Commercial Suborbital Sounding Rocket Market: A Role for Reusable Launch Vehicles

Space advocates adopted the tenet that the way to reduce the cost of space access is to fly reusable vehicles so development and production costs could be amortized over many flights. Some have also suggested that commercial suborbital flights, both for scientific payloads and for human space flight participants, may provide a path in which a revenue stream can be ultimately used to fund orbital and deep space operations. Some aspiring space launch providers (NewSpace) have incorporated in order to develop and fly such vehicles. This paper examines the economic and business conditions for reusable suborbital sounding rockets. Given current market size and pricing, the global nonmilitary suborbital sounding rocket market is less than 60 flights of perhaps 200-kilogram payloads annually at roughly $1 million each. High demand elasticity (increased demand with lowered prices) at a price of significantly less than $250 per kilogram of payload might increase the market to possibly 1500 flights annually. The business case for developing and flying reusable sounding rockets for this market cannot be closed with investor capital unless flight rates are markedly higher than at present. This paper discusses potential approaches to closing the business case.