When Rocket Lab said that it would push back the first flight of its Neutron rocket until 2027, investors reacted as you might expect. The company’s shares fell by around 11% the following day. Rocket Lab had found problems with the fuel tank and needed time to put them right. For those of us who have spent decades in the industry, delays of this kind, though disappointing, are not surprising. Building a rocket is extraordinarily difficult, and even the best engineers cannot always foresee what will go wrong.
Now what? SpaceX transformed launch so completely that the industry became dependent on it. As SpaceX prepares to set aside Falcon 9 to focus on the much larger Starship, there is a real fear we will be dragged back to the 1990s. Rocket Lab is attempting to step into the breach; Blue Origin and a handful of others are also developing rockets. They are years behind SpaceX, however. And Rocket Lab’s mishap shows much work must still be done.
The Danger of Relying on One Rocket
I saw the early days of the launch transformation at SES. I was chief technology officer, and our engineers were working closely with SpaceX. We had to assess whether we could trust the company’s rockets. We decided, after careful consideration, that we could. In 2017, SES became the first commercial satellite operator to launch a spacecraft on a previously flown orbital rocket booster. SpaceX, we saw, could meet our demands for safety and reliability.
It’s easy to forget what life was like before. Launch companies traditionally built rockets to fly once, and manufacturers discarded costly engines and other hardware after each mission. SpaceX challenged that approach in extraordinary fashion: recovering its boosters, inspecting them and preparing them to fly again. Its engineers had to solve a wide variety of very difficult problems, and the company suffered failures and made errors along the way. Yet by 2025, SpaceX had launched Falcon 9 165 times in a single year – a rate that would once have seemed almost inconceivable.
In part because of the frequency of launch that SpaceX enabled, commercial space has entered something like a golden age. Yet SpaceX now uses most of its Falcon 9 flights to deploy satellites for its own Starlink network. According to Reuters, Starlink accounted for around 79% of Falcon 9 missions in 2026, while several satellite companies are facing waits stretching into 2028 or 2029. Operators cannot readily turn to another provider that offers the same combination of price, reliability, and frequent launches.
Nobody yet knows how quickly Starship can take over from Falcon 9, or how readily it will serve the wide range of customers who currently use Falcon 9. We could therefore face a shortage of launch capacity reminiscent of the difficulties satellite operators experienced 30 years ago. In short: longer waits, less choice, and potentially higher costs for companies. We need more than one dependable route into space.
The Opportunity in a Difficult Market
There are reasons to be concerned, but also to believe other companies can rise to the challenge. Blue Origin has already sent its New Glenn rocket into orbit and successfully recovered a booster, although it has also suffered setbacks. Rocket Lab has extensive experience launching smaller satellites with Electron – even if Neutron presents a much greater engineering challenge. Neither company has yet matched Falcon 9’s record of frequent, reliable launches. But SpaceX did not achieve that record overnight, and we should not expect its competitors to do so either.
We should also look beyond the companies whose names appear on the rockets. Every new launch provider needs engines, fuel systems, advanced materials, electronics and software, as well as the means to test and manufacture them. Smaller companies can develop these products without having to build an entire rocket themselves, and as launch companies seek to cut costs and increase production, specialist suppliers may find new customers for their work. Some could become important businesses in their own right, serving several launch providers rather than depending on the success of one.
Competition is a good thing, and here it could also drive engineers to find better ways to build rockets. The companies seeking to challenge Falcon 9 will have to figure out how to make their rockets cheaper, easier to build, quicker to prepare, or better suited to particular missions. Some may achieve this by improving on existing designs, but others may develop new engines, materials or production methods. Those advances could benefit other parts of the space industry, even if some of the companies pursuing them ultimately fail. Necessity is the mother of invention.
We should not welcome delays or underestimate the scale of the task ahead. Rocket Lab’s experience shows why investors and customers must give engineers the time they need to test their designs and correct faults. But the company’s recent, understandable setbacks have not got rid of the urgent need for there to be more launch providers, nor have they proved that any one company will prevail. I have seen what happens when talented engineers take on a problem that many people consider beyond their reach. Space is all about grand ambitions and achieving the impossible. Who knows? Perhaps the next great success in space may well come from the attempt to solve the launch crunch.
Martin Halliwell is a Partner at NewSpace Capital, a private equity firm investing in high-growth space companies. He was previously Chief Technology Officer of SES, where he led global technology and R&D and oversaw the development and deployment of satellite systems. He also spearheaded SES’s partnership with SpaceX, overseeing six Falcon 9 launches and making SES the first commercial satellite operator to commit to reusable rockets.
