Rocket Lab is doing a nice job of increasing its own launch cadence, despite having given up on reusable Electron first stages. They seem on track to make 20 or so launches this year (40% cadence increase).

Falcon 9 is certainly dominant, but with luck that will change in the next half decade, with other companies launching often enough to reduce the Falcons from their massive lead of almost 150% of the rest of the world combined. SpaceX has demonstrated in the past decade the great advantage of reusability, and Rocket Lab has demonstrated that reusable is not so easy to accomplish; it seems to have limitations.
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Jeff Wright wrote: “Why didn’t Elon just make more Falcons?”

Booster stages or upper stages? It could be that SpaceX is currently launching at its maximum pace in any given month but is still learning how to turn around their pads in shorter times or to produce Falcon upper stages faster. Or both.

It’s clear to everyone not blinded by Randians ideology that the Starship guys simply don’t know what they’re doing anymore–their best guys are leaving.

And, if Amazon doesn’t sign on for more SpaceX launches, I wonder just how sympathetic the FCC would be to a plea for deadline extension. It’s one thing to try everything and still come up short, but failing to try the obvious and readily available at some kind of reasonable scale isn’t going to be a good look.

In justice, I don’t disagree. Amazon has struggled badly with getting production started, and as we know from the shareholder suit, Amazon’s board insisted on trying to launch it all on their own terms (i.e., no SpaceX). Amazon has itself to blame for a lot of this problem.

And yet, it’s clear that the politics of the situation are pushing harder and harder at having bonafide competition to SpaceX. Some of this ebbs and flows from the state of the relationship between Trump and Musk — this week, Trump looks like he’d go down and put in a few hours on the Kuiper assembly in person if he could spare the time — but there are far more ingredients in this recipe. The FCC wants the competition; the industry and many of its customers want the competition; DoD wants the competition; Congress wants the competition. Or to be more precise, critical masses of people in these organizations want the competition. And right now, unfortunately, Kuiper is the only thing on the horizon that looks even possible as such competition.

So I do not think we should be surprised if the FCC bends over backwards to give Amazon an extension next year when the time comes. I think that will be even easier to do if Kuiper has got production going at a reasonable tempo — no matter how badly they and their favored launch providers have bolluxed up the launch side of the equation.

But SpaceX’s launch cadence also continues to climb. It may well wind up launching 40 more Falcons this year than it did last year. If it sets a 2026 goal of 200 Falcon missions or above, it might be able to make Amazon a deal for anywhere from quite a bit to all of next year’s launch total increment. I don’t think even the upper end of such a deal would get half of Kuiper on orbit by July of next year, but it would get Amazon a lot closer than it’s going to get if it sticks strictly to the launch deals it currently has.

And, if Amazon doesn’t sign on for more SpaceX launches, I wonder just how sympathetic the FCC would be to a plea for deadline extension. It’s one thing to try everything and still come up short, but failing to try the obvious and readily available at some kind of reasonable scale isn’t going to be a good look.