No need to doubt it — folks over at NASA actually understand farbetter than the cheerleaders do the downstream consequences of SpaceX's monopoly-like dominance, as well as SpaceX's own structural weaknesses.
I said this more than two years ago (not here, not inside China). If you look at the reaction in reality today, the conclusions drawn by industry people over thereline up with my own observations.
It's really quite simple. True aerospace today spans an enormous range of disciplines and systems. You're talking about an industrial base that needs 300,000 to 800,000 specialized professionals behind it just to function.
To put it bluntly: if this industry doesn't spend decadesaccumulating hundreds of thousands of engineers, technicians, scientists, and specialists across dozens of trades — all feeding continuous technical iteration — the whole thing can't run in the later stages.
But a single company, even one as aggressive as SpaceX, cannot sustain an industrial ecosystem of that scale.
China's two state aerospace conglomerates (CASC / 航天科技 and CASIC / 航天科工) alone account for ~300,000 direct employees. Factor in the broader ecosystem — suppliers, adjacent sectors, research institutes, universities — and the total talent pool easily exceeds 700,000.
It takes a human-capital (intellectual-capital) base of that magnitude to credibly support humanity going into deep space.
SpaceX's human (and intellectual) scale simply isn't there. Current headcount is supposedly around 22,000 people. My own projection: it'll hit a hard ceiling around 50,000, and that limit won't be technical — it'll be organizational — the governance architecture of a companyjust doesn't scale cleanly past that without ossifying or breaking.
Right now, the so-called "new guard" of U.S. space entrepreneurship really boils down to only two real players: SpaceX and Blue Origin. Together, they're maybe 30,000 people.
Meanwhile, at the peakof the American space age, the entire industrial ecosystem was mobilizing a specialist workforce on the order of 300,000–400,000. (Today it's probably under 200,000 — and a lot of what remained got gutted by congressional dysfunction and short-termism.)
That U.S. — the one with that deep a bench — was what actually commanded China's respect. What America has effectively done is dismantle that foundation, and SpaceX has acceleratedthe dismantling.
But — and this is the crux — SpaceX hasn't actually rebuilt a complete replacement system. What it built is a partial substitute. Within that substitute, what SpaceX is good at becomes verystrong; what it isn't oriented toward becomes systematically weak.
That's imbalance. That's distorted, lopsided development.
SpaceX triggered a revolution before its time. But if you've read Chinese history, you know: revolutions extract enormous costs, and the destruction they visit on the old order is terrifyingly thorough. That kind of destruction very often poisons the revolution's own endgame — individual actors may survive or even thrive, but the broader collective project can easily get hollowed out.
A healthyrevolution can't be a lopsided monoculture; it has to arrive at a new macro-level equilibrium. What I see in America's current trajectory is not equilibrium — it's amplified distortion.
Once you grasp that, you understand why I'm not nearly as bullish on the "SpaceX way" as the hype suggests.
And honestly? This isn't just a "now-problem." It's a recurrence of something structurally endemic to America — and more broadly to Western capitalism itself. FDR patched over some of the worst of it (and thatunderlying social-industrial compact is what actually let the U.S. out-compete the USSR). Then the Reagan era came along and un-did the patch.
You misunderstand. It's just that you think China needs to make an immediate targeted response — that failure to respond specifically means defeat, losing the game.
But that's typical Western thinking, not Chinese.
Professor Gao Zhikai said something I think you should ponder carefully. China's victory is achieved across a vast stretch of time, chosen through longer-range calculation and counterbalancing against opponents.
From the very beginning, it was never about short-term confrontation. This way of thinking is deeply ingrained in Chinese bones — it goes all the way back to our myths and legends, like Jingwei filling the sea, or Yu Gong moving mountains.
That's why Gao Zhikai said: for most of China's 5,000 years of history, America didn't exist. And China can, in the next 5,000 years, not see America, not care about America.
What I mean when I say "China can choose" is that China can simply disregard the rules and constraints set by the West. In fact, China is already reshaping all the rules.
The current space game rules were built on the premise of excluding China (in Chinese perception, this history of exclusion goes back longer than you think).
Precisely because such rules have always existed, China has built, in the space domain, a unique aerospace system outside of America's (still inferior to the U.S. today — about a 10-year gap).
But this system is gradually tearing open the blockade that the U.S.-built system has imposed on China. For instance, Russia has gone from being an opponent participating in the blockade against China to a partner in China's aerospace technology system.
Don't underestimate Russia — its real capability is still stronger than the EU plus Japan combined.
America's problem, as I said earlier, is that the real strength of American aerospace came from that peak-era America that could do anything. That strength was comprehensive — strong in every detail, every direction.
China's competition has always been aimed at chasing that all-powerful America. But today's America can no longer maintain that kind of near-universal superiority; it can only choose to lead in select areas.
Why? First, the total amount of intellectual input is insufficient (compare the total workforce numbers in the Chinese and American aerospace industries). Second, the effective utilization rate of funds is a major problem (capital efficiency). Finally, funding allocation is also distorted.
This is the fundamental reason why America is basically bound to lose. To fix these things would require decades of planning and incremental improvement. For example, where are the high-quality industrial workers suited to modern manufacturing? American basic education has already run into serious problems. And America also restricts the inflow of high-quality talent.
In Chinese eyes, America's advantages can be leveled in about 10 years. And beyond that? China has more brainpower, more capital, and is laying groundwork in advance across more technological domains.
Even now, America is starting to fall behind in rocket engine technology. China's technological lag has always been rooted in insufficient investment — and that insufficiency had many causes, mostly because too many industrial sectors started from too low a base. But the point is, China has now gone through a round of industrial upgrading; the generational gap at the starting line has been erased, and in many areas China has even overtaken.
That little advantage SpaceX has — that leading edge built on a distorted ecosystem — is actually very fragile. It's like a team in an arena: if only one or two players are outstanding, the threat is limited — you just shut down those scoring points. But if every player on the team is capable and performs well on average, then who wins more?
The United States hasn't lost yet — it's not yet time to say it's lost. But I don't see the possibility of it winning in the end.
The core reason is that the U.S. aerospace industrial ecosystem is actually in the midst of disintegration (what I'm looking at is the process of that 300,000–400,000 specialized talent system collapsing into a ~100,000-level technical talent system). This disintegration is caused by a combination of major problems in the U.S. education and talent pipeline, major problems in the U.S. industrial system, and major problems in the U.S. financial investment system.
The existence of SpaceX accelerated the collapse of the old system. But the new system it rebuilt — in terms of talent scale, technological reserves, and capital efficiency — is simply insufficient to support comprehensive innovation and competition with China in the aerospace domain.
