Satellite operators are facing a launch crisis as the number of available rockets diminishes, a situation that could last years and prevent new satellites reaching space.

Just last year, wait times for a rocket launch were only 12 months or so, says Anatolii Papulov, founder and CEO of UK space tech firm NewOrbit, but the situation has now changed dramatically. “The lead times to launch right now are basically 30 to 36 months,” he says. “This will definitely impact a lot of start-ups.”

There “absolutely is a launch crisis at the moment”, says Caleb Henry, a senior analyst for US company Quilty Space, which is being caused by a number of factors. The first is that Elon Musk’s firm SpaceX is said to be sunsetting one of the most widely used rockets in the world, the Falcon 9. This reusable rocket, which debuted in 2010, transformed the launch industry and ushered in a new age of commercial space flight.

There were 165 Falcon 9 launches in 2025, the most of any rocket in the world and five times more than every other US rocket combined. While two-thirds of these were Starlink launches for the company’s space internet constellation, the others were a mix of government and commercial projects, including ride-share missions where companies can hitch a ride to space with others at a cost as low as $3000 per kilogram.

SpaceX, however, is reportedly no longer taking bookings on Falcon 9 beyond 2028. That is because it is transitioning to its much larger rocket, Starship, which reached orbit for the first time on 28 September. But it is unclear how available Starship will be for commercial launches, with SpaceX potentially focusing on more profitable areas like its own Starlink constellation – which generated $11.4 billion in revenue in 2025, nearly two-thirds of the company’s total revenue – or its planned orbital AI data centre satellites.

Matt Hausman at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in the US, a former engineer at SpaceX, says the launch capacity crunch is “a little bit of a result of SpaceX’s success”. The firm has lowered launch costs by 10 times or more, making it “a lot easier for smaller players to get involved in the space industry”, he says. Ending Falcon 9 leaves many of those players without a route to space, says Hausman.

Starship, which NASA is hoping will return humans to the moon, may still offer ride-share missions. But the rocket is designed with flat Starlink satellites in mind, deploying them through a slot in the side like a candy dispenser. This design might not support bulkier satellites from other companies, although some versions of Starship might have a more traditional satellite deployment mechanism.

The war in Ukraine is also having an impact. Prior to Russia’s invasion in 2022, about a fifth of global launch capacity, including many commercial launches, was handled by Russian rockets such as Soyuz, says Henry. Since the war began, that route to space has ended.

Another issue is the lack of commercial rivals to SpaceX. Its next closest competitor is US company Rocket Lab, which launched 18 of its smaller Electron rockets to orbit in 2025, but has yet to launch its new, larger Neutron rocket. Many other firms are developing new rockets, but these haven’t started flying regularly. Another competitor, the New Glenn rocket from Jeff Bezos’s company Blue Origin, is grounded after exploding in May. Other rockets, such as Europe’s Ariane rockets and India’s Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle, meanwhile, launch only a few times a year.

Much of global launch capacity was already taken up by another of Bezos’s companies, Amazon, before SpaceX reportedly ended bookings on Falcon 9. In 2022, the firm ordered 83 launches for its own space internet constellation, Amazon Leo, of which only 14 have launched so far. 

NewOrbit did manage to book a launch to space on an undisclosed rocket in 2028, but the process was “very hard”, says Papulov. “I think we got one of the few slots which were available.”

China has also begun operating more commercial rockets, but US and most European satellites are barred from launching on these rockets because of US regulations. “Even if you have a satellite built in Europe, if it has a component from America, it cannot fly on a Chinese rocket,” says Henry.

That leaves the global launch industry in very uncertain territory. SpaceX could still make Starship widely available and the crisis would dissipate, or other launch companies “could come in and fill the void left by Falcon 9”, says Henry.

At the moment, though, we “don’t know what 2029 or 2030 will look like yet”, he says. “The worst-case scenario is Starship is not available, Falcon 9 is gone and no one has replaced that pathway to space. In that scenario, a lot of businesses will struggle.”