An unexpected Halloween scare

Over the course of the last several months, I've run stories saying SpaceX is cutting launches of their ultra-reliable workhorse Falcon 9 on the way toward completely shutting down Falcon 9 operations "real soon now" and a shortage of launch capabilities - worldwide - is coming.  

To borrow a joke we used to throw around at work all the time, "don't worry - it's not that bad. It's worse." 

Along that line, yesterday, Ars Technica's senior space editor Eric Berger ran a longer than usual post based on the evidence that for roughly the last 25 years, SpaceX needed NASA - sometimes desperately - and that has changed to the point that now NASA needs SpaceX far more than SpaceX needs NASA. In a way, this should be completely obvious; I mean, in calendar 2025, SpaceX launched more than the rest of the world combined. Of the US' global leading 181 launches, 165 of them - 91.1% - were SpaceX launches. China launched 91 times.

Today, Ars follows up with a headline that Analysts find that the looming launch crisis is “more severe” than anticipated. The short version of the story is that the US will be really pinched for at least the next five years, and probably won't be over the shortage until more like "the late 2030s".

A new report from the analytics firm Quilty Space confirms that, outside of China, the world faces a significant shortage of rockets over the next five years.

The firm estimates that between now and 2030, there will be a shortfall of about 150 launches compared to demand from satellite operators and civil space agencies. If demand from the US military is added in—and SpaceX does not extend the Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy program to accommodate increased national security needs—the shortage could be doubled.

Caleb Henry, director of research at Quilty Space, put it this way. “What we wanted to get at is to understand how severe this launch crisis is and when will it be resolved. What we learned is that the launch crisis is more severe than we thought and that it will not go away this decade for sure, and it might not abate until sometime late in the 2030s.” 

It's true that SpaceX is a major contributor to the problem - since they did over 91% of last year's US launches, how could they not be? There's more than one reason for that, and the two big ones are that Starship is far behind schedule and that SpaceX has gone public on the stock market. To remain a good investment they need to be making money. The biggest chip that SpaceX has that can pay them well isn't putting small satellites into orbit, it's Starlink, and the biggest thing they can do for Starlink is to continually upgrade their network. Launching the V3 Starlink satellites is a job for Starship. 

Of course, SpaceX isn't the only factor, they're just the big, obvious one. In addition, the war in Ukraine took Russian launches off the Western market, Amazon's Leo constellation's demand is using up Atlas Vs and European Space Agency's Ariane 6s, developmental delays like the Vulcan being grounded, the New Glenn blowing up its launch complex, Rocket Lab's Neutron not being quite ready, along with Relativity Space's Terran R, and Nova. The retirement of the Falcon 9 as a rocket for commercial service is looking to be in the early 2030s, but that still adds into the big picture Quilty is trying to understand.

At a time when the supply of commercial rockets is contracting, demand for satellite launch is soaring, from megaconstellation operators such as Amazon to a flurry of small satellite startups. The report estimates the crunch will become most acute in 2028 but should then slowly improve.

“How should people react and plan around this?” Henry asked. “To be honest, I don’t have a good answer. If you haven’t booked your launch already, and you need one, you’re late.”

It seems to me that this could be temporary. Starship isn't operational, yet, but it could well be that the talk about launching not just more than once a week, but more than just once a day is the way out of this. Now it's true that we haven't seen a model Starship with a more conventional or typical looking cargo bay, just the Pez dispensers, but it doesn't seem like something that should take a lot of development. Not much design effort, just coordination, meaning a subcontractor could do that. It's true that, as Quilty points out, “SpaceX has also stopped affirming Starship as a commercial launcher” and there's no evidence that the company is putting effort into developing a conventional payload fairing door for the vehicle to accommodate traditional satellites and spacecraft.

I can see someone like a major satellite launch customer (cough, like Amazon Leo, cough) coming to Gwynne Shotwell at SpaceX saying, "if we can get the launches to put up our satellites, we'll design the Starship Payload door and the stuff behind it, and qualify it for flight so that you don't have to stretch staff to do it." Or, as Dan Goldberg, president and chief executive of Telesat, said, they could design their satellites to fit in the SpaceX Pez dispenser's layout. Granted not every satellite could be "Pez-shaped," but it's a starting point. 

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