New Rockets Represent a Window of Opportunity for Access to Space

July 11 was a bad day for SpaceX. For the first time since 2015, its Falcon 9 rocket failed to deliver its payload into orbit. After a flawless launch from the Vandenberg Space Force Base in California, the rocket’s first stage separated as planned and descended back to Earth. But the second stage, with 20 Starlink satellites onboard, failed to reignite. The rocket dropped off its cargo only 135 kilometers above the planet, too low for the satellites to climb up using their own thrusters.

The first Falcon 9 launch failure after more than 300 faultless flights made the global space industry uneasy as it grounded the only fully operational medium-lift launcher available in the western world.

“It caused a bit of concern in the market because everybody’s aware that the market leans on SpaceX,” Dallas Kasaboski, a space industry analyst at consultancy firm Analysys Mason, tells Via Satellite. “Sometimes, you’re not really aware of it until there’s a hiccup like this. Globally, SpaceX is launching more than 50 percent of things into orbit. If you count Starlink, the number jumps to 70 or 80 percent.”

While Falcon 9 resumed launches in July after 15 days, the rocket had another pause in August. At press time for this article, Falcon 9 is grounded again after the second stage had an off-nominal deorbit burn after launching a NASA astronaut and Russian cosmonaut to the International Space Station.

Over the past seven years, SpaceX has conquered the western launch market thanks to its aggressive drive to reduce cost through reusability and frequent flights. At the same time, its main competitors — Arianespace and United Launch Alliance (ULA) — have struggled with delays in their new launcher developments.

ULA ceased production of its Atlas V rocket this year while its new Vulcan Centaur, originally slated for a 2019 debut, had so far performed one flight [Update: ULA launched the second Vulcan mission on Oct. 4].

Europe’s Arianespace, which had dominated the global launch market up until 2017, grappled with the development of its new medium-lift Ariane 6. The rocket finally took to the sky in July, four years behind schedule and one year after the supply of its predecessor, the workhorse Ariane 5 ran out. Arianespace has also dealt with losing access to the Russian Soyuz rocket following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

The Crunch

SpaceX alone cannot satisfy the world’s growing hunger for spaceflight. The arrival of Earth observation and broadband internet constellations has shaken up the sector over the past few years and flooded launch providers with levels of demand unforeseen a decade ago.

“Over the past five to 10 years, satellite manufacturers started building at scale. They started building constellations and the demand for launch increased dramatically,” says Kasaboski. “The problem is that supply didn’t really match and actually got worse because a lot of vehicles went offline.”

While in 2013, 213 satellites were dispatched to space worldwide on 83 launches, in 2023, 2,926 satellites hitched a ride to orbit on 225 rocket flights, according to Kasaboski. SpaceX, which launched 96 times that year, served most of that demand.

In 2024, SpaceX is on track to launch Falcon 9 nearly 150 times, having completed 85 launches as of August 31. But SpaceX’s spectacular growth (only five years ago, the company was launching merely a dozen times per year), can hardly keep up with the growth in satellite manufacturing. Analysys Mason estimates that over 37,000 satellites may need a ticket to orbit within the next ten years.

Relief in Sight?

Maxime Puteaux, principal advisor at space consultancy firm Novaspace, expects the “bottleneck” in the launch market to remain a problem until at least 2028 and possibly until the early 2030s.

In the coming years, a range of new vehicles is set to enter service, alleviating the current crunch and challenging SpaceX’s near monopoly. ULA and Arianespace, which both are preparing for the second launches of their respective new vehicles, will soon gain new competition.

In November, Blue Origin is expected to inaugurate the reusable New Glenn. In development since the early 2010s, the rocket will have a capacity of 45,000 kg to Low-Earth Orbit (LEO), more than four times as much as Ariane 6 in its basic configuration. Rocket Lab’s medium-lift Neutron is expected to lift off for the first time next year. And Firefly and Relativity Space intend to debut their respective medium-lift vehicles a year later.

Yet Puteaux estimates that neither of these rockets, Vulcan Centaur and Ariane 6, included, will reach full cadence within the next two years.

“The debut launch is challenging — but scaling up is even harder,” says Puteaux. “It’s not just about repeating the launch but also about putting all the industrial suppliers and supply chain in a full speed cruise mode with the continuous flow of manufacturing and shipping of elements from the different factories. We usually see 10 to 18 months between the first and second launch and up to 24 months before a launcher reaches its full capacity.”

ULA announced recently that the second Vulcan flight is scheduled for October 4. Mark Peller, ULA’s senior vice president of Vulcan Development and Advanced Programs, tells Via Satellite that the company aims “to have the capability in place next year to launch multiple times per month.”

ULA has already sold 70 launches on Vulcan Centaur, which can loft up to 27,200 kilograms to LEO in one go.

Arianespace CCO Steven Rutgers recently said at World Space Business Week that the company plans to launch another Ariane 6 mission this year, and has a goal to reach 10 launches per year.

Rocket Lab, the only company so far to have conquered the difficult small launch market with Electron, targets flying the reusable Neutron for the first time around mid-2025.

“We’ve recently had a whole bunch of successful engine hot fires and we’re feeling we’re in a very good place with propulsion, which is typically the long pole in the tent,” Rocket Lab CEO Peter Beck tells Via Satellite.

Since its debut in 2017, Electron has completed 50 launches and is currently the third most frequently launched rocket in the world. But despite Electron’s success, Rocket Lab realized that what the market really wants is more medium launch capacity. The firm’s engineers refocused from perfecting Electron through reusability to building the by-design reusable Neutron. With an ability to lift 13,000 kg to LEO, the new rocket, first introduced in 2021, will represent a 43-fold increase in payload capacity compared to the agile Electron.

“The small launch market is growing handsomely every year, but the medium class is where the real choke point is,” says Beck. “A lot of constellation spacecraft are expected to come online at a similar point in time, sort of in the 2025 to 2027 timeframe when a tremendous amount of launch will be required to be executed and there is a very small number of viable companies able to do it.”

Kasaboski agrees that the growing demand gives medium-launch developers an advantage as the now tried and tested SpaceX Falcon 9 will not be able to monopolize the lot.

“The overall rocket supply will increase,” Kasaboski says. “But I think there will be an ongoing issue because the supply is not growing fast enough to outpace demand and that won’t really change unless demand slows down, perhaps if some constellation players have troubles reaching their manufacturing goals or downstream market forces will start telling the constellation manufacturers that there isn’t market for them.”

As things stand, in addition to SpaceX, which has ambitions to expand Starlink to more than 40,000 spacecraft, Amazon Kuiper is expected to begin launching in late 2024. Canada’s Telesat, European Union’s IRIS² and France-based E-Space also expect to begin launching in the coming years.

Starship: The Elephant in the Room

According to Puteaux, one big question mark hangs over the future evolution of the launch market: SpaceX’s super-heavy Starship, which is improving with each flight test. The launcher, pitched as the means that will take humans to the Moon and Mars, has potential “to eat everybody’s lunch,” as Puteaux puts it.

With a capacity to lift 150,000 kg to LEO — compared to Falcon 9’s 22,800 kg — Starship could push prices as low as $150 per kg, compared to the currently estimated $2,720 for a Falcon 9 launch.

Puteaux says Starship will likely be busy with its Human Landing System (HLS) contracts for NASA when the rocket is first operational. “I think there will be room for the commercial market, but it will be lower priority. I don’t see commercial customers launching with Starship in the next 24 months,” he says.

Kasaboski thinks that Starship will put “a lot of pressure” on the market, especially on emerging players due to the low prices it is likely to offer.

“That vehicle will be capable of launching so many satellites at a time, that even if one or two missions a year are dedicated to [rideshares], it should be able to provide a lot more opportunity for medium- to smaller-sized satellites,” says Kasaboski. “There is hope that Starship mostly focuses on bigger things and that their rideshare options are limited.”

The Value of Reusability

Puteaux thinks that cost-optimization through full reusability will provide a competitive edge and a better chance to remain in the market once Starship is up and running.

“Any progress into reusability will help to lower the supplier cost structure, meaning that [the company] will be able to transfer this economy of scale to the customer,” he says.

Aware of the looming threat, Rocket Lab designed its Neutron to be reusable from the start, hoping it would achieve better performance than SpaceX’s tried and tested Falcon 9.

“We can create a system that we think will be very competitive,” Beck says.

Featuring a fairing integrated into the first stage that releases the entire expendable upper stage, Neutron will enable Rocket Lab to perform missions with a rapid turnaround.

“The first stage represents something like 70 percent of the total cost of the rocket,” says Beck. “So, we focus on reusing as much of that as we can and then building the lowest cost second stage possible.”

Texas-based Firefly, which has so far completed two successful flights of its small launcher Alpha, a rocket with a capacity about three times that of Electron, also plans to make its upcoming Medium Launch Vehicle (MLV) reusable.

“The first stage of our MLV is going to be reusable, although not immediately,” Firefly’s Chief Revenue Officer Brett Alexander tells Via Satellite. “On the first flights, we will implement processes and things to demonstrate reusability, and we have concepts and ideas for second stage reusability as well.”

MLV, capable of lifting 16,000 kg into LEO, is expected to make its debut in 2026 and will take around four years to reach its full cadence of monthly launches, Firefly says.

Ariane 6 is fully expandable while Vulcan Centaur has reusable components, which can be recovered after launch, but the Vulcan first stage doesn’t perform a controlled landing.

Both Rocket Lab and Firefly have confidence in the future of their small launchers, insisting that demand for dedicated space rides will continue to grow. While Rocket Lab wants to further reduce the cost of Electron launches through reusability (although getting Neutron off the ground is a priority now, as Beck says), Firefly plans to prove its competitive edge through responsive launch. The company’s Victus Nox mission for the U.S. Space Force, launched a year ago, demonstrated a fast-paced dispatch, requiring merely 24 hours from the payload reception to launch.

“We plan to apply that same sort of operational cadence to the medium launch vehicle when that first flies,” says Alexander. “It’s important from a national security customer perspective, to respond to on orbit threats, but also for LEO constellations who might want to replace a satellite that has died and created a gap.”

If existing forecasts come to pass, the medium lift launchers will unlikely suffer from too much market pressure to begin with. Puteaux expects the market to remain vendor-driven for at least the next four to five years.

“Until there is too much supply, customers will not be able to dictate what they want,” he says. VS