SpaceX Strategic Innovation, Disruption, and Ebusiness

Strategic Initiatives

SpaceX has accomplished a wide range of feats in recent years, and it is worth highlighting some of the company's most significant strategic initiatives. First, the company has developed a reusable rocket capable of being launched, landed, and reused for subsequent missions. In the past, rockets were designed to disintegrate or burn up upon reentry into Earth's atmosphere. Johnson (2019) points out that with this reusability capability, SpaceX has set the stage for routine missions to space at a fraction of current costs.

Second, another notable strategic initiative is Inspiration4 — a scheduled spaceflight by private citizens aboard the company's SpaceX Resilience capsule. The flight, which was designed to orbit Earth, was scheduled to last a total of three days. As SpaceX notes on its website, this is essentially the first ever all-commercial space shuttle flight to launch (SpaceX, 2021). In the past, such missions had been exclusively reserved for trained astronauts.

Third, SpaceX has also developed the first privately owned spacecraft capable of ferrying both astronauts and cargo to the International Space Station. This spacecraft is named the Dragon. The company states that with the Dragon, it has effectively "returned America's ability to fly NASA astronauts to and from the International Space Station on American vehicles for the first time since 2011" (SpaceX, 2021).

Disruptive and Innovative Technologies

A close assessment of SpaceX's future plans indicates that the company is keen on deploying disruptive technologies. Disruptive technology, as defined by Baltzan (2017), is "a new way of doing things… disruptive technologies tend to open new markets and destroy old ones." As Baltzan further notes, disruptive technologies typically enter the marketplace with little influence and slowly evolve until they challenge and eventually replace well-established players. A well-known example is Sony, which continuously improved its technology and edged out established names in its industry.

A compelling example of a future disruptive technology pioneered by SpaceX is the use of the Starship system to transport people to any location on the planet in record time — speculated to be less than an hour. In the words of Johnson (2019), "the company has announced plans to use its massive Starship system to fly suborbital missions to routinely ferry passengers around the world in about half an hour." Under this model, a businessperson could have breakfast in New York, lunch in Shanghai, a late evening meeting in Melbourne, and still return to New York for dinner — a scenario that currently seems extraordinary given the distances involved.

For instance, it currently takes an average of 19 to 20 hours to travel from Melbourne, Australia to New York, particularly since commercial airliners typically make multiple stops along the way. SpaceX's plan to use the Starship system as a form of commercial airliner would revolutionize international travel. Smith and Scott (2020) note that disruptive technologies fundamentally alter the way enterprises or entire industries operate. In this case, SpaceX would be transforming both how individual airlines operate and how the broader airline industry functions. With the Starship system available, most airlines and aerospace companies would likely be forced back to the drawing board, as customers would naturally gravitate toward faster, more convenient travel options.

It should be acknowledged that disrupting the airline industry would not be a straightforward endeavor for SpaceX. History, however, shows that many companies have started as underdogs and eventually upset entire industries. Furth (2018) points to Amazon as a company that embodies disruption in every sense. Consistent with Baltzan's (2017) view that disruptive technologies destroy old markets while opening new ones, Furth (2018) observes that Amazon was able to challenge well-established enterprises such as booksellers and publishers from its very beginning. True to Baltzan's (2017) characterization of disruptive technologies, Amazon has evolved considerably over time — it did not begin as the massive ecommerce platform we know today. In Furth's (2018) words, the company has successively edged out "many large and previously powerful companies that could not or did not want to take the threat seriously."

Conclusion

There is no question that SpaceX is a highly innovative company. It has applied new technologies to solve longstanding challenges — most notably through the development of a reusable rocket that can be launched, landed, and reused for subsequent missions, which has significantly reduced costs in this domain. The company has also demonstrated a clear commitment to deploying disruptive technologies, most prominently the Starship system, which has the potential to transform global transportation as we know it. Taken together, these achievements position SpaceX as a company capable of accomplishing feats that no other enterprise has yet achieved, and its trajectory suggests continued disruption across multiple industries in the years ahead.