Arianespace, the French company launching the national broadband network's satellites into orbit, is cutting jobs and costs to compete against SpaceX – the start-up space company founded by technology billionaire Elon Musk.
Arianespace ASEAN managing director Richard Bowles said Arianespace remained confident it could maintain its 50 per cent share of the space launch market despite SpaceX's slashing prices by building reliable rockets that are smaller and cheaper.
But Mr Bowles also said the company had to undergo substantial restructuring to keep up with the competition and reduce the number of separate contractors.
"It's quite clear there's a very significant challenge coming from SpaceX," he said. "Therefore things have to change … and the whole European industry is being restructured, consolidated, rationalised and streamlined.
"If you're going to reduce costs then what does that mean? It means a reduction in jobs – SpaceX is achieving a lot with a lot fewer people than there are present in the European industry."
NBN was originally due to launch in mid-2015 as part of a $2 billion program to get high-speed broadband to rural and remote Australia but this was delayed to November due to problems finding a co-passenger for the launch.
Arianespace has long been seen as the planet's most reliable commercial launch provider. NBN picked Arianepace over Russia's Proton rocket, which last week suffered a catastrophic launch failure that destroyed a Mexican communications satellite.
But SpaceX has successfully launched 18 times since 2010 at much lower costs and signed a $US1.6 billion contract with NASA to resupply the International Space Station.
SpaceX is also working on a program to re-use its Falcon 9 rockets by landing them at designated locations. Its founder Mr Musk has claimed successfully doing so could slash costs by a hundred-fold.
But Mr Bowles said that doing so could in fact slash SpaceX's key advantage, which is to slash the amount each rocket costs by mass-producing them.
"Their producing engineering is really good and they're producing volume with hundreds of hundreds of engines," he said. "But that seems to be completely opposite of the philosophy of reusing it because as soon as you start reusing them you're not going to be producing them."
He also described Mr Musk's mission to send humans to Mars as being "off the wall" because it would cost trillions of dollars to do with very little commercial return. Instead, Mr Bowles said settling humans on the Moon was more realistic.
"Maybe he thinks that by creating sufficient momentum and developing expectations that we have to go to Mars he can force the [United States] Senate and Congress and NASA to fund it," Mr Bowles said. "If he can convince them to do it then he's unbelievably good."