Wednesday, August 26, 2026

Editor’s Choice: A gut check to the White House’s 1,000 annual launches goal

08/26/2026

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By Dan Robitzski

One thousand missions to space (and reentries) launched from American soil by the year 2030. That’s the goal set out in new updates to the National Space Transportation Policy, which got updated for the first time in 13 years last week.

“The United States must establish and maintain space transportation capabilities that ensure access to the full range of orbital regimes relevant to United States interests, from suborbital and very-low Earth orbit altitudes to the lunar surface, Lagrange points and deep space,” the policy states.

It is, to say the least, an ambitious goal. Especially given reports that access to space is harder to come by.

In 2025, there were 181 American launches (165 of which used the Falcon 9), and there were 144 in 2024, according to the American Enterprise Institute’s Space Data Navigator.

Unsure what to make of a five to six-fold increase in launches over the next three years, I asked AEI senior fellow Todd Harrison for his thoughts.

“I think it is at the upper limit but not totally unreasonable,” Harrison told me in a conversation over email. “If you look at the rate of growth in U.S. launches from 2020 through 2025, the compound annual growth rate was a little over 37%. If you extrapolate that exponential growth rate through 2030, it puts you at around 900 launches per year.”

However, he thought that the number may be “far-fetched,” given that newer and upcoming launch vehicles have higher payload capacity than their predecessors, suggesting that there may be fewer launches of more heavily-laden spacecraft in the next few years.

There were other reasons that the prediction may not hold.

“We are roughly 2/3 of the way through the year and have 114 launches. If you extrapolate that through the end of the year, that will mean a total of about 170, which is less than last year’s 181 and far from the trend line projection of 248 (a 37% increase over last year),” Harrison said.

“I think the reason we are seeing a plateau is that the Falcon 9 is likely at or near its maximum launch rate,” he added. "They are literally launching one almost every other day. That could be due to a variety of constraints on the pads, recovery boats, upper stage production, booster refurbishment, etc.”

To that point, the National Space Transportation Policy focuses on launch infrastructure more than it does launch vehicles, with the goal of improving launch and reentry sites and increasing access to them.

Ultimately, the number may not prove realistic. But that’s not the end of the world, Harrison said, since the stakes of a general policy document making an incorrect projection are fairly inconsequential.

“If it is used for budgeting, setting staffing levels, or building facilities, I would want something that accounts for projected satellite launches, new launch vehicles coming online and other factors to make it more bounded and realistic,” he said.

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SIGNIFICANT DIGIT

125,000 Acres

The amount of land in Louisiana SpaceX acquired to build Starbase Louisiana, a planned launch facility that would include 10 Starship launch pads.

Shackleton Crater, at the south pole of the moon, is believed to host quantities of water ice deep within its shadow. Credit: NASA

CHANG’E-7 DELAYED

China decided to delay Chang’e-7, a robotic lunar south polar landing mission, just hours before its planned launch on Aug. 24. Now, the mission may not launch until next year, based on ambiguous language in the China Manned Space Engineering Office (CMSEO)’s postponement announcement. The announcement read that the “launch … cannot take place during the planned window this year,” potentially referring to that specific launch window or any launch window in 2026.

Like for NASA’s Artemis missions, weather played an unfortunate role in mission planning, with Typhoon Narra nearby likely being the reason for the postponement.

The limitations for suitable launch windows stem from the overall mission plan for Chang’e-7, in which a lunar orbiter will observe the moon for weeks or maybe months to gather imagery prior to a landing attempt. The landing site is thought to be Peak Near Shackleton, which due to its elevation can receive nonstop illumination for several months at a time. The logic behind the timing, likely, is to target the start of one such time period so that the mission can operate in continuous light for as long as possible.

The delay, if longer than a month, could allow the U.S. to land near the lunar south pole first.

Trending This Week

After flying cubesats on the first two Space Launch System missions, NASA will not include them on the rocket’s next flight.

Ursa Major, a Colorado-based defense technology company that builds rocket engines, hypersonic missiles and solid rocket motors, plans to go public through a merger with a blank-check company in a deal valuing the combined business at about $2.3 billion.

NASA is working with Advanced Space on the CAPSTONE 02 mission, scheduled to launch in late 2027. It will feature two spacecraft built by Terran Orbital that will operate in a highly elliptical lunar orbit.

Kepler Communications announced the start of commercial in-orbit optical data relay service, marking the smallsat operator’s expansion beyond the Internet of Things connectivity business it began more than a decade ago.

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SpaceX's big plans for Starship in Louisiana

08/26/2026

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Top Stories

SpaceX revealed plans Tuesday to build a massive new Starship launch site in Louisiana. The company and state officials announced Starbase Louisiana, a facility that will ultimately include 10 launch pads for Starship and associated infrastructure. SpaceX pledged to spend $100 billion to develop the site, but did not disclose details about how that money would be spent or over what timeframe. That investment would be far larger than the $15 billion SpaceX said earlier this year it spent on overall Starship development to date. Starbase Louisiana will be located on 125,000 acres in Vermilion Parish, on the Gulf Coast south of Lafayette. The announcement came the same day SpaceX said it is ending Falcon 9 launches of Starlink satellites from Florida. The company will continue to use Falcon 9 for Starlink in launches from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California, but future Starlink launches from Florida will use Starship. [SpaceNews]

CesiumAstro is raising more money as it continues to acquire other companies. CesiumAstro said Tuesday it acquired mission software specialist 1Aardvark, the third such deal in less than a year to bring more capabilities in house. While CesiumAstro has not disclosed its valuation, which a source previously said crossed the $1 billion threshold with a $270 million Series C disclosed in February, the company said an ongoing Series D round will raise it from its current level. CesiumAstro is preparing to deploy the first Element spacecraft in October as a precursor to Synchronicity, a proposed constellation of 737 satellites to provide connectivity for enterprise and government users. [SpaceNews]

As the space industry grows, it is facing a hiring crunch. Businesses and government agencies are struggling to find the engineers, cleared workers and mid-career managers needed to turn surging investment and demand into spacecraft and services. The industry has long bemoaned the struggle to attract enough engineering talent, but the issue has become even more acute in recent years. That includes, in the government, both scaling up of missions but a loss of experienced civil-service personnel. [SpaceNews]

Impulse Space is ramping up a GEO rideshare program because of high demand. The company announced two years ago it would pursue a program using its Helios kick stage that can deliver several tons of payload to GEO when launched on vehicles like the Falcon 9. Last year, Impulse Space said it expected to run one such rideshare mission a year, but at a briefing Tuesday during the Small Satellite Conference, the company said it would now seek to fly at least two such missions a year. The manifest for the first mission, scheduled for the first half of 2027, is now closed, and the company is opening waitlists for missions scheduled for 2028. [SpaceNews]

High demand and uncertainty about the future of SpaceX's rideshare program have led companies to get creative about providing such services. One launch service provider, SEOPS, converted a planned GEO rideshare mission on a Falcon 9 to a mid-inclination LEO mission, seeing high demand from LEO customers. Portal Space Systems, which bought a Falcon 9 for its first Supernova satellite launch, is working with Maverick Space Systems to sell excess capacity on the launch for rideshares. The moves come amid industry concern that SpaceX will end its rideshare missions in the next few years. [SpaceNews]

Simera Sense, a developer of imaging payloads for spacecraft, is pushing to expand imaging capabilities for smaller spacecraft. Simera Sense has supplied 10 hyperspectral imagers to U.S. satellite services provider Loft Orbital over the past year, it announced Wednesday. Loft integrates the imagers on standardized satellite buses it orders in batches, mainly from Airbus, to host customer payloads and operate the spacecraft on their behalf. According to Simera Sense, more than 15 of its HyperScape100 imagers for other customers have been deployed to date and are all operating successfully in orbit. [SpaceNews]

Redwire will produce spacecraft components in cooperation with Luxembourg-based Edge Aerospace. The companies announced a licensing agreement to allow Redwire to produce data processing units and network switches developed by Edge Aerospace in a U.S. facility. Through the agreement, Edge Aerospace seeks to accelerate delivery of space-qualified computing products while increasing supply chain resilience and broadening support for its growing U.S. customer base. [SpaceNews]

Other News

Two astronauts installed a new antenna on the International Space Station during a spacewalk Tuesday. NASA's Anil Menon and ESA's Sophie Adenot spent six and a half hours outside the station on a spacewalk that concluded at 2:57 p.m. Eastern. The two successfully installed a space-to-ground antenna, replacing one that had malfunctioned. The antenna was originally scheduled to be installed on a spacewalk last week, but it took astronauts longer than expected to remove the old antenna. This was the third of three spacewalks conducted from the station this month, although NASA said last week it was considering adding a fourth in early September for additional ISS maintenance work. [Space.com]

SpaceX launched more Starlink satellites from California early this morning. A Falcon 9 lifted off from Vandenberg Space Force Base at 5:35 a.m. Eastern, putting 27 Starlink satellites into orbit. The booster for this mission completed its 24th flight. [Spaceflight Now]

NASA does not plan to fly cubesat secondary payloads on the next Space Launch System mission. The agency said at the Small Satellite Conference that changes in the design of the Artemis 3 mission, including a decision to fly SLS without an upper stage since Orion will remain in low Earth orbit, led the agency to decide not to incorporate cubesats on the flight. SLS carried 10 cubesat secondary payloads on Artemis 1 in 2022 and four cubesats on Artemis 2 earlier this year. NASA is considering resuming adding cubesats to future SLS missions. [SpaceNews]

A lunar smallsat mission will pick up where a cubesat mission left off. NASA and Advanced Space announced last month the CAPSTONE 02 mission, which will fly a pair of smallsats in lunar orbit to test rendezvous and proximity operations. The mission will build upon the CAPSTONE cubesat mission launched in 2022 to study operations in a near-rectilinear halo orbit around the moon. While Advanced Space and NASA had been talking about a follow-on to CAPSTONE for a year and a half, NASA's announcement in March that it will develop a lunar base, requiring dozens of missions, helped crystallize plans for CAPSTONE 02. NASA said CAPSTONE 02 will cost just under $100 million, excluding launch. [SpaceNews]

TrustPoint has tested C-band signals it plans to use for navigation services. The company said Tuesday a NovAtel receiver from Swedish company Hexagon acquired and tracked a live C-band signal from a TrustPoint satellite, while a separate laboratory test evaluated a combined L-band and C-band receiver under simulated jamming. The company said a main goal of the test was to show that C-band capability could be added to established satellite navigation receiver technology and used alongside conventional L-band signals, helping reduce the effects of GPS signal jamming. [SpaceNews]

Odin Space, a British startup focused on addressing lethal, non-trackable space debris, has extended its agreement to fly its Black Box on Arkisys Cutter spacecraft. The companies said Tuesday that four additional Odin Black Boxes will launch on Arkisys Cutter small spacecraft. Those payloads are designed to help detect debris too small to be tracked from the ground. Under the agreement, evidence-based collision insurance, underwritten through Lloyd's of London, will become a standard offering for Cutter hosted payloads. [SpaceNews]

Never Mundane

"Don't just fly more often. Fly so frequently that something as awe-inspiring as a rocket launch can maybe feel mundane. That's a little bit of a fib. Rocket launches never are mundane, but it sounds good in a speech. It will never stop feeling like a thrill ride, honestly."

– SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell, speaking at an event Tuesday to announce plans for SpaceX's new Starbase Louisiana launch site.