00:00This rocket launch might be the end of the beginning for SpaceX's dominance.
00:04That's because it accomplished something China has never done before.
00:07Its booster rocket came back.
00:10Not into the ocean, not as wreckage.
00:13It was caught by wires on a sea platform.
00:15That matters because recovering reusable boosters is the trick that made SpaceX so hard to beat.
00:21An expensive bit of equipment comes home, gets refurbished and flies again.
00:26It's how SpaceX's Falcon 9 cut launch costs by almost 90%.
00:30China's version is not a copy though.
00:32SpaceX lands boosters on legs.
00:34China's trying to catch them in a sort of net,
00:36cutting out landing gear and potentially freeing up more weight for cargo.
00:40SpaceX wants to go one step further with Starship,
00:43which would reuse both its boosters and the spacecraft itself.
00:47But it's having some issues.
00:49It's slated for commercial operations later this year,
00:52but has suffered failures on every one of its 12 test flights.
00:55The bigger warning for Elon Musk is not China's one rocket, it's the patent.
01:00Right now China's space industry looks a lot like its electric vehicle industry did 10 years ago.
01:06A chaotic alphabet soup of companies,
01:08all of which seem well behind Musk's cutting edge.
01:11Then competition, stake backing and manufacturing scale,
01:15turned them into global threats,
01:17competing with Toyota, GM, Volkswagen and Tesla.
01:20Reusable rockets may be next.
01:23SpaceX is still the company to beat.
01:25But China Inc. has entered the race.
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