A small space startup that's never launched a rocket keeps landing big contracts “I think that SpaceX is very well positioned to compete here, and I think this is going to have a really big impact on the dedicated smallsat launch providers,” Pivovarova told CNN Business. However, she also noted there are still some unanswered questions about SpaceX’s new program, like how it will fit the dedicated smallsat missions into the long list of launches it already has lined up. According to a new web page that went live Monday, SpaceX says it plans to launch about one dedicated smallsat rideshare per year beginning in late 2020 or 2021. Each mission will travel to a sun-synchronus orbit about 500 to 600 kilometer (310 to 372 miles) above Earth. That’s a common destination for Earth observation and communications smallsats, according to Pivovarova. SpaceX is expected to continue launching large communications satellites as it clears a backlog of scheduled missions. Military payloads are also expected to remain a core part of its business. But SpaceX’s president and chief operating officer, Gwynne Shotwell, acknowledged that the company’s core launch business hasn’t grown like it once hoped. SpaceX had forecasted in 2017 it would be launching 30 to 40 rockets per year by 2018, according to SpaceNews, but it only launched 21 times last year and is expected to match that number in 2019. “We thought the commercial market might expand to that, I think we probably wished it had, but [now] we’ve got plenty of capacity to launch our Starlink system,” Shotwell said, according to SpaceNews. Related