Small Space Launch Failures

There are a lot of new orbital launch vehicles being developed around the world, with names that are not particularly well known in the space industry, including ABL Space Systems’ RS1, Astra Space’s Astra Rocket, Beijing Interstellar Glory Space Technology’s Hyperbola, Expace’s Kuaizhou, Firefly Aerospace’s Firefly-Alpha, the Iranian Space Agency’s Simorgh, the Korean Aerospace Research Institute’s Nuri, Landspace’s Zhuque and NewSpace India’s Small Satellite Launch Vehicle (SSLV).

These small launchers and others typically do not receive the same degree of industry attention or media news coverage as larger rockets under development or just commencing their operational life such as NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS), Blue Origin’s New Glenn, SpaceX’s Starship and United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan. In part, it has to do with the fact that they are either being developed by relatively obscure companies or are from non-Western countries... China, India, Iran and South Korea.

But the other part is that these small launchers have suffered a fair number of technical problems which have resulted in numerous launch failures of late. In the last three years (plus January 2023), for example, there have been 27 orbital launch failures. That’s a lot of failures in such a short period of time, at least by historical standards. Twenty of those 27 were logged by the small launchers I’ve mentioned above.

Normally, you see two to four launch failures in any given year, not an average of nine. But that’s okay, cause it’s a sign the industry is active and growing. No more sleepy industry.

Teal Group tracks these failed events in its Spaceflight Failures & Malfunctions appendix. This report was updated recently to include eight failed launch missions for 2022. Among these were two failed Astra Rocket 3.3s, an Epsilon CLPS, a Firefly-Alpha, a Hyperbola 1, an SSLV, a VEGA C and a Zhuque-2. In all these cases, the payloads were either destroyed or re-entered the Earth’s atmosphere too soon and burned up. In most, the problem involved a malfunction in an upper stage a few minutes after liftoff.