PARIS — The recent experience of smallsat launch aggregators Spaceflight Industries and Alba Orbital illustrate what’s getting better and what’s not on launch availability.
Both have been forced to wait two years or more for their selected launchers — SpaceX in the case of Spaceflight, and Soyuz for Alba — to make good on long-booked contracts.
For Spaceflight, the 2016 launch of its Sherpa smallsat carrier as a supplemental passenger on a SpaceX rocket was delayed for a year, forcing many of its 80-plus satellite customers to quit . . .
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