Can anyone realistically challenge SpaceX’s launch supremacy?
Summary
- And if its boss now tries to kill NASA’s own heavy lifter, will that matter?
Elon Musk’s appointment as Donald Trump’s waste-cutter-in-chief involves at least one glaring conflict of interest. A paradigm example of waste, which would be near the top of any cutter’s hit list, is the Space Launch System (SLS), a rocket designed to carry 95-tonne payloads into orbit to support America’s plan to return astronauts to the Moon. Adjusted for inflation, it has so far cost more than $30bn—and has been launched just once. Moreover, it has an obvious and much cheaper commercial rival in the form of Starship, a vehicle with a greater capacity and which, unlike the SLS, is reusable. Starship was developed by SpaceX. But, as the world knows, SpaceX’s boss is Mr Musk.
How this will play out remains to be seen. Indeed, the future of NASA in its entirety is in jeopardy if Mr Musk means what he says about the size of his proposed cuts ($2trn from a federal budget of $7trn). That organisation, which has little to show for a $25bn annual budget, is surely ripe for the slaughterhouse.
Yet, though it would look bad if Mr Musk killed it, the SLS is not and never could be a true competitor for Starship. Moon missions aside, whether it lives or dies makes no practical difference to his armlock on America’s space-launch industry. SpaceX’s actual main challenger at the moment is Blue Origin, a firm founded by Jeff Bezos in 2000, 18 months before SpaceX’s formation in 2002.
Blue streak?
Blue Origin has not yet enjoyed SpaceX’s stellar success. Its current product, New Shepard, is a toy. (It cannot reach orbit. It merely carries rich tourists above the Karman line, 100km up, which is the official boundary of outer space.) But that will soon change. The firm is now conducting pre-launch tests on New Glenn, a rocket both reusable and orbital. If all goes well, a prototype will lift off from a specially built pad at Cape Canaveral sometime in the next few weeks.
New Glenn actually will be a challenger to SpaceX. It will carry 45 tonnes into orbit. That is still less than the 150 tonnes a Starship will manage, but more than the 23 tonnes of a Falcon 9. And it will be enough for Mr Bezos to get busy assembling Project Kuiper, his proposed satellite-internet constellation. Whether New Glenns will be produced in the sort of quantities, and achieve the turn around times, planned for Starships, remains to be seen.
Success for New Glenn would help assuage American officialdom’s understandable nervousness that any firm, however cosy its relationship with the president, should have an armlock on the important business of launch—a nervousness implicit in the name, Assured Access to Space, of a large bit of America’s Space Force that is involved in procurement. There is also a second back-up of sorts, though not a very convincing one, in the form of the United Launch Alliance’s (ULA’s) Vulcan Centaur.
The ULA is a joint venture between Lockheed Martin and Boeing that represents the last vestiges of the old way of doing space flight—with big, disposable rockets and relaxed launch schedules. Vulcan Centaur lifts 27 tonnes, making it a theoretical competitor of Falcon 9. But it has seen only one lift-off since its maiden flight in January. And it will not be reusable. Moreover, it depends on Blue Origin for its first-stage engines—the BE-4 motors which that firm developed to launch New Glenn. Indeed, there has been talk in the past that Blue Origin might simply buy the ULA, though what it would do with such a legacy asset is unclear.
A duopoly (or even a duopoly-plus), though better than a monopoly, is still unideal. As Winston Churchill said of fuel supplies to Britain’s navy, “safety and certainty…lie in variety and variety alone". A number of smaller and less billionaire-dependent firms are therefore still paddling, though admittedly only at the shallow end of the market.
Rocket Lab’s Electron launchers have been lifting small (up to 320kg) loads into bespoke orbits since 2018. Now the firm, based in Long Beach, California, plans one called Neutron, with a capacity of 13 tonnes and a scheduled first launch in the middle of next year. It is also getting into the space-science market with a pair of Mars-bound satellites built for the University of California, Berkeley which it hopes will be launched next year.
Hot on its heels is Firefly Aerospace, based near Austin, Texas, which had the first fully successful launch of its Alpha rocket (capacity just over a tonne) in 2023 and is planning a larger device (capacity 16 tonnes) in collaboration with Northrop Grumman. Firefly is interested in space science, too. Its Blue Ghost lunar lander, due for launch next year on a SpaceX vehicle, will carry customers’ instruments and experiments to the Moon’s surface.
Northrop Grumman operates on its own recognisance as well. Its Antares system can lift eight tonnes and its smaller offering, Pegasus, 450kg. It also offers the delightfully dubbed Minotaur, which, as the name suggests, is cobbled together out of parts from other rockets—namely motors from decommissioned Minutemen intercontinental ballistic missiles and bodywork from Pegasus.
Those are the successes. In rocketry, however, failure is certainly an option. In 2023 Relativity Space, a neighbour of Rocket Lab in Long Beach, tried unsuccessfully to reach orbit with a rocket called Terran 1 that was made largely by 3D printing. It hopes to have another go in 2026 with a modified version, Terran R, which relies less on that novel manufacturing technique. ABL Space Systems in El Segundo, to the north-west of Long Beach, likewise failed in 2023 and has scaled back its ambitions from being an all-comers commercial service to focusing on missile defence. And Astra Space, of Alameda, California, has undergone several corporate reincarnations in the wake of failed launches. It is currently pinning its hopes on what it calls Rocket 4, which has attracted the interest of the Defence Innovation Unit, a part of the Pentagon.
Destruction testing
If you have money, of course, launch failures provide a learning opportunity. They are, indeed, part of SpaceX’s business model, as its approach to developing Starship has shown. But even that mighty firm came close to death when its first three attempts to send a rocket into orbit, between 2006 and 2008, went wrong. Another failure would have killed it. But the fourth go worked—and the rest is history.
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