Beginner's Guide to Space Launch—with pictures!

Introduction

Note: This turned out to be a very in-depth article, which may not fit into many readers' busy schedules. To accommodate this, I've put together a TL;DR bullet-point version, located after the Conclusion section, which highlights all the relevant information. If you're interested in seeing the detailed explanations, cited figures, and in-depth coverage of all the points, feel free to jump to your points of interest in the main article.

Who's writing this?

Hey, my name is Maxim. I'm a double-major in Economics and Physics at UC Berkeley (where I am involved in growing the NewSpace community), a Supply Chain Intern at Rocket Lab (one of the largest commercial space launch providers), and Co-founder & CEO at Tour, a travel planning platform that makes it easier to plan trips with friends.

More broadly, I'm a futurist who has been interested in the space economy since middle school. This article is part of a series on how we are using space to build a better future for everyone on Earth. I believe that more people should know about the impact space is having on helping us fight climate change, food insecurity, and humanitarian challenges today. In the end, it is my hope that by the end of the series more people learn about the tremendous potential that space infrastructure has for all humankind, and persuade people to get involved in building a better future.

Why does it matter?

In my last article—Beginner's Guide to the Space Economy —I went over the structure and composition of the space economy. I highly recommend reading it before this article for context, though this article can live on its own and I review relevant information. The space economy is currently a $424 billion industry, and is projected to grow to $1 trillion by 2040 . In this article, let’s now take a look at how it was made possible. Specifically, I'd like to go over what space launch is, who the major space launch providers are, and how they made the space economy possible. Simply put, the hundreds of billions of dollars dedicated to helping Earth from space would be there without the reduction in launch costs accomplished by commercial launch providers. Let's find out why.

Space launch?basics

Before we delve into the economics and impact of space launch, let’s quickly cover the technical fundamentals.

What is an?orbit?

In order for something to be in “orbit,” the spacecraft has to travel faster than gravity pulls it back down towards Earth. Essentially, when a spacecraft (or some other payload) is able to complete one revolution around the Earth without propulsion, it is in orbit. When it can-not, it is on a suborbital trajectory.

Image source:?https://zoefact.com/assign/science/technology/sub-orbital-spaceflight.html

So, space launch systems are basically a way to get to a high-enough speed above the Earth’s atmosphere such that they don’t fall back down to Earth*.

*Since the atmosphere extends pretty far into space, orbits degrade slowly over time as spacecraft hit atmospheric molecules and slow down. Even if you’re above the reaches of the atmosphere, orbits still degrade extremely slowly due to things like solar winds (light from the sun pushing back on the spacecraft), stray molecules, gravitational interference from other planets/objects, radiation, and other factors.

Atmosphere: the showstopper for space launch

By far the most difficult part of getting to space is getting through the atmosphere. The atmosphere is what allows us to breathe, clouds to exist, and the sun to not burn us all to a crisp with radiation. The atmosphere is also quite thick and puts up a lot of resistance on things moving through it as a result.

The atmosphere is thickest at the surface and progressively gets thinner the farther you go from the ground. At 328,000ft/100,000m is the Karman line — the internationally recognized boundary of space. A spacecraft can complete at least one full orbit around the Earth without propulsion at around 492,000ft/150,000m. Notably, the atmosphere doesn’t actually end at the Karman Line, and extends all the way out to roughly 6,200mi/10,000,000m, but is pretty much negligible after roughly 620mi/1,000,000m.

Image source:?https://earthhow.com/atmosphere-layers-troposphere-stratosphere-mesosphere-thermosphere/

When something goes back into the atmosphere, it is going through “re-entry.” Usually, without proper shielding, most objects burn up due to the immense friction from atmospheric molecules that collide with the spacecraft at extreme speeds. Of course, given a high enough mass and/or being built out of particularly heat-resistant materials, some objects can survive re-entry without any shielding.

Getting past the atmosphere

The most common way to get to orbit in the commercial space industry is with a two-stage rocket.?

The first stage (sometimes called the booster stage) is an extremely powerful engine with a large fuel tank. The engine shoots out exremely hot gas at a very high speed, pushing the rocket off the ground. The goals of the first stage are to overcome the force of gravity and to get through the thickest, densest layers of the atmosphere surrounding Earth.

The second stage is a less powerful rocket engine with a smaller fuel tank. Its goal is to push the payload to the necessary speed to actually form an orbit.

Rocket stages illustrated on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. The SpaceX Falcon 9 heavy also has two large boosters on each side of the main first-stage booster, to accommodate its larger payload capacity. Image source:?CNN Business - SpaceX’s latest launch and recovery attempt: We explain it all

Some modern rockets also feature what’s known as a kick stage, which can deliver payloads to even more precise orbits. Spacecraft built for different purposes can require different orbital inclinations (the tilt of the orbit), eccentricities (how oval the orbit is), periapsis and apoapsis (lowest and highest points of an orbit, respectively), and other parameters.

Back to economics

Doing all of this is not free. Unsurprisingly, it’s generally pretty expensive to build rockets. As such, there exists a cost to launch stuff to orbit. We use two metrics to make it easy to compare different launch costs: the cost per launch and cost per kilogram to some orbit. The cost per launch is simply the cost to build and launch a single rocket, not including any fixed R&D and other overhead costs. The cost per kilogram is the launch cost divided by the amount of payload that the rocket can launch, measured in kilograms (my apologies to fellow Americans, but Freedom Units aren’t very popular in industry). In this article, I will normalize all costs to Sun-Synchronous Orbit (SSO for short), which refers to an orbit that looks like this:

Image source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/ ...

SSO is one of the most popular launch destinations, with applications ranging from reconnaissance, imaging, and weather to climate monitoring, communications, and the Internet of Things. Using the same orbital plane for cost metrics lets us have a fair comparison between different launch providers. I chose SSO because Low Earth Orbit (LEO; the most popular orbit for satellites) figures aren’t always available.

Please note that customers do not pay those exact costs when actually purchasing launch services, since launch providers have to actually make money. The customer-side figures are not publicly available (largely because they vary greatly from company to company), so this is the best way for us to compare launch provider costs.

From reviewing the physical fundamentals of getting to space, two things stand out in particular:

1. The most intense part of the journey is the beginning.
2. By proxy, the most expensive part of the rocket is the first stage.

From these two things, we can deduce that the best way to save money is to reuse the most expensive part of the rocket: the first stage. Thinking about it, it makes sense—imagine how expensive it would be to fly if we had to build a new plane for every flight. As an example, consider that a brand-new Boeing 747–8 costs roughly $418 million and can carry 416 passengers. If you “launch” a new Boeing 747–8 for every flight and it spontaneously combusts after everyone gets off the plane, you’ll have a “launch cost” of $1,004,807 per passenger*. Very few people—if anyone—would ever fly at that price.

*You might wonder what the cost per kilogram of doing this would be. An average person from North America weighs 80kg, so the cost of launching a brand-new Boeing 747–8 every time would be $12,560/kg. Interestingly enough, this is about the same as what it used to cost to launch to space on SpaceX before it was able to make the Falcon 9 reusable.

Here's what a Boeing 747-8 looks like. It wouldn’t be very smart to destroy a $418 million plane every time you needed to fly. The same fundamentals apply to $50 million rockets. Image source:?AirDataNews

So, the natural thing to do is to make rockets reusable, just like planes. That way, we don’t have to build a new multi-million dollar rocket each time you want to launch something into space. Companies in the commercial space launch sector have been focusing on exactly that. Unfortunately, it is also extremely difficult to do so. Assuming we focus on just the first stage: the booster has to be equipped with heat shields to make sure it doesn’t burn down on going back towards the Earth. Additionally, the first stage also has to be?really?good at flying itself, be able to make multiple extremely precise burns to save fuel, and balance itself on landing. As a result, most space launch providers in the past simply didn’t bother — there was no incentive to save money. The government was the primary entity launching stuff into space, and they were willing to accept the high launch costs for political reasons (such as job creation).

Of course, a notable exception was the space shuttle, which ironically had an even higher cost to per kilogram to launch than traditional launch systems ($54,200/kg to SSO * vs $30,000/kg** to SSO on traditional providers). The development of the Space Shuttle produced some of the most groundbreaking research in modern history, and awarded us many technologies that we now take for granted, so it’s not like this money was wasted. However, it was simply too impractical for the United States to use past 2011, especially given its less-than-ideal track record (notably, the Challenger disaster at launch in 1986 and the Columbia disaster during re-entry in 2003).

*For full disclosure, I should mention that some estimates put it a bit lower at $40,000/kg (which I think is a fair estimate). Largely, the variation comes from the fact that the launch costs of the space shuttle varied from $576,000,000 to $1.6 billion per launch, as did its payload capacity (as it was subject to the configuration for a given mission). It’s not really possible to get a single precise figure here because of that. Regardless of which number is used, the Space Shuttle was still more expensive than most traditional launch system alternatives during its time.

**Similar to the Space Shuttle, industry estimates vary greatly. Not only does each individual rocket launch cost greatly differ, but most traditional launch providers have now updated their pricing to compete with SpaceX and other commercial launch companies. As such, it’s rather challenging to find what the average price used to be. I went through a few different sources and $30,000/kg was around the median high-end cost estimate, hence its usage throughout the article.

Here’s the Space Shuttle. The two white boosters and the orange fuel tank were not reusable—only the actual Shuttle was. As a result, the system costs did not significantly decrease due to reusability. Image source:?Wired

But why even bother with reducing launch costs? Why not just use traditional launch systems if they’ve been working just fine for the past several decades?

The importance of launch?cost

In every mission, launch costs by far make up the biggest expenditure. This means that if we want to enable space to be a commercially viable platform, we need to bring down the cost to put things up there. In other words, reducing launch costs opens up space for significantly more applications by companies, non-profits, educational institutions, scientific organizations, and even governments, too. Basically, almost everyone would be able to use space to get something done if we manage to substantially reduce the cost barrier.

This is where commercial space launch providers have played an outsize role in enabling us to use space as a way to help problems on Earth. SpaceX has done the most grunt work in this area and enabled both space commercialization and the rise of its competitors, thanks to renewed confidence in space launch as a viable industry.

SpaceX: the foundation of the space?economy

SpaceX was founded by Elon Musk in 2002 with rocket engineer Tom Mueller and a small team of scientists and engineers.

Before we proceed, I’d like to acknowledge that Elon Musk is a polarizing public figure, inviting a diverse range of opinions ranging from super-fandom to extreme hatred. Regardless of what one’s opinion is on the eccentric founder, the extremely talented, dedicated, and perseverant team at SpaceX has done some of the most intense and important engineering work of our century.

In 2002, SpaceX designed, tested, and built a rocket from the ground up. Essentially, Elon Musk and the team realized that the present way of building rockets was extremely cost-inefficient—traditional rocket manufacturers utilized hundreds of subcontractors, with each focusing on a particular component and charging their own profit margin on top. As a result, the final product was several orders of magnitude more expensive than its actual material and labor costs.?

The team decided to design and build the rocket from scratch, in-house, eliminating as many intermediaries as they could between raw inputs and the final design. Unsurprisingly, that wasn’t easy to accomplish; it turns out that building rockets is really hard, and a lot can go wrong with a skyscraper-sized metallic tube with a controlled explosion inside.?

SpaceX failed 3 times before its first successful launch of the Falcon 1—its first rocket model—and was on the verge of bankruptcy. SpaceX was saved by its fourth overall and first successful launch of the Falcon 1 on September 28th, 2008.

Today, SpaceX has gone a long way from the humble Falcon 1 in 2008. The company boasts two powerful rockets—the Falcon 9, a medium-to-large payload rocket launcher, and Falcon 9 Heavy, which specializes in large payloads. Effectively, SpaceX is the most successful commercial launch provider and boasts an impressive list of achievements:

SpaceX’s achievements include the first privately funded?liquid-propellant rocket ?to reach orbit around Earth,?the first private company to successfully launch, orbit, and recover a spacecraft, the first private company to send a spacecraft to the International Space Station, the first?vertical take-off and vertical propulsive landing ?for an orbital rocket, the first reuse of an orbital rocket, and the first private company to send astronauts to orbit and to the?International Space Station . SpaceX has flown the Falcon 9 series of rockets?over one hundred times .

— Wikipedia , as of May 27, 2022

Perhaps SpaceX’s most important contribution to humanity is its pivotal role in serving as the foundation of the present-day space economy. Virtually all industries in the space economy require low launch costs to be solvent, and that's exactly what SpaceX provided.

The price per kilogram for satellite launches prior to SpaceX’s commercialization was as high as?$30,000 per kilogram , and remained virtually unchanged between 1970 and 2000. SpaceX's Falcon 9 Heavy currently has a launch cost of?$2,350 per kilogram , a 12.8x (92%) reduction in its class. At its most expensive, the Space Shuttle cost?$54,200 per kilogram , representing a 23x (96%) reduction.?Please note that the precise values vary based on source due to varying methods of calculation, but the magnitude of change is pretty much consistent across the board at roughly 90% or greater reduction between 1980 and today.

As a final point of comparison, Russia's Soyuz 2* rocket—used by the United States and various space companies after the retirement of the Space Shuttle in 2011—are presently launched at a cost?at least 7x greater ?than offered by SpaceX today for similar payload capacity.

*Notably, this is currently not a viable option due to the Russian war in Ukraine. Prior to the war, the United States and companies within it were a regular customer thanks to the Soyuz 2's remarkable track record.

This was accomplished through vertical integration (reducing the number of third-party suppliers and focusing on in-house manufacturing) and large-scale reusability—by landing the expensive first-stage rocket boosters on either floating platforms in the ocean or on land not too far from the launch site, allowing for quick turnaround and full reusability.

The Starship

The reduction in launch costs that SpaceX was able to accomplish is truly magnificent. However, it pales in comparison to what SpaceX expects to do with the behemoth rocket that they are currently developing—the Starship.

Starship is to be the biggest rocket to ever be built in human history. You may have seen some videos of it flying around during flight tests, and it genuinely looks surreal. Here’s an example:

And a compilation by CNET, with explosions:

If successful, the Starship is projected to bring down the launch cost per kilogram to as low as?$10–20/kg.

You’ve read that correctly. There are no missing zeroes. At $15/kg, it would be cheaper to launch a satellite to SSO than FedEx it within the United States .

Given even the lowest figures presented above, you can tell just how game-changing a price like this would be—against the lowest cost per kilogram to SSO, a pessimistic scenario cost of $80/kg would be a 30x reduction in launch cost. The projected cost per launch of the Starship is just $2,000,000 (or $12,000,000, according to more skeptical analysts), with an astonishing proposed payload capacity of 100,000 to 150,000kg . At an average weight of a human from North America at 80kg, the cost per person to SSO in the optimistic case would be just $1,600—in line with many airline ticket prices for international flights today.

SpaceX plans to accomplish this by doing two things:

1. Full reusability. The entire rocket will be 100% reusable.
2. Making the whole rocket out of steel and using liquid oxygen for propellant—both significantly cheaper building materials and fuel than traditional rockets

Of course, time will tell if SpaceX is able to deliver on actually building the Starship at the cited cost. Despite the fact that SpaceX has a generally excellent track record and was able to deliver on everything they’ve promised so far in terms of its traditional launch systems, the Starship project has seen non-trivial delays. Notably, the Starship is yet to complete its first successful flight despite being expected to do so years earlier . A 90-minute suborbital test flight to be conducted in 2022 is currently pending FAA approval, with a final report to be released on June 13th (at the time of writing).

At this point, it may seem like SpaceX will dominate space launch for the foreseeable future. However, there is substantially more demand for space launches than there exists supply. Furthermore, SpaceX simply doesn’t address the needs of a non-trivial and growing number of clients, creating several niches ripe for competitors to fill.

The case for SpaceX competitors

Given SpaceX's incredibly successful track record, perseverance, and historical relevance, the company has enjoyed by far the most publicity in the commercial launch sector. As a result, most people don’t know that there are hundreds of other companies currently working toward making space launch more accessible.

New space launch companies are addressing market niches that SpaceX is not focused on, such as expedited small payload launch (using a medium-sized, small-lift rocket that can be launched more frequently), flexible launch locations (being able to launch a rocket anywhere with a really fast turnaround), and dedicated launch (launching a small payload directly to the specific orbit needed for the payload to function).

Rocket Lab: Pioneer of small-lift rockets

The biggest niche that is overlooked by SpaceX is expedited small payload launch.?

Founded in 2006 by Peter Beck, an aerospace engineer from New Zealand, Rocket Lab is by far the biggest and most successful player in this space.

While SpaceX builds large rockets (Falcon 9 is classified as medium-lift and Falcon 9 Heavy is comfortably in the heavy-lift class), Rocket Lab’s primary launch vehicle—the Electron—is classified as a small-lift vehicle.

Rocket Lab's Electron in action. Image source: https://qz.com/1185386/rocket-lab-electron-the-first-orbital-flight-of-the-small-rocket-is-big-for-space-business/

This means that Electron’s payload is substantially lower than that of Falcon 9, clocking in at 300kg to LEO* vs. the 16,250kg to LEO** carried by the SpaceX flagship. Notably, it costs $25,000/kg to LEO to launch on Rocket Lab and $3,076/kg to LEO on SpaceX's Falcon 9.

*I had to use LEO figures because I couldn't find SSO figures were not available for the Falcon 9. Electron can take 200kg to SSO at $37,500/kg.

**Falcon 9 can carry 22,800kg when not landing on an ocean-based floating platform, bringing down the cost to ~$2,200/kg.

However, the price per kilogram doesn't tell the full story in this case. It costs at least $50,000,000 to launch a reusable Falcon 9, meaning SpaceX can only do a limited number of launches per year. On the flip side, Electron's smaller construction allows Rocket Lab to build more rockets at a lower cost (just $7,500,000 per launch ) in a shorter timeframe. In turn, Rocket Lab can do three things:

1. Access a wide customer base of companies (namely lean, venture-backed satellite startups) that need their products in space faster, thanks to increased launch frequency.
2. Target small satellite companies directly, giving them more relevant options. For example, Rocket Lab’s Photon kick stage allows the company to position satellites in more precise orbits without any intermediaries, rather than just dumping them in LEO or SSO like SpaceX (which then requires satellite companies to rely on third-party space tug companies like D-Orbit or Momentus).
3. On rides with dedicated launch, a small-satellite operator actually gets to go exactly where, when, how, and what orbit they need to go to. Effectively, the customer would gets their own private rocket—something that isn't possible with rideshare programs like SpaceX.

In turn, it’s more than worth it for clients with specific needs—especially satellite constellation operators that launch in bulk—to pay a higher cost per launch for the customizability of their ride to orbit. Furthermore, Rocket Lab is currently also working on reusability (you may have seen the viral news story of Rocket Lab attempting to catch Electron's first stage with a helicopter recently), so launch prices are expected to come down significantly soon, enabling even more customers to use Rocket Lab's launch platform.

Rocket Lab’s rise was enabled precisely by this customer-centric approach and a strong track record (at the time of writing, Rocket Lab has successfully?launched 146 satellites into orbit ). Rocket Lab is seen in the industry as the second most successful commercial space launch provider after SpaceX as a result.

In the future, Rocket Lab plans to double down on this philosophy by deeply integrating space systems into their product offering. Essentially, Rocket Lab’s long-term plan is to not just launch satellites into space, but to manufacture many of their components too. The company has already acquired 4 space systems manufacturers over the past couple of years and has already supplied parts to 1,700 satellites in orbit . Beyond Electron, Rocket Lab is also planning to develop a reusable medium-lift rocket—the Neutron —to compete with SpaceX’s Falcon 9, likely putting launch pricing at parity while offering significantly greater customizability for clients.

Rocket Lab is playing a really important role in the formation of the space economy, as it gifts significantly more options for space companies looking to perform operations in space around Earth. Consequently, space is opened up for a significantly greater variety of use cases that go on to benefit humanity tremendously.

Of course, Rocket Lab isn’t the only company trying to capture market share in this subsector. In fact,?most new space launch startups ?in development are targeting a similar payload capacity to that of Rocket Lab.

Astra: Launch?anywhere

One of the startups competing with Rocket Lab that’s recently had some success is Astra Space.

Astra was founded by serial tech entrepreneurs Chris Kemp and Adam London in 2016 and is based in Alameda, California (San Francisco Bay Area). The startup became the fastest company to reach orbit after founding in November of 2021, taking just five years and a month, beating SpaceX by over a year.

Astra’s latest launch vehicle, creatively named the Rocket 3.3, carries an even smaller payload than Rocket Lab's Electron—carrying 150kg to SSO at its highest. This also makes Astra’s rockets incredibly inexpensive, at just $2,500,000 per launch. Astra's launcher would then have a cost per kilogram to SSO of just $16,667/kg.

Astra's Rocket 3.3. You can tell the rocket is (relatively) quite compact, as it's barely taller than the nearby lamp post. Image source: Astra Rocket 3.3 Comes to Life Ahead Satellite Launch - autoevolution

If successful, Rocket 3.3 would allow Astra to acquire three very interesting qualities:

1. Rockets can be launched very frequently and don’t even need to be reusable to be cost-effective. Instead, Astra can focus on reducing costs through economies of scale (the more units they make, the cheaper it gets to build, since the cost of fixed assets like factories can be spread out amongst more outputs, and certain materials can be ordered in bulk).
2. Rockets can be launched at very small and inexpensive launch sites (Astra calls this model “launch anywhere, anytime”).
3. Each rocket will only carry a couple or so satellites, so each launch can be configured precisely to how the customer wants it.

Astra’s plan is to effectively quadruple down on the approach pioneered by Rocket Lab and offer really precise service for its clients. It can be argued that there is sufficient demand in the industry to allow Rocket Lab, Astra, and even their competitors to survive and thrive in their respective niches. Both companies significantly expand access to space as a place to do useful activities, and I'm personally very excited about the incredible growth and value that these companies are supporting.

Honorable mentions

Naturally, a steady demand also invites new companies to try their hand at capturing it. There are a number of really interesting and promising companies in late stages of development that I wanted to mention before transitioning to the next topic.

1. Relativity Space, based in Long Beach, which 3D prints their entire rocket and has their first launch attempt coming up in June 2022.
2. Firefly Aerospace, based in Austin, Texas, which will be attempting the launch of its 1,000kg Firefly Alpha for the second time—also in June 2022. Their strategy is interesting, as their rocket fits right between Electron and Falcon 9 in terms of payload size, filling a medium-size payload niche.
3. ABL Space Systems, based around LA (El Segundo), which combines Astra, Starship, Relativity, and Firefly into one product. Their LOX-powered, 1,350kg payload rocket is expected to cost just $12,000,000 per launch , giving it a price tag of $8,888/kg to LEO and ~$12,000/kg to SSO.
4. India's PSLV rocket, which launches to LEO, SSO, and Geostationary Transfer Orbit (GTO; the orbit from which it's relatively inexpensive for satellites to get to GEO). The rocket can launch up to 1,750kg to SSO at roughly $14,000-15,500/kg and is generally seen as a very reliable launch vehicle for rideshare (having carried hundreds of small satellites with no issue). The Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO), which builds the PSLV, is currently experimenting with reusability. If ISRO is able to bring down the cost per launch (from $26 million for the most expensive configuration), the PSLV will be a strong competitor in the subsector too.

Other than the above, there are also hundreds of other space launch companies working towards broadening access to space, both in the United States and abroad.

Interestingly, existing two-stage rockets are not the only way for us to get to space—a concept currently being explored by alternative launch systems.

Alternative launch?systems

Throughout the article, you may have noticed that I’ve been referring to launching stuff into space as “space launches” rather than “rocket launches.” This is because while rockets are by far the most common, popular, and reliable way to access space, they are not the only way to do so.

Over the years, there have been a number of different proposals for more cost-effective space access using alternative launch systems. As we covered earlier, the most cost-intensive part of accessing space is the first part of the journey: going from the ground to the upper levels of the atmosphere using a massive first-stage rocket booster. Companies like SpaceX and Rocket Lab then have to find ways to return the booster back to Earth to reuse it, which consumes fuel and is very challenging on the technical side.

Alternative launch systems are essentially alternative ways to reach the upper levels of the atmosphere (or skip that part of the journey altogether).

Air-to-space launch

Air-to-space launch is the most straightforward way to bypass the lower atmosphere. Basically, the two-stage rocket is brought up to 30,000–40,000 feet, skipping the most dense parts of the atmosphere, and launched in the air. In the past, companies attempted to use balloons (rockets launched from balloons are hilariously called “Rockoons”), blimps, and airplanes. Only a handful of companies have managed to launch successful test flights, and only two have been able to form track records of actually doing air-to-space launch. Today, just one of them is conducting and scaling air-to-space launches, and that is Virgin Orbit.

Virgin Orbit was formed in 2017 as a spin-off of Virgin Galactic. It is a subsidiary of the Virgin Group, famously founded by Richard Branson. Before Virgin Orbit came Northrop Grumman's Pegasus launch system, which served as the battleground and proof of concept for launching rockets off large planes. Over the years, the launch system has been struggling to compete with modern launch providers due to its high cost.

The team at Virgin Orbit was able to take the concept pioneered by Pegasus and iterate on it to reduce costs. The company then procured a Boeing 747–400 aircraft from Virgin Atlantic (named “Cosmic Girl”) and modified it to carry a small two-stage rocket called the LauncherOne under its wing.

The LauncherOne is deployed from an altitude around 35,000 feet, above the ocean, and is able to reach orbit. Virgin orbit can carry up to 300kg to Sun-Synchronous Orbit and 500kg to Low Earth Orbit at a cost of roughly $12 million per launch ($40,000/kg to SSO, $24,000/kg to LEO), placing it at the higher end of cost per kilogram in industry. Notably, the LauncherOne is not reusable at all.

"Cosmic Girl" and LauncherOne. Image source: SpaceNews

Despite the price tag, the company offers theoretically unprecedented launch flexibility: fundamentally, their launch system can be deployed at any airport that can handle a Boeing 747-400 and store the facilities for rocket maintenance.* In and of itself, this is a stark contrast to the highly specialized, expensive, and remote launch sites that companies have to ship their payloads to when they need to launch, not to mention the capital expenditures that space launch providers must commit in order to build their own launch sites. The company also has a relatively successful track record (3/4 launches successful [the only failure had a test payload], with 26 total satellites delivered to space), placing it ahead of competitors in the launch anywhere industry like Astra.

It remains to be seen if the Virgin Group subsidiary will be able to bring down launch costs to compete with traditional launch systems. While air-to-space launch systems are quite competitive on paper, Virgin Orbit still has to get approval from local and national aviation authorities and environmental agencies. They also have to secure mission licenses, which often take months, as flights have to be carefully planned and approved to balance the geographic requirements for the target orbit and proximity to populated areas (and land in general). Therefore, while the turnaround time is lower for these kinds of launches, traditional rocket launch companies are still more than able to compete for customers in need of launch window flexibility.

Virgin Orbit’s work is undoubtedly pioneering in its own way, and I'm personally very excited to see this type of launch system develop further.

Mass accelerator

Perhaps, it is not necessary to skip the lower level of the atmosphere in order to save money and fuel. As we discussed at the start of the article, a first-stage rocket booster is basically a way to get to a high enough speed to get through the dense atmosphere before switching to a less powerful, more efficient rocket for the upper levels. So, why not just use some other way to get through the low-altitude atmospheric soup instead of burning heavy, expensive fuel?

This is where kinetic energy launch systems come in. Kinetic energy launch systems aim to use something other than rockets (which use chemical energy) to get payloads to the upper atmosphere (or beyond). Kinetic energy launch systems include mostly-theoretical systems like rail guns (which have not proven to be sufficiently efficient, at least on Earth) and similar technologies.

A company called SpinLaunch, founded in 2014 by serial entrepreneur and pilot Jonathan Yaney (with investments from Google and Airbus, among others), is working on creating the first usable kinetic energy launch system by using what’s known as a Mass Accelerator.

Specifically, SpinLaunch is developing a giant spinner (the “Mass Accelerator” in question) that throws the rocket into space at an extremely high speed (roughly 5,000mph/8,000kmh). Once the rocket is at a high enough altitude (around 200,000ft or 61,000m), it can boost itself up to the necessary speed to form an orbit. Doing so eliminates 70% of the fuel that it normally takes to launch a satellite. The mass accelerator can likely be powered with renewable energy, reducing greenhouse gas emissions relative to traditional rocket launches by an equally significant magnitude (SpinLaunch also said they plan to use non-fossil fuel propellant for the actual rocket, so it has potential to be a net-zero launch system altogether).

If successful, the system could potentially reduce launch costs to as low as $500,000 per 200kg , at parity with current SpaceX’s Falcon 9 Heavy launch cost—and an 8x reduction relative to Astra, which currently has the lowest (albeit aspirational) cost per launch in the small satellite sub-sector.

While this may sound like an insane idea, SpinLaunch was actually able to build a functioning proof of concept in October of 2021, and conducted an even more extensive test in April of 2022. A scaled-down version of their eventual launch system launched a small rocket on a sub-orbital trajectory, hurling the 10-meter (32 foot) rocket through the air at thousands of miles per hour.

They even had a camera placed on the rocket that recorded on-board footage; you can watch it here:

If successful, SpinLaunch will fundamentally transform the way we access space and reduce the cost per kilogram dramatically. However, it remains to be seen whether this technology can work at the scale that SpinLaunch is targeting, and whether or not they’ll be able to reach a competitive cost per kilogram with their working iteration.

(Optional) Footnote: Space elevators

I have to mention space elevators, as they have been a subject of science fiction, edutainment YouTube videos, and general industry discourse for the past few decades.

Belonging to the alternative space launch systems class, a space elevator is basically a giant elevator tower that brings up payloads directly outside the atmosphere into Geosynchronous orbit (GEO; an orbit at 35,786km/22,236mi above sea level, where the orbital speed is equal to Earth's revolution speed, so whatever is in GEO stays at the same point above Earth at all times). The payload then only has to complete a relatively short burn to change its orbit to something more precise. Using a space elevator would save us from using basically 99% of the fuel currently needed for space launch, would be 100% carbon-neutral past the emissions during construction, and would be relatively inexpensive to use (maybe—depends how much energy it takes and how much said energy actually costs).

Space elevator concept art. Image source: NBC News

The problem with space elevators is that we need extremely strong materials to make them capable of withstanding the insane difference in physics as the elevator goes up (and stuff like space debris—natural and artificial). Additionally, the energy requirements to lift something up vertically for such a long distance are quite hefty. At the moment, neither the energy capabilities nor construction materials are commercially available. Perhaps, in the future we will be able to build one, but they are currently not a viable way of accessing space; even if we do manage to construct one, it’s also not clear how much cheaper it’s actually going to be given the enormous construction and energy costs required. It might be cheaper to just use Starship-like spacecraft and other launch systems for the foreseeable future.

Conclusion

This was a really long article and took me a long time to write, so I really hope it was value-additive and enjoyable. I know that I didn’t address some of the impacts of space launch, such as the environmental considerations surrounding launch sites, space debris, and the greenhouse gas emissions of launching rockets into space. These and other considerations will be addressed beginning with the next article on the applications of space and subsequent installments. I was originally planning to write about them here, but this article was already really long and I didn’t want to oversaturate the reader.

My hope is that we’re now clear on the principles of space launch, how space launch economics work, and the pivotal role that space launch providers play in the formation of the space economy. Additionally, I hope it was interesting to learn about the cool alternative ways to get stuff to space in the form of air-to-space and kinetic energy launch systems.

As we delve into the incredibly beneficial uses of space-based devices in the article, keep in mind that none of them would have been possible without the incredible work that these launch providers have done and are doing to reduce the cost and increase the accessibility of launching payloads into orbit.

As always, please feel free to share your thoughts and back — and share this article so that more people can learn about the impact of space on Earth. And, if you haven't already, make sure to check out the first article about the space economy.

Best wishes,

Maxim Kraft

TL;DR:

As promised, here's the condensed version of the same information as above. This bullet point list takes less than 4 minutes to read. Please don't use this summary out of context to scrutinize the article, as all the nuances are captured in the long-form writing above.

• An orbit is a stable trajectory in space around Earth, wherein an object can complete at least one full revolution around the Earth without external propulsion. Applications in space that need persistent time to bring value must be placed in orbit.
• To get to orbit, you have to travel faster than gravity pulls you back towards the ground and be above thick parts of the atmosphere.
• The atmosphere is the gaseous barrier between the Earth's surface and the vacuum of space. It is thicker towards the ground and gets progressively thinner as altitude increases.
• Naturally, this means that the hardest part about getting to space is the beginning: getting through the thick layers of the atmosphere. Doing so is possible with a highly-powerful vehicle equipped with a highly-powerful engine and ample fuel supply. This is a rocket.
• Modern rockets usually come in two stages (but can have more depending on the design). The first stage is by far the most expensive and powerful, as it has to fight through the resistance put up by gravity and the low-altitude atmosphere.
• Launch costs make up the biggest cost of any mission to space. Therefore, reducing costs to launch to space will allow more people to use space to do beneficial things.
• Based on the above, the most effective ways to reduce launch costs are through:

1. Building rockets without using too many subcontractors (which all tack on their own profit margins, which adds up quickly)
2. Reusing at least the first stage of the rocket. It's not economical to destroy an expensive aircraft every time we fly, and it's equally uneconomical to destroy an expensive rocket booster every time we put things in space. Imagine how expensive an airline flight would be if you needed a $100 million plane for every flight!

• The company that pioneered building rockets without subcontractors and reusing them is SpaceX, which brought down launch costs by as much as 26 times. Doing this gave birth to the $424 billion space economy we have today. Make sure to check out the Beginner's Guide to the Space Economy article (10 min. read) to see what the space economy is.
• SpaceX offers the least expensive way to get to orbit, but it's not always the best for what different companies need in order to fulfill mission objectives. This makes SpaceX competitors quite important, as they enable access to more use cases and provide significantly more frequent opportunities to go to space (which enables more diverse and lean business models to be applied to space technologies, further reducing costs and increasing utility).
• Most new launch companies tackle the small satellite market, because it's the biggest, most impactful market with the most diverse set of needs. Notably, Rocket Lab—arguably the second most successful commercial space launch provider—reliably offers frequent launch windows to small satellite operators with incredible levels of customization. For example, a constellation operator that fully books a Rocket Lab launch can dictate exactly when, how, and what orbit to get to at a fraction of the cost of the nearest alternative.
• A number of Rocket Lab competitors exist, such as Astra, which aim to double down on Rocket Lab's philosophy. They are mostly at early stages of development for now. Generally, a higher number of high-quality launch services is better: it allows more companies to use space and competition incentivizes innovation.
• One example of such competitive innovation is the Alternative Launch Systems class. Within it, Virgin Orbit offers rocket launches from an aircraft at comparable rates to traditional rocket launches, and SpinLaunch is working on a mass accelerator to throw rockets into the upper levels of the atmosphere at thousands of miles per hour.
• Fundamentally—regardless of their specific approaches—space launch providers are the foundation upon which the space economy is built. Without them, many of the technologies we take for granted today would not be possible (or would be prohibitively expensive).