Some satellite companies still have an appetite for boutique launch services

If you ask most satellite companies aside from SpaceX, they will tell you the world doesn’t have enough capacity for launching payloads into orbit. This is despite the blistering launch cadence we’ve seen around the world in recent years, led by SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket.

Customers in any sector will, of course, usually welcome competition. Theoretically, competition will lead to lower prices and allow the best to rise to the top. It seems like the customers buying launch services were right. SpaceX is dialing back its Falcon 9 launch program, and there is no certainty about when SpaceX’s reusable next-generation super-heavy-lift rocket, Starship, will carry anything to orbit besides the company’s own Starlink satellites.

So it’s no surprise satellite operators are cheering the success of a new launch provider. This was especially the case a few days ago, when Germany’s Isar Aerospace reached orbit for the first time with its Spectrum rocket. The launcher delivered a batch of CubeSats to low-Earth orbit from a spaceport in northern Norway, and Isar tasted success after its first test flight ended in failure last year.

Isar’s success is good news for Europe’s space sector, eager for a new path to orbit alongside the continent’s incumbent launch providers, Arianespace and Avio. Several European companies are running to catch up with Isar, including another German startup, Rocket Factory Augsburg, and Spain’s PLD Space. The Exploration Company, based in Germany and France, is working on a heavy-lift-class rocket engine.

Up early

Halfway around the world from Europe, executives at the Japanese-headquartered satellite company Astroscale were awake at 5 am local time on Sunday to watch the live webcast from Norway as Isar aimed for the stars. Just days earlier, Astroscale announced it had signed a deal with Isar to launch a mission as soon as next year.

This was the second launch contract Astroscale has inked with Isar. The companies announced a contract in March for the Spectrum rocket to launch a different Astroscale satellite. Astroscale signed these agreements with Isar before the company achieved orbit.

Astroscale wasn’t alone in placing early bets on Isar. Government-backed missions from the European Space Agency, the European Union, and the Norwegian and German governments make up the bulk of the company’s launch backlog. Those customers have an interest in helping Isar gain a foothold in the launch market.

But Isar Aerospace could not count Astroscale as part of its captive market, so it was noteworthy that an established company selected an unproven rocket to launch two of its most important missions. Astroscale’s business is focused on satellite servicing and mitigation of space junk, a segment of the market that matches well with rockets the size of Isar’s Spectrum for dedicated rides to orbit.

Another satellite servicing company, US-based Katalyst Space, launched a spacecraft in July in pursuit of a NASA astronomy satellite falling out of orbit. Like Astroscale, Katalyst required a dedicated launch into a unique orbit to reach its target. It chose the seldom-used air-launched Pegasus XL rocket made by Northrop Grumman. Technical problems prevented Katalyst from rescuing NASA’s aging Swift observatory.

One of Astroscale’s missions assigned to launch with Isar Aerospace is ELSA-M, led by Astroscale’s UK division. The ELSA-M spacecraft will capture and deorbit a satellite in Eutelsat’s OneWeb broadband constellation to demonstrate end-of-life servicing. The other is ADRAS-J2, a demonstration mission partially funded by the Japanese space agency that will attempt to grab onto a defunct Japanese rocket in space and remove it from orbit. ADRAS-J2 follows a highly successful demo mission called ADRAS-J that approached and inspected the same Japanese rocket body in 2024.

Both missions are key to proving out Astroscale’s capabilities for what it sees as lucrative business opportunities in the satellite servicing market. Ars spoke with Chris Blackerby, Astroscale’s chief operating officer, this week to discuss the company’s goals in satellite servicing and its appetite for launch services. We present a portion of the interview below.

Ars Technica: You must have been thrilled with the results from Isar’s test flight. What was it like seeing the rocket reach orbit?

Chris Blackerby: It was Sunday morning, 5 am or so Japan time, and I was up watching. They did a fantastic job in everything from the PR side of it, having the chief engineer on there to explain everything. Even just watching them explain through as I was sitting on my couch early in the morning on Sunday, my confidence was growing as I was watching the team explain everything they’d done, all the prep they had taken to get to that point. We’d done a lot of background research. We had teams go out there to do due diligence research at their manufacturing site and talk to a lot of their technical leaders. So we were pretty confident already. Certainly, the launch was incredible. Checking off all the markers, all the milestones, deploying the payloads—it was everything we could have hoped for. Obviously, congratulations to them. But yeah, you’re right. We have two big missions set up on Isar, and we’re excited to see them continue to improve and show success and get to launch with them.

Ars: Astroscale’s business case seems to require dedicated launches. Rideshare doesn’t really work if you’re trying to launch into a very specific orbit and reach a specific satellite for servicing. Is that correct? Why not go for a launch on a proven rocket, like Rocket Lab’s Electron, which you used for your previous mission?

Blackerby: Launch, as you well know, is the big issue around the industry writ large. First of all, to answer the specific question, yeah, you’re right, dedicated launch is pretty essential for us for most of our missions. We could do a rideshare, but it’s much more complicated. So a dedicated launch makes it much better. Then we have to factor in capacity for the payload, and that can answer your second question. Right now, for Rocket Lab current capability, we’ve expanded beyond it. ADRAS-J was smaller, mass-wise, so it could fit into an Electron. ADRAS-J2 and ELSA-M cannot. Of course, they could fit into (Rocket Lab’s) Neutron, but they’re not ready yet.

And when we look around at other options, Stephen, for all of the talk about the ubiquity of launch and the dropping prices and the capacity that’s everywhere, I don’t know. I don’t see it yet. There are not a lot of consistently reliable options that are out there. I don’t think that’s anything that’s too controversial to say. So we had to look for something that fit our budget. It had to fit our capacity in terms of size. It should be dedicated, as you mentioned. So when you get that Venn diagram that throws in all of those various requirements, Isar really fit the bill. And yes, choosing a launch provider that hasn’t proven consistent success yet is definitely a risk. But as I said, we did a lot of checking on them, a lot of due diligence, and we’re very confident what we what we decided.

Ars: The only other proven launch provider in that 1-ton range is Firefly Aerospace, but they’ve had some issues with their Alpha rocket.

Blackerby: That’s exactly right. Our missions are around that area, under a ton, but in the 500 to 700 kilogram area. And yeah, there’s not much. There were a bunch that were out there that were in that area for a while, including Relativity, they were aiming for that, and Astra was in that. There were a few others that were in that range at one time. But everybody is going bigger now, so there’s not a lot. There are still a few small ones out there, but to fit into that dedicated 1-ton class, there’s not a lot. We’re hopeful. We’re thinking about launch vehicles, which we all have to be thinking about, especially with all of the SpaceX news recently, and the uncertainties that have been widely reported about how available rideshares are going to be with SpaceX. We’re just excited to see proof from a lot of different operators. Blue Origin, we saw the big Stoke fundraise recently, so yeah, we’ll see. But you’re right. As far as 500-kilogram to 1-ton class, there are not a lot of options.

Ars: The ADRAS-J mission appeared to be a huge success for Astroscale. What did you learn, and how did that prepare you for going up to grab that rocket?

Blackerby: It was such an incredible mission. I love talking about it. It was pretty ground-breaking. We are extremely excited and extremely grateful to JAXA (the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency) for driving this, and this is the first step toward proving out an on-orbit servicing capability toward more sustainable use of space and debris removal, which was the foundation of Astroscale. But beyond that, the capabilities to identify, approach, rendezvous with an object in orbit, which is fairly unprecedented from a commercial company, especially a non-communicative one like the ADRAS-J client was, as it will be again for ADRAS-J2.

In terms of what we learned, boy, we need a whole conversation on this. But just building out a mission that needed to approach an unprepared, uncommunicative object, everything that goes into that from the hardware side, from the ConOps (concept of operations) development, making sure that we make it as as safe as possible, so that there is fault identification analysis to say, ‘OK, detect the problem, make sure that the spacecraft knows that when it’s autonomously approaching, as it gets close, it can identify where there’s any kind of anomaly, and it knows we need to try again. Safety is the paramount issue when we’re doing anything like this, approaching an object in orbit. That was key, and all of those learnings from designing, building, manufacturing, launching, operating the satellite. It was everything. We learned so much from that.

The pictures, which you’ve seen, the images that we took from ADRAS-J are so exquisite, and it helped us to build ADRAS-J2. We now know what the client object looks like. We know it’s not rotating. That was a key step. We built ADRAS-J to be able to rotate around the client object in orbit, so that if we had to find that payload adapter as we’re spinning around, we could go in and grab it for ADRAS-J2. What we learned with ADRAS-J is the client object is pretty stably pointing down toward the Earth. We got a very clear image of what the object looks like right now. We know it’s not degraded. We know that there’s a clear path toward grabbing it at the payload adapter. All of those are things that we learned over the development of ADRAS-J that have helped building ADRAS-J2, I won’t say easier because none of this is easy, but easier than it would have been without that kind of capability and that kind of knowledge.

Ars: You have another mission working with JAXA, ISSA-J1, to go rendezvous and inspect two decommissioned Japanese satellites. How is that different than inspecting a rocket body?

Blackerby: ADRAS-J2 is going to an oblong rocket body. It’s not spinning. ISSA-J1 is going to satellites, and it’s going to have to approach something that has a solar array sticking out, so we’re expecting that it could be spinning. So the RPO (rendezvous and proximity operations) is definitely going to be more complex. We need to be able to develop this tech to precisely approach this large piece of debris that likely is not going to be a stable object, and we’re also going to a couple of them with ISSA-J1. A lot of the technical capabilities that we’ve developed by building out all of our missions… they share a common baseline in terms of technology as we think about the guidance, navigation and control, and the visualization and the RPO that’s necessary to do this identification and approach. But there are all these little differences, and that’s why each mission is unique in its own way, and it all builds to this larger dataset of learnings that we’re developing, and all of this is in pursuit of this servicing ecosystem. If we’re going to get to this level of servicing ecosystem for all aspects of security and economics and the sustainability of the space environment, we need to have this large dataset of approaching objects, of identifying objects, and of capturing objects, and so that’s what we’re building out across the board in the portfolio of our missions.

Ars: So you’re crawling before walking or running?

Blackerby: That’s it. Our first mission, ELSA-D, that was definitely a crawl. In that case, we brought our debris with us, and let that go, and then showed we could capture it. That was the first step.

Ars: What is the operational use case for the technology Astroscale is developing?

Blackerby: I’m assuming you mean like repeatable, consistent servicing. Every step we take is another step toward that goal. It’s hard for us to give a specific date on that or a timeframe. But the fact is, we’ve got eight, nine missions under manufacturing right now around the world. We have a variety already that are out there. None of them are on the level of, say, a repeatable multi-order service yet. That’s going to come. It’s just a matter of time. The missions that we’re doing now, we’ve taken these incremental steps. ELSA-D, our first mission, was fully internally funded. That was funded by the money that we raised on the equity markets. ADRAS-J, the second mission, that was that was jointly funded with JAXA, so we worked on that together. ELSA-M, we’re working on that together with ESA and the UK Space Agency. With ADRAS-J2, we’re getting toward being revenue-positive with these missions. Our missions going forward, for the most part, are revenue-positive. If we look at that from the perspective of sustainability, not of space, but of our company, economic financial sustainability, we’re already getting to that point. We need to get more toward a commercially repeatable mission, and we’re not there yet. But we’d like to see, by the early part of the next decade, the early 2030s, that we’re going to start seeing a more consistent, commercially viable servicing ecosystem being developed.

Ars: You have a refueling demonstration mission, the Provisioner, under contract with the US Space Force. What business opportunities do you see coming from the US military?

Blackerby: Provisioner is big. We’re really excited about that. That’s launching soon as well, and it’s going to demonstrate the capability of refueling. We think there’s going to be a growing market for that, and the demand signal is coming in from the US. When we think about where that next technology and demand is going to be, refueling is a big one. You’ve seen what some of the other contracts are that are out there. There’s a deorbit-as-a-service study that’s been put out (by the Defense Innovation Unit). There are some life extension mission interests that we see. We see a lot coming out in terms of close-in inspection, making sure that the customer can understand where the threats are, and whether that’s debris or some other kind of threat, they want to be able to have the the capability to do close-in RPO. So we’re excited for all of these kinds of missions that governments are showing an interest in that require a close-in RPO.

To be clear, we’re talking about the capability to identify and station-keep and come in close to an object. This is not about flying by an object and snapping pictures as you go, or getting to within a couple kilometers and taking pictures. We got to within meters of ADRAS-J. That’s the kind of really incredibly exquisite capability that we’re building out. We see that there’s going to be interest in docking, taking pictures, all of that. We’re seeing interest from not just the US government, but from governments and even the commercial sector across all of the regions where we’re located globally.

Stephen Clark is a space reporter at Ars Technica, covering private space companies and the world’s space agencies. Stephen writes about the nexus of technology, science, policy, and business on and off the planet.