Japan just landed a reusable rocket prototype and SPCX is not threatened by this.

JAXA successfully launched and landed a reusable rocket prototype sat in noshiro, akita prefecture. Flight lasted 40 sec and reached 10 meters which is first successful test of its kind for japan's national space agency.

Its a legitimate milestone for JAXA and worth acknowledging but the framing going around is its not a good look for SPCX  

Spacex has been landing falcon 9 boosters since 2017,falcon 9 is an orbital class rocket that routinely lands after delivering payloads to orbit 550km above the earth and they have done it over 300 times. Starship which is what actually competes for next generation launch contracts, has landed from 70km altitude and is being tested for full orbital reuse.

A 10 meter hop is where spacex was in 2012 with the grasshopper test program and tbh not a criticism of JAXA ,the early stage development looks like this and you have to start somewhere but the gap between a 40 sec proof of concept and an operational reusable orbital launch system is measured in decades and tens of billions of dollars

China's test on friday is slightly more interesting for SPCX because china has both the funding scale and the political will to compress that timeline aggressively but even there the operational competitive threat is a 2030s story at the earliest.

So the risk to SPCX this week is FAA prohibited investment list, the ai phone denial, cpi on Tuesday and whether the market decides to price in geopolitical risk more aggressively into a stock trading at 94x trailing revenue and now Spcx is even accessible to eu users for margin trading on bitpanda

Is anyone adjusting their SPCX thesis based on the Japan test or we can call this noise?