PARIS — Companies that are fielding new launch vehicles are now facing the challenge of scaling up operations to meet the continued high demand for them.
During a panel discussion at World Space Business Week here Sept. 16, executives with several launch companies that have or are about to introduce new launch vehicles say they are turning their attention to increasing their launch cadence.
Among the most aggressive is Blue Origin, whose New Glenn rocket is scheduled to make its inaugural launch as soon as November. That is a change from earlier plans after NASA announced Sept. 6 it would delay the launch of its ESCAPADE Mars mission on a New Glenn in mid-October out of concerns the rocket would not be ready in time.
That change will not have a major ripple effect on the manifest for New Glenn, said Jarrett Jones, senior vice president for New Glenn at Blue Origin, on the panel. “We will then go right back into the launch cadence that we intended to do,” he said, with a capacity for up to 12 launches in 2025.
“At this point, it’s really hard to determine how many we will get to,” he cautioned, with a likely range of 8 to 10 next year. “But then, for 2026, we go straight into 24 launches.”
Fueling that jump in launch rate will be a fleet of reusable boosters. Jones said Blue Origin expects to have four boosters operating “in rotation” for launches by the end of 2025, with two to four more built annually after that. Each booster is intended to fly up to 25 times, but he added that the early boosters may not reach that number of flights.
The company is hedging its bets on the first booster, which Dave Limp, chief executive of Blue Origin, announced on social media Sept. 13 is named “So You’re Telling Me There’s a Chance.”
“No one has landed a reusable booster on the first try. Yet, we’re going for it, and humbly submit having good confidence in landing it,” Limp said.
“For this first launch, I have two primary objectives: get to orbit and land the booster,” Jones said. “It’s super-critical because we have to get that down pat and then get our reusability and then get to rate. We can’t wait on it in 2025.”
Other companies are planning to increase launch rates. United Launch Alliance launched its first Vulcan Centaur in January and its second flight, called Cert-2, is scheduled “within the next month,” said Tom Burkholder, senior director for business development and sales at ULA, on the panel.
A successful Cert-2 will allow ULA to start launching national security missions. He said the company still expects to perform two such launches before the end of the year.
Nobuyuki Shiina, deputy general manager for space systems business development at Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, said his company had originally planned a launch rate of six H3 rockets a year. “We decided to increase to eight launches per year,” he said, to support additional commercial and government demand.
Arianespace said its Ariane 6, which made a mostly successful debut in June, will make its second launch before the end of the year. Steven Rutgers, chief commercial officer at Arianespace, said the company expects to conduct six Ariane 6 launches in 2025.
In a later briefing with reporters, Stéphane Israël, chief executive of Arianespace, said the company planned a “progressive ramp-up” to get to a launch rate of 9 to 10 per year starting in 2027. The exact number, he said, will depend on the mix of Ariane 62 and Ariane 64 missions, two variants that use two and four solid rocket boosters, respectively.
Production of those boosters is a bottleneck for Ariane 6, he said. “If we were to increase the cadence, we would have to invest a lot” in producing additional boosters, he said. “This is a clear obstacle to an increased cadence.”
Israël said he would not rule out eventually making those investments to increase launch cadence. “But we can only do it if there is a sustainable business case,” he said, including sufficient demand to amortize the cost of that investment. “We are not going to introduce on the market more than 9 to 10 in the coming years.”
The focus, he said, is getting to that steady rate of up to 10 launches per year, which includes both qualifying the performance of the rocket and scaling up production. “There are both engineering and manufacturing challenges.”
