Satellite operators near panic over not enough launch capacity

Their view is this should be the Golden Age of launch, especially in the US, which leads the world. Instead, they want to launch more and the prospects look to be a reduction in launch capability rather than continuous increase. 

Over the last three years, an average of 270 orbital rockets have launched from Earth, a more than threefold increase from only a decade ago. Apparently unexpectedly, demand for launches is going up while launch capability is expected to be declining. 

As part of his job as the director of research at Quilty Space, Caleb Henry speaks with satellite operators all the time. And he is hearing a constant and increasingly loud refrain from companies that want to put stuff into space.

“What we have is an industry in panic,” Henry said.

Stories from around the industry are pouring in. The Amazon LEO constellation can't get enough launches to keep up with the number of satellites they want to put up in orbit, so they're dropping the production rate. These are launches Amazon booked five years ago and enough boosters aren't ready to launch the payloads. AST SpaceMobile is waiting to get their constellation into orbit, and had to tell investors at an earnings call last Monday that they were unable to get enough launch capacity to remain on schedule. They told investors that launch availability was now pacing the deployment of the constellation.

With a growing number of constellations big and small, there is a huge and growing demand signal. The Commercial Space Federation predicts demand for thousands of satellite launches annually in less than a decade. Analysys Mason forecasted that more than 37,000 satellites will need to be launched between 2023 and 2033. Henry’s own firm, Quilty Space, has charted a change in the discussion from how many launch companies the US market can support to who can execute the fastest to meet surging satellite needs. 

For several years, SpaceX and the Falcon 9 have led the launch business. There are two aspects of this "more launches than the rest of the world combined" title that SpaceX has that need to be kept in mind. First, most of the Falcon 9 launches are their own Starlink network satellites so if they accelerate launches for everyone else, they have to either massively increase their launch cadence to add the new customer's launches, or cut their own Starlink business by launching other companies satellites over their own. Second, they've already been making statements that as Starship comes online, that Falcon 9 operations will be slowed and eventually stop. 

In financial documents, it’s clear that SpaceX views commercial launch as a rounding error compared to revenues from its own satellites in space. A majority of the company’s revenue ($4.3 billion out of $7.8 billion) during the second quarter of 2026 came from Starlink, whereas less than 12 percent was due to space services, of which commercial launch is but a fraction. This disparity is only likely to widen.

SpaceX has already moved beyond “peak” Falcon 9 operations. The company flew the rocket 165 times last year, and it will probably fly about 20 fewer missions this year. SpaceX is already making ground system changes to reflect these reductions.

The company’s president, Gwynne Shotwell, has previously said the operational lifetime of the Falcon 9 may end in 2030 or 2032. However, more recently, commercial satellite customers have been running into difficulties when trying to purchase a launch after 2028. One source said SpaceX has told the US government that it intends to end commercial launches after 2028 but will continue flying the Falcon 9 rocket for a limited number of federally contracted missions after that.

It's always best to look at numbers like that "life of the Falcon 9 may end in 2030 or 2032" as what we used to call BAGATOE (pronounced like BAG-A-TOE) an acronym for Best Available Guess At Time Of Estimate. Those dates are very much able and likely to move around. 

The bottom line is the biggest enabler of the start of the commercial space sector being the biggest contributor to growth has been the workhorse Falcon 9. As Eric Berger over at Ars Technica put it, “Without SpaceX, the Western launch market would have been completely screwed over the last half-decade.” Almost entirely due to one simple thing, the war in Ukraine. And the world's not so simple reactions to it. 

Amid all the opportunities to respond to Russia’s retreat from the Western market, only one company stood up. As Russian soldiers marched into Ukraine, SpaceX was beginning to perfect the reuse of the Falcon 9 rocket’s first stage. The company flew the Falcon rocket 31 times in 2021. By 2023, this number nearly tripled to 91 rockets.

As SpaceX’s main competitors struggled to bring new vehicles online, the Falcon 9 rocket flew and flew. It backstopped the entire Western Hemisphere’s launch needs, boosting everything from Europe’s prized Galileo satellites to NASA astronauts to Jeff Bezos’ Amazon LEO vehicles into orbit.

Naturally, with a situation this dire, the pressure is on for new vehicles to come online. Ariane 6 has had a relatively smooth development to this point, but their production goal is 10 vehicles per year, and that's not going to have a big effect. The two that could, Blue Origin's New Glenn and ULA's Vulcan - both of which have often been referred to as competition for SpaceX are currently grounded. Worse than simply grounded, New Glenn has the problem of having to build an entirely new launch pad due to the explosion during the test at the end of May. Still, both of these are being built to be reusable, so they're like the Falcon 9 but able to lift bigger payloads.

In 2020, as part of the National Security Space Launch program, the US Space Force procured dozens of Vulcan launches for military missions. Two years later, Amazon purchased 38 Vulcan launches and options for up to 27 New Glenn flights for the Amazon program, which later would be renamed Amazon LEO. Both had more missions than they could fly for a while.
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Six years after the Space Force award, Vulcan has launched just two military missions. Vulcan has stumbled due to ongoing problems with the performance of its solid rocket boosters, which are provided by Northrop Grumman. The Pentagon has grown increasingly frustrated with the delays and has already moved several payloads previously intended for Vulcan onto SpaceX’s Falcon 9.

What about Starship itself? It's being built partly as replacement for putting the Starlink constellation into orbit, and one concern I've come across (not in the source article for this) is the industry is concerned about having to create satellites that will fit Starship's Pez dispenser for deploying satellites. It seems that would be a relatively minor change compared to the development of Starship itself, but this is the time to consider this.

Yes, there are other systems under development. Rocket Lab's Neutron isn't a heavy lift system, but in the size class of the Falcon 9. As we've talked about before, the goal is to fly Neutron before the end of this year, so compared to some other options, it's closer to being real. Firefly and Northrop Grumman are developing the Eclipse rocket, which will have a lift capacity of 16 metric tons. Less has been published about progress on this rocket, and it will most likely arrive later than the other vehicles on this list.

My personal bet is that no one vehicle is going to get the launch industry out of this current problem. It's going to take years and a mix of different vehicles. 

This isn't a recent picture - I took it from a 2025 post - but it always struck me as an essential, if not the essential, Falcon 9 picture. One taking off while another sits on its launch pad waiting to be next. Image credit: SpaceX