SpaceX Describes Itself as an Infrastructure Company, Not Just a Rocket Builder

SpaceX has long been known for developing ever-larger, more reusable rockets. According to a senior company official, that identity has shifted over the past decade with the rise of Starlink, and the change has sped up over the last 18 months as the company has moved toward data and artificial intelligence.

Speaking at the UP.Summit conference in Florida, SpaceX vice president of launch Kiko Dontchev said the company now sees itself differently. "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," he said, describing work on the ground and in low Earth orbit, with the Moon and eventually Mars as future targets.

Dontchev also discussed how employees are using artificial intelligence, saying adoption accelerated sharply this year after a slower start. Tasks that once took hours or days now take seconds to minutes, he said, and the work of spotting foreign object debris in aerospace parts has been largely automated with the AI assistant Grok. He said the pace of change in engineering is unlike anything he has seen in his 16 years at the company.

Source: Ars Technica