1 hour ago
39
America's la peur du jour — online tools assures me that's French for "fear of the day" — isn't the Iran War, AI stealing our jobs, or even Rep. Nancy Mace demands that we not ogle the sleeve tats she demands that we ogle.
If she doesn't want us to stare at her tats, maybe she should switch back to scoop-neck tops? I dunno.
As it turns out, what bedevils our fine nation today is a satellite operations industry "in panic," as Quality Space research chief Caleb Henry told Ars Technica over a looming rocket shortage.
It seems crazy. We live in the Golden Age of Rocketry.
SpaceX keeps humming along, setting one Falcon 9 record after another while also working even harder to make Falcon 9 obsolete.
Blue Origin's reusable New Glenn rocket should get back to work early next year, and Northrop Grumman will eventually work out the kinks with the solid fuel boosters for ULA's Vulcan rocket. I mean, you would certainly hope so. And then there are innovative launch solutions coming down soon from upstart rivals like Stoke Space, Rocket Lab, and Relativity Space. And those are just the up-and-coming American firms.
Governments and private equity around the world continue dropping serious coin into innovative launch tech.
Speaking of innovation, we can't leave out SpaceX's Starship, which will likely enter full service before the end of the year. If all goes to plan, as the program matures, each Starship launch will lift more than five times as much stuff to orbit as Falcon 9, while costing less per launch. A lot less.
So with all this going on, how could we possibly run out of launch capacity?
It's all in the timing... and the pricing... and where the money really is.
And it ain't in launch.
And Another Thing: Starship Flight Test 14 is tentatively set for August 28, and it'll be a big'un. In addition to attempting another Super Heavy booster catch, the upper stage Ship will enter orbit for the first time and deploy 20 fully operational, high-capacity Starlink V3 satellites. SpaceX would also like to attempt the first Ship catch right back at Starbase, Tex., but the FAA is being hinky about the permit. So we'll see.
For years, ULA held a virtual monopoly on lucrative U.S. government space launches. And yet the company — a joint venture between Boeing and Lockheed, so it isn't publicly traded — has never been valued at more than three or four billion dollars. And that was before SpaceX started taking its lunch money. Er, launch money.
SpaceX doesn't enjoy a nearly TWO TRILLION DOLLAR market cap because it puts stuff in space. SpaceX has a nearly TWO TRILLION DOLLAR market cap because the company first figured out how to get to space comparatively cheaply (with Falcon 9), then figured out how to make serious bank there (with Starlink), and now promises to dwarf Starlink's revenues with Starship and orbital data centers.
The company's unparalleled launch capacity is merely the means to its ends.
You have to understand that before you can understand why satellite operators are "in panic."
First of all, all those government and private equity dollars haven't yet amounted to much. And Stoke Space, Rocket Lab, and Relativity Space have yet to deliver on anything like the scale of Falcon 9.
Second, if the money isn't in actually launching stuff, then why should SpaceX keep selling more lift than the bare minimum it might need to sustain cash flow?
SpaceX's Falcon 9 puts up Starlink satellites at a loss to the company, but then those satellites generate billions worth of subscriber revenue — and growing with each launch. Starship will do the same, but bigger and better, branching out from lower-revenue internet service to (hopefully) much higher-revenue data services and xAI. Starship is coming along quickly enough that SpaceX has already slowed Falcon 9's launch cadence for the first time this year, and will probably retire it completely around 2030-2032.
So, you have your own satellite business that you need to get into LEO? You'll either have to stand in line behind Starlink and xAI, or wait for those rival firms to get hopping.
“I think it’s fair to say there’s more than a bit of a panic about the availability of launch,” Stoke's Devon Papandrew told Ars Technica. “Even if the four medium-lift new entrants all achieve their goals in terms of flight success and cadence, it’s actually not going to make that much of a difference in demand right away. I’ve been saying for a while that I think 2028 is when this problem becomes really acute.”
What occurs to me is that while SpaceX might make the most money keeping Starship mostly to itself for data-center launches and Artemis missions to Luna, maybe the company should think twice about retiring Falcon 9 outright.
It's a proven workhorse — with enough remaining demand to instill "more than a bit of a panic" in potential customers — so spinning off Falcon 9 might make good business sense. Sell or lease the operations to a third party, then sit back and collect the royalties. There might even be a case for operators to band together and make a pitch to assume operations themselves.
There's little sense in SpaceX devoting talent, capital, and infrastructure to a rocket the company sees as nearly obsolete. But it might make a whole lot of sense for somebody else.
English (US) ·