Satellite operators are in panic mode due to a worsening launch crisis

(This is a long one.)

from
https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/08/theres-a-huge-launch-crunch-right-now-and-it-will-probably-get-worse/

Satellite operators are in panic mode due to a worsening launch crisis
What happens if the Falcon rockets stop flying?

Eric Berger – Aug 17, 2026 4:00 AM |  416

The Western launch market would be in big trouble without the Falcon 9. 
Credit: SpaceX

This should be a golden era of launch.

During the last three years, an average of 270 orbital rockets have 
launched from Earth, a more than threefold increase from only a decade 
ago. By every metric available, the launch industry is crushing it: 
Prices have never been more competitive, launches never more frequent, 
and access to space never more rapid.

Paradoxically, though, there is a growing crunch in launch availability.

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.

Anecdotes abound. A Canadian satellite company, Telesat, recently 
received inquiries from other companies asking if they would consider 
sharing some of the 11 Falcon 9 launches Telesat has booked for its new 
constellation. (Sorry, no, is the reply). The Amazon LEO constellation 
has had to throttle back production of satellites because few of the 
dozens of launches it booked half a decade ago are ready. And during an 
earnings call last Monday, officials from AST SpaceMobile said launch 
availability was now the pacing item for deploying its 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.

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And if things are bad now, there are reasons to believe they may get 
even worse over the next two to four years.

X marks the spot
Myriad factors are driving this crunch, but the principal concern of 
late has been SpaceX.

The company that is almost exclusively responsible for the dramatic 
increase in launch availability in the 2020s has signaled that it 
intends to wind down Falcon 9 operations as quickly as possible in favor 
of the larger Starship rocket. Some might see that as a good thing due 
to Starship’s enormous payload capacity. But there are growing concerns 
that SpaceX will largely focus on its own payloads—Starlink v3 
satellites and orbital data centers—because of their potential to drive 
far greater profits. The Starship rocket’s PEZ satellite dispenser, 
optimized for Starlink, is an indication of the company’s priorities.

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.

Whether or not these dates stick, it has become clear to commercial 
satellite operators that they can no longer reliably plan their future 
around the workhorse Falcon 9 rocket, creating a huge pain point for the 
commercial space industry in the United States and other Western countries.

This is because of an inescapable reality: Without SpaceX, the Western 
launch market would have been completely screwed over the last half-decade.

The war in Ukraine
On February 24, 2022, Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine. 
This took Russian rockets off the table for Western countries, including 
European nations. Most immediately impacted was OneWeb, which lost some 
satellites already in Soyuz launch processing and eventually had to turn 
to a direct competitor, SpaceX and its Falcon 9 rocket, to complete its 
constellation.

The loss of the Soyuz and Proton rockets for Western commercial purposes 
came at the same time that two other leading providers were shutting 
down their older rockets for newer models. In Europe, the transition 
from the Ariane 5 to Ariane 6 rocket was underway. Across the pond, 
United Launch Alliance sought to end its dependence on Russian engines 
for the Atlas V rocket by migrating to the new Vulcan rocket.

Both projects had initially targeted completion by 2020, but by the time 
of the war’s outbreak, neither new vehicle was close to flying for the 
first time. Effectively, this meant that Arianespace and United Launch 
Alliance had a dwindling number of older rockets that were already 
spoken for.


Two solid-fueled boosters and a Vulcain 2.1 main engine propel the 
Ariane 6 rocket into the sky over French Guiana. Credit: ESA – M. Pédoussaut
The war also offered a chance for two Asian nations with ties to the 
West, Japan and India, to step up. Both countries, with the H3 rocket in 
Japan and LVM3 in India, had been seeking to support the commercial 
satellite industry. But the H3’s debut slipped to 2023, and the first 
launch ended in failure. The eighth launch of the vehicle in 2025 was 
also a failure. To date, the vehicle has not been a commercial success 
and averages only a handful of launches a year. India’s LVM3 has 
launched even fewer times, just once or twice a year.

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.

Waiting on Vulcan and New Glenn
The Ariane 6 rocket made its debut flight in July 2024 and has had a 
nice track record. But with a production goal of ten vehicles a year, 
the rocket won’t make a meaningful dent in the global need for launch 
capacity.

That left just two large rockets, the Vulcan vehicle and Blue Origin’s 
New Glenn booster, as the key vehicles to bring competition to SpaceX 
and help ease the growing demand for launch capacity in the mid-2020s.

The demand has long been evident. Even before these two rockets reached 
the launch pad, their launch manifests were booked up. 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.

To compound problems, neither rocket has had an easy road from its debut 
(January 2024 for Vulcan, January 2025 for New Glenn) toward reaching a 
higher cadence.

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.

New Glenn got started even later than Vulcan, but it appeared to be 
reaching a nice cadence after successfully landing a first stage booster 
on the rocket’s second flight in November 2025. Unfortunately, tragedy 
struck in May of this year when the rocket exploded during a static fire 
test in Florida. This conflagration took out the vehicle’s only launch 
pad. New Glenn is therefore offline at least until the end of 2026, and 
despite the company’s professed optimism about returning to flight 
rapidly, probably into the early months of 2027.

So nearly half a decade after the onset of the Ukraine War, the Western 
launch market has not changed much. Ariane 6 has made a difference for 
Europe, but for the rest of the commercial launch industry, a holding 
pattern remains as Falcon 9 backstops all.

What about the next generation?
Vulcan and New Glenn are heavy lift rockets, but beyond them, a new 
generation of US medium-lift vehicles is in development.

The smallest is Stoke Space’s Nova rocket, which is intended to be fully 
reusable with a capacity of up to 7 tons to low-Earth orbit. Stoke’s 
chief executive, Andy Lapsa, has been careful not to release a target 
date publicly. However, during a recent visit to the company’s factory 
in Kent, Washington, company officials told Ars that they hope to 
deliver the flight version of the first stage to the launch site in 
Florida for testing this fall. A launch seems possible during the first 
half of 2027 if things go well.

Rocket Lab’s Neutron vehicle can loft 13 metric tons to low-Earth orbit 
in a reusable model and 15 tons in expendable. This vehicle’s launch 
target, which was once the year 2024, has slipped multiple times. 
According to its latest guidance, the company plans to ship Neutron to 
its launch site in Virginia before the end of this year. A debut launch 
in 2027 seems plausible but not guaranteed.

Since being acquired by Google billionaire Eric Schmidt, Relativity 
Space has been making steady progress on the large Terran R vehicle, 
which is intended to have a reusable mode lift capacity of 23.5 metric 
tons and 33.5 metric tons in expendable mode. Given recent progress with 
Terran R, a debut launch is plausible within the next 12 months, but 
since this is such a big rocket, there may be additional delays.


Rocket Lab’s Neutron rocket is shown in this rendering delivering a 
stack of satellites into orbit. Credit: Rocket Lab
Finally, Firefly and Northrop Grumman are developing the Eclipse rocket, 
which will have a lift capacity of 16 metric tons. Less is known about 
progress on this rocket, and it will most likely arrive later than the 
other vehicles on this list.

Even if one or more of these rockets makes its debut in 2027, none of 
the companies above have much experience with medium-lift growing pains. 
It will take time to scale up operations to produce more than a handful 
of launches per year. For this reason, Stoke’s vice president of 
business development, Devon Papandrew, thinks the launcher crisis will 
worsen in the next couple of years before conditions improve.

“I think it’s fair to say there’s more than a bit of a panic about the 
availability of launch,” Papandrew told Ars. “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.”

So what will happen?
As the impending launch crisis comes to the industry, questions have 
begun to swirl about whether the federal government might intervene to 
keep the Falcon rockets flying. After all, NASA financially supported 
the development of the Falcon 9 and its launch pads to some degree 
through the Commercial Cargo program. And the US military has leverage 
over SpaceX through the National Security Space Launch Program.

Some of the wilder ideas involve forcing SpaceX to sell its Falcon 9 
infrastructure to a third party—another space company, a 
space-interested billionaire, or someone else. Others have suggested 
that the US government could step in and nationalize SpaceX. That could 
be done if the US Congress passes a law stating that assured access to 
space is essential to national defense.

There are some major problems with this approach, though. Chief among 
them is that the Falcon 9 hardware and infrastructure work so well 
because of the engineers and technicians at SpaceX who have developed 
and continue to perfect the launch system. Many of these people would 
probably not want to work for a new employer (or the government) and 
would likely move to other positions or remain at SpaceX and move to the 
Starship program.

SpaceX founder Elon Musk would also have a massive war chest to oppose 
any such action, and because he is a large donor to Republicans, he 
would have considerable political capital to deploy.

And does it make sense to make war on SpaceX? The company’s success in 
launch and low-Earth orbit communications offers the United States its 
best weapon in the civil and national security contest with China, and 
lawmakers would likely be reluctant to kneecap that effort. For these 
reasons, space policy experts do not expect a serious conflict between 
the government and SpaceX over the future of the Falcon 9 rocket.

“Any government effort in this area to keep Falcon 9 flying would have 
to be mutually agreeable and beneficial to both parties,” said Scott 
Pace, director of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington 
University.

Pace and other policy experts said the US government could be taking 
actions now to address these problems, such as increasing the number of 
spaceports and being more accommodating of expansion at existing US 
launch facilities. Efforts could also be made to sign “technology 
safeguards agreements” with nations like Japan to allow US rockets to 
launch commercially from there and elsewhere in the world.

But the fundamental problems are not going away.

Over the last decade, many people in the US launch industry have issued 
forecasts that have been far too optimistic, and so far, only SpaceX has 
been able to rapidly increase its cadence. Demand has outstripped 
supply, and that will probably continue for some time.

“The way I think this pans out is we have a slow and eventual 
introduction of new vehicles and a slow and hopefully steady ramp up of 
rockets from incumbents,” Henry said. “And come the 2030s, we get some 
semblance of balance. But I don’t see it happening quickly, unfortunately.”

Photo of Eric Berger
Eric Berger Senior Space Editor
Eric Berger is the senior space editor at Ars Technica, covering 
everything from astronomy to private space to NASA policy, and author of 
two books: Liftoff, about the rise of SpaceX; and Reentry, on the 
development of the Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon. A certified 
meteorologist, Eric lives in Houston.

comments include

Bongle Ars Praefectus
16y
4,513
Subscriptor++
Nora Lenderbee said:
Wouldn't the obvious marketplace solution be for SpaceX to raise the 
price of Falcon 9 launches until customers cut back on demand?
That would likely cause a different kind of crisis: all the 
constellation business models probably would fall apart if their 
estimated launch costs doubled or tripled.
Report
Upvote
160 (161 / -1)
Monday at 7:26 AM
ricardoRI Ars Scholae Palatinae
9y
1,134
Subscriptor
Nora Lenderbee said:
Wouldn't the obvious marketplace solution be for SpaceX to raise the 
price of Falcon 9 launches until customers cut back on demand?
It may be the “marketplace solution” but it does not solve the 
fundamental capacity issues.

Space X isn’t going to shut down the F9 program until Starship comes on 
line. If only half of Musk’s puffery is true, that will provide immense 
capacity and squeeze the the other launch companies.