🏠 > [[Interviews]] > December 10 2025 **Insider**: [[Brian Rogers]] **Source**: [Reuters](https://vimeo.com/1145559104/09ef2a7170) **Date**: December 10 2025 🔗 Vimeo Link: https://vimeo.com/1145559104/09ef2a7170 >[!summary] Vimeo video embedding not yet supported ## Transcript # Launch Velocities: Scale Up Without Slowing Down — Reuters Events Webinar Panel (Rocket Lab, Firefly Aerospace, Sierra Space, Stoke Space) ### Welcome and Webinar Overview (0:00) **Lily Mace (Reuters Events):** Hello and welcome. I’m Lily Mace, conference director here at Reuters Events, and I’m delighted to welcome you to this webinar, **“Launch Velocities: Scale Up Without Slowing Down.”** Today we have an excellent panel with experts from Rocket Lab, Firefly Aerospace, **Sierra Space** *(transcribed as “c Aerospace”)*, and Stoke Space, led by Dave, president of the Commercial Space Federation. We’re looking to make this webinar as interactive as possible, so please submit your questions through the Q&A feature on the toolbar at the bottom of your screen, and the panel will do their best to get to them as we go. So without further ado, I’d love to hand over now to Dave. Hope you all enjoy the discussion. Thanks, Dave. **Dave (Commercial Space Federation) (0:38):** Great, thanks Lily. And again, good afternoon, or good morning, good evening to everyone—depending on where you find yourself today. My name is **David [unclear last name]** *(transcribed as “David Osa”)*. I’m the president of the **Commercial Space Federation (CSF)**, a trade association in Washington, D.C., and we’re the chief advocate / trade association lobbying group for commercial space—so very heavily U.S.-focused, but obviously the commercial space industry and the folks represented on the call today are very global and international. We have with us today: **Brian Rogers**, Vice President of Global Launch Services at Rocket Lab; **Adam Oaks**, Vice President of Launch Vehicles at Firefly Aerospace; **Jordan Fletcher**, Deputy Chief Engineer *(corrected later)* at Sierra Space; and **Allison “Allie” Crutchfield**, Senior Counsel and Senior Director for Stoke Space. I’m going to take the moderator position and share a couple of scene-setting slides and comments to open up the conversation and set the stage. ### Scene Setting: CSF, Market Growth, and Launch Forecasting (1:38) **Dave (1:38):** First and foremost, I always like to take a moment to give a little commercial about CSF—who we are. I’ve been excited to watch this organization grow over the last couple of years as excitement around commercial space has grown dramatically. I started my career 20-plus years ago at the Satellite Industry Association (SIA). Twenty years ago, SIA very much represented what was considered “commercial space”—SES and Intelsat and the commercial GEO satcom providers. You turn 20 years now, and I come to CSF and I believe now this is truly commercial space industry as we see it today. For all the excitement and energy and billions and billions of dollars of new investment coming in: the latest statistic I’ve seen is somewhere around **$32.5B** (according to **BryceTech** *(transcribed as “Price Tech”)* ) invested in commercial space in the last year, with over **$30B** of that **$32B** invested in satellite launch infrastructure. I think that’s going to be very germane to our conversation today. But just to wrap this up: CSF and the space industry is always the space [unclear: “sports”]. At the bottom of the screen here—up through engineering service providers, space situational awareness and remote sensing, folks doing exciting things in commercial LEO, space manufacturing, in-space transportation; satellite operators; space exploration (Moon, Mars, **cislunar** space); huge global supply chain; and then of course several of the folks we have on this call—reentry— which sort of makes everything else on this page. This conversation comes to us at a very interesting time. CSF is about to put out a new study in probably the January timeframe. This will be publicly released, so you’ll all be able to download the report and get access to it. I asked our friends at Rational Futures—the organization that’s been leading this study effort—to give a snapshot of what we’re going to say. The goal is to look at the launch forecast in the coming decade: independent analysis based on FCC filings (for instance, in the United States), adding some level of reality to that list, and trying to understand which ones are real and which ones are very speculative. There’s an optimistic view right now, pessimistic view. Next slide: [unclear] “80 years looking year-to-year base” … [unclear] “… will need to be launched by the folks I think on this call … start to have a conversation about how we’re … and then last…” And last but not least, there’s been tremendous investment over the last nine to 10 years: over **$65B** invested in space broadly defined, with **33%** as the largest subset of that. **Unidentified participant (5:54):** Dave, I don’t mean to interrupt you—it’s just a little hard to hear your audio. Extremely faint. Or do I just need to speak up like this? **Dave (6:04):** That’s a little better. Great. With that, I’ll pause and use that as scene setting, and turn to my panelists to start the conversation by introducing themselves and telling us a bit about how the company—or how they themselves—are helping scale up. ### Panel Introductions (6:28) **Jordan Fletcher (Sierra Space) (6:28):** Good morning. My name is Jordan Fletcher. Minor correction: I’m actually the **Chief Engineer at Sierra Space** for the **Tranche 2 Tracking Layer** program. That’s a pretty recent change. I’m working for the new defense division within Sierra Space. We like to say we’re “defending today and defining tomorrow.” As for myself, I’ve spent much of my career working on the system side of space—technology, launch vehicles, things like that—for companies like Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics, United Launch Alliance, and now at [unclear: “Aerospace”]. I tend to view things through the lens of customer requirements, mission success, and the use case for the end user. For me, launch velocity is more than just additional rockets on the manifest. It’s about building systems that can scale under tight timelines—under schedule and customer demands—without compromising quality, reliability, and integrity. I’m excited to bring the integrator and customer perspective today. **Dave (7:42):** Thank you, Jordan. Allie, over to you. **Allie Crutchfield (Stoke Space) (7:52):** All right. Allie Crutchfield here with Stoke Space. A little bit about Stoke: we’re a new entrant into the launch game. We’re building a rocket called **Nova**—a medium-lift, 100% reusable, two-stage vehicle. The key differentiator is that reusable upper stage is protected by an **actively cooled reentry heat shield**—so no tiles. The idea being it’s robust and resilient to damage, and therefore enables rapid reflights without tons of inspection or refurbishment—aiming toward aircraft-like capability. My background has been largely in the regulatory game: FAA licensing, day-of-launch operational constraint management (airspace and maritime), making sure government agencies are working together so we can scale in a way that supports the growing industry while balancing the needs of other customers and safety. **Dave (9:05):** Awesome. Thank you, Allie. Brian, over to you. **Brian Rogers (Rocket Lab) (9:15):** Good morning—from the west coast of the U.S. to wherever you are in the world right now. Brian Rogers, Vice President of Global Launch Services at Rocket Lab. Rocket Lab has two business units: **Launch** and **Space Systems**, and both are scaling tremendously. On the launch side: our **Electron** launch vehicle has launched **76** times to date. We’re on track to something above **20** this year—and in fact, 19 and 20 are on the pad right now. That includes our **HASTE** launch vehicle—a suborbital variant (Hypersonic Suborbital Testbed) for hypersonic test flight / missile defense kinds of missions. And of course, the **Neutron** launch vehicle—more of a constellation-class launch vehicle—coming to the pad next year. On the Space Systems side: we’ve got over **42 satellites** in backlog, including commercial constellations for the likes of **Globalstar**, and national security work—Rocket Lab is also performing on one of the **SDA tranches**. Happy to be here. **Dave (10:05):** Awesome. Thanks Brian. Adam, round us out. **Adam Oaks (Firefly Aerospace) (10:15):** Adam Oaks, VP of launch vehicles at Firefly Aerospace. Quick background: I spent basically a decade-and-change at SpaceX, starting in the test area and ultimately moving into the production propulsion team for a handful of years. I saw everything go from a hope and a dream to a fully qualified **EELV**-class vehicle at the time, and was instrumental in how that played out. Taking that perspective—especially around **vertical integration**—there’s a lot of similar culture here at Firefly. I’ve been here six and a half years, hired by the founder. As he looked at the future—what makes a new space company successful? It’s the can-do attitude and the courage to hold fast. The one that’s germane to this conversation is vertical integration, where you can control your own destiny and build on those things as fast as you go. On our side: there’s the launch team with **Alpha** and then our medium-class vehicle, **Eclipse**. On the spacecraft side, our tagline is “end-to-end space transportation company.” The most recent success was **Blue Ghost** landing on the Moon in March this year, among other upcoming missions and customers. ### Market Demand: “Do We Need This Many Launch Providers?” (12:01) **Dave (12:01):** Here’s a question that’s been on everybody’s mind at some point: do we need this many launch providers? Is the market big enough? How are you looking at the demand forecast for small versus medium versus large—and where does your company play? Jordan, do you want to start? **Jordan Fletcher (12:38):** From my perspective it’s a little different—we’re not in the launch business per se; we’re in the customer perspective. If we look at the state of the industry and the growth of the new space economy, there’s certainly a lot of opportunity. It’s also nice to get diversity in the defense industrial base—for capability as a nation. From a customer perspective, more launch providers gives us flexibility to choose launch dates, planes, inclinations, and so on. So we’re very excited to see that. **Dave (13:29):** Allie, Brian, Adam—anyone else want to jump in? **Allie Crutchfield (13:38):** As probably the newest entrant into the launch game, a lot of people asked us that question. But as far as we can tell, the market is **supply constrained**. Any launch provider that can prove they can launch routinely, affordably, and reliably is probably going to have as many customers as they can serve. **Brian Rogers (14:02):** I tend to agree. As we move to proliferated architectures in space and the numbers increase, we’re hearing across commercial, national security, and civil: more options and the breaking of the monopoly would be a good thing. And this panel is about the ability to scale. Building your first rocket is incredibly hard—you have PhDs turning the wrenches and pouring over work instructions. Scaling that to launch a hundred times a year is a completely different challenge. Even with super heavy launch vehicles and new entrants, there’s still a tough hill to climb to meet market need. If you go back a couple years—when **Amazon Kuiper** *(transcribed as “Amazon Kuer”)* bought up literally all the launch capacity in the market—if you look at that as just one constellation, the answer is absolutely yes: more launch is still needed. **Adam Oaks (15:02):** Just to close that out: we saw the crunch in supply and demand. The line of sight was over the horizon three years ago, and now you’re seeing it play out. There were a lot of promises in vehicle availability, but now the cards have been played and you see what’s still in front of us. Architectures need to be launched—and ultimately there’s even more. Now the challenge is on us as providers to execute. It would be interesting to put a footnote for yourself in five years and look back—launch has historically been challenging to predict. There are a lot of medium-sized vehicles being developed. People use the transportation analogy—small, medium, whatever size ships, airplanes, etc. I think we have the right spread of vehicles. Winners and losers will emerge, but there are a lot of capable people—exciting times ahead. ### Great Power Competition: China (16:17) **Dave (16:17):** Let me ask a macro competition question: China. CSF put out a report a couple months back called *Redshift* about how dramatically China has improved space capabilities over the last decade, and that they’re poised to potentially overtake the U.S. in several areas. Most of you are “western world” providers—how concerned are you about China’s ability to mass-produce and maybe underprice/undercut in the future? **Brian Rogers (16:53):** I don’t think about it as attacking market share globally. They seem to be self-sustaining in a number of ways. We saw this with the end of Russian launch vehicles after the invasion of Ukraine. The way we address market is not “what is the addressable market of China.” It isn’t one. But in the context of great power competition: we have to keep pace. We have to be able to replenish, be resilient, and have a variety of capability to keep pace with what China is doing. **Allie Crutchfield (17:43):** One thing that did stand out is the U.S. is far ahead on **reusability**. If we’re talking rapid reuse, that’s going to be an important factor in maintaining customer base and keeping it cheap. **Adam Oaks (18:00):** I think if anything, it’s a motivator. Great power competition is becoming more real by the day. American ingenuity ultimately gives us an edge, but they continue to demonstrate they’re serious, and they’ll keep pushing. A failed first attempt at reusability doesn’t mean they’ll stop—it’s just a matter of time. And regulatory lines that prevent addressing that market or them flying equivalent payloads for us—I don’t see that going away in our lifetime. **Jordan Fletcher (18:50):** I’m with everyone else. A nation-state actor pushing innovation creates a “new space race” dynamic that spurs investment dollars and opportunities domestically. Historically, the original space race was kicked off by geopolitical tensions—and we’re seeing echoes of that now. ### Regulation and Licensing: Modernizing the System Without Sacrificing Safety (19:16) **Dave (19:16):** One topic is regulatory. China can move heaven and earth to let companies test and fail and get licensed quickly. We obviously don’t have that here in the U.S. and in most democratic countries—there’s more red tape and process. Allie, this is your specialty: are we falling behind because of regulatory issues? Are we making progress? What’s left to be done? **Allie Crutchfield (20:13):** How much time do you have? (laughs) I have many thoughts. I’ll boil them down: Yes—regulation probably slows down not the innovation, but the ability to implement it regularly or as quickly as we want. Everyone is trying to get to the same place, but we’re bound by antiquated processes and technology. It wasn’t even five years ago that I was sending hand-signed documents in triplicate via mail for parts of the process. In the last five to 10 years, we’re leaps and bounds better—mostly because demand had to be met. I think our government, particularly the **FAA** *(transcribed as “the a”)*, is dedicated to getting as many launches out as possible and not slowing anyone down. **Allie Crutchfield (21:11):** [Connection unstable / audio drop.] **Dave (21:31):** You broke up for eight to 10 seconds there. **Allie Crutchfield (21:31):** Sorry. My point is: we are constrained, but there are immediate things we can solve by throwing technology at it—like a portal to track licenses and applications (something we’ve been waiting for a long time). It requires appropriations and investment in DOT/FAA, not just for launch licensing but also airspace decluttering, and making sure ranges have the right tools to allow multiple launches a day. We’re slowly getting there, but not at the pace we need. **Brian Rogers (22:18):** I think the trend is good. We have a checklist of things to keep working through to increase cadence. If you look at the trajectory of the launch ranges—and what they’ve been able to accomplish—**FAA Part 450** is a good data point, and the drive to commercialize is good. But the regulator also needs an eye on safety, not bureaucracy—we don’t want to go full China and be dropping hypergolic spent tanks on villages. There’s a line in the sand. Overall, happy with the trajectory; we need to keep our foot on the gas. **Jordan Fletcher (23:00):** Great points. There are good reasons for some regulation—lessons learned over a long process. But there are systems in need of modernization, both regulatory and technological. Those are opportunities for us to work with customers and improve efficiency while delivering mission success. **Adam Oaks (23:55):** I heard a saying: they have a lot of “red [unclear: ‘pride’],” we have a lot of red tape sometimes. You can show up to the airport 32 minutes before an airplane takes off and get through security and do all those things safely. The challenge for us as providers is: how do we create a system and a process that lets that kind of speed happen? In 10 years it’s going to be to that point—more flights than we can dream of. I don’t think anyone could have predicted the numbers we’re seeing now back in 2005. And I think the administration right now is very pro making regulations make sense. ### Launch Sites and Infrastructure: Throughput vs. “More Spaceports” (24:46) **Adam Oaks (24:46):** …The past couple of years, I don’t think the problem is that we need to start having more sites around. **[unclear / missing segment in source transcript between 24:46 and 27:24]** **Brian Rogers (27:24):** From a business perspective, that can be detrimental. If you’re not getting maximum throughput on your existing sites, diversification for the sake of diversification adds overhead without more addressable market. You have to be careful with the idea that more launch sites automatically adds more business. **Jordan Fletcher (27:44):** From my naive perspective, I don’t think we’re quite at the point where launch infrastructure is so squeezed that we need new spaceports. There are technical aspects that dictate what makes a good location—coastal launches over ocean so if something goes wrong early, you’re dropping a stage into the water rather than over Billings, Montana. There’s probably a smaller number of potential new sites, and we may not be quite there yet. **Allie Crutchfield (28:30):** I worry about a well-placed hurricane [unclear remainder of sentence] … we’re trying to make that better through rulemakings and industry discussions… but it’s absolutely harder to reenter. ### Reentry as a Regulatory Bottleneck: The Varda Example (32:23) **Allie Crutchfield (32:23):** Reentry is hard—technically hard, hard to prove reliability, and very hard to get licensed the first time. First-time licenses are always the hardest. **Brian Rogers (32:39):** Quick anecdote: the **Varda** reentry mission Allie mentioned earlier—Rocket Lab created the buses for the first couple of those missions. It does a very precise reentry burn and GNC to reenter a targeted space. That first launch went up and ended up being like three times longer than it should have been, because it took so long to get regulatory approval to do it. Rocket Lab and Varda ultimately got there with government partners, but it was painful—so much so that now I think Varda has selected to do all their reentries over Australia—wide open places—where the regulatory environment is like: “We want to stimulate this economic development, so let’s make it easier.” In the U.S., the pendulum swung the other way: you’re not even allowed to launch until you have your reentry license. We have to be careful. Focus on safety, of course, but not stifle economics—especially when partners like Australia are saying: “Heck yeah—let’s go do it.” **Dave (33:46):** Jordan? **Jordan Fletcher (33:46):** My expertise is less on the Dream Chaser side, so I won’t say too much about what I don’t know. I’ll echo: focus on safety. There are enormous technical challenges in ascent and reentry. Keeping focus on regulatory, technical challenges, safety, and mission success—it’s a complicated dance, but we need to bring it together to achieve it. ### Hypersonics and Suborbital Reentry Profiles (34:26) **Adam Oaks (34:26):** One piece we didn’t cover: with programs like [unclear: “MTB / Mock TVB”] and others—and as Brian mentioned, **HASTE**—from hypersonic scaling, those are reentry vehicles. You have to have the full flight profile and plan for where it’s going to come down covered before you get to the pad. That licensing piece is going to be pushed on. For Varda—those are a solved problem, there’s a process in place. What’s interesting is taking some of these ballistic trajectories and suborbital shots and putting them into the commercial world—we’ll naturally want to go way faster than historically. Having an open mind to how you change those processes is going to be interesting over the next two years, because there are dozens of launches on the books for things like that. ### Supply Chain and Vertical Integration (35:23) **Dave (35:23):** Let me change gears to supply chain and scalability—launch, satellite manufacturing, and reentry. There’s a lot of conversation about insourcing / vertical integration vs. outsourcing. How is your company approaching the supply chain, and how do you make those tradeoffs? **Brian Rogers (Rocket Lab) (36:14):** At Rocket Lab it’s a tale of two cities. On the launch vehicle side, we’ve always been very vertically integrated. That’s not to say we don’t have an expansive supply chain—lots of things come in—but it’s like **Inconel powder** *(transcribed as “inkin L powder”)*, and then [unclear: “raw carbon / rock carbon”], and we make entire launch vehicles. Propulsion systems and those sorts of things are produced vertically. SpaceX has shown that vertical integration allows cadence without external suppliers slowing you down, and better total cost of ownership across the value chain. On the space systems side, we’ve also been very vertically integrated, but our acquisition strategy has been twofold: find pain points / choke points in the market (star trackers, reaction wheels, solar, etc.) with high barriers to entry—like a solar factory that’s basically a semiconductor plant. So it made sense to acquire the company at the time called **SolAero** *(transcribed as “Soro”)* and bring them in, because Rocket Lab scales things into mass-produced products. We continue to be a merchant supplier: we sell solar, star trackers, reaction wheels—the idea being a rising tide lifts all ships. **Jordan Fletcher (37:48):** It’s something you always have to balance—make/buy decisions. It’s challenging to bring in all aspects of vertical integration. You have to focus on core competencies—where you shine and bring value. Sometimes the answer is yes (in-house), sometimes no. Often it’s case-by-case, part-by-part. **[unclear / missing segment in source transcript around 38:30–43:30]** **Adam Oaks (43:30):** As you scale from Alpha to Eclipse, that makes short order of some of the engineering challenges. On the spacecraft side, there’s a lot going on. Obviously landing on the Moon—it doesn’t matter if you can only do it once. There are upcoming missions, and the way we view it is we’re building new Lego blocks every day—different technologies and engineering rigor—to understand the “space physics problem.” As we build those pieces out, we learn clever ways to stack the Legos and accomplish mission sets across the whole solar system. ### Stoke’s Path: Building a Fully Reusable System (44:13) **Dave (44:13):** Allie—Stoke is going from zero to full reusability? **Allie Crutchfield (44:13):** We sure are. I mean—we’ve got to launch first, right? We have a launch coming up this year, which is by far the most exciting thing going on. It’s the most exciting time—this is where you get out all the kinks. We’re finishing up pad installation. We’re at **LC-14 at Cape Canaveral**, which was [unclear]. **[unclear / missing segment in source transcript around 44:38–50:52]** **Unidentified speaker (50:52):** …This could enable bigger satellites within bigger rockets, and okay, great—but that is not to say it’s going to shift the rest of the market, where rockets could be waiting to get to whatever their metric is for “fullness” before they’ll launch in order to pass price savings onto a customer. ### Cost per Kilogram, Nontraditional Concepts, and “City Bus” Cadence (51:06) **Dave (51:06):** Okay, interesting. **Adam Oaks (51:06):** I’d definitely do the math if that’s a reasonable number to get to. I would never second guess the possibility or innovative minds out there—even if it’s not traditional chemical energy conversion rockets. **SpinLaunch** was trying something unique, and the little **kid** in you just has to root for them. I know there are other spinoffs trying similar things, but that’s a really hard number to hit in dollars per kilogram. To Brian’s point: you’re going to a given orbit in a given location. To get to that kind of cost, it’s going to be “city bus” level service. The price of satellites and the level of commitment—your willingness to commit brain cycles to that problem—has to come down dramatically, or it has to scale economically with volume. Data centers may be that **nod** from venture capital and across. There has never been a better time to start a space company. ### Closing Remarks (56:39) **Adam Oaks (56:39):** I want to pump up everyone out there: sure, this is a launch panel and scaling is hard and business is hard—but what else are you going to work on? We should all be working on space stuff. It beats building toasters. And you should all join the Commercial Space Federation too, because you need that large advocate in the capital. **Allie Crutchfield (57:02):** CSF enables a lot of these conversations because we’re able to talk to each other under one umbrella. It helps us raise the tide together and work with regulators through you all. Thank you to Dave for the CSF work. **Dave (57:13):** Thank you. Thank you, [unclear: “Ellen” / likely “Allie”]. Lily, over to you. **Lily Mace (Reuters Events) (57:22):** Thank you very much to Brian, Allison, Adam, Jordan, and Dave for that fantastic conversation. This recording will be on demand if you’d like to watch it again or share it with colleagues and peers, and you’ll be sent a link with the recording in the next 24 hours. This webinar has been developed in the run-up to **Space and Satellite USA 2026**, taking place **June 8–9 in Washington, D.C.** Registration is now live. Be sure to check out our Space and Satellites website, where satellite scale and production is a key theme. Once again, thank you all for listening, and thanks again to our panelists and moderator. **All panelists (58:03):** Thanks everyone. Thanks very much. Thanks. Source: uploaded transcript file.