It has been 13 years since the debut of a new medium-lift rocket in the United States, the Antares vehicle developed by Orbital Sciences Corporation.
The initial 100-series variant of the Antares rocket was kind of a hot mess. The rocket used old Soviet engines built during the era when Apollo astronauts were landing on the Moon. Decades later, in the 1990s, Aerojet acquired the engines and refurbished them for a rocket that would launch in the 2010s. Predictably, on the fifth launch of an Antares rocket in 2014, it exploded.
The Antares vehicle is the last of a dying breed of medium-lift rockets—defined as having a lift capacity of 2 to 20 metric tons—in the United States. Nearly a decade and a half later there is a new generation of medium-lift vehicles coming online, and they are starkly different from Antares, which had not just Russian engines but a core stage manufactured in Ukraine.
Four forthcoming rockets all have engines built by the rocket’s manufacturer in the United States. Each of these companies has taken various lessons from SpaceX’s successful Falcon 9 rocket, arguably the most important of which is to build as much of one’s rocket, and particularly the engines, in-house as possible to control timelines and costs.
Now, with SpaceX pulling the Falcon 9 rocket from the commercial market as soon as 2028, the “race” to bring new medium-lift capacity into service is for more than bragging rights. There are fortunes to be made, and commercial space startups to be saved.
Satellite operators legitimately don’t know who to book launches with in the 2027 to 2030 timeframe because of uncertainty over which rockets will be available. The Falcon 9 is no longer for sale. The larger Vulcan and New Glenn rockets have stacked manifests and are expensive for small- and medium-sized satellites. And no one really knows which new medium-lift vehicles will be ready and capable of scaling up their launch cadence.
