At a panel discussion earlier this month during the Annual Meeting of the Transportation Research Board in Washington—the only space session in a meeting dominated by other modes of transportation—Carlos Niederstrasser of Orbital ATK provided an update on his tracking of the number of small launch vehicles. It was a project that he and colleague Warren Frick started a few years ago to present at the annual Conference on Small Satellites at Utah State University. Given the high level of interest in that survey, they have continued to update it.
To be considered, vehicles have to be under active development in the last few years or be operational, and be capable of placing no more than 1,000 kilograms into low Earth orbit. The vehicles also have to be available to commercial customers or the US government, ruling out some launch vehicles/missiles in places like Iran and North Korea.
By those metrics, Niederstrasser said five small launch vehicles are operational today: Orbital ATK’s own Pegasus and Minotaur I rockets, and three Chinese vehicles: Kaitouzhe-2, Kuaizhou-1A, and Long March 11. However, by his count, there are 35 small launch vehicles in active development worldwide, a number that has soared since starting the list a few years ago. “There was a period of time last year where I was finding a new vehicle almost every week,” he said.
Of those 35, just over half, or 18, are US vehicles. Most of the rest come from three other countries: six from China, four from the UK, and three from Spain. Niederstrasser said he keeps a “watch list” of an additional 30 vehicles about which there’s not enough information publicly available to determine yet if they are real projects.