The company raised US$75 billion when it went public on Friday and made its chief executive Elon Musk the world’s first trillionaire.
But Shen Yingchun, a professor at Beihang University, told Beijing Daily: “China does not need to and cannot copy SpaceX.”
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She said “the strength of the US model is efficiency”, using the market to drive down costs and forcing companies to innovate.
Shen argued that China’s commercial space sector was taking a different approach by focusing on building up its satellite networks before trying to cut costs.
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“The strength of the Chinese model is scale – using the national will to concentrate resources and systematically address issues such as infrastructure, setting standards and risk sharing, where markets typically fail,” Shen said.
She said that once this infrastructure was in place, the country’s space industry would have the chance to “make a big leap forward” in areas such as the development of smart cities and the low-altitude economy.