Getting a payload to orbit

The launch is the famous part and increasingly the simplest one. What surrounds it decides your year.

There are two ways to space for most payloads. A dedicated launch buys the whole rocket and puts your spacecraft exactly where you want it, on roughly your schedule, for a price with two or three more zeros than most first missions carry. A rideshare buys a seat on someone else's manifest: dramatically cheaper per kilogram, in exchange for going where the bus goes, when the bus goes.

Rideshare is how most small payloads fly now, and its real costs are not on the price sheet. Your orbit is approximately the primary passenger's orbit. Your schedule is the manifest's schedule, and manifests slip, which means your team, your insurance window and your license timelines all have to survive a slip. Integration is its own project: your spacecraft has to mate to a deployer, pass environmental testing, and satisfy the launch provider's safety review, all documented, all on deadlines that arrive faster than teams expect.

Between you and the rocket there is often a broker or integration house. A good one aggregates payloads, owns the deployer hardware, handles the paperwork and the test campaign, and has seen every way this goes wrong. This is a market where experience is the product, and it is exactly the kind of introduction we can make once we understand your mission.

Two questions sort most conversations quickly. What does the payload mass, roughly: a few kilograms, tens, or hundreds? And does the mission care which orbit it reaches, or mostly that it reaches orbit at all? Those two answers determine whether you are a rideshare passenger, a candidate for a small dedicated vehicle, or something in between.

What we will not do is name the right provider from a chatbot conversation, and you should be suspicious of anyone who will. Manifests, pricing and reliability records move constantly. What we do is take the mission in plain language and introduce you to people whose job is this, after confirming they are interested and available.