The shortage of available launch vehicles is a growing challenge for government and commercial customers seeking to launch spacecraft, panel members said Wednesday during the Glenn Space Technology Symposium in Ohio.
The problem, panelists said, is not necessarily a shortage of rockets, but the increasing difficulty of getting a ride on one. SpaceX is pivoting away from its Falcon 9 workhorse amid its effort to begin commercial flights with the Starship-Super Heavy design. Meanwhile, Blue Origin halted New Glenn launches after one of the rockets exploded on the pad in May, and United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan Centaur was grounded in February after a solid rocket booster anomaly.
“We have thousands of satellites scheduled for launch by 2030. The problem is we don’t have enough launch vehicles to launch these satellites,” said Robert Perez-Alemany, program manager and Space Development Agency liaison at the Defense Innovation Unit.
SDA last year began launching operational satellites for its Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture constellation.
This launch vehicle shortage is also affecting planned on-orbit demonstrations, Perez-Alemany added.
“I met with a tech company in Los Angeles the other day, briefing me on their next demo, which is important for us to validate their process,” he said. “They told me the launch they were scheduled to do for December 2026 got moved to late October 2027. So that whole technology just got postponed a year.”
Companies planning lunar lander missions for NASA’s Moon Base initiative have also faced booking challenges, said Trent Martin, an executive at Intuitive Machines, which is slated to launch its third lander early next year.
“I’m telling people, ‘I have money to buy rockets right now. Can you sell me a rocket?’ And sometimes I’m running into trouble with that, and so that has been a big challenge,” Martin said.
At some point, NASA may want to address the problem more directly, said Ray Allensworth, vice president of spacecraft at Firefly Aerospace, whose second lunar lander mission is scheduled for 2027.
“NASA will need to start getting more involved in launch vehicle procurement,” she said. “We’re kind of entering into an unknown territory, when the markets are changing on what launch vehicle configurations are available when, and exactly at the time that the rate of missions is significantly increasing. So, I think having NASA come in and help be a partner to procure and help support manifest pairing is something that could be hugely beneficial.”
This availability issue has also been noticed on the launch provider side, said Andy Bunker, vice president of government operations and business strategy at Rocket Lab. The California-based company is targeting late this year or early next for the inaugural flight of its medium-lift Neutron rocket.
“There’s definitely a launch bottleneck,” Bunker said.
Part of the solution, he said, could be increased utilization of the existing launch sites outside of Cape Canaveral, Florida, and Vandenberg Space Force Base, California. For instance, Rocket Lab has launched its small-lift Electron rockets a handful of times from the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport in Wallops, Virginia.
Bunker said he believes the updated National Space Transportation Policy announced last month by the Trump administration will help address these shortages. A White House memo about the update states, “By 2030, our space transportation ranges must grow to support more than 1,000 launches and reentries every year.”
Blue Origin’s Jacki Cortese, vice president of civil space, said during the same event she expects the market to soon adapt and address the current shortage.
“Whatever is happening in the launch industry I think is temporary,” as new vehicles begin or resume operations, she said.
