The smallsat LVs start flying this year. Expect 6-9 from Electron if no problems and a couple test flights from LauncherOne and Vector. Say upto12 from these 3 in 2018 and 30 in 2019. Still more LV in development so maybe few more start flying 2019.
Or, everyone's chewing through backlog and 2019 sees a stall, with another, much larger spike in 2020 as Starlink and Oneweb start seriously deploying...
Quote from: Lar on 02/01/2018 10:39 pmOr, everyone's chewing through backlog and 2019 sees a stall, with another, much larger spike in 2020 as Starlink and Oneweb start seriously deploying...I agree, eating through backlog is probably a big part of this year's spike. One Web should have initial deployments this year, and I expect serious Starlink deployments in 2019, so I expect it to be somewhat smooth, even if it drops a bit next year.Amusingly, I checked the timeline of spaceflight on Wikipedia again, and the list of flights for this year has only gotten longer. I checked the history to see if this was a mistake, and an edit that increased the number of planned flights came with the comment "Even more scheduled flights… Lies, damn lies and launch schedules " At this point, more planned launches this year probably just means more slipping to next year.
The "backlog argument" would be more convincing if 2017 had an unusually low number of launches but 90 is higher than most recent years.
Quote from: DreamyPickle on 02/15/2018 05:14 pmThe "backlog argument" would be more convincing if 2017 had an unusually low number of launches but 90 is higher than most recent years.There should have been some dip in the annual launches to create a backlog... but there hasn't been one to my knowledge. Have to be careful how to calculate the current uptrend because of small number statistics and some halting and restarting that the launch providers have experienced, but there does seem to be more to launch and more providers of that service these days.