What Israel Can Do in Space

In his June Mosaic article, “Israel in Space,” Arthur Herman provides an excellent overview and history of Israel’s space capabilities. But it is important to understand both Israel’s current limitations and its potential space opportunities for the future in the context of the massive disruption in the space industry that will be occasioned by SpaceX’s Starship becoming operational well within this decade.

While it’s understandable that Israel doesn’t want to depend on other nations for the delivery of critical orbital assets for its national security, it (like most countries) is geographically disadvantaged for getting into space from its own territory. With the exception of earth-observation satellites in sun-synchronous orbit at 98-degrees inclination, most orbital launches have eastward azimuths, which allow them to take advantage of the earth’s rotation. However, if Israel were to conduct such launches from its base at Palmachim, it would overfly both its own territory and hostile neighbors, risking casualties from failed launch attempts. So it launches toward the west, over the Mediterranean, with a significant reduction in mass delivered to orbit, having to fight the planet’s rotation rather than benefiting from it. This restricts the use of its launchers for the commercial market, because few if any customers have a desire to get into the few retrograde orbits to which it can deliver satellites.

In addition, its Shavit orbital rocket (whose lower stages are based on the Jericho ballistic missile) is old, expendable solid-motor technology, overdue for an upgrade in an age of reusability, which America and other nations are rapidly entering. This shift to reusability has been inspired by SpaceX’s Falcon rocket family, which has now successfully recovered and reused booster stages hundreds of consecutive times, resulting in dramatic cost reductions. So if Israel wants to control its own fate in launch, and become a player in the commercial launch market, it has to deal with these two issues: geography and technology.