America’s la peur du jour — online tools assures me that’s French for “fear of the day” — isn’t the Iran War, AI stealing our jobs, or even Rep. Nancy Mace demands that we not ogle the sleeve tats she demands that we ogle.
If she doesn’t want us to stare at her tats, maybe she should switch back to scoop-neck tops? I dunno.
As it turns out, what bedevils our fine nation today is a satellite operations industry “in panic,” as Quality Space research chief Caleb Henry told Ars Technica over a looming rocket shortage.
It seems crazy. We live in the Golden Age of Rocketry.
SpaceX keeps humming along, setting one Falcon 9 record after another while also working even harder to make Falcon 9 obsolete.
Blue Origin’s reusable New Glenn rocket should get back to work early next year, and Northrop Grumman will eventually work out the kinks with the solid fuel boosters for ULA’s Vulcan rocket. I mean, you would certainly hope so. And then there are innovative launch solutions coming down soon from upstart rivals like Stoke Space, Rocket Lab, and Relativity Space. And those are just the up-and-coming American firms.
Governments and private equity around the world continue dropping serious coin into innovative launch tech.
Speaking of innovation, we can’t leave out SpaceX’s Starship, which will likely enter full service before the end of the year. If all goes to plan, as the program matures, each Starship launch will lift more than five times as much stuff to orbit as Falcon 9, while costing less per kilogram. A lot less.
So with all this going on, how could we possibly run out of launch capacity?
It’s all in the timing… and the pricing… and where the money really is.
And it ain’t in launch.
Hellbound and Down 