As dominance of launch market looms, SpaceX now valued at $21 billion

The updated value of SpaceX places the company in rarefied air.

After two serious accidents in 2015 and 2016, SpaceX has been on a tear in 2017 with 10 successful launches, including the historic re-flight of two used boosters and a used Dragon spacecraft. These achievements suggest the company is well on its way toward developing low-cost, reusable boosters, and therefore the rocket company founded by Elon Musk may be on the cusp of capturing much of the global launch market.

A new valuation appears to back up this optimism. According to the New York Times, SpaceX recently raised $350 million in additional funding, and during this process the company was valued at $21 billion. This represents a significant increase from 2015, when Google and Fidelity invested $1 billion in SpaceX, valuing the company at $12 billion.

The new report notes that the updated value of SpaceX places the company in rarefied air, as just six other venture-backed companies are valued at $20 billion or more around the world. These companies include US-based companies Uber, Airbnb, Palantir, and WeWork, as well as Chinese firms Didi Chuxing and Xiaomi.

The common thread among most of these business is their potential to become a globally dominant business, which SpaceX aspires to in the commercial launch market. During his testimony before a Senate subcommittee earlier this month, a senior vice president for SpaceX, Tim Hughes, noted that in 2013 SpaceX had less than 10 percent of the global share of commercial launch contracts. That number jumped to about 40 percent this year, and Hughes predicted it would rise to 60 percent in 2018.

"Prior to SpaceX entering the commercial space launch market with the Falcon 9 launch vehicle, the US had effectively ceded this market to France and to Russia, and no US company had launched a single commercial mission to GTO since 2009," Hughes testified. "SpaceX has brought this multi-billion dollar market back to the United States."

It remains to be seen whether SpaceX will truly make good on all of this, but this year has certainly been promising. Musk has said his company will deliver the final version of its workhorse Falcon 9 rocket, the Block 5 variant, by late this year or early 2018. That first stage booster will be optimized for rapid, low-cost reusability. If it works, Musk could probably cut his overall prices in about half, further undercutting a market already under considerable pressure from his low-cost rockets.