When a Falcon 9 lifted off from Vandenberg Space Force Base June 12, it carried a broad cross-section of the general smallsat industry. Transporter-8, SpaceX’s eighth dedicated rideshare mission, included 72 payloads for deployment right into a sun-synchronous orbit. Several firms developing constellations had satellites on board, like radar imaging company Iceye, optical imaging company Satellogic and weather and tracking company Spire. Several smaller firms and organizations had spacecraft on board, as did aerospace giant Lockheed Martin, which deployed 4 satellites for DARPA’s Blackjack program.
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A few of the customers on Transporter-8 were flying their first satellites, but none had an experience quite like Starfish Space. The startup was flying its Otter Pup spacecraft, to show satellite servicing technologies, as a part of an orbital transfer vehicle (OTV) developed by Launcher. Nevertheless, Launcher’s OTV began spinning uncontrollably shortly after separation from the Falcon 9’s upper stage, an anomaly Launcher later blamed on software.
Launcher deployed Otter Pup and its other payloads, but Starfish Space said it was struggling to recuperate control of the spacecraft. “Given the events experienced post-launch and the present state of the satellite, it’s unlikely that Otter Pup will have the option to proceed with its mission,” the corporate said in a press release a pair weeks after the launch. “Nevertheless, we’ll proceed to try to save lots of Otter Pup, and we’re grateful for the continued support of our mission partners.”
Such drama is, fortunately, the exception to the rule for rideshare launches, which have change into increasingly routine. Nevertheless, the industry itself is facing upheaval. As interest in smallsats grows, more firms have entered the market to rearrange launches and supply additional services, like OTVs for “lastmile” delivery of rideshare customers to their destinations. Those firms are also finding it difficult to search out alternative rides in a launch market where a single company — SpaceX — is dominant.
Increasing demand and increasing size
Satellites have launched as secondary payloads for many years. For much of that point, nevertheless, those payloads were arranged on a one-off basis, hitching rides ad hoc on rockets with room to spare. Growing interest during the last 15 years in cubesats, often developed by universities or startups, led to the emergence of rideshare aggregators, firms that might function an intermediary between satellite developers on the lookout for rides and launch service providers with excess capability on the market.
“The rideshare market continues to grow annually with increased demand from recent industrial, academic and government customers, in addition to from our long-term customers expanding their constellations,” said Jeanne Allarie, chief industrial officer of Exolaunch, a German company that gives rideshare launch services.
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But because the demand for rideshare launches grows, the shoppers for those launches are changing. Renato Panesi, chief industrial officer of Italian rideshare operator D-Orbit, says his customers fall into two broad categories. The most important customers for his company are smallsat constellation developers trying to construct out their systems. The opposite major group are startups, universities and governments trying to launch their first satellites.
Those two customer sets are moving in numerous directions. The constellation market isn’t growing as fast as projected just a few years ago, which D-Orbit suspects is because of a mix of supply chain issues affecting the satellite industry and challenges raising capital.
In the opposite category, Panesi said the corporate has seen a rise in demand from regions like Latin America and the Middle East which are just beginning to get entangled in space operations. “That may be a superb signal if we consider that one among the goals of the community is to democratize access to space.”
The dimensions of smallsats searching for rides can be changing. “A lot of our cubesat customers are growing in size and even going to the microsat form factor to extend their capabilities and performance,” said Allarie. “Microsats are growing in mass and volume too, profiting from cost-efficient rideshare launches.”
D-Orbit has also seen microsatellites get heavier, converging on a spread of 120 to 150 kilograms. “It’s like mobile phones,” Panesi said. “They were big within the ’90s, after which they became smaller, only to change into greater but more powerful.”
Customers are increasingly on the lookout for greater than only a port on a payload adapter. Several rideshare firms have developed or are working on OTVs that may provide “last-mile” delivery of satellites after deployment from the launch vehicle in addition to accommodate hosted payloads. That features D-Orbit, which has flown its ION vehicle 11 times.
Those added capabilities bring with it additional complexity and challenges, because the Launcher OTV problem on Transporter-8 illustrated. Momentus bumped into problems with its first Vigoride OTV launched last yr but had more success with two vehicles launched this January and April. Those missions weren’t complete successes, though: Momentus said July 28 that two NASA cubesats carried on its Vigoride-6 tug in April were deployed within the improper orbit, which it blamed on “human error within the mapping of a software command.”
Spaceflight bows out
One in every of the pioneers of the trendy rideshare industry was Spaceflight. The Seattle-based company had arranged launches for a whole lot of smallsats on greater than 50 launches, from Astra’s Rocket 3.3 to India’s PSLV and SpaceX’s Falcon 9. That included buying a whole Falcon 9 for its SSO-A dedicated rideshare mission in 2018, a forerunner to SpaceX’s own Transporter series of missions.
It was a surprise to many within the industry, then, when Firefly Aerospace announced June 8 that it had acquired Spaceflight for an undisclosed sum. Firefly said it acquired Spaceflight to enhance its ability to supply end-to-end space transportation services together with its Alpha launch vehicle and Space Utility Vehicle transfer vehicle.
“With a high market demand for our on-orbit services and rapid response missions, this acquisition uniquely positions Firefly to reply immediately to our customers’ needs,” Bill Weber, chief executive of Firefly, said in a press release about its purchase of Spaceflight.
Firefly said it will retain Spaceflight’s payload processing facility and its workforce. Nevertheless, it not plans to proceed Spaceflight’s primary business of arranging rides on a wide range of non-Firefly launch vehicles.
“We’re currently assessing the needs of our combined customers to fulfill their mission requirements with Firefly’s launch vehicles,” Firefly spokesperson Risa Schnautz said. “Firefly will honor Spaceflight’s current contracts but won’t be aggregating payloads on other launch vehicles moving forward.”
Neither Firefly nor Spaceflight offered more details in regards to the deal that effectively takes a serious rideshare aggregator off the market. Some within the industry have speculated that Mitsui & Co. and Yamasa Co., the Japanese firms that bought Spaceflight in 2020, were not considering investing in Spaceflight’s development of the Sherpa line of tugs. Spaceflight also had a strained relationship with SpaceX, with SpaceX informing rideshare customers in March 2022 it will not work with Spaceflight beyond missions already manifested.
Other rideshare firms are still weighing the consequences of Spaceflight’s exit. “Our pipeline is continuous to grow, but it surely’s not connected with Firefly’s acquisition of Spaceflight,” said Exolaunch’s Allarie. “This event hasn’t had an impact on our business.”
“I feel it’s too early to say,” said D-Orbit’s Panesi. He noted the 2 firms had collaborated prior to now, with D-Orbit taking some Spaceflight customers when a Sherpa tug suffered a fuel leak and needed to be taken off a Transporter launch. “It was amazing to work with them, and I hope we are able to proceed to accomplish that in the longer term.”
Small launcher competition
A couple of years ago, rideshare launches gave the impression of they may change into a thing of the past. The rise of small launch vehicles, with dozens in development, promised more frequent, tailored access to space for many smallsat developers, who would have the option to get their satellites into their desired orbit once they needed to. In that scenario, only probably the most cost-conscious customers would follow rideshare.
It hasn’t worked out that way to this point, though. The last yr has been crammed with delays, failures and bankruptcies. The primary launches of ABL Space Systems’ RS1 and Relativity Space’s Terran 1 each failed earlier this yr, with Relativity subsequently deciding to retire the Terran 1 to deal with the much larger Terran R. Astra retired the failure-prone Rocket 3.3 to work on the larger Rocket 4. Launcher halted plans to develop its own launch vehicle after being acquired by space station developer Vast. And, most spectacularly, Virgin Orbit filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in April, three months after a launch failure, with its assets auctioned off in May.
For now, rideshare firms don’t see much competition from small launch vehicles. “Rocket Lab is the one company up and running providing recurring launches with Electron, and so they have a limit when it comes to capability,” said Panesi. “All the opposite newcomers still should show they’ll make it.”
Rocket Lab, meanwhile, isn’t concerned about competition from rideshare providers. “What we discover is that customers will send up a few spacecraft on a Transporter, do a mission demo, and once they really need to construct out their constellation to their desired orbits, that’s once they come and see us,” said Peter Beck, chief executive of Rocket Lab.
He said he was seeing way more “defections,” as he put it, from Transporter missions to Electron than the opposite way around. He added that his company was also picking customers from other small launch vehicle firms.
Rideshares and small launch vehicles are also not mutually exclusive. Exolaunch arranged the launch of Telesat’s LEO 3 demonstration satellite on an Electron in July, a rideshare mission that also carried cubesats from NASA and Spire.
D-Orbit signed a contract in 2022 with Isar Aerospace, a German company developing the Spectrum small launch vehicle. Panesi said that might give its customers greater flexibility in selecting their orbits. “We are able to determine when to launch. We are able to determine what orbit,” he said. “That improves the time to our goal orbit.”
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Dependence on SpaceX
While small launch vehicle firms have struggled to get their vehicles flying, those working on larger vehicles haven’t done a lot better. The mixture of retirements of vehicles just like the Ariane 5, delays in the event of Ariane 6, Recent Glenn and Vulcan Centaur, and the withdrawal of Soyuz from the market has created an absence of capability for industrial and government customers alike.
That extends to rideshare aggregators as well. For a lot of firms, Transporter missions, together with the occasional secondary payload opportunity on other Falcon 9 launches, are the one game on the town for flying their payloads.
“SpaceX is the one alternative if we take into consideration recurrent flying,” D-Orbit’s Panesi said. “That is, I feel, a problem for end users because they principally should develop their business plans based on SpaceX’s offering. They launch only when SpaceX launches.”
Rideshare firms are working to diversify their launch opportunities. D-Orbit launched its first mission on a Vega in 2020, and the corporate expects to launch future missions on the Vega-C. That vehicle, though, stays out of service after a launch failure in late 2022 and will not resume launches until 2024.
Exolaunch, besides arranging the Telesat satellite on an Electron, also flew several secondary payloads on a PSLV launch in late July, and Allarie said the corporate was vehicles like Ariane 6, Vega-C and Isar’s Spectrum in the longer term. Nevertheless, the majority of its smallsats fly on Transporter missions.
Rideshare firms proceed to make use of SpaceX not since it’s the one major option but in addition because, they are saying, it provides them an excellent service. “SpaceX has completely modified the paradigm of rideshare launches,” she said. “Rideshare launches have never been so reliable and inexpensive.”
“The connection is excellent,” Panesi said. Customers like flying on Falcon 9 because its reliability ends in lower insurance costs and since the Transporter missions fly on a daily schedule without significant delays. “SpaceX is ideal for our rideshare missions.”
While SpaceX sells space on its Transporter missions to rideshare aggregators, it also sells on to satellite operators, who presumably get well rates than in the event that they went through an aggregator. Rideshare firms say they’ve not seen evidence of SpaceX poaching customers or otherwise undermining their businesses.
Allarie said Exolaunch complemented SpaceX by handling the complexities of managing multiple customers. “SpaceX has been a really perfect launch provider in all senses.”
Rideshare firms can even provide opportunities on missions which are otherwise sold out. As of late July, SpaceX’s own rideshare website listed no openings for launching a single smallsat before mid-2025.
Panesi expects the rideshare industry’s dependence on SpaceX to proceed through next yr. “I feel the turning point will probably be the top of 2024 or starting of 2025,” he said, as recent vehicles enter service.
That strong demand for launch services implies that rideshare will proceed to be an option for the foreseeable future, even amid the upheavals within the industry and the shifting launch options, as firms and organizations search for one of the best opportunities to fly their satellites. Even potential competitors within the small launch industry say rideshare options are here to remain.
“When you don’t mind riding the bus to a specific orbit, that’s one of the best value thing you’ll be able to do, so you must do this,” said Rocket Lab’s Beck of rideshare missions. “If that’s what’s required, then that’s filling a terrific market opportunity.”