Run
Image Source: @zuoyeweb3
The forced arrival of the B2B era.
In 1984, the still-libertarian Reagan signed the Commercial Space Launch Act to counter state-owned rockets from Europe and China抢占 the civilian market, especially China's Long March series beginning to occupy about 10% of the market share with "cheap" prices.
The subsequent story is the lessons of大规模试错 by America's industrial富 N代 and internet新贵. Just one example: Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen sponsored Burt Rutan to develop the suborbital spacecraft SpaceShipOne, which won the $10 million Ansari X Prize in 2004, awarded to a spacecraft that could cross the Kármán line twice within a week.
In fact, after another space shuttle disaster in 2003, the Bush administration signed the Commercial Space Launch Amendments Act of 2004, explicitly requiring NASA and other departments to purchase private space launch services.
Looking back at history, one can find that Bezos' Blue Origin and Musk's SpaceX were mostly founded around 2000. Their emergence is not突兀 but a normal continuation of history.
Sino-American industrial competition has always been an arena of national capabilities in the commercial field. Whether the target is aerospace or AI is unimportant. Great power competition has no retreat; the Soviet Union必然跟进 the Star Wars program, and America must also抢占 orbital resources.
The interaction between the state and commercial entities allows commercial aerospace to gradually transition to B2B2C.
In 1999, the CIA established the In-Q-Tel (IQT) venture capital company,紧跟硅谷风尚, using more fashionable ways to guide commercial ideas to conform to the national will. Its main member Michael Griffin not only accompanied Musk to Russia to buy missiles but also, during his tenure as NASA administrator (05-09), promoted the implementation of the Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) program.
In 2023, 21 years after its founding, SpaceX finally achieved profitability through Starlink subscription services. But 2008 was the生死年. Peter Thiel's Founders Fund $20 million investment helped Musk hold on until the fourth test launch succeeded, ultimately securing the NASA contract.
Mentioning one more thing, IQT also invested $2 million in Peter Thiel's Palantir in 2005 and long served as its sole customer, also helping Palantir evolve PayPal's anti-fraud model into an intelligence surveillance analysis system.
To date, Musk has received over $10 billion in orders from NASA. The overall development cost of Starlink is shared by the American venture capital industry and the government.
Musk completed the final B2C commercial闭环—the Starlink project.
A very interesting phenomenon: so-called commercial aerospace is actually the satellite subscription industry, but this dream valuation is clearly not as grand as the stars and oceans. People like to fantasize about space travel around rocket exhaust; no one goes wild with joy over a satellite orbiting Earth once.
But in fact, the lower the commercial rocket price and the greater its payload capacity, the lower its proportion in the entire commercial aerospace industry. This is also why the article deliberately略过 Musk's prediction of Starship's $100/kg cost—not disbelief, but that it could be even lower.
But when reduced to the point where even 60,000 low-orbit satellite replenishment networks cannot meet payload demand, rocket payload capacity will instantly enter a残酷 price war. Rocket payload shortages will transition to an过剩 stage within 5 years.
Taking SpaceX as an example, its Starlink revenue is over $12 billion, while launch services are only around $3 billion. Yes, commercial aerospace payload capacity has never been the main event of the space economy. $20 billion in launch services only accounts for about 3%-4% of the overall share, with the vast majority份额 in satellite navigation, remote sensing, and communication services.
SpaceX's plan can only be to move towards the civilian market. Among the three major market areas of satellite navigation, remote sensing, and communication, navigation and remote sensing have long been occupied by governments, militaries, or B2G/B2B/B2B2C models. For example, Amap navigation involves the BeiDou system, ground stations, chip manufacturing, and subscription services. Although the share is large, the interest chain is too complex.
Only the communication market has been validated by predecessors like the Iridium system. The next step is large-scale market expansion,刚好 perfectly契合 the demand for reusable rockets. Referring to the distribution of 4G/5G base stations, China occupies 40% and 60% shares respectively. SpaceX's Starlink should actually be纳入 the 6G discussion category—American-style弯道超车.
Different from China's situation, after AT&T was拆分, major communication operators陷入低质量内耗, unable to meet stable communication需求 in边缘地区. Starlink绕开 existing infrastructure and渠道商 with direct connection,本质上 a victory of the B2C model.
Currently, Starlink has about 8.5 million active users, contributing $12 billion in annual revenue. Musk顺利拿走 the most profitable satellite subscription in commercial aerospace, while Falcon 9 also continuously replenishes/组网 with a rapid launch mode of 2-3 days, supporting the daily operation of 7500 active星座.
As for the remaining peers like Bezos, OneWeb, Google, Microsoft, although they have different views on space, their commercial闭环 are not as complete as SpaceX's. Especially after OneWeb turned to Europe,陷入 traditional pork-barrel models. SpaceX's remaining opponents are only peers across the ocean.
Blocking Musk Piece by Piece
In those years, the hall was full of ivory tablets; it was once a place of song and dance.
Musk's连环爆炸 to success is, first and foremost, financial success.
SpaceX's $1.5 trillion valuation: the dream is to go to Mars, the reality is selling Starlink, the宣传 is Falcon 9. Beyond delivery capability, SpaceX熟练游走 between financial markets and real industry, driving the transformation of civilian commercial aerospace towards low-orbit constellations.
The good news for Eastern counterparts is that SpaceX has already explored the constellation model. The national team's StarNet and the Shanghai local team's Qianfan constellation both have庞大的现实需求.
The bad news is they only have two years to冲刺. LEO orbital resources follow a first-come, first-served模式. China's orbital resource applications submitted in 2020 will expire and作废 in 2027, so in 2025, StarNet甚至出动 the Long March 5 to launch占位星.
The Long March 12A and Zhuque-3 at the end of 2025 both target the "satellite internet technology test satellite"组网需求, with出奇一致 results: first-stage recovery失败, second-stage入轨成功. Now both the national team and private teams face the现实考验 of 2026.
Musk's low-slow-small business scripture: low orbit, small satellites, slow colonization.
Image Caption: Musk's Associated Enterprises
Image Source: @theinformation
Musk is a very capable project manager. In new energy, AI, and commercial aerospace, even solar energy and brain-computer interfaces, he has his own unique打法, and can mutually耦合商业需求.
China's model is state牵引总需求, guiding private companies to benchmark against a certain attribute of Musk, to achieve公私兼济, and prevent the birth of超级财团, avoiding excessive绑架 of the national economic industry.
BYD benchmarks Tesla, DeepSeek benchmarks Grok, LandSpace benchmarks SpaceX.有趣的是, LandSpace really has its own low-orbit constellation plan.
Taking low-orbit constellations as an example, the national team controls StarNet as the总需求, while private commercial aerospace companies serve as payload capacity配套 to融资,爆产能, and IPO. Of course, one cannot equate domestic commercial aerospace companies with rocket companies, but they possess the highest溢价 during the payload shortage era.
Just as one cannot equate the world's commercial aerospace with low-orbit constellations, but within ten years, they won't reach Mars and the moon.
For new models like satellite manufacturing, services, telemetry, even computing power, we留待之后的文章 for introduction. Currently, payload capacity is the bottleneck of all space economy.
For current commercial aerospace (rocket) enterprises, the path to模仿 and benchmark SpaceX is very clear:
- First build mature "small-thrust" liquid oxygen kerosene engine Merlin.
- Take the engine, achieve VTVL (Vertical Takeoff and Vertical Landing) controllable testing, which Musk called Grasshopper跳.
- Achieve orbital launch capability, SpaceX's Falcon 1, mainly for入轨 verification.
- Based on the above three, achieve a first-stage recoverable实用 rocket Falcon 9, also SpaceX's主力 rocket.
- Repeat the above steps, develop a larger liquid oxygen methane engine Raptor, a larger rocket—Starship, achieving complete reusability.
Of course, because the focus is on rocket payload capacity, SpaceX's Crew Dragon steps are略去 here. At least within 10 years, orbital manned flight will not become the main商业化 force.参考 Wang Chun's $200 million, ten times more expensive than Sun Ge's suborbital tourism.
As mentioned earlier, SpaceX and Blue Origin originated around the early 2000s,某种意义上同步 with the internet privatization process. But unlike the internet's rapid shift to B2C or C2C service models after infrastructure completion, commercial aerospace's rocket and satellite products have long not achieved independence at the physical layer.
This forms a对照 with "the disappearance of the加密 physical layer." Commercial aerospace's坚守 has shown signs of收编 the internet and AI. Space computing and satellite internet are方兴未艾, while after Ethereum转向 PoS, it's impossible to even become the economic layer of the internet, at most becoming金融业的 SaaS.
Under the narrative of an independent physical layer, China's commercial aerospace industrial policy is 30 years behind America's, roughly starting in 2014/15 and reaching the first融资高峰 in 2018. Most of the companies we are familiar with, like LandSpace, Tianbing, were founded around this time.
After the National Space Administration formally established the "Commercial Aerospace Department" in 2025,加上 SpaceX's $1.5T IPO rumors and the 2027 low-orbit constellation确定订单倒逼产能, domestic commercial aerospace (rockets) formally entered the淘汰赛 stage.
Image Caption: Progress of Major Chinese Commercial Aerospace (Rocket) Companies
Image Source: @zuoyeweb3
According to incomplete statistics, in 2026 there will be at least 10+ recoverable rockets加注待发. Besides the Long March 12甲 representing the national team's recoverable route, only Zhongke Aerospace has a strong "national team" color. It is incubated by the Institute of Mechanics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, a比较奇特的混合所有制企业. As mentioned earlier, the Institute of Mechanics was also Qian Xuesen's work unit upon returning to China.
After细分 SpaceX's nodes, Land
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