Will 2024 Be a Year of Rocket Debuts?

Ten years ago, governments around the globe forecast a broad swath of new rockets would be in service by now. No one would have predicted that SpaceX would dominate the global launch market, and become the de facto provider for satellite operators looking for an assured ride to space.

This year, three new heavy launch vehicles could finally give the Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy some competition: From the United States, ULA’s Vulcan and Blue Origin’s New Glenn; and from France, Arianespace’s Ariane 6.

All three rockets should have been flying for several years now. Geopolitical events including the COVID-19 pandemic and Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, along with technological hiccups or redesigns, forced delays, compounding the current dearth of launch options in the market.

That could change very soon.

On Jan. 8, ULA successfully launched its Vulcan rocket for the first time from Cape Canaveral, Florida — a major milestone for the long-awaited heavy-lift rocket.

Vulcan’s development began one decade ago in 2014, meant to replace ULA’s two existing launchers and to respond to growing competition in the launch market prompted by the emergence of SpaceX.

ULA has sold more than 70 Vulcan missions to date, with roughly half of the missions for government customers including the Space Force and NASA, and half for commercial missions, such as Project Kuiper, says ULA CEO Tory Bruno. Vulcan will see “a handful” of launches in 2024, per Bruno, but in 2025, ULA plans to increase that cadence to a rate of every two weeks.

Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, Arianespace is preparing to achieve full qualification of Ariane 6 by April, and expects the rocket’s maiden launch to take place between mid-June and the end of July, CEO Stéphane Israël says.

Ariane 6 will undergo one final test in January, before the launch pad at the Guiana Space Centre (CSG) in French Guiana is freed up to prepare for the inaugural flight, Israël says. Meanwhile, some flight elements are under final assembly to be delivered to the CSG by the end of the same month.

Ariane 6’s current order book counts 28 launches, including 18 launches for Kuiper, as well as three launches for commercial operators Eutelsat, Intelsat, and Optus, per the company. Seven launches are for the French military, as well as the European Space Agency (ESA)’s Galileo navigation satellite system, and the intergovernmental weather monitoring body EUMETSAT.

Similarly, Blue Origin’s New Glenn space vehicle was expected to have launched by now. A company spokesperson confirmed that the rocket is expected to launch in 2024, but did not provide further details on the vehicle’s status or an expected launch date.

The rocket’s manifest reflects orders worth “billions of dollars” over the next several years, with customers including NASA’s Launch Services Program and Project Kuiper, the spokesperson said in an email.

“A Decade in the Making”

The eventual launches of these three vehicles could break through the burgeoning bottleneck of requests for rides to space. Governments have a growing list of launches for their own missions, but must also now compete with the flourishing commercial market.

For the U.S. Space Force, it’s been “a decade in the making to get to where we are today,” says Col. Doug Pentecost, Assured Access to Space deputy program executive officer at Space Systems Command.

2024 is significant, not only for the new launch vehicles coming online, but for the swan song journey for a longtime rocket workhorse for the U.S. military, he notes. ULA’s Delta IV Heavy will launch its final mission for the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) in March, two decades after first taking off in 2004.

Meanwhile, ULA’s Atlas V has only 17 launches remaining on its manifest, with its final mission scheduled in 2030. The Atlas V was the poster child for the U.S. military’s push to cut ties with the Russian-made RD-180 rocket engine, following Moscow’s invasion of the Ukrainian peninsula of Crimea in 2014.

The National Security Space Launch (NSSL) program was created to support the development and operations of at least two launch vehicles that could carry critical Defense Department (DoD) missions into space.

“By definition, assured access space is having more than one way to get into space, to have at least two, if not more, families of systems in space,” says Pentecost.

The Space Force is currently winding down Phase 2 of the NSSL program, where ULA provided about 60 percent of launch missions, and SpaceX provided the remaining 40 percent. The service just closed the door on bids for Phase 3; contracts will be awarded by the end of 2024, and launches will begin in fiscal year 2025.

Phase 3 will expand the NSSL program by adding a third launch provider for the more traditional, national security-oriented missions, but also include a separate procurement lane that focuses on smaller launch startups that can support more “commercialized, risk-tolerant” missions, per Pentecost.

The more traditional, three-contractor track is set to include 48 missions, but that number could change, Pentecost stresses — the Space Force originally planned to buy 34 launch missions under the Phase 2 contract, but ended up buying 48, due to emergent proliferated constellation developments.

The clock is ticking for new U.S. launch vehicles to get off the ground, and Pentecost is watching that clock.

The Vulcan rocket in particular will be in high demand now that it has successfully launched, as the Space Force is planning to fly three key missions on the rocket in 2024, including the seventh GPS-III satellite.

And with the Space Force awarding Phase 3 NSSL missions next year, and planning for missions in 2026 and 2027 — “I need Blue Origin flying by October 2026,” Pentecost says.

Are Microlaunchers Ready for Liftoff?

Heavy-launch vehicles may not be the only rocket debutantes in 2024. Microlaunch companies ABL Space Systems and Germany’s Isar Aerospace are each preparing new vehicles to take flight this year.

Isar’s inaugural rocket, dubbed Spectrum, is currently in the middle of assembly in the company’s manufacturing facilities in Munich, says Stella Guillen, the company’s chief commercial officer.

Once assembled, it will be delivered to the company’s launch pad at Andøya Spaceport in Norway, sometime during the first quarter of 2024, and launch once lower and upper stage fire testing is completed, she notes.

Spectrum is designed to provide launch services to the small satellite market – up to 1 metric tonne (1,000 kilograms) of capacity – to Low-Earth Orbit (LEO), per Guillen. The company has contracts for operations at two launch sites: its exclusive pad in Andøya, Norway, and at CSG in French Guyana, in order to service a variety of orbits and inclinations. Isar currently has 17 confirmed customers for Spectrum.

Meanwhile, California-based ABL Space Systems is preparing for the inaugural flight of its RS-1 microlauncher in 2024. Dubbed “Flight 2,” it will be a production variant of the rocket that initially flew in January 2023, which failed shortly after liftoff.

Flight 2, which will launch from the Pacific Spaceport Complex-Alaska on Kodiak Island, will include manufacturing upgrades, operational and general performance upgrades, says Harry O’Hanlon, company founder and CEO. Last fall, the rocket completed a series of integrated test activities alongside ABL Space System’s GS0 modular orbital launch site in Long Beach, and the ABL team is now activating the GS0 site in Alaska, with a ground test campaign planned in early 2024 ahead of Flight 2.

The European Launch Context

The launch market is still recovering from the supply chain disruption prompted by the COVID-19 pandemic, and Europe in particular continues to reel from the fallout of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine nearly two years ago.

While the COVID-19 pandemic affected global supply chains, it was the geopolitical situation introduced by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and the subsequent dropped use of Soyuz rockets in Europe, that led to a loss of launch sovereignty in Europe.

“One of the biggest lessons learned in Europe is, we no longer want to have one launch supply chain,” says Maxime Puteaux, a principal advisor for Euroconsult based in Paris.

Arianespace is the only launcher in Europe capable of launching to Geostationary Orbit (GEO). The majority of planned missions for the EU or ESA were designed for launch on either Ariane 6 or Vega C. Still, “people don’t want to recreate such a situation looking forward,” he notes.

To that end, the ESA plans to launch a competition seeking new launch vendors, and embrace a more U.S.-style procurement process, officials shared at the EU Space Summit last November in Seville, Spain.

"You can be sure that all of these microlaunchers are already betting on a second generation, which will be by far more capable,” Puteaux adds. The question then becomes, which companies are capable of raising the capital for such investments, and actually deliver on their promise.

European launch providers and experts warn against comparing the U.S. and European markets too closely.

The need for institutional launch is much more important in the United States than in Europe, with its human spaceflight mission set, and the much larger military space apparatus, says Israël.

"It's very important to be inspired by what has been done in the United States, but we cannot cut and paste the U.S. model,” he notes. “We must find our European way to space."

2024 Marks “New Light in the Darkness” for the Launch Market

If even only a portion of the planned rocket launches occur in 2024, their success would still do much to ease the current supply shortage, says Dafni Christodoulopoulou, a research analyst with NSR, an Analysys Mason company.

NSR forecasts that about 200 launches will take place globally in 2024, to send around 1,900 satellites into orbit. “There is a lot of demand, but when new launch vehicles come online, delays and failures are expected, as well,” limiting the growth in launch cadence, says Christodoulopoulou.

The sectors that are most at risk of losing their launch slot if these rockets don’t succeed as expected are emerging markets and new technology testers – customers that don’t have a high budget and are not already proven, says Christodoulopoulou.

But 2024 should bring “new light in the darkness that we are currently experiencing in terms of access to space,” says Puteaux.

Euroconsult forecasts that by 2032, about 2,800 satellites will be launched globally on a yearly basis, representing about four metric tonnes of payloads. About 50 percent of those satellites will be part of megaconstellations.

“Those projects are kingmakers, and should one project be delayed or canceled, it will impact the forecast,” says Puteaux.

Launch providers that traditionally catered primarily to government customers are pivoting toward commercial missions. ULA is preparing for a more commercial-centric future by developing a “LEO-optimized” version of the Vulcan’s Centaur V upper stage, intended to improve the rocket’s competitiveness for commercial megaconstellations, notes Bruno.

Israël forecasts nine to 10 launches per year for Ariane 6, with four out of those yearly launches dedicated to ESA and European institutional customers. The other five to six are dedicated to the commercial market, he says.

The increased cadence of commercial space missions has presented operators with an underestimated challenge in spaceport capacity.

The majority of current planned launches will occur from legacy sites, such as Cape Canaveral or CSG. The infrastructure at those sites is decades old, and will be increasingly stressed by providers aiming to launch on a weekly, or eventually, daily basis. While launch providers are still securing pads at these sites, companies like Isar are investing in exclusive access to smaller spaceports like Andøya, while ABL Space Systems is betting its GS0 “launch site in a box,” which the company says will serve as its differentiator among launch providers.

Also, the Space Force is investing $1.3 billion over the next five years for launch range improvements, meant to bring the largely 1960s-era infrastructure into modern times, says Pentecost.

Launch capacity is critical as the commercial market has placed increased demand on the U.S. military’s two main spaceports, he notes. The Eastern Range at Cape Canaveral hosted 74 launches in 2023 — twice as many launches as in 2021, when it hosted just 32. The Western Range at Vandenberg Space Force Base hosted 37 launches in 2023; in 2021, only 11 missions were launched.

The new year brings an opportunity to end the “de facto monopoly” by SpaceX, which has absorbed much of the launch demand in Western nations, says Euroconsult’s Puteaux. Vulcan’s launch this month is a step in that direction, but Ariane 6 and New Glenn still need to succeed, too.

If they don’t, Puteaux warns, “It shows that if you need access to space as a Western customer, you don't have a choice except to go for SpaceX.” VS

Vivienne Machi is an award-winning journalist based in Los Angeles.