This column has previously reported on the in-flux state of the launch service provider sector of the space industry (see “Dollars and Sense,” April 2013), and has covered the progress of new market entrant SpaceX’s Falcon launch vehicles and Dragon payload. This market received another shake up this spring, with the April 21 launch of Orbital Sciences’s Antares vehicle on its maiden flight. The all-liquid fuel-propelled booster carried a four-ton mock-up of the Cygnus cargo carrier that Orbital intends to use for International Space Station (ISS) resupply.

SpaceX was the first of the commercial market entrants with a NASA Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) contract, the resolution to ISS crew ferrying and cargo resupply envisaged in NASA’s fiscal year 2011 budget and the Augustine Commission report. However, Orbital is now also squarely in the game that NASA calls its “C3PO” program (after the “Star Wars” golden robot, standing for “Commercial Crew & Cargo). Orbital’s COTS contract is valued at $1.9 billion for eight ISS resupply flights to deliver a total of about 20 tons of cargo, with another $288 million budgeted for development of the Antares vehicle, April’s test flight and the planned demonstration mission this summer. By comparison, SpaceX’s COTS contract is valued at $1.6 billion for 12 ISS resupply flights to deliver a collective 22 tons of cargo, with a separate $396 million contract for developmental test and demonstration flights.

While SpaceX has designed and built all Falcon and Dragon hardware, including the engines, Antares uses components designed and built by various third party suppliers. The Antares first stage AJ-26 engines were originally designed for the Soviet Union’s N-1 launch vehicle, an intended competitor to the Saturn 5 in launching crews to the moon. The Antares maiden flight marked the first time the engines had lifted a payload to orbit, and in its next flight, Antares should lift the actual Cygnus cargo module to orbit. Orbital has announced that if that flight is successful, it intends to make a COTS cargo mission to the ISS before the end of the year.

The apparently successful deployment of the two medium-lift launch vehicles goes far in the privatization of access to space for ISS resupply and low earth orbit “routine” ferrying of crew and cargo envisioned by the Augustine Commission and the C3PO project. In fact, it is probably safe to say that the concept is already validated, although it will probably always be at least politically necessary to have government-owned and operated “lifeboat” vehicles on standby to rescue stranded crews. However, Antares-Cygnus and the Falcon 9-Dragon further widen the chronic overcapacity of the launch services sector.

United Launch Alliance (ULA) of Denver, the Boeing-Lockheed Martin joint venture that flies Delta and Atlas launch vehicles, is a competitor for government work. Arianespace, a French company with French majority, but pan-European ownership that launches the Ariane 5; International Launch Services (ILS), a U.S. company owned by Khrunichev State Research and Production Space Center of Russia, which launches Khrunichev-built Proton launch vehicles; and Sea Launch, originally owned by Boeing, and now owned by an Energia of Russia affiliate, which launches Energia-built Zenit vehicles, continue to contest the heavy-lift/dual payload launch market, in which demand remains static in the roughly 20 to 25 heavy commercial satellite per year bracket. China Great Wall Industry Corp. was in the past confined mainly to its domestic market for its Long March vehicles by western regulatory restrictions, but has made inroads outside of its domestic market in the last few years, launching satellites for Eutelsat, Venezuela, Turkey and Pakistan.

Can markets, even newly emerging ones, create the demand to support all the launch capacity on the market? This is a key question in these exciting times.

Owen D. Kurtin is the founding member of New York City-based law firm Kurtin PLLC and a founder and principal of private investment firm The Vinland Group LLC. He may be reached at [email protected].