SpaceX itself also acknowledged the possibility in a June securities filing, warning that it “may prioritize our own launch payloads over additional U.S. government contracts or third-party customers.” That shift now appears to be taking effect …
Supporting anecdotal evidence:
A few years ago I tried booking a rideshare on the SpaceX website and got as far as the point where I’d have to pay the deposit. I seem to remember they had flights scheduled well into the 2030s, and even beyond.
https://www.spacex.com/rideshare … https://rideshare.spacex.com/
Now, as far as I can tell, there are just 2 flights scheduled. Both are SSO missions in 2027, and neither of them has any availability. And the rideshare webpages aren’t linked (or reachable?) from the SpaceX front page.
Until today I had assumed that a Starship variant with something like the Space Shuttle payload bay would be quite a high priority for SpaceX. Now I don’t know what to think! Are they going to serve out their existing Falcon contracts, and HLS on Starship, and then become a purely Starlink + Starmind launch company? With a bit of Mars stuff in their spare time?
Pedantic semantic point …
“I can tell you SpaceX has already gone captive because we have a whole bunch of customers coming to us and saying, oh my God, can you fly us?” Ranzo said during the company’s 10 September earnings call.
I’m not aware of “gone captive” really meaning anything, at least in British English. The best I’ve found is that, pertaining to animals, it could be roughly synonymous with ‘domesticated’. E.g. tortoises
Maybe referring to a captive market?
Ah, that’s probably what he had in mind. But really it’s more like the opposite. It seems like SpaceX is causing chaos by abandoning their captive market.
(Unless the term is also used to refer to the relationship between adjacent layers in a vertically integrated company.)