Is this Elon’s competition?
He doesn’t currently have any.
Boeing and Lockheed have been trying to peddle the United Space Alliance joint venture for a few billion.
NASA’s going to get transformed in the next little while (Elon works fast) into an actual mission-based agency that is about space exploration. And it will likely spend less money and get a lot more done.
There are a bunch of other aerospace entities in the world, including a bunch of small ones in the US.
Sierra has that minishuttle, but no ride to space, and it really needs to be tested with no crew, at least a few times. I’d love to see them succeed. There was even scuttlebutt that they wanted to buy ULA. The problem they seem to have is the same as the old-line aerospace companies, they take too much time to get too little done.
They have only one prototype, if memory serves the drop test they did a few years ago resulted in damage to the craft because of landing gear failure, which they blamed on the landing gear manufacturer.
If the orbital test results in partial or complete failure, it’ll be years and millions of dollars to do their second test. It’s likely they’ll either watch a competitor or more than one build and test such a vehicle and succeed first.
My guess is, RocketLab (from NZ I think) is going to emerge among the other private enterprise launch outfits. They are working on reusability, but are being very careful about how they spend.
The Indian gov’t’s space program has done more for less than other national programs. The only problem they’ll have with manned flight [racist joke alert] will be the hundreds trying to ride on the outside of the thing.