Launch Leaders Address the Need for High Cadence, Reliability, and Listening to Customers

While SpaceX dominated launch activity in 2023, other established and emerging launchers including Relativity Space, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, United Launch Alliance, Arianespace, and Rocket Lab see an abundance of opportunities in the market. Launch execs spoke on a Monday panel at SATELLITE 2024 to share what they’re seeing in the industry, as well as best practices in meeting customer demands.

Stephanie Bednarek, SpaceX’s recently appointed vice president of Commercial Sales, addressed the recent Starship flight test on March 14.

“We’re very happy with the successful test flight three. But we hear the market loud and clear that there needs to be a lot of launch options and high cadence is really important,” Bednarek said. “Higher cadence isn't just about trying to launch as often as you can. It allows you to have more and more reliability. You get additional data which makes you have a safer system and be able to pass that safety and reliability onto customers.”

Bednarek also said SpaceX plans to continue flying Falcon for a while once Starship is operational, and that there will be “layers” of transition to Starship entering service.

“Between Falcon 9, Falcon Heavy and with Starship coming online, we really are able to launch anything to anywhere which is a wonderful capability that we have,” she added.

Mark Peller, vice president for Vulcan Development at United Launch Alliance said ULA’s new Vulcan rocket, which recently entered service with a successful debut launch in January, was designed to be a flexible launch system, with an architecture that can be adjusted from the lower end of the median to the very high end.

“We've worked to develop a product that will be competitive and support a wide range of our customers’ needs. We've developed a system [that is] high performance and capable of supporting a variety of markets,” Peller said. “But we are seeing that we first started to develop volume is expansion in the LEO [Low-Earth Orbit] market beyond what we're expecting. We're actually taking advantage of that opportunity.”

Steven Rutgers, CCO of Arianespace, said the company plans to launch the long-awaited Ariane 6 rocket within the next few months.

“For over 40 years, we've been launching satellites from our launch base in Kourou [French Guiana],” he said. We've launched over 350 rockets. We are very excited to announce that in approximately 90 to 100 days, you're going to see the inaugural flight, the maiden flight, for our Ariane 6 rocket, which is 65 meter tall, very powerful, new launcher. It’s for the changing markets that we see around us today.”

Josh Brost, chief revenue officer of Relativity Space, talked about Relativity’s shift in strategy from Terran 1 for the LEO market, to the medium- to heavy-lift Terran R, designed for mass production.

“Looking at the growing demand, growth was in the LEO market,” said Brost. “As we were configuring Terran 1, we really wanted to optimize it to get the best possible economics to LEO. But at the same time, having a great economics if your launch rate is very low, it’s not a very meaningful market. You have to build capacity at the same time. We're making very thoughtful investments in our factories and our test sites and launch sites to enable us to ramp up capacity quickly.”

Rocket Lab CFO Adam Spice said one challenge for new providers coming into the launch business is how to avoid getting constrained by other parts of the launch ecosystem. Rocket Lab has diversified its offerings with the Space Systems business and the company now builds spacecraft components and buses. He said the two businesses are part of a full strategy to remove bottlenecks in the market.

“Our belief has been that if new space is going to live up to its expectations, you got to remove a lot of the choke points and bottlenecks you don't normally associate with launch,” said Spice. “That’s why at Rocket Lab, 70 percent of our revenue today comes from the satellite side of the business. We think that being an end-to-end provider, we're not just focused on launch, but also providing your customers an end where you get the rest of the entire supply chain, and have a lot more predictability launch because you control how the spacecraft are coming through the supply chain as well.”

On the topic of generating sales and new business in a competitive market, speakers said listening to what customers want is as important as reliability.

“They want to launch the second the [rockets] are available,” said Bednarek. “We just ask that customers are upfront with us about schedules. When you’re buying full performance on the Falcon 9 or Falcon Heavy, we can optimize for your needs.”

Iwao Igarashi, vice president and general manager of Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, Ltd., echoed Bednarek’s sentiments.

“Generally speaking, simply listening to the customer's needs, and applying the solution with customers works,” said Igarashi. “We welcome the open-minded discussion with customers.” VS