Starship faces historic upper-stage landing attempt, Rocket Lab's Electron flies its hundredth mission the same week
Expendable small rocket has outlived every flashier rival
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Photo of Eric Berger
arstechnica.com
Two launch programs reach milestones this week that illustrate opposite philosophies of getting to orbit. SpaceX is preparing a Starship test flight from Starbase, Texas, with an upper-stage landing attempt scheduled roughly 22.5 hours after liftoff — the first serious try at recovering a vehicle that no orbital rocket has ever fully reused. Rocket Lab's small Electron, meanwhile, flies its 100th mission on November 14 from New Zealand's Mahia Peninsula, delivering a synthetic-aperture-radar satellite for Japanese operator iQPS on a rocket wearing special gold-and-black livery.
The contrast matters because the industry has spent a decade arguing that reusability is the only path to cheap access to space, and the evidence remains split. Electron, first flown in 2017, is expendable — yet its dull, punctual cadence has outlived every flashier small-launch competitor. Starship is designed to make its economics work only if both stages come back; SpaceX keeps learning from what breaks, at a cost per test flight that only a company of its size can absorb.
The rest of the report shows the market pricing this in. Avio says its Vega C needs additional investment just to climb from four to six, then nine, flights a year — and one Ariane 64 launch consumes solid boosters equivalent to a full year of Vega C's baseline cadence. Firefly signed a multi-launch deal with Japan's Synspective covering up to ten Alpha flights through 2030, two SAR satellites per mission, from Wallops and Vandenberg. Stoke Space signed a multi-launch agreement with Planet Labs without announcing terms. Firefly CEO Jason Kim pitched Alpha's one-ton payload and responsive launch slots as the draw.
The Electron century flight will pass almost unnoticed beside Starship's fireball-or-triumph headlines, which may be the point: 100 consecutive deliveries of a working product is the quietest argument in the industry about which method actually pays.