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PARIS — Launch companies are reiterating plans to sharply increase flight rates to meet growing government and commercial demand, even as some fall short of earlier projections.
Executives speaking at a Sept. 15 panel at the World Space Business Week conference highlighted efforts to scale up flights of new vehicles that have entered service in the last two years.
“The key for us is cadence,” said Laura Maginnis, vice president of New Glenn mission management at Blue Origin, citing investments in tooling and automation “so that we can scale up with a really dramatic increase in the coming year to meet the needs of all of our customers.”
At the same conference a year ago, another Blue Origin executive projected the company would conduct 8 to 10 New Glenn launches in 2025. To date, New Glenn has launched once this year, the vehicle’s inaugural mission in January.
Maginnis said Blue Origin is preparing for New Glenn’s second launch, carrying NASA’s ESCAPADE Mars smallsat mission, “in the coming weeks,” but she did not provide a date. Rocket Lab, which built the twin spacecraft, noted in a Sept. 12 social media post that it had yet to ship them to the launch site, suggesting liftoff may still be a couple of months away.
She added that Blue Origin is building a fleet of reusable New Glenn boosters and has produced eight upper stages to increase its cadence. “Next year, we’ll be launching multiple times per month. That’s our target.”
Blue Origin is not alone in falling short of forecasts. United Launch Alliance projected 20 launches in 2025 between the Atlas 5 and Vulcan Centaur, but in August CEO Tory Bruno said the company now expects nine.
As recently as June, Arianespace projected five Ariane 6 launches this year, including the debut of the more powerful Ariane 64, with four solid-rocket boosters, but has completed only two Ariane 62 flights, including one in August.
During the panel, Arianespace CEO David Cavaillolès said the company plans two more launches this year for a total of four and declined to confirm if the Ariane 64 will fly before year’s end.
The next launch, scheduled in “a couple of weeks,” will be an Ariane 62 carrying the Sentinel-1D radar imaging satellite for Europe’s Copernicus Earth observation program. The customer and configuration for the other mission will be announced later.
“What I can share is that the development of Ariane 64 is going in the right direction,” Cavaillolès said. “Next year we’ll have quite a lot of Ariane 64. We see, talking to customers, that this is a product that is highly relevant.”
Speakers agreed that demand for launch services remains strong from both commercial constellation operators and governments reacting to a shifting geopolitical landscape. That includes potential demand from the proposed Golden Dome missile defense system in the United States.
“We do see that Golden Dome is going to require a lot of launches,” said Nicole Jordan, who leads business development and strategy for launch vehicles at Northrop Grumman. That includes Eclipse, the medium-lift rocket Northrop is developing with Firefly Aerospace. “Eclipse is being designed to be able to serve a lot of those national security space missions, including Golden Dome.”
Capacity remains tight across most launch providers, with a few exceptions. “We have some room for commercial flights in the near term,” said Nobuyuki Shiina, deputy general manager for business development at Mitsubishi Heavy Industries’ (MHI) space systems unit.
He said demand is prompting MHI to increase launch rates for its H3 rocket. “The original plan was launching six launches per year,” he said, but is now projecting growth. “Not drastically, but year by year: six launches, seven launches, eight launches.”
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