China to attempt 100 launches in 2024
China’s state-run press today announced that the country will attempt 100 launches in 2024, a number that includes launches from official government space agencies as well as a number of pseudo-companies that are supervised closely by that government.
This prediction now gives us a reasonably complete list of predictions from all the major players in the international launch market. Adding them all together, that market is predicting it will complete 366 launches in 2024, a number that would be 58% higher than the record set last year of 213 successful launches in a single year.
Will it happen? Not likely. Every one of those players routinely overstates its goals from year to year. For example, Russia’s numbers are always vastly high, with this year predicting 40 launches, a number that country hasn’t achieved in almost three decades.
At the same time, both China and SpaceX, the biggest players in this market, have been very good in recent years of predicting their output, only slightly missing their stated goals.
Based on these facts, it remains distinctly possible that the world’s global rocket industry will complete more than 300 successful launches in 2024, a number that is more three times higher than the average number of launches per year from the dawn of the space age in 1957 through 2021.
China’s state-run press today announced that the country will attempt 100 launches in 2024, a number that includes launches from official government space agencies as well as a number of pseudo-companies that are supervised closely by that government.
This prediction now gives us a reasonably complete list of predictions from all the major players in the international launch market. Adding them all together, that market is predicting it will complete 366 launches in 2024, a number that would be 58% higher than the record set last year of 213 successful launches in a single year.
Will it happen? Not likely. Every one of those players routinely overstates its goals from year to year. For example, Russia’s numbers are always vastly high, with this year predicting 40 launches, a number that country hasn’t achieved in almost three decades.
At the same time, both China and SpaceX, the biggest players in this market, have been very good in recent years of predicting their output, only slightly missing their stated goals.
Based on these facts, it remains distinctly possible that the world’s global rocket industry will complete more than 300 successful launches in 2024, a number that is more three times higher than the average number of launches per year from the dawn of the space age in 1957 through 2021.