SpaceX now fundamentally an “infrastructure company,” senior official says

For a long time, SpaceX has been synonymous with the development of newer, larger, and ever-more-reusable rockets. But that began to change over the last decade with the introduction of Starlink, and the change has accelerated during the last 18 months as the company has pivoted to data and artificial intelligence. At last week’s UP.Summit conference in Florida, the vice president of launch at SpaceX, Kiko Dontchev, offered some of the most revealing comments to date about the company’s changing focus, how it is embracing AI, and why the Falcon 9 rocket—which has dominated global launch for a decade and remains the world’s preeminent launch vehicle—is firmly on the road to retirement. “In the last couple years, when I talk about SpaceX, yes, we are a rocket company, but…