WASHINGTON, Aug 4 (Reuters) - SpaceX is increasingly reserving space on its rockets to launch its own Starlink satellites, crowding out rival space companies that have long depended on Elon Musk's company to get their payloads into orbit.
Starlink's share of SpaceX missions has grown year after year, rising from 54% of the Falcon 9 rocket's manifest in 2020 to about 79% so far in 2026, according to a Reuters analysis of launch data compiled by astrophysicist Jonathan McDowell.
In recent months, at
least seven spacecraft companies have been told that Falcon 9 is fully booked for all types of missions until 2028 or 2029, eight sources told Reuters. They added that the bottleneck is driven by SpaceX's plans to transition to the new Starship rocket, designed to be fully reusable and cheaper than Falcon 9.
Starlink's growing percentage of SpaceX launches reflects an economic reality. Analysts estimate that a single Starlink mission using Starship could bring in tens of millions of dollars more in revenue for SpaceX than launching a commercial customer's payload to space. That calculation is based on the expected returns of adding more satellites to Starlink's network.
The unit is critical to SpaceX's success, accounting for 60% of its revenue last year. Even as SpaceX transitions to the Starship rocket, the company's NASA obligations and its plans for Starlink are likely to occupy most of its launches.
SpaceX did not respond to Reuters requests for comment. The company has said it is targeting late 2026 for Starship's first orbital mission, which will deploy a batch of SpaceX's next-generation Starlink satellites.
Starlink, which has deployed more than 10,000 satellites, brought in $11.4 billion in revenue in 2025, while SpaceX earned $4.1 billion from its space and launch business.
"SpaceX has a scarce resource, which is their own launch capacity," said Akhil Rao, chief economist at space industry research firm Rational Futures and a former NASA employee.
"If they were to use the same launch capacity for an external customer, then they are, in a sense, giving up the profits that they could have earned by flying their own internal satellites."
There are well over 500 companies building spacecraft or operating satellites in space that make up U.S. demand for rocket launches, representing some $50 billion in capital investment since 2000, BryceTech senior analyst Phil Smith said.
AI AMBITIONS
SpaceX, which went public in June, has said it will use Starship to expand Starlink and, eventually, launch up to 1 million solar‑powered satellites engineered as orbital AI data centers.
NASA also has a deal with SpaceX to use Starship as a moon lander as soon as 2028. The NASA contract involves dozens of in-space refueling flights and tests with Starship.
Though SpaceX has already booked some commercial customers on Starship, its NASA obligations and its own satellite goals could leave little room for customers in the first few years of the operational launch schedule, experts said.
"Elon could make Starship widely commercially available and let everyone ride on it for super-cheap, but I don't know why they would do that," said one satellite executive who has had difficulty booking Falcon 9 this year.
"If the AI market is anywhere close to what they're projecting, the opportunity cost of not flying data centers is just immense," the executive said.
SpaceX said in its IPO prospectus that it "may prioritize our own launch payloads over additional U.S. government contracts or third-party customers."
The Falcon 9 has been a workhorse for much of the U.S. space industry, thanks to its reusable first-stage booster and speedy launch rate. But its price has risen from around $54 million in 2013 to roughly $74 million today.
A vertically integrated SpaceX focused on launching its own satellites could further raise the cost of space access and squeeze out dozens of smaller players building spacecraft without an orbital-class rocket of their own, analysts said.
"There's nothing anywhere in the industry that says launch prices are going to drop, or that it's even going to be available at scale anytime in the future," said another satellite executive who was unable to book a Falcon mission.
"The valley of death is going to get a hell of a lot deeper for space companies in general," the executive said, adding that young startups could face particularly strong headwinds.
COMPETITORS
Other launch companies have struggled to match SpaceX's reusability advantage or launch rate with Falcon 9, which has achieved 35 reuses of a single booster.
Blue Origin's New Glenn, a long-awaited reusable challenger to Falcon 9, exploded on a launchpad in May and will be grounded at least until the year's end.
United Launch Alliance's Vulcan rocket has been grounded since February over a booster issue. ULA, a joint venture between Boeing and Lockheed Martin, is the main launch provider for Amazon's Leo network, a budding rival to Starlink.
Rocket Lab, which is second to SpaceX in launch rate, is developing a fully reusable rocket called Neutron and is in the process of buying satellite communications firm Iridium for $8 billion.
Without Rocket Lab, Iridium would have to spend billions on rocket launches to get its next-generation satellites to space.
"Now, we can envision doing it more cost effectively and faster, which means more cash to generate for ourselves and invest in other services and businesses," Iridium CEO Matt Desch told Reuters.
If Starlink "was spending the 10, 15, 20 billion dollars with someone else to launch those satellites, I don't think they would exist today," he added.
Rocket Lab also sells satellite components, such as solar panels, and said revenue from that business started surpassing that from its launch business years ago. But the company has a financial interest in keeping launch customers happy because it also supplies them with satellite components.
"Our business model is just different to SpaceX - we set out from the beginning to provide merchant components and systems to our customers," Rocket Lab CEO Peter Beck said. "If nobody can launch anything, all of those components businesses dry up too. So we're very self-interested to make sure that everybody else launches."
(Reporting by Joey Roulette; editing by Tiffany Wu and David Gaffen)
