smartcooky
Penultimate Amazing
To add to this: Cape Canaveral has about 35 paunch pads, most not in use. It is Space Force, not NASA. It does mostly government launches (military and intelligence and such). Space X has one (1) out of those 35, plus two landing pads. Admittedly, SpaceX is using 100% of the rocket landing space there.
Cape Kennedy (NASA) has 3 launch pads with a fourth one planned. Space X has one of those, and if the planned one is built it will be for Space X.
So that's SpaceX using less than 10% of Canaveral/Kennedy's pads. The great majority (about 2/3) of the launch pads are inactive. The area is operating at a far lower capacity and launch rate than it was built to accommodate.
Nobody is blocking anyone down there. To use the airport analogy, this like Denver International Airport (bigger than Manhattan, six runways, at least one long enough to land the Space Shuttle) running no more than a few dozen flights a day. Canaveral/Kennedy is great big complex, built for a level of spaceflight dreamed of in the 1950's and 60's and that we never got close to achieving. It is massively overbuilt and under-utilized.
Exactly! All this talk of blocking launch pads, and of SpaceX launches being at the expense of competitors is a load of old tosh, being spread by haters, as well as a bunch of people like Bezos who are butt-hurt over being out-done by a competitor.