SpaceX Official: Company Is Now Fundamentally an Infrastructure Firm
SpaceX launch vice president Kiko Dontchev said at the UP.Summit conference in Florida that the rocket maker sees itself as an infrastructure company and is rapidly adopting AI. He also said the Falcon 9 rocket is on the road to retirement.
Kiko Dontchev, vice president of launch at the US space company SpaceX, said at last week's UP.Summit conference in Florida that the company no longer regards itself as merely a rocket maker. In his words, SpaceX is fundamentally an infrastructure company, a shift tied to the adoption of artificial intelligence at work and to the gradual retirement of the Falcon 9 rocket.
From rockets to infrastructure
SpaceX was long known for developing ever larger and more reusable rockets. Over the past decade, with the introduction of the Starlink satellite service, the company's focus began to change, and over the last 18 months the pivot toward data and artificial intelligence has accelerated. Falcon 9 has dominated global launch for ten years and remains the world's preeminent launch vehicle, but Dontchev said it is firmly on the road to retirement.
"In the last couple years, when I talk about SpaceX, yes, we are a rocket company, but fundamentally we are an infrastructure company at this point," Dontchev said. He explained that the company is building infrastructure on the ground and in low Earth orbit, soon on the Moon, and eventually on Mars.
Artificial intelligence at the company
Earlier this year, SpaceX acquired xAI, another company of founder Elon Musk. Dontchev said engineers were already using xAI's tools, but in recent months employees have truly figured out how AI can speed up their work. A year ago adoption was not so rapid, he said, but since the start of this year it has been extremely fast. He described the acceleration in engineering capability as unlike anything he has seen in his 16 years at the company.
Tasks that once took employees hours or days now take seconds or minutes. The change is not limited to engineers: identifying foreign object debris (FOD) in aerospace parts has been largely automated using the AI assistant Grok. Such debris can cause catastrophic damage to engines and other spacecraft components.
