Companies who built their business arranging launches of smallsats on SpaceX’s rockets are now buying entire launches for themselves, a symbol of how tight the market for getting to orbit has become.
Exolaunch and SEOPS, two companies that arrange rides to space for small-satellite operators, have each booked dedicated Falcon 9 launches as they seek more control over when and where their customers fly. Other launch-service companies are reshuffling missions and looking for additional capacity as the need to get to space outpaces the supply of available rides.
“Demand is growing much faster than capacity,” Robert Sproles, chief executive of Exolaunch, said in a June interview.
The moves are evidence of the industry-wide crunch for launch services. The increasing demand for rideshare accommodations by a booming number of space companies coupled with industry concerns about the long-term future of SpaceX’s rideshare missions are forcing launch providers to get creative about how they serve their customers.
The result has been a series of unusual steps.
In May, Exolaunch announced it purchased two Falcon 9 launches, planned for late 2027 and 2028, it will use for flying its smallsat customers. SEOPS also announced in May it acquired a Falcon 9 for a dedicated rideshare mission to sun-synchronous orbit in late 2028, named Waymaker. The company is also revamping some missions to better meet pent-up demand. In addition, Portal announced Aug. 20 it is partnering with Maverick Space Systems, a launch aggregator that has arranged smallsat launches on many SpaceX rideshare missions.
From GEO to LEO
After SEOPS announced its Waymaker mission, demand was strong from the start.
“We’re hitting 90-something percent sold out on the SSO flight,” Evan Hoyt, president of SEOPS, said in an interview in mid-August. “We started looking at how we can best serve the demand we are seeing.”
Rather than immediately buy, or try to buy, another Falcon 9 launch, SEOPS elected instead to modify one it previously bought. In November 2024, the company announced it purchased a Falcon 9 for a rideshare mission called Darkstar to geostationary transfer orbit (GTO), scheduled for 2028. At the time, it appeared to complement SpaceX’s own rideshare services that were focused on low Earth orbit.
However, customer readiness for the GTO mission was lagging. “The backlog for GTO is there and growing, but most of the programs we’re finding are having delays,” he said. “It looks like 2029 will be the earliest to do a GTO rideshare.”
Those delays and the high demand for LEO rideshare missions led SEOPS to repurpose that launch. “At this point, it became really clear that mid-inclination was the next right option,” Hoyt said.
Under the company’s new plan announced Aug. 17, the launch originally acquired for the Darkstar mission will be used for a rideshare mission to a mid-inclination orbit, called Waymaker-1 and scheduled for early 2028. The earlier rideshare mission to SSO, now called Waymaker-2, remains scheduled for late 2028.
Hoyt said SEOPS has seen strong demand for a wide range of orbits in LEO, hence the decision to offer a mid-inclination mission in addition to one to SSO. “There’s demand in everything for LEO, and it’s only on the rise,” he said.
He said SEOPS plans to continue flying Waymaker missions regularly based on that demand as well as access to vehicles. The company is considering using other launch vehicles as they become available for later missions.
“We watch and gauge demand, and we watch and gauge providers,” he said. “We’re trying to be the ones to marry that up at the right time, and have that answer just slightly ahead of when the customers need an answer.”
A Portal to rideshare
Among those customers looking for an answer for launch was Portal Space Systems. The company, which is developing spacecraft with propulsion systems that offer both high thrust and high-delta-V, had already arranged a launch for Starburst-1, its first ESPA-class spacecraft, on a SpaceX Bandwagon rideshare mission in October.
The company, though, needed a ride for its larger Supernova spacecraft, whose first flight is planned for 2028. “We saw launch as a commodity that the industry thought was solved, or not scarce, suddenly becoming potentially more scarce,” Jeff Thornburg, chief executive of Portal, said in an interview. He cited the grounding of Blue Origin’s New Glenn and ULA’s Vulcan rockets in recent months.
“You saw a lot of movement in launch manifests, trying to grab whatever launch was remaining,” he said. “You can’t be a space company if you’re not going to space.”
Thornburg said he talked with SpaceX and was able to secure a dedicated Falcon 9 launch for Supernova. Despite his connections — he worked for several years at SpaceX leading development of the Raptor engine — that surprised even his own employees.
“When I told the team we got our own Falcon 9 at an all-hands meeting recently, there were audible gasps in the audience,” he recalled.
That dedicated Falcon 9 provides significant excess capacity. Portal announced Aug. 20 it is partnering with Maverick Space Systems, a launch aggregator that has arranged smallsat launches on many SpaceX rideshare missions, to sell that excess capacity for secondary payloads.
“While we were negotiating this with SpaceX, it just became more and more obvious that there were going to be a lot of people that needed access to orbit that weren’t going to be able to capitalize on rideshare because there’s not as many of them,” Thornburg said of the decision to work with Maverick to fly secondary payloads.
The companies did not disclose how much payload capacity will be available on the mission, which Portal calls “Motus Via Sol” or “movement with the sun,” a nod to Supernova’s solar thermal propulsion system. They said they will be able to accommodate ESPA-class payloads and larger “cake-topper” satellites placed on top of the payload stack.
With Supernova and its propulsion system, which can provide up to 6 kilometers per second of delta-V, it will be able to maneuver significantly after deployment from the Falcon 9. “If we have a predominant rideshare partner that absolutely has to be somewhere, we can accommodate that and still meet our mission needs,” he said.
However, unlike a dedicated rideshare mission, the requirements of Supernova will take precedence over the secondary payloads. “My number one obligation is to our mission, our investors and our customers, and so that was really the driving factor here,” he said. “The market forces, while we were negotiating this, just happened to move in our favor to create a lot of inbound interest from secondary payload customers that needed to get their stuff to orbit.”
Don’t panic
Despite the upheavals in the launch market, both launch providers and satellite operators said they were not panicking about the potential end of SpaceX’s own rideshare services, provided customers can plan ahead.
In earnings calls in mid-August, the chief executives of both HawkEye 360 and Spire Global played down concerns about access to space by noting they had secured launches for their satellites through 2028. Both companies have relied on SpaceX rideshare missions for launching many of their satellites.
“It is not something that is keeping us up at night right now,” John Serafini, chief executive of HawkEye 360, said. “We have the benefit of being locked down for the next two years, but we are looking at and we are considering different options.” That includes working with emerging launch providers such as Firefly Aerospace and Stoke Space.
“They don’t seem to be operating in any kind of panic,” Hoyt said of the customers SEOPS has talked with for launch accommodations. “They’re just responding to what they see and what they assess the market’s doing.”
Hoyt has encouraged operators to plan ahead for launch, by two years or more, even if they’re not sure of the market. “We’re saying you have to get ahead of your sales curve a little bit,” he said. “We understand there’s some risk there, but with the market and the unknowns what they are, you’ve got to get ahead of launch early.”
Exolaunch’s Sproles said he understood if SpaceX wanted to get directly out of the rideshare business. “SpaceX has been very transparent about their desire for Starship to be the future of the company,” he said. “The reality is that whether the SpaceX rideshare program remains or doesn’t, there is not enough capacity for the demands of the market.”
Thornburg, despite his ties to SpaceX, declined to speculate on the future of SpaceX’s rideshare missions. “ I wanted to make sure we were good over the next couple of years to get where we needed to be.
“Putting the Portal logo on the payload fairing of a Falcon 9 rocket wasn’t on my bingo card two or three years ago, but I am super excited about that,” he added.