Shortage of Rockets Leading to Satellite Launch ‘Bottleneck,’ Experts Say

There are an estimated 23 active rocket launch facilities across the globe, but a massive increase in launch requests from the satellite industry is spurring demand for more capacity, especially when it comes to rockets.

In March, a report by Goldman Sachs estimated that 70,000 low earth orbit (LEO) satellites could be launched in the next five years, a tenfold increase from the current launch number.

Starlink, a subsidiary of Elon Musk’s SpaceX company, dominates the LEO market, providing cheaper and faster communications than satellites in a higher geosynchronous orbit (GEO).

With a rash of competitors to Starlink entering the market, there is now a line forming at space launch sites around the world.

“The bottleneck right now is not the launch pads—the site where you want to launch the rockets—but the bottleneck is the rockets themselves,” Viktor Shpakovsky, a partner in Beyond Earth Ventures, which invests in space tech, robotics, and communications, told The Epoch Times.

Shpakovsky said satellite companies looking to launch into space often have to wait for a year or more because SpaceX is prioritizing its own Starlink launches.

‘Huge Queue’ to Launch Satellites

“For early-stage companies, the only way is to wait for these transporter missions, which are happening maybe twice a year,” Shpakovsky said.

“There is a huge demand to launch something into orbit, but there is a huge queue.”

On June 23, SpaceX used its reusable Falcon 9 rocket to launch its latest transporter mission from the Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. The company stated that there were “70 payloads on this flight, including cubesats, microsats, re-entry capsules, and orbital transfer vehicles.”

Jason Steffen, professor of physics at the University of Nevada–Las Vegas, told The Epoch Times that if a space port has enough launch pads, there is no real need to limit the number of rockets that can be sent up.

“It would be hard to come up with a reason why you couldn’t launch rockets from a single site with multiple launch pads, every 30 minutes or something like that. That’s long enough to get one rocket out of the way, and then recover the debris, and proceed with the next one,” Steffen said.

He said it was “plausible” that the bottleneck was caused by a shortage of rockets.

“You don’t necessarily want to do a production run of 1,000 rockets and then find out that there’s some defect in it,” he said.

LEO satellites orbit anywhere between 100 miles and 620 miles above Earth, while those in GEO are 22,236 miles up.

Because they are in a lower orbit, LEOs cover less of the Earth’s surface, and operators need to have a greater number of satellites, in what is known as a constellation.

Marian Rudnyk, a planetary scientist and former NASA astronomer, told The Epoch Times that bottlenecks were liable to become “critical” if a proposed lunar power constellation becomes reality in 2028.

A lunar power constellation is a system of orbiting satellites that transmit power wirelessly to a lunar base or surface operations.

Rudnyk said the rapid growth in LEO satellites had imposed difficulties for support infrastructure such as communications networks, noting that “already support for exploration and science is straining the old [Deep  Space Network], and I can see such needs as well as many others becoming strained.”

But he said he believes that artificial intelligence (AI) will allow companies and governments to “quickly innovate and rapidly build to fill any unexpected gaps.”

The first two decades of space exploration were dominated by the United States—in the shape of NASA—and the Soviet Union, but the European Space Agency (ESA), which was created in 1975, and Japan and China soon joined the space race.

India Planning a Space Station

India has also made rapid progress and plans to launch a manned space mission, Gaganyaan, by 2027 and put its own space station—the Bharatiya Antariksh Station—into orbit by 2035.

On Sept. 2, Israel stated that it had launched Ofek 19, a synthetic aperture radar observation satellite from an undisclosed location using a Shavit rocket launcher.

The biggest change in the landscape in recent years has been the boom in private corporations and contractors, most notably SpaceX.

Steffen said NASA’s share of the national budget, which peaked at about 4 percent in the late 1960s at the height of the “space race,” has fallen to about 0.5 percent.

He said that these days, NASA makes up only a small portion of the demand for space launches.

“I suspect that most of SpaceX’s clients are military, and then commercial after that, and NASA’s probably a fairly distant third,” Steffen said.

The Goldman Sachs’s report forecasts that the satellite market could grow from $15 billion to $108 billion by 2035, with about 53,000 satellites originating in China.

Shpakovsky said China does not welcome foreign investors in its space tech industry because it is so closely related to defense.

“In China and in the U.S., there are very different models. In China, there is no shortage of money, so all the capital is mostly government capital. But in the U.S., most of the capital is private capital,” he said.

“It’s the U.S. and China that’s driving a lot of technology right now, but the two countries don’t really trust each other.”

In May 2024, the U.S. Space Force’s intelligence chief, Maj. Gen. Gregory J. Gagnon, said China had deployed a vast network of satellites capable of targeting U.S. forces in a conflict situation.

Ideally, satellite launch sites should be eastward-facing and close to the equator—in order to take advantage of the west-to-east spin of the Earth—and near the ocean to avoid debris falling back onto populated land.

China’s main launch site is at Wenchang on the island of Hainan in southern China, which is 19 degrees north of the equator.

Brazil’s Tempting Launch Site

Brazil has a launch site at Alcantara, which is only two degrees south of the equator.

In 2019, then-Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro signed an agreement with U.S. President Donald Trump to allow four companies from the United States—including Virgin Orbit, which has since filed for bankruptcy—to use Alcantara.

Brazilian Telecommunications Secretary Hermano Tercius told Bloomberg in November 2024 that current Brazillian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva offered the site to Beijing as a launch base for SpaceSail—also known as Shanghai Yuanxin Satellite Technology—which signed a deal that month to provide broadband for Brazil’s state-owned telecom firm, Telebrás.

At the time, SpaceSail stated that it planned to launch 648 satellites by the end of 2025 and more than 150,000 satellites by 2030.

Shpakovsky said Alcantara’s location was “quite favorable” for space launches and noted that “it could become a major investment project for China to establish a launch pad outside its territory.”

Starlink, which needs permission from the Federal Communications Commission to launch satellites, now has more than 4 million users across more than 100 countries, but several new rivals are set to challenge its dominance of the market.

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has set up Blue Origin as a rival to SpaceX and, in April, launched the first 27 satellites for his Project Kuiper broadband service from Cape Canaveral. The plan is for Kuiper to have 3,236 low-orbit satellites, rivalling Starlink.

China Satellite Network Group, a state-owned corporation set up in 2021, plans to launch 12,992 satellites as part of its GW Constellation. LandSpace, also based in China, aims to launch 10,000 satellites in its Honghu Constellation.

On Aug. 25, the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corp. (CASC) announced that it had launched a Long March 8A rocket carrying the 10th group of satellites for the Guowang broadband megaconstellation.

On June 25, Houston-based Axiom Space announced that it had signed a memorandum of understanding with India’s Skyroot Aerospace to “explore collaboration opportunities to advance space exploration and access to low-Earth orbit.”

Rudnyk said the United States and China will probably continue to dominate the space race, noting that Russia’s war in Ukraine had drained that country’s resources and focus.

“If the Europeans are smart, they can probably maintain parity in a number three slot, but they still really need to step up their game,” Rudnyk said.

In October 2024, the European Commission awarded the contract to develop IRIS2 (Infrastructure for Resilience, Interconnectivity and Security by Satellite), a constellation of 290 LEO satellites, to the SpaceRISE consortium.

The ESA has always launched rockets from South America—namely Kourou in French Guiana—because it is close to the equator, but two new options at Esrange, in northern Sweden, and Andoya, off the coast of Norway, have emerged in recent years.

Shpakovsky said another emerging problem is that there is no coordination between the companies or countries launching satellites.

There are no flight traffic controllers in space, and there are millions of pieces of debris.

Shpakovsky said Starlink is doing a lot of maneuvers every month to avoid collisions, and in 2019, the ESA stated that its Aeolus Earth observation satellite had to fire its thrusters to avoid hitting part of the Starlink constellation.

“It’s the issue of the future, because this space debris right now, it’s not a big problem,” Shpakovsky said.

“But the more satellites we have in orbit, the more potential collisions we might have, and if there is a big collision, it can be a disaster.”

Steffen predicts that greater coordination will be needed in the future to address the issue. “There is a lot of debris,” he said. “It’s the small particles that are the problem. I suspect that … at some point that’s going to need to be coordinated more internationally.”