Another technical realm where the U.S. has an advantage, at least for the moment: space launchers.
I think it would be fair to say that if anything the PRC has moved ahead in its relentless deployment of military assets to space, and its advancement in ASAT weapons and GEO remote sensing satellites eclipse the U.S. But the U.S. does have a current advantage in boosters, primarily via the Falcon 9 system. The gap might seem manageable at first glance: for 2023 and 2024 the number of launches favored the U.S. by only 2:1, and obviously a huge percentage of those were Starlink missions. But if you look at the…throw weight, for lack of a better term…of the rockets used, the discrepancy is much, much larger. At 17,000 kg to low eartg orbit, F9 is considered a medium lift system (5,000 - 20,000 kg to LEO) when recovered. However , it is at the very edge of what is considered ‘medium’. If expended completely, it actually crosses over 20 tons into ‘heavy’ territory. A comparison I did of every PRC launch for the year 2023 compared to just the F9 launches of the same year showed a payload gap of roughly 7 : 1, excluding other platforms. The number of objects orbited by both sides that year was 2300 : 200 (ish). A complete apples to apples analysis would require the mass, inclination, apogee, and perigee of everything launched and I am not about to do that. But those two back of a Deny’s placemat calculations show that the U.S. can launch roughly an order of magnitude more stuff into LEO any given year.
Now again, a huge number of these launches were Starlink and the majority of the remainder were civilian, often not even for US based organizations. But the U.S. is now poised to capitalize on its advantage. The NRO has begun spamming remote sensing satellites into space as part of its proliferated constellation, with eight missions delivering 150+ satellites in about ten months time (in addition to other missions and orbital regimes). The SDA has ten missions on the books to deploy 126 communications satellites and a network of 30+ missile tracking satellites inside a year starting this summer (after nearly a year of delays). 200 more satellites are on order for SDA’s Incr 2, with planned launch dates in the 2026-2027 timeframe. By 2030, the proliferation constellations of NRO and SDA likely reach a thousand platforms all on their own.
And of course we cannot help but mention Starlink here, even though it is a nominally civilian system: it still equips every Army TOC, is proliferating across naval ships, and is installed on vehicles as small as those 4x4 golf carts the USMC uses. In Ukraine they are used down to the fireteam level by sniper/scouts operating in the Gray Zones. It clearly is a key military enabling capability, and one for which there is no Chinese equivalent: the first satellites for a similar PRC system started launching only in the last year.
The PRC has over a half a dozen rocket programs, both private and government, set to launch for the first time just in 2025 alone (a couple already have). Moreover it can to some degree keep up with the U.S. simply by prioritizing military payloads: a full half of its launches are military related in 2023-2024. But it will take a monumental increase in cadence rate just to overcome F9 by itself, and the numbers and types of rockets available to the U.S. space industry is also growing. New Glenn has entered the market as has Vulcan, and while the former has demonstrated no recovery it has full recovery hardware developed and installed. The latter is fully disposable but none the less has much reduced costs over its predecessors and a very ambitious launch cadence scheduled. Two more companies were just added to Space Forces vendor list, and at some point in the future it seems all but certain that super heavy is militarized, with perhaps its first reuse occurring in mere weeks.
I have no doubt the PRC will start to close the gap, if not this year than the next, by proliferating all of its rocket lines even if they are older models or newer ones that are still single use. But it will be pouring money into those projects and likely not be on an equal footing for a decade or two, given that US recoverable super heavies are already on the cusp of entering service while the Chinese space industry is largely trying to catch up to Falcon 9.
I think it would be fair to say that if anything the PRC has moved ahead in its relentless deployment of military assets to space, and its advancement in ASAT weapons and GEO remote sensing satellites eclipse the U.S. But the U.S. does have a current advantage in boosters, primarily via the Falcon 9 system. The gap might seem manageable at first glance: for 2023 and 2024 the number of launches favored the U.S. by only 2:1, and obviously a huge percentage of those were Starlink missions. But if you look at the…throw weight, for lack of a better term…of the rockets used, the discrepancy is much, much larger. At 17,000 kg to low eartg orbit, F9 is considered a medium lift system (5,000 - 20,000 kg to LEO) when recovered. However , it is at the very edge of what is considered ‘medium’. If expended completely, it actually crosses over 20 tons into ‘heavy’ territory. A comparison I did of every PRC launch for the year 2023 compared to just the F9 launches of the same year showed a payload gap of roughly 7 : 1, excluding other platforms. The number of objects orbited by both sides that year was 2300 : 200 (ish). A complete apples to apples analysis would require the mass, inclination, apogee, and perigee of everything launched and I am not about to do that. But those two back of a Deny’s placemat calculations show that the U.S. can launch roughly an order of magnitude more stuff into LEO any given year.
Now again, a huge number of these launches were Starlink and the majority of the remainder were civilian, often not even for US based organizations. But the U.S. is now poised to capitalize on its advantage. The NRO has begun spamming remote sensing satellites into space as part of its proliferated constellation, with eight missions delivering 150+ satellites in about ten months time (in addition to other missions and orbital regimes). The SDA has ten missions on the books to deploy 126 communications satellites and a network of 30+ missile tracking satellites inside a year starting this summer (after nearly a year of delays). 200 more satellites are on order for SDA’s Incr 2, with planned launch dates in the 2026-2027 timeframe. By 2030, the proliferation constellations of NRO and SDA likely reach a thousand platforms all on their own.
And of course we cannot help but mention Starlink here, even though it is a nominally civilian system: it still equips every Army TOC, is proliferating across naval ships, and is installed on vehicles as small as those 4x4 golf carts the USMC uses. In Ukraine they are used down to the fireteam level by sniper/scouts operating in the Gray Zones. It clearly is a key military enabling capability, and one for which there is no Chinese equivalent: the first satellites for a similar PRC system started launching only in the last year.
The PRC has over a half a dozen rocket programs, both private and government, set to launch for the first time just in 2025 alone (a couple already have). Moreover it can to some degree keep up with the U.S. simply by prioritizing military payloads: a full half of its launches are military related in 2023-2024. But it will take a monumental increase in cadence rate just to overcome F9 by itself, and the numbers and types of rockets available to the U.S. space industry is also growing. New Glenn has entered the market as has Vulcan, and while the former has demonstrated no recovery it has full recovery hardware developed and installed. The latter is fully disposable but none the less has much reduced costs over its predecessors and a very ambitious launch cadence scheduled. Two more companies were just added to Space Forces vendor list, and at some point in the future it seems all but certain that super heavy is militarized, with perhaps its first reuse occurring in mere weeks.
I have no doubt the PRC will start to close the gap, if not this year than the next, by proliferating all of its rocket lines even if they are older models or newer ones that are still single use. But it will be pouring money into those projects and likely not be on an equal footing for a decade or two, given that US recoverable super heavies are already on the cusp of entering service while the Chinese space industry is largely trying to catch up to Falcon 9.
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