Launch market competition and pricing pressure

SpaceX's low launch prices, especially for communication satellites flying to geostationary (GTO) orbit, have resulted in market pressure on its competitors to lower their own prices. Prior to 2013, the openly competed comsat launch market had been dominated by Arianespace (flying Ariane 5) and International Launch Services (flying Proton). With a published price of US$56.5 million per launch to low Earth orbit, "Falcon 9 rockets were already the cheapest in the industry. Reusable Falcon 9s could drop the price by an order of magnitude, sparking more space-based enterprise, which in turn would drop the cost of access to space still further through economies of scale." SpaceX has publicly indicated that if they are successful with developing the reusable technology, launch prices in the US$5 to 7 million range for the reusable Falcon 9 are possible.

In 2014, SpaceX had won nine contracts out of 20 that were openly competed worldwide in 2014 at commercial launch service providers. Space media reported that SpaceX had "already begun to take market share" from Arianespace. Arianespace has requested that European governments provide additional subsidies to face the competition from SpaceX. European satellite operators are pushing the ESA to reduce Ariane 5 and the future Ariane 6 rocket launch prices as a result of competition from SpaceX. According to one Arianespace managing director in 2015, it was clear that "a very significant challenge was coming from SpaceX ... Therefore things have to change ... and the whole European industry is being restructured, consolidated, rationalized and streamlined." Jean Botti, Director of innovation for Airbus (which makes the Ariane 5) warned that "those who don't take Elon Musk seriously will have a lot to worry about." In 2014, no commercial launches were booked to fly on the Russian Proton rocket.

Also in 2014, SpaceX capabilities and pricing began to affect the market for launch of US military payloads. For nearly a decade the large US launch provider United Launch Alliance (ULA) had faced no competition for military launches. Without this competition, launch costs by the U.S. provider rose to over $400 million. The ULA monopoly ended when SpaceX began to compete for national security launches. At a side-by-side comparison, SpaceX's launch costs for commercial missions are considerably lower at $62 million.self-published source?

In 2015, anticipating a slump in domestic, military, and spy launches, ULA stated that it would go out of business unless it won commercial satellite launch orders. To that end, ULA announced a major restructuring of processes and workforce in order to decrease launch costs by half.

In 2017, SpaceX had 45% global market share for awarded commercial launch contracts, the estimate for 2018 is about 65% as of July 2018.

On January 11, 2019, SpaceX issued a statement announcing it would lay off 10% of its workforce, in order to help finance the Starship and Starlink projects.

In the first quarter of 2020, SpaceX launched over 61,000 kg (134,000 lb) of payload mass to orbit while all Chinese, European, and Russian launchers placed approximately 21,000 kg (46,000 lb), 16,000 kg (35,000 lb) and 13,000 kg (29,000 lb) in orbit, respectively, with all other launch providers launching approximately 15,000 kg (33,000 lb).

NASA announced its first crewed launch in over a decade using SpaceX's Crew Dragon capsule would take place May 27, 2020, from Kennedy Space Center, at SpaceX's Launch Complex 39A (LC-39), taking astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley to the International Space Station. The launch was postponed due to bad weather. The vehicle launched successfully on May 30, 2020, and successfully docked with the International Space Station on May 31, 2020, at 10:16 AM EDT.

On May 26, 2020, the NASA's administrator, Jim Bridenstine, stated that: “Because of the investments that NASA has made into SpaceX we now have, the United States of America now has about 70 percent of the commercial launch market, . . . That is a big change from 2012 when we had exactly zero percent.”