By Mike Gruss
We're roughly halfway through 2026, and here's a data point that may surprise you: At the current pace, there could be fewer launches this year than in 2025.
Let’s set a baseline first. I asked Jonathan McDowell, a former astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics who tracks orbital activity, for some help.
In 2025, he counted 329 launch attempts. That included 198 from the United States (and Rocket Lab New Zealand) and 92 from China.
When McDowell and I traded emails earlier this week, the space industry was on pace for 317 launch attempts for 2026. If it holds, it will be the first time the number of launches drops since 2019.
On one hand, that’s a bit of a surprise. There’s an abundance of optimism around the space industry that’s translated to a lot of money. Seemingly every week the demand for launch becomes clearer. (See: Orbital’s 100,000 satellite constellation of orbital data centers.)
On the other, even casual readers know this has not been a pristine year for launch companies.
McDowell said he believed SpaceX’s workhorse, the Falcon 9 rocket, “is going at the max rate they can do with the pads they have.”
Then Starship has faced delays. United Launch Alliance's Vulcan and Blue Origin's New Glenn have been on hold but neither were expected to be high cadence.
“One might have expected an increase in the Chinese rate, that's the main surprise. They have had some setbacks (Tianlong-3 and a CZ-3B failure) and slow progress on some of the new vehicles,”
Andrew Jones tackled that issue in this week’s China Report newsletter.
China conducted 44 launches across the first six months of the year, nine more than the 35 for the same period last year. China went on to record 92 orbital launch attempts in 2025, with a typically back-loaded second half, meaning the country is well on course for its unofficial goal of more than 100 launch attempts across 2026. This increase has come in part from an uptick in launches for the Qianfan and Guowang megaconstellations, with seven related launches apiece.
Four new rockets had first flights, with the successful launches of the Kinetica-2 from CAS Space in March and Long March 12B in June. The Tianlong-3 from Space Pioneer failed in April, while the first Ceres-2 solid rocket ended in failure in January, just hours after the loss of a mission due to an anomaly with the venerable Long March 3B. And you won’t have long to wait for the next debut, with the Long March 10B ready and waiting on Hainan island.
There are two takeaways. The first is that there were not quite as many launches for the first half of the year as many folks expected.
But the second is that it may get increasingly difficult to find a ride.
Last week, Debra Werner and Emma Gatti dropped this story that had the space community talking.
Nine SpaceX partners and customers tell SpaceNews that SpaceX is not accepting Transporter reservations beyond late 2028 or early 2029, and the manifest for the next couple of years is nearly full. Some customers said they expect that SpaceX will extend Falcon 9 rideshares if its super heavy-lift Starship rocket does not come online as quickly as company leaders anticipate.
But the lack of spots — potentially as few as half as many as in recent years — has left satellite companies scrambling to find a way to space.
This is the issue to follow in the second half of the year.
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