Market dynamics in satellite launch industry
Space launch market competition
is the manifestation of
market forces
in the
launch service provider
business. In particular it is the trend of
competitive dynamics
among
payload transport
capabilities at diverse
prices
having a greater influence on launch purchasing than the traditional political considerations of country of manufacture or the national entity using,
regulating
or
licensing
the launch service.
Following the
advent of spaceflight technology
in the late 1950s, space
launch services
came into being, exclusively by
national
programs. Later in the 20th century commercial operators became important customers of launch providers. International competition for the
communications satellite
payload subset of the launch market was increasingly influenced by commercial considerations. However, even during this period, for both commercial- and government-entity-launched
commsats
, the launch service providers for these payloads used launch vehicles built to government specifications, and with state-provided development funding exclusively.
In the early 2010s, five decades after humans first developed spaceflight technology,
privately-developed
launch vehicle systems and space launch service offerings emerged. Companies now faced economic incentives rather than the principally political incentives of the earlier decades. The space launch business experienced a dramatic lowering of per-unit prices along with the addition of entirely new capabilities, bringing about a new phase of competition in the space launch market.
In 2024 it was reported that, counting all global spaceflight and launch activity,
SpaceX
, utilizing its
Falcon family of rockets
had launched close to 87% of all upmass on Earth in the year 2023.
[1]
History
[
edit
]
In the early decades of the
Space Age
?1950s?2000s?the government
space agencies
of the
Soviet Union
and the
United States
pioneered
space technology
. This was augmented by collaboration with affiliated
design bureaus
in the USSR and contracts with commercial companies in the US. All rocket designs were built explicitly for government purposes. The
European Space Agency
(ESA) was formed in 1975, largely following the same model of space technology development. Other
national space agencies
?such as China's
CNSA
[2]
and India's
ISRO
[3]
?also financed the indigenous development of their own national designs.
Communications satellites
were the principal non-government market after the 1970s. Although launch competition in the early years after 2010 occurred only in and among global commercial launch providers, the US market for military launches began to experience multi-provider competition in 2015, as the
US government
began to move away from their previous monopoly arrangement with
United Launch Alliance
(ULA) for military launches.
[4]
[5]
[6]
By 2018, the ULA monopoly on US national security space launch had evaporated.
[7]
[6]
By mid-2017, the results of this multi-year competitive pressure on commercially bid launch prices was being observed in the actual number of launches achieved. With frequent recovery of first-stage boosters by SpaceX,
expendable
missions had become a rare occurrence for them.
[8]
But the new landscape did not come without a cost. Many space launch providers are expending capital to
develop
new lower-cost reusable spaceflight technologies. SpaceX alone had expended about
US$1 billion
by 2017 in order to develop the capability to reuse orbital class boosters on a subsequent flight.
[9]
By 2021, the monopoly previously held by
nation states
to be the only entities to fund, train, and send astronauts for
human space exploration
was ending as the first mission with exclusively private citizens?
Inspiration4
?was launched in September 2021. The rocket and
capsule
for the flight, the training, and the funding are all provided by private entities outside of the traditional NASA process that had held the US monopoly since the early 1960s.
[10]
1970s and 1980s: Commercial satellites emerge
[
edit
]
Non-military commercial satellites began to be launched in volume in the 1970s and 1980s. Launch services were supplied exclusively with launch vehicles developed originally for various
Cold War
military programs, with their attendant cost structures.
[11]
SpaceNews
journalist Peter B. De Selding has asserted that
French government
leadership, and the
Arianespace
consortium "all but invented the commercial launch business in the 1980s" principally "by ignoring
U.S. government
assurances that the reusable
U.S. space shuttle
would make expendable launch vehicles like Ariane obsolete."
[12]
2000-2010
[
edit
]
Little market competition emerged inside any national market before approximately the late 2000s. Some global commercial competition arose between the national providers of various nation states for international commercial satellite launches. Within the US, as late as 2006, the high cost structures built in to government contractors'?
Boeing
's
Delta IV
and
Lockheed Martin
's
Atlas V
?launch vehicles left little commercial opportunity for US
launch service providers
but considerable opportunity for low-cost Russian boosters based on leftover Cold War
military missile
technology.
[13]
DARPA
's
Simon P. Worden
and the
USAF
's Jess Sponable analyzed the situation in 2006 and offered that, "One bright point is the emerging private sector, which [was then] pursuing
suborbital
or
small lift
capabilities." They concluded, "Although such vehicles support very limited
US Department of Defense
or
National Aeronautics and Space Administration
spaceflight needs, they do offer potential technology demonstration stepping stones to more capable systems needed in the future.";
[13]
demonstrating capabilities that would grow in the next five years while supporting published list prices substantially below the rates on offer by the national providers.
[14]
2010-2020s: Competition and pricing pressure
[
edit
]
- ^
First launch of the competitive PSLV-CA and PSLV-XL versions (2007 and 2008)
- ^
Maiden flight of Vega was non-commercial
- ^
Excluding two demo flights of Kuaizhou-1 version in 2013 and 2014
- ^
Atlas + Delta excluding military missions and GPS; Dnepr, Rokot, Zenit
Since the early 2010s, new
private options
for obtaining spaceflight services emerged, bringing substantial
price pressure
into the existing market.
[14]
[15]
[16]
[17]
Before 2013,
Europe's
Arianespace, which flies the
Ariane 5
, and
International Launch Services
(ILS), which marketed
Russia
's
Proton
vehicle dominated the communications satellite launch market.
[18]
In November 2013, Arianespace announced new pricing flexibility for the "lighter satellites" it carries to orbits aboard its Ariane 5 in response to SpaceX's growing presence in the worldwide launch market.
[19]
In early December 2013,
SpaceX
flew its
first launch to a geostationary transfer orbit
providing additional credibility to its low prices which had been published since at least 2009. The low launch prices offered by the company,
[25]
especially for communication satellites flying to
geostationary
(GTO) orbit, resulted in
market pressure
on its competitors to lower their prices.
[18]
By late 2013, with a published price of
US$56.5 million
per launch to
low Earth orbit
, "Falcon 9 rockets [were] already the cheapest in the industry. Reusable Falcon 9s [were project to potentially decrease] the price by an order of magnitude, sparking more space-based enterprise, which in turn would drop the cost of access to space still further through economies of scale."
[15]
Falcon 9 GTO mission pricing in 2014 was approximately
US$15 million
less than a launch on a
Chinese
Long March 3B
.
[26]
Despite SpaceX prices being somewhat lower than Long March prices, the Chinese Government and the
Great Wall Industry
company?which markets the Long March for commsat missions?made a policy decision to maintain commsat launch prices at approximately
US$70 million
.
[27]
In early 2014, the ESA asked European governments for additional
subsidies
to face the competition from SpaceX.
[28]
Continuing to face "stiff competition on price",
[14]
in April seven European
satellite operator
companies?including the four largest in the world by annual revenue?asked that the ESA
"find immediate ways to reduce Ariane 5 rocket launch costs and, in the longer term, make the next-generation Ariane 6 vehicle more attractive for smaller telecommunications satellites. ... [C]onsiderable efforts to restore competitiveness in price of the existing European launcher need to be undertaken if Europe is [to] maintain its market situation. In the short term, a more favorable pricing policy for the small satellites currently being targeted by SpaceX seems indispensable to keeping the Ariane launch manifest strong and well-populated."
[29]
In competitive bids during 2013 and early 2014, SpaceX was winning many launch customers that formerly "would have been all-but-certain clients of Europe's Arianespace launch consortium, with prices that are $60 million or less."
[29]
Facing direct market competition from SpaceX, the large US launch provider
United Launch Alliance
(ULA) announced strategic changes in 2014 to restructure its launch business?replacing two launch vehicle families (Atlas V and Delta IV) with the new
Vulcan
architecture?while implementing an
iterative and incremental development
program to build a partially reusable and much lower-cost launch system over the next decade.
[30]
In June 2014, Arianespace CEO
Stephane Israel
announced that European efforts to remain
competitive
in response to SpaceX's recent success had begun in earnest. This included the creation of a new
joint venture
company from Arianespace's two largest
shareholders
: the launch-vehicle producer
Airbus
and engine-producer
Safran
. No additional details of the efforts to become more competitive were released at the time.
[31]
In August 2014,
Eutelsat
, the third-largest fixed satellite services operator worldwide by revenue, indicated that it planned to spend approximately
€100 million
less each year in the next three years, due to lower prices for launch services and by transitioning their commsats to
electric propulsion
. They indicated they are using the lower prices they can get from SpaceX against Arianespace in negotiations for launch contracts.
[32]
By December 2014, Arianespace had selected a design and commenced development of the
Ariane 6
, its new entrant into the commercial launch market aiming for more competitively priced launch service offerings, with operational flights planned to begin in 2020.
[33]
In October 2014, ULA announced a major restructuring of processes and workforce with the stated objective to decrease launch costs by half. One of the reasons given for the restructuring and new cost reduction goals was competition from SpaceX. ULA had less "success landing contracts to launch private, commercial communications and earth observation satellites" than it had with launch
US
military
payloads, but CEO
Tory Bruno
stated that the new lower-cost ULA launcher could be competitive and succeed in the commercial satellite sector.
[34]
In 2014, the US
GAO
calculated the average cost of each ULA rocket launch for the US government had risen to approximately
US$420 million
.
[35]
By November 2014, SpaceX had "already begun to take market share"
[36]
from Arianespace. Eutelsat CEO
Michel de Rosen
said, in reference to ESA's program to develop the Ariane 6, "Each year that passes will see SpaceX advance, gain market share and further reduce its costs through
economies of scale
."
[36]
European government research ministers approved the development of the new European rocket?
Ariane 6
?in December 2014, projecting the rocket would be "cheaper to construct and to operate" and that "more modern methods of production and a streamlined assembly to try to reduce unit costs" plus "the rocket's modular design can be tailored to a wide range of satellite and mission types [so it] should gain further economies from frequent use."
[14]
In 2015, the ESA was attempting to reorganize to reduce bureaucracy and decrease inefficiencies in launcher and satellite spending which had been tied historically to the amount of tax funds that each country has provided to it.
[37]
In May 2015, ULA stated it would go out of business unless it won commercial and civil satellite launch orders to offset an expected slump in U.S. military and spy launches.
[38]
As of 2015
[update]
, SpaceX remained "the low-cost supplier in the industry."
[39]
However, in the market for launches of
US military
payloads, ULA faced no competition for nearly a decade, since the formation of the ULA
joint venture
from Lockheed Martin and Boeing in 2006. However, SpaceX was also upsetting the traditional military space launch arrangement in the US, which in 2014 was called a monopoly by space analyst Marco Caceres and criticized by some in the
US Congress
.
[40]
By May 2015, the SpaceX
Falcon 9 v1.1
was certified by the
USAF
to compete to launch many of the expensive satellites which are considered essential to US national security.
[41]
And by 2019, ULA, with their next-generation, lower-cost Vulcan/Centaur launch vehicle, was one of four launch companies competing for the US military's multi-year block-buy contract for 2022?2026 against SpaceX (Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy),
Northrop Grumman
(
Omega
), and
Blue Origin
(
New Glenn
), where only the SpaceX vehicles are currently flying and the other three are all slated to make their initial launch in 2021.
[6]
University of Southampton
researcher
Clemens Rumpf
argued in 2015 that the global launch industry was developed in an "old world where space funding was provided by governments, resulting in a stable foundation for [global] space activities. The money for the space industry [had been] secure and did not encourage risk-taking in the development of new space technologies. ... the space landscape [had not changed much since the mid-1980s]." As a result, the emergence of SpaceX was a surprise to other launch providers "because the need to evolve launcher technology by a giant leap was not apparent to them. SpaceX show[ed] that technology has advanced sufficiently in the last 30 years to enable new, game changing approaches to space access."
[42]
The
Washington Post
said that the changes occasioned from multiple competing service providers resulted in a revolution in innovation.
[17]
By mid-2015, Arianespace was speaking publicly about job reductions as part of an attempt to remain competitive in the "European industry [which is being] restructured, consolidated, rationalized and streamlined" to respond to SpaceX price competition. Still, "Arianespace remained confident it could maintain its 50% share of the space launch market despite SpaceX's slashing prices by building reliable rockets that are smaller and cheaper."
[43]
Following the
first successful landing and recovery of a SpaceX Falcon 9 first stage in December 2015
, equity analysts at investment bank
Jefferies
estimated that launch costs to satellite operators using Falcon 9 launch vehicles may decline by about 40% of SpaceX' typical
US$61 million
per launch,
[44]
although SpaceX had only forecast an approximately 30 percent launch price reduction from the use of a reused first stage by early 2016.
[45]
In early 2016, Arianespace was projecting a launch price of
€90?100 million
, about one-half of the 2015 Ariane 5 per launch price.
[12]
In March 2017, SpaceX reused an orbital booster stage that had been previously launched, landed and recovered, stating the cost to the company of doing so "was substantially less than half the cost" of a new first stage. COO Gwynne Shotwell said the cost savings "came even though SpaceX did extensive work to examine and refurbish the stage. We did way more on this one than [is planned for future recovered stages]."
[46]
A 2017 industry-wide view by
SpaceNews
reported: By 5 July 2017, SpaceX had launched 10 payloads during a bit over six months?"outperform[ing] its cadence from earlier years"?and "is well on track to hit the target it set last year of 18 launches in a single year."
[8]
There were indeed 18 successful Falcon 9 launches in 2017. By comparison,
France-based
Arianespace
, SpaceX’s chief competitor for commercial telecommunications satellite launches, is launching 11 to 12 times a year using its fleet of three rockets?the heavy-lift Ariane 5, medium-lift
Soyuz
and light-lift
Vega
. Russia has the ability to launch a dozen or more times with
Proton
doing both government and commercial missions, but has operated at a slower cadence the past few years due to launch failures and [the] discovery of an incorrect material used in some rocket engines.
United Launch Alliance
, SpaceX’s chief competitor for defense missions, regularly conducts around a dozen or more launches per year, but the Boeing-Lockheed Martin joint venture has only performed four missions through mid-year 2017.
[8]
By 2018, the monopoly ULA had held on US national security space launch was over.
[7]
ULA responded to the
Falcon 9
by beginning development in 2014 on the
Vulcan rocket
, a partly reusable vehicle powered by Blue Origin
BE-4
engines, intended to replace its ageing expendable
Atlas V
and
Delta IV
rockets.
[6]
In early 2018,
SpaceNews
reported that "[t]he rise of SpaceX has disrupted the launch industry at large."
[7]
By mid-2018, with Proton flying as few as two launches in an entire year, the
Russian
state corporation
Roscosmos
announced they would retire the Proton launch vehicle, in part due to competition from lower-cost launch alternatives.
[47]
In 2018 SpaceX launched a record 21 times, exceeding the 18 launches in 2017; ULA had flown just 8 flights in 2018.
[48]
That record was again beaten in 2020 with 26 Falcon 9 launches and 2021 with 31 launches.
[49]
In early 2019, the French "
Court of Audit
criticized Arianespace for what it "perceived as an unsustainable and overly cautious response to the swift rise of SpaceX’s affordable and reusable Falcon 9 rocket." The Ariane 6 was found to be uncompetitive with SpaceX launch service provider options, and further found that "the most probable outcome for Ariane 6 is one in which the very existence of the rocket will be predicated upon continual annual subsidies from the
European Space Agency
(ESA) in order to make up for the rocket’s inability to sustain commercial orders beyond a handful of discounted shoo-in contracts."
[50]
Raising private capital
[
edit
]
Private
capital
invested in the space launch industry prior to 2015 was modest. From 2000 through the end of 2015, a total of
US$13.3 billion
of investment finance had been invested in the space sector.
US$2.9 billion
of that was
venture capital financing
,
[51]
of which $1.8 billion was invested in 2015 alone.
[51]
For the space launch sector, this began to change with the January 2015
Google
and
Fidelity Investments
investment of
US$1 billion
in SpaceX. While private satellite manufacturing companies had previously
raised
large capital rounds, that has been the largest investment to date in a launch service provider.
[52]
SpaceX developed the
Falcon Heavy
(first flight in February 2018), and are developing the
Starship
launch vehicle with private
capital
. No government financing is being provided for either rocket.
[53]
[54]
After decades of reliance on
government
funding to develop the
Atlas
and
Delta
families of launch vehicles, in October 2014 the successor company?ULA?began development of a rocket, initially with private funds, as one part of a solution for its problem of "skyrocketing launch costs".
[16]
However, by March 2016 it had become clear that the new
Vulcan
launch vehicle would be developed with funding via a
public?private partnership
with the US government. By early 2016, the US Air Force had committed
US$201 million
of funding for Vulcan development. ULA has not "put a firm price tag on [the total cost of Vulcan development but ULA CEO Tory Bruno has] said new rockets typically cost $2 billion, including $1 billion for the main engine".
[55]
ULA had asked the US government in 2016 to provide a minimum of
US$1.2 billion
by 2020 to assist it in developing the new US launch vehicle.
[55]
It was unclear how the change in development funding mechanisms might change ULA plans for pricing market-driven launch services.
[56]
Since Vulcan development began in October 2014, the privately generated funding for Vulcan development has been approved only on a short term basis.
[16]
[55]
The ULA board of directors?composed entirely of executives from Boeing and Lockheed Martin?is approving development funding on a quarter-by-quarter basis.
[57]
Other launch service providers are developing new
space launch systems
with substantial government capital investment. For the new ESA launch vehicle?Ariane 6, aiming for flight in the 2020s?
€400 million
of development capital was requested to be "industry's share", ostensibly private capital.
€2.815 billion
was slated to be provided by various European government sources at the time the early finance structure was made public in April 2015.
[58]
In the event,
France
's
Airbus Safran Launchers
?the company building the Ariane 6?did agree to provide
€400 million
of development funding in June 2015, with expectation of formalizing the development contract in July 2015.
[59]
As of May 2015
[update]
, the Japanese legislature was considering legislation to provide a legal framework for private company spaceflight initiatives in
Japan
. It was unclear whether the legislation would become law and, if so, whether significant private capital would subsequently enter the Japanese space launch industry as a result.
[60]
[
needs update
]
In the event, the legislation appears not to have become law, and little change in the funding mechanism for Japanese space vehicles are anticipated.
The economics of space launch are driven, in part, by business
demand
in the space economy.
Morgan Stanley
projected in 2017 that "revenue from the global industry will increase to at least
US$1.1 trillion
by 2040, more than triple the figure in 2016. This does not include "the more aspirational possibilities presented by space tourism or mining, nor by [NASA] megaprojects."
[61]
2014 and beyond
[
edit
]
A number of market responses to the increase of lower-cost competition in the space launch market began in the 2010s. As rocket engine and rocket technologies have fairly long
development cycles
, most of the results of these moves would not be seen until the late-2010s and early 2020s.
ULA entered into a partnership with Blue Origin in September 2014 to develop the BE-4
LOX
/
methane
engine to replace the
RD-180
on a new lower-cost first stage booster rocket. At the time, the engine was already in its third year of development by Blue Origin. ULA indicated then they expected the new stage and engine to start flying no earlier than 2019 on a successor to the Atlas V
[62]
A month later, ULA announced a major restructuring of processes and workforce to decrease launch costs by half. One of the reasons given for the restructuring and new cost reduction goals was competition from SpaceX. ULA intended to have preliminary design ideas in place for a blending of the Atlas V and Delta IV technology by the end of 2014,
[34]
[63]
but in the event, the high-level design was announced in April 2015.
[56]
By early 2018, ULA had moved the first launch date for the Vulcan launch vehicle to no earlier than mid-2020,
[64]
and by 2019, were aiming to launch in 2021.
[6]
Blue Origin is also planning to begin flying its own orbital launch vehicle?the
New Glenn
?in 2021
[6]
, a rocket that will also use the Blue
BE-4
engine on the first stage, the same as the ULA Vulcan. Blue Origin's Jeff Bezos initially said they did not plan to compete for the
US military
launch market, stating the market is "a relatively small number of flights. It's very hard to do well and ULA is already great at it. I'm not sure where we would add any value."
[65]
Bezos sees competition as a good thing, particularly as competition leads to his ultimate goal of getting "millions and millions of people living and working in space."
[65]
This decision was reversed in 2017, with Blue Origin saying it did intend to compete for US national security launches.
[66]
[67]
In 2019, Blue was not only competing to offer the New Glenn launch vehicle for the US military's multi-year block-buy contract for "all [US] national security launches from 2022 to 2026" against SpaceX, ULA (for which Blue is on contract to provide the BE-4 engines for the ULA Vulcan), and others, it had "said the Air Force competition was designed to unfairly benefit ULA."
[6]
In early 2015, the French space agency
CNES
began working with
Germany
and a few other governments to start a modest research effort with a hope to propose a
LOX
/
methane
reusable launch system
, to supplement or replace the
Ariane 6
that was only then beginning full development in Europe,
[68]
by mid-2015, and subsequently
[
when?
]
renamed
Ariane Next
,
[
citation needed
]
with flight testing unlikely before approximately 2026. The stated design objective was to reduce both the cost and duration of reusable vehicle refurbishment and was partially motivated by the pressure of lower-cost competitive options with newer technological capabilities not found in the Ariane 6.
[69]
[70]
Responding to competitive pressures, one stated objective of Ariane Next is to reduce Ariane launch cost by a factor of two beyond improvements brought by Ariane 6.
[71]
[
needs update
]
Ariane 6, the European launch vehicle design prior to Ariane Next has seen delays. In 2014, operational flights of the expendable Ariane 6 were slated to begin in 2020,
[33]
but by mid-2021 had slipped to 2022.
[72]
SpaceX stated in 2014 that if they were successful at developing the
reusable technology
, launch
prices
in the
US$5 to 7 million
range for the
reusable Falcon 9
could be achieved in the longer term.
[73]
In the event, SpaceX did not choose to develop the reusable second stage for the Falcon 9, but are doing so for their next-generation launch vehicle, the new fully reusable
Starship
. SpaceX indicated in 2017 that the single-launch marginal cost of the Starship would be approximately
US$7 million
.
[74]
In November 2019, Elon Musk reduced this figure to $2 million -- $900,000 for fuel and $1.1 million for launch support services.
[75]
After the mid-2010s, prices for
smallsat
and
cubesat
launch services began to decline significantly. Both the addition of new small launch vehicles to the market (
Rocket Lab
, Firefly, Vector, and several Chinese service providers) and the addition of new capacity of rideshare services are putting price pressure on existing providers. "Cubesats that used to cost
US$350,000?400,000
to launch are now
US$250,000
and going down."
[76]
According to an industry panel interviewed in October 2018, an industry shakeout is expected between 2019 and 2021 due to the excess supply compared to demand. Prices should reach stability once the new entrants have demonstrated their capabilities.
[77]
[
needs update
]
In the first quarter of 2020, SpaceX launched over 61,000 kg (134,000 lb) of payload mass to orbit while all Chinese, European, and Russian launchers placed approximately 21,000 kg (46,000 lb), 16,000 kg (35,000 lb) and 13,000 kg (29,000 lb) in orbit, respectively, with all other launch providers launching approximately 15,000 kg (33,000 lb).
[78]
Competition for the American heavy-lift market
[
edit
]
As early as August 2014, media sources noted that the US launch market may have two competitive
super-heavy
launch vehicles available in the 2020s to launch payloads of 100 metric tons (220,000 lb) or more to low-Earth orbit. The US government is developing the
Space Launch System
(SLS), capable of lifting very large payloads of 70 to 130 metric tons (150,000 to 290,000 lb) from Earth. On the commercial side, SpaceX has been privately developing their next-generation
Starship
launch system,
[79]
featuring fully reusable boosters and spacecraft, and targeting 150 metric tons (330,000 lb) of payload. Development of the
methalox
Raptor engine
began in 2012,
[80]
first flight tests were done in 2019.
[81]
By 2014,
NASASpaceflight.com
reported: "SpaceX [had] never openly portrayed its
BFR
plans in competition with NASA’s SLS. ... However, should SpaceX make solid progress on the development of its BFR over the coming years, it is almost unavoidable that America’s two HLVs will attract comparisons and a healthy debate, potentially at the political level."
[79]
The Starship is planned to replace the
Falcon 9
and Falcon Heavy launch vehicles, as well as the
Dragon spacecraft
, initially aiming at the Earth-orbit launch market, but explicitly adding substantial capability to support
long-duration spaceflight
in the
cislunar
and
Mars mission
environments.
[82]
SpaceX intends this approach to bring significant cost savings that will help the company justify the development expense of designing and building the Starship system.
[83]
Following the successful
maiden flight
of the SpaceX Falcon Heavy in February 2018, and with SpaceX advertising a
US$90 million
list price for transporting up to 63,800 kg (140,700 lb) to low-Earth orbit, U.S. President
Donald Trump
said: "If the government did it, the same thing would have cost probably 40 or 50 times that amount of money. I mean literally. When I heard $80 [
sic
] million, I'm so used to hearing different numbers with NASA."
[84]
Space journalist Eric Berger extrapolated: "Trump seems to be siding with commercial space advocates, who say that, while rockets like the Falcon Heavy may be slightly less capable than the SLS, they come at a drastically reduced price that will enable much quicker, broader exploration of the Solar System."
[84]
A consolidated Arianspace reported 15 total launches for the Ariane, Soyuz, and Vega rockets in 2021.
[85]
Launch contract competitive results
[
edit
]
Before 2014
[
edit
]
Before 2014, Arianespace had dominated the commercial launch market for many years. "In 2004, for example, they held over 50% of the world market."
[86]
- 2010: 26 geostationary commercial satellites were ordered under long-term launch contracts.
[87]
- 2011: Only 17 geostationary commercial satellites went under contract during 2011 as an "historically large capital spending surge by the biggest satellite fleet operators" began to tail off, something that had been anticipated to follow the various satellite fleets being substantially upgraded.
[87]
- 2012: As of September 2012
[update]
, the major launch providers globally were Arianespace (France), International Launch Services (United States) which markets the Russian Proton launch vehicle, and
Sea Launch
of Switzerland which markets the Russian-Ukrainian Zenit rocket. In late 2012, each of them had manifests that were "full or nearly so for both 2012 and 2013."
[87]
- 23 geostationary orbit communications satellites were placed under firm contract during 2013.
[88]
2014
[
edit
]
A total of 20 launches were booked in 2014 for commercial launch service providers. 19 were for flights to
geostationary orbit
(GEO), one was for a
low Earth orbit
(LEO) launch.
[89]
Arianespace and SpaceX each signed nine contracts for geostationary launches, while
Mitsubishi Heavy Industries
was awarded one. United Launch Alliance signed one commercial contract to launch an
Orbital Sciences Corporation
Cygnus
spacecraft to the LEO-orbiting
International Space Station
following the destruction over the pad of an Orbital
Antares
vehicle in October 2014. This was the first year in some time that no commercial launches were booked on the Russian (
Proton-M
) and Russian-
Ukrainian
(
Zenit
) launch service providers.
[89]
For perspective, eight additional satellites in 2014 were booked "by national launch providers in deals for which no competitive bids were sought."
[89]
Overall in 2014 Arianespace took 60% of commercial launch market share.
[90]
[91]
2015
[
edit
]
In 2015, Arianespace signed 14 commercial-order launch contracts for geosynchronous-orbit commsats, while SpaceX received only nine, with International Launch Services (Proton) and United Launch Alliance signing one contract each. In addition, Arianespace signed their largest launch contract ever?for 21 LEO launches for
OneWeb
using the Europeanized Russian Soyuz launch vehicle launching from the ESA spaceport?and two Vega smallsat launches.
[12]
The launch of the US Air Force's first
GPS III
satellite is expected no earlier than 2017 rather than 2016 as originally planned.
[92]
[
needs update
]
ULA?after having held a
government-sanctioned
monopoly
on US military launches for the previous decade?declined to even submit a bid, leaving the likely contract award winner to be SpaceX, the only other domestic US provider of launch services to be certified as usable by the US military.
[4]
Since 2016
[
edit
]
SpaceX's market share increased rapidly. In 2016, SpaceX had 30% global market share for newly awarded commercial launch contracts, in 2017 the market share reached 45%,
[93]
and 65% in 2018.
[94]
Five years after SpaceX began to recover Falcon 9 booster stages, and three years after they began reflying previously-flown boosters on commercial flights, the US military contracted in September 2020 for flying several
US Space Force
GPS satellite flights in 2021+ on previously-flown booster rockets in order to reduce launch costs by over
US$25 million
per flight.
[95]
By 2023, the overall
demand
for launch services remained high after growing substantially in the previous decade. The "combination of retirements of large launch vehicles like the
Ariane 5
, delays in the development of
Ariane 6
,
New Glenn
and
Vulcan Centaur
, and the withdrawal of
Soyuz
from the market has created a lack of capacity for commercial and government customers alike"
[96]
even with SpaceX launching a record 61 launches in 2022 and over 50 launches in the first eight months of 2023. Furthermore, despite many startups developing
small
and
medium launch vehicles
, only
Rocket Lab
has been consistently launching commercially for the
smallsat
market. For the other competitors, the "year has been filled with delays, failures and bankruptcies." The first launches of
ABL Space Systems
’
RS1
and
Relativity Space
’s
Terran 1
both failed in 2023, while
Virgin Orbit
filed for bankruptcy.
[96]
Launch industry response - to lower prices - from 2014
[
edit
]
In addition to price reductions for proffered launch service contracts, launch service providers are restructuring to meet increased competitive pressures within the industry.
In 2014,
United Launch Alliance
(ULA) began a multi-year major restructuring of processes and workforce to decrease launch costs by half.
[34]
In May 2015, ULA announced it would decrease its executive ranks by 30 percent in December 2015, with the layoff of 12 executives. The management layoffs were the "beginning of a major reorganization and redesign" as ULA endeavors to "slash costs and hunt out new customers to ensure continued growth despite the rise of [SpaceX]".
[97]
[
failed verification
]
According to one
Arianespace
managing director in 2015, "'It's quite clear there's a very significant challenge coming from SpaceX,' he said. 'Therefore, things have to change - and the European industry is being restructured, consolidated, rationalised and streamlined.' "
[98]
Jean Botti,
Chief technology officer
for
Airbus
(which makes the Ariane 5) warned that "those who don't take
Elon Musk
seriously will have a lot to worry about."
[99]
Airbus
announced in 2015 that they would open an
R&D
center and
venture capital
fund in
Silicon Valley
.
[100]
Airbus CEO
Fabrice Bregier
stated: "What is the weakness of a big group like Airbus when we talk about innovation? We believe that we have better ideas than the rest of the world. We believe that we know because we control the technologies and platforms. The world has shown us in the car industry, the space industry and the hi-tech industry that this is not true. And we need to be open to others' ideas and others' innovations."
[101]
Airbus Group CEO
Tom Enders
said: "The only way to do it for big companies is really to create spaces outside of the main business where we allow and where we incentivize experimentation ... That is what we have started to do but there is no manual ... It is a little bit of trial and error. We all feel challenged by what the Internet companies are doing."
[102]
Following a SpaceX launch vehicle
failure in June 2015
?due to the lower prices, increased flexibility for partial-payload launches of the Ariane heavy lifter, and decreased cost of operations of the ESA
Guiana Space Center
spaceport?Arianespace regained the competitive lead in commercial launch contracts signed in 2015. SpaceX’s
successful recovery of a first stage rocket in December 2015
did not change the Arianespace outlook. Arianespace CEO Israel stated the next month that the "challenges of reusability ... have not disappeared. ... The stress on stage or engine structures of high-speed passage through the atmosphere, the performance penalty of reserving fuel for the return flight instead of maximizing rocket lift capacity, the need for many annual launches to make the economics work ? all remain issues."
[12]
Despite ULA restructuring begun in 2014 to decrease launch costs by half,
[34]
the cheapest ULA space launch in early 2018 remained the
Atlas V 401
at a price of approximately
US$109 million
, over
US$40 million
more than a SpaceX standard commercial launch, that the US military began to utilize for some US government missions that flew in 2018.
[103]
By early 2018, two European government space agencies?
CNES
and
DLR
?began concept development for a new reusable engine aimed to be manufactured at one-tenth the cost of the Ariane 5's first-stage engine,
Prometheus
. As of January 2018
[update]
, the
first flight test
for the rocket engine in a demonstration vehicle was expected in 2020. The goal was to "establish a base of knowledge for future launch vehicles that could, maybe, be reusable."
[104]
In the market for launches of
small satellites
?including both
rideshare
launch services on medium-lift and heavy-lift launch vehicles, and the developing capacity from
small launch vehicles
?prices were falling by early 2018 as more launch
capacity
entered the market. Cubesat launches that had previously cost
US$350?400 thousand
had declined by March 2018 to
US$250 thousand
, and prices were continuing to decline. New capacity from Chinese
Long March
and Indian
PSLV
medium-lift vehicles and a number of new small launchers from
Virgin Orbit
,
Rocket Lab
,
Firefly
, and a number of new Chinese small launch vehicles are expected to put more downward pressure on prices, while also increasing the ability of entities launching smallsats to purchase custom launch dates and launch orbits, increasing overall responsiveness to launch purchasers.
[76]
As recently as 2013, nearly half of the world's commercial launch payloads were launched on Russian launch vehicles. By 2018 the Russian launch service market share was projected to shrink to about 10% of the world's commercial launch market. Russia launched only three commercial payloads in 2017.
[105]
Technical problems with the Proton rocket and intense competition with SpaceX have been the prime drivers of this decline. SpaceX's share of the commercial market has grown from 0% in 2009 to a projected 50% for 2018.
[
citation needed
]
By 2018, Russia had indicated it would reduce focus on the commercial launch market. In April 2018, Russia's chief spaceflight official, Deputy Prime Minister
Dmitry Rogozin
said in an interview, "The share of launch vehicles is as small as four percent of the overall market of space services. The four percent stake isn’t worth the effort to try to elbow Musk and China aside. Payloads manufacturing is where good money can be made."
[106]
The global launch market revenue from the 33 commercial orbital launches in 2017 was estimated to be just over
US$3 billion
while the global space economy is much larger at
US$345 billion
(2016 data). The launch industry is becoming increasingly competitive; however, by 2018 there had not been a large increase of launch opportunities in response to decreasing prices.
[105]
In 2018,
Ars Technica
reported that Russia may be the first launch provider to be a casualty of over supply of launch services.
[106]
By May 2018, as SpaceX prepared to launch the first
Block 5
version of Falcon 9, Eric Berger reported in
Ars Technica
that, during the eight years since its maiden launch, Falcon 9 had become the dominant rocket globally, through SpaceX efforts to take risks and relentlessly innovate driving efficiency upwards.
[107]
The first Block 5 booster flew successfully on 11 May 2018, and SpaceX then "lowered the standard price of a Falcon 9 launch from
US$62 million
to about
US$50 million
. This move further strengthens SpaceX’s competitiveness in the commercial launch market."
[108]
In mid-2018, no fewer than three commercial launch vehicles?Ariane 6, Vulcan, and New Glenn?were being targeted for
initial launch
in 2020, two of them explicitly aimed at competitively responding to the offerings of SpaceX
[109]
(although journalists and industry experts were expressing doubts that all these target dates would be met.
[110]
[109]
)
In addition to building new launch vehicles and endeavoring to lower launch prices, competitive responses may include new product offerings, and now do include a more schedule-oriented launch cadence for dual-manifested payloads on offer from Blue Origin. Blue Origin announced in 2018 they intend to contract for launch services a bit differently than the contract options that have been traditionally offered in the commercial launch market. The company has stated they will support a regular launch cadence of up to eight launches per year. If one of the payload providers for a multi-payload launch is not ready on time, Blue Origin will hold to the launch timeframe, and fly the remaining payloads on time at no increase in price.
[111]
This is quite different from how dual-launch manifested contracts have been previously handled by Arianespace (Ariane V and Ariane 6) and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries (
H-IIA
and
H3
). SpaceX and International Launch Services offer only dedicated launch contracts.
[111]
In June 2019, the
European Commission
provided funding for a three-year project called RETALT to "[copy the] retro-propulsive engine firing technique used by SpaceX to land its Falcon 9 rocket first stages back on land and on autonomous drone ships." The RETALT project funding of
€3 million
was provided to the
German Space Agency
and five European companies to fund a study to "tackle the shortcoming of know-how in reusable rockets in Europe."
[112]
In December 2021, the
Government of France
announced a plan to fund the "France-based rocket firm ArianeGroup to develop a new small-lift rocket called Maia by the year 2026."
[113]
The country is doing this separately from the normal intergovernmental projects of the European Space Agency, where France also plays a major role since the ESA founding. The French finance minister,
Bruno Le Maire
said France intends to "have our SpaceX, we will have our Falcon 9. We will make up for a bad strategic choice made 10 years ago."
[113]
Effect on related industries
[
edit
]
Satellite design and manufacturing is beginning to take advantage of these lower-cost options for space launch services.
One such satellite system is the
Boeing 702SP
which can be launched as a pair on a lighter-weight dual-commsat stack?two satellites conjoined on a single launch?and which was specifically designed to take advantage of the lower-cost SpaceX Falcon 9 launch vehicle.
[114]
[115]
The design was announced in 2012 and the first two commsats of this design were lofted in a paired launch in March 2015, for a record low launch price of approximately
US$30 million
per GSO commsat.
[116]
Boeing CEO
James McNerney
has indicated that SpaceX's growing presence in the space industry is forcing Boeing "to be more competitive in some segments of the market."
[117]
Early information in 2015 on the
Starlink constellation
of 4000 satellites operated by SpaceX intended to provide global Internet services, along with a new
factory
dedicated to manufacturing low-cost smallsat satellites, indicate that the
satellite manufacturing industry
may "experience a
supply shock
similar to what the launcher industry is experiencing" in the 2010s.
[42]
[
needs update
]
Venture capital investor
Steve Jurvetson
has indicated that it is not merely the lower launch prices, but the fact that the
known prices act as a signal
in conveying information to other entrepreneurs who then use that information to bring on new related ventures.
[118]
Launch vehicle cost vs mass launch cost
[
edit
]
While vehicle launch cost is a metric utilized when comparing vehicles, the cost per lb/kg launched is also an important factor that is not always directly correlated with the overall launch vehicle cost. The cost per lb/kg launched varies widely due to negotiations, prices, supply & demand, customer requirements, and the number of payloads manifested per launch. Pricing also differs depending on required orbit.
Geosynchronous orbit
launches historically taking advantage of economies of scales with larger launch vehicles and greater use of the maximum payload capacity of a vehicle vs LEO launches. These varying cost and requirements makes
market analysis
imprecise.
[20]
See also
[
edit
]
References
[
edit
]
- ^
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External links
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