All aboard (4/17/23)

Good morning. The roads are closed, the FAA license is secured, and the crowds have flocked to Boca Chica to try to catch a glimpse of Starship’s long-awaited debut. We’re holding our breath from home…

In today's edition...🚀 Launch supply and demand🚂 Transporter-7 launches📆 The week ahead

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McKinsey Expects a Shortfall in Launch Capacity

The space industry is preparing to send tens of thousands of satellites to orbit in the coming decade, building out large constellations across the spectrum of possible capabilities. They may run into a bottleneck, however, when it comes to booking tickets to space.

This morning, McKinsey released its analysis of the demand for launch services compared with the supply of launch services. The analysts found that as more startups prepare to launch their first satellites and expand their growing constellations, there is still a significant shortfall in the near term in the supply of medium- and heavy-lift launch services.

Supply and demand

Right now, the McKinsey team tallies ~7,500 satellites orbiting the Earth. ~5,000 of these are used for comms, ~1,000 for EO applications, and ~1,500 for tech dev and research purposes.

• Looking ahead, the analysts found demand to launch up to 67,000 more with an average mass of 1 ton, largely dominated by communications sats.

• The base case is a little more modest, showing 24,000 new satellites are likely to be deployed by 2030 with an average mass of 870 kg.

The Starship effect: The bull case hinges on Starship’s success. If the mega-rocket is able to reach the launch cadence it promises—a daily launch rate by 2030 and a fleet of 30 boosters and 60 ships—then the analysts see more than double the launch capacity for the industry than in their base case.

On supply: “While demand dynamics are uncertain, launch is also at a tipping point,” the analysts wrote. “Many medium- and heavy-launch vehicles are being retired, and most remaining capacity is already booked.”

ULA’s Atlas V, Arianespace’s Ariane 5, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries’ H2, and Northrop’s Antares 230+ are nearing the end of their lifetimes, leaving a medium- and heavy-lift gap in their wake. For the foreseeable future, McKinsey writes, SpaceX will continue to dominate access to orbit with the Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy.

Several new rockets—including the Ariane 6 and New Glenn, besides Starship—are scheduled to come online soon, but the gap in capacity doesn’t have a quick-fix solution.

“Of course, in space commerce, there is often a yawning gap between intention and execution,” the analysts write. “A rocket in development is not equivalent to being able to offer an immediate or scheduled ride into orbit. In all cases, we expect a significant ramp-up period, even after a successful first flight.”

Assessing the impact

In the short term, the McKinsey analysts doubt that companies with ambitious timelines to deploy large constellations will be able to meet their targets. In the long term, though, demand is expected to stagnate while launch supply continues to increase—meaning launch providers will have to prioritize cost control and reliability from the beginning to ensure competitiveness in the long term.

“The data, in aggregate, suggest that the space industry faces a potential double bind,” the analysts write. “In the short term, the most likely scenario is a capacity shortfall, but in the longer term, the biggest risk is oversupply.”

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The Train to Space Departs

Happy belated Transporter launch day to all who celebrate.

At 2:48am Saturday, SpaceX launched the Transporter-7 mission on a Falcon 9, carrying 51 customer payloads to new homes in orbit.

These rideshare missions are big days for small satellite companies that rely on the comparatively low cost to send their birds to orbit. On this flight, SpaceX safely delivered batches of EO satellites, sensors, OTVs, and precious cargo for first-time fliers. Here’s our highlight reel and recap of the riders on the mission.

Sateliot’s IoT solution

Sateliot, a Barcelona-based startup specializing in satellite IoT connectivity, sent its first commercial 5G nanosatellite using the standard 5G IoT protocol to orbit with the Transporter-7 bunch.

Connecting the IoT: Sateliot has been working for the past five years to develop a standard for connecting IoT devices over a space-based 5G network.

• The company has secured roaming agreements with 40 mobile network operators and mobile virtual network operators around the world for permission to deploy its services.

• Sateliot has already signed €25M ($27M) in binding orders for its service next year, CEO Jaume Sanpera told Payload.

Sateliot launched its first satellite in March 2021. The nanosat launched this morning is a demonstration of the 5G connectivity technology and will be the first of the commercial constellation.

The next four satellites are slated to launch on Transporter-9, at which point, Sanpera said, they’ll have the capability to begin initial services. After that, the company intends to deploy 64 sats by 2024 and the full constellation of 256 by 2025.

Adler-2 and Tilebox

The second in a series of in-space debris monitoring satellites built and operated by Spire also hitched a ride on Transporter-7 to detect and measure clutter in LEO. The Adler-2 satellite is a 6U cubesat equipped with a foldable sensor array, a radar instrument, and a polarimeter for looking at clouds and aerosols.

Midstream monitoring: Tilebox, a software company building a platform to make it easier to manipulate satellite data, is acting as the middleman between the Adler satellites and Earth. The midstream platform allows scientists back home to develop modeling tools and algorithms to analyze the data more easily.

• The goal: to lower cloud processing costs and speed up the adoption of satellite data tools across many industries.

Eyes in space

This launch was a big one for small EO companies setting up their constellations and new types of monitoring in LEO. A handful of companies sent their very first commercial satellites to orbit this morning:

• Tomorrow.io, a space-based weather forecasting startup

• Wyvern and Orbital Sidekick, two EO companies deploying hyperspectral sensors for agriculture and oil & gas monitoring, respectively

Not everyone was a first-timer. GHGSat, a Canadian emissions monitoring startup, deployed three satellites to continue identifying emissions sites around the world. Unseenlabs, Spire, HawkEye 360, and Satellogic also added birds to their growing constellations.

Best of the rest

While SpaceX did not release the full mission manifest, there are certainly plenty of highlights we can point to.

• Two OTVs, Vigoride-6 for Momentus ($MNTS) and D-Orbit’s vehicle, deployed suites of customer sats in orbit.

• Exolaunch deployed 21 of the satellites riding on the mission, 50% of which were new customers.

• Several student-built payloads rode on the mission, including the DISCO-1 radio and science experiment, the Sapling-2 radio networking demonstrator, and the RoseyCubesat-1 satellite carrying a camera for high school student observations.

• AstroForge, a company hoping to eventually mine asteroids, launched a spacecraft designed to test its asteroid material refinement technique in orbit.

• Kenya deployed Taifa-1, its first EO bird.

In Other News

• CSIS (the Center for Strategic and International Studies) released its 2023 assessment of the greatest threats to the space domain.

• The Tiangong space station crew completed its fourth spacewalk.

• China also launched the Fengyun 3G weather satellite on a Long March 4B.

• SpaceX’s 27th Cargo Dragon departed the ISS and splashed down off the coast of Florida.

• Ingenuity, NASA’s Mars helicopter, successfully completed its 50th flight.

The View from Space

Starship towers over the Texas coast before this morning’s launch attempt.