Is There a Future For the Rocket Industry?
A dozen startups are shooting for the stars. Can they all succeed?
The rocket industry looks red hot right now. Every week brings half a dozen announcements of new companies, more funding or another failed test launch. And yet, despite the massive amounts of money pouring in, it is not at all clear the rocket industry is really commercially viable.
Much of the excitement is inspired by SpaceX, Elon Musk’s revolutionary rocket company. And while it is true that SpaceX has changed the market and probably earned a lot of money for Musk, few others companies will be able to replicate that success.
Musk’s key insight was the importance of reusable rockets. Before SpaceX almost all rockets were single use, disposed of after each flight. That made them expensive: imagine how much plane tickets would cost if they threw away the aircraft after every flight.
Once SpaceX mastered the technology — one that many industry insiders thought was decades away — they could undercut everyone else. Fifteen years ago, before SpaceX started regular flights, it cost around $10,000 to send a kilogram into orbit. Now that same kilogram can be launched for less than $3,000.
While reusable rockets make a lot of sense commercially, the technology is expensive and complicated to master. Elon Musk, already wealthy, could afford to bankroll SpaceX for the decade it took to go from building a rocket to landing it. Few other new companies have that luxury.
Hence the second approach adopted by many new entrants. Alongside the fall in rocket prices, a second revolution is space technology has quietly been taking place — the rise of cubesats and smallsats. These small satellites are cheap and relatively easy to build. As a result, the high barriers of entry to the space industry have melted away, inspiring a boom in innovative NewSpace startups.
Traditional satellites are massive, often as big as a double-decker bus. Cubesats, by contrast, are the size of a shoebox. Combine this with falling launch costs, and space suddenly gets much cheaper. For the first time this means space is open to anyone with a few tens of thousands of dollars to spare, from universities to entrepreneurs.
At first these cubesats were launched alongside bigger satellites, taking advantage of unused space on the rocket. As the market for smallsats has grown, however, the need for dedicated launchers has grown. RocketLab, a New Zealand based company, built the Electron launcher specifically to address this market.
Others are now trying to do the same, without yet worrying about reusability. Many, it seems, plan to follow the path taken by RocketLab, who recently announced the development of a new large reusable rocket. First build a simple and profit making smallsat launcher and then follow up with a more complicated version.
Can this really work for so many rocket companies? Some argue that as launch costs fall the demand for launches should rise. Look at Starlink, or OneWeb, they argue. All those satellites will need a lot of rockets. That may be true, but the numbers don’t yet show it.
Over the past few two decades the total number of worldwide rocket launches has increased from around sixty per year to approximately one hundred a year. At first glance this seems to support the optimists. But in reality much of this rise is down to China’s growing space program. Strip them out of the numbers and the rate of launches has barely risen from sixty to seventy a year.
Instead the rocket industry has been changing in other ways. The traditional powers — ArianeSpace and ILS — used to carry the majority of commercial satellites into orbit. Nowadays many of those satellites fly on SpaceX instead, seeking reliable service for a low price.
One reason why the number of rockets is only slowly increasing is simple. As satellites have gotten smaller, more of them can be crammed into a single launch. Some recent flights have carried more than a hundred satellites into orbit. One SpaceX rocket earlier this year sent 143 small satellites into space.
The smallsat revolution might still create demand for dozens of rocket companies. Increased competition might collapse launch costs, drawing ever more entrepreneurs into the newspace industry. The promised explosion in rocket numbers might be just a few years away.
But it’s also possible that it doesn’t pan out. A few large rockets may be enough to satisfy almost the entire demand, putting all but a handful of providers out of business. SpaceX and RocketLab, as the first movers, almost certainly have the advantage. Blue Origin, backed by billionaire Jeff Bezos, is another strong contender. But the rest are betting on a future that may never happen.
Scientists at CERN, the powerful European particle accelerator, found signs of unexplained physics. Examinations of how quarks decay appeared to show certain particles were more likely to be produced than others, a result that contradicts the modern theory of particle physics.
Though the evidence is not yet strong enough for scientists to be sure of what they have seen, it could provide an opening for a new fundamental theory. Some have suggested that a new force of nature might be at play, or perhaps that so far undiscovered particles are being produced in the process.
More detailed studies will be needed to strengthen the evidence. It is also possible, as has happened several times before, that those studies will reveal that nothing unusual is happening at all. For physicists, who know the current model has weaknesses, but don’t know how to replace it, any prospect of new physics is welcome.
A decade ago NASA launched the Commercial Crew Program, an effort to build a commercial capacity to launch astronauts. That goal was successfully met when SpaceX carried a crew to the International Space Station last year. Now NASA wants to encourage companies to develop private space stations in orbit. The Commercial LEO Development program will start later this year, and may see the first contracts awarded early in 2022.
So much reporting around health, science and space exploration is unrealistic, hyperbolic and misleading. These are complicated topics, and there are often no easy or straight forward answers. Instead what is needed is analysis, discussion and an exploration of the possible ways forward.
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