The United States is launching more rockets than ever before — but is it enough? With U.S. orbital launch demand already surpassing 180 launches per year and a pipeline of satellite constellations, government missions, and proposed space-based data centers that could push that number into the thousands, America’s launch infrastructure is facing a stress test it was never designed to handle. In this episode, Tom Patton talks with Dr. Tom Colvin, Managing Partner and Chief Technologist at Rational Futures, to unpack the findings of the firm’s May 2026 report “SCRUBBED: America’s Launch Capacity Challenge”, which was commissioned by the Commercial Space Federation.
Dr. Colvin brings rare cross-domain credibility to this conversation — a Ph.D. in Aeronautics and Astronautics from Stanford, years as a Senior Policy Advisor at NASA, and deep roots in the space sustainability and commercialization policy world. At Rational Futures, he and co-founder Dr. Akhil Rao have built a firm focused on exactly the kind of rigorous, independent analysis that government agencies and commercial operators need but rarely get: quantitative, mission-specific, and free from institutional bias. The report they’ve produced doesn’t predict the future — it maps the conditions under which a serious launch capacity crisis becomes unavoidable.
What emerges from the data is both clarifying and alarming. Traditional launch sites like Cape Canaveral and Vandenberg are already straining under congestion, infrastructure coordination failures, and regulatory friction.
“Right now, operators are experiencing friction at the current launch cadence. The predictions for future launches are kind of off the charts, and nobody knows really what the capacity of even our existing infrastructure is, or when we’ll hit that capacity limit, what’s the biggest bang for the buck to fix it,” Colvin said. “And so we were taking a first sort of stab at making a much more rigorous, physically grounded and traceable analysis that people who are trying to plan for future infrastructure can use. Because if you’re going to build new infrastructure, you want it to be right-sized to the amount of demand or services that you’re going to have to provide. So that was effectively what we were doing — we pitched that we can also bring in certain technical constraints that we haven’t seen other people address.”
Non-traditional sites — inland and sea-based spaceports — hold theoretical promise but face massive capital requirements and a chicken-and-egg demand problem that market forces alone are unlikely to solve. Meanwhile, proposals for orbital data center constellations totaling over one million satellites represent a demand scenario so large it would require an entirely different conception of what American launch infrastructure looks like.
