Blue Origin Explosion Strengthens SpaceX’s Case for Launch Dominance
Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Matt Bloxham argues that Blue Origin’s New Glenn launchpad explosion is a significant setback for one of the few companies with a plausible chance of pressuring SpaceX. In his assessment, the failure reinforces SpaceX’s advantage in reliable launch capability and strengthens the case investors can make for its leadership, even as its valuation depends on belief in far-reaching plans such as orbital data centers and large-scale space infrastructure.
Blue Origin’s failure weakens a rare source of pressure on SpaceX
Nighttime footage sourced to @JCONCILUS and labeled Cape Canaveral, Florida, May 29, showed a large fireball on a distant launchpad. For Matthew Bloxham, the explosion was a “significant setback” for Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin, which he described as already struggling to keep pace with Elon Musk’s SpaceX.
The setback matters, in Bloxham’s assessment, because there are few commercial launch companies with any plausible chance of putting pressure on SpaceX. Blue Origin, he said, had already been “falling behind,” and the explosion gives SpaceX another opportunity to persuade investors — “if they needed any convincing” — that it remains the “untouchable leader” in rocket launch.
The incident also served as a reminder of the operational difficulty behind a sector that can look mature from a distance. Bloxham noted that rockets have been sent into space for decades, but that launching them remains “incredibly difficult” and difficult to do reliably. The advantage he emphasized is not merely being able to build and fly rockets, but being able to do so repeatedly and dependably.
SpaceX’s Falcon 9 was the benchmark he used. Bloxham said SpaceX has “largely got that locked down,” particularly with Falcon 9, while acknowledging that the company has had its own issues with Starship. His view was that Starship is still making progress, and that the contrast with Blue Origin matters because some future commercial space plans depend on launch capability at enormous scale.
It shows you that even though we've been sending rockets into space for decades now, that it's an incredibly difficult thing to do, and a difficult thing to do reliably.
The competitive set Bloxham identified was narrow. If another company is going to approach SpaceX’s position, he said, Blue Origin and Rocket Lab are perhaps the two leading commercial competitors capable of creating that tension. But both, in his assessment, remain “a long way” from getting close to what SpaceX already has.
The valuation story depends on belief in a decade-plus vision
Caroline Hepker pressed Matthew Bloxham on a related question: if SpaceX’s ambitions include future concepts such as orbital data centers, how should investors think about valuation? Hepker described orbital data centers as an idea that only weeks earlier would have seemed “extraordinary,” and placed it among the “very, very future-focused, lofty ideas” attached to SpaceX.
Bloxham’s answer was that valuing SpaceX is “not very easy,” because the case is tied less to current financials than to belief in a long-duration vision. He compared Elon Musk’s companies to what he called a “hero concept”: investors have to “ignore the current numbers” and buy into a decade-plus view of what the company could become.
Tesla was his example of how those narratives can evolve. In Bloxham’s telling, Tesla moved from being understood as a car company, to an autonomous-vehicle company, to a company centered on data, and then toward robotics. The point was not that each transition is assured, but that Musk-linked valuations often rest on the market’s willingness to follow a shifting, expansive future story.
SpaceX’s story, in this framing, is tied to whether launch capacity becomes the enabling infrastructure for larger businesses. Bloxham specifically mentioned orbital data centers as part of the company’s future-growth plans. If those plans require large-scale rocket launch capability, then SpaceX’s existing launch position becomes part of the logic investors may use to evaluate the company’s long-term potential.
That is why the Blue Origin explosion matters beyond the immediate technical setback. Bloxham treated visible failures by would-be competitors as part of the backdrop against which SpaceX can argue that its launch capability is difficult for others to approach.
The multiples show how far investors may be asked to stretch
When Matthew Bloxham tried to “anchor” SpaceX’s valuation in market comparisons, he used sales multiples rather than earnings or near-term cash flows. Rocket Lab, he said, trades at about 100 times sales. A SpaceX valuation of $180 billion to $200 billion would put it “roughly” in that same range.
| Company | Valuation frame discussed | Bloxham’s comparison |
|---|---|---|
| Rocket Lab | About 100 times sales | A high-growth space benchmark |
| SpaceX | $180 billion to $200 billion valuation | Roughly comparable to Rocket Lab’s sales multiple |
| Anthropic | About 20 times forward sales | Based on expected annualized revenue run rate for this year |
Rocket Lab supplied one high-growth space benchmark. Anthropic supplied a different point of reference: Bloxham said the AI company, which he described as hoping to IPO later this year, would be at about 20 times forward sales based on an annualized revenue run rate expected for this year.
He did not present those comparisons as a full valuation model. They were a way to show that investors are already working with a wide range of valuation frameworks, and that SpaceX is pushing investors toward the high end of relative valuations. Where investors finally land, he said, will show what they are prepared to pay.
The tension is straightforward. SpaceX can point, in Bloxham’s telling, to launch capabilities that serious competitors remain far from matching, and Blue Origin’s failure gives that claim more force with investors. But the valuation still asks investors to buy far into the future — into launch scale, orbital infrastructure, and whatever the company’s story may become over the next decade. Bloxham left that question open: SpaceX’s position in launch looks unusually strong in his assessment, but the price investors are willing to assign to that strength remains unresolved.