Share of Mass to OrbitWide moat

In any given recent year, SpaceX has accounted for the large majority of all the mass humanity placed in orbit — a share so lopsided it reads less like a competitive market than like a utility with a fringe of small challengers. Part of that is its own Starlink satellites, but a great deal is everyone else's payloads, because everyone else's payloads have nowhere better to go. When a single firm carries most of the world's cargo to space, it enjoys the economics of a natural monopoly on a road no one else has finished building.

A share that large is a moat in its own right, because it feeds the cost and cadence advantages that produced it. Volume drives SpaceX's costs down, funds the next vehicle, and deepens the operational lead — while starving rivals of the flight heritage and the revenue they would need to catch up. Dominance, in a business with this much scale economics, tends to entrench itself rather than erode, at least until a competitor with strategic rather than commercial motives — the Chinese state programs are precisely that¹ — decides the position is too important to concede.