George Patterson wrote:
wrote:

Please tell us about some of them.

The big hitter is Ariane in France. They've been launching since 1980
and
currently put up more than half the satellites launched every year.
They just
signed a deal with the Russian space agency, which will allow them to
use the
Soyuz infrastructure.

Ariane ws developed by and is operated by ESA, the European
counterpart to NASA:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ariane

E.g. Ariane is not a private venture.


Messerschmitt made a stab at it at about the same time, but I'm not
sure they
every got operational. They were planning to build launch facilities
in Africa.

Then there's International Launch Services, which is a joint venture
of Lockheed
Martin and Russian rocket builder Khrunichev State Research and
Production Space
Center. They were formed in 1995.

Checking out their site http://www.ilslaunch.com/whoweare/ it is not
clear how many launches they have made. It is clear that they rely
on launch vehicles that were developed and proven by the US and
Soviet Governments.


Sea Launch was also formed in 1995 and made their first commercial
lift in 1999.
They launch from platforms in the ocean to get around having to deal
with NASA
to use land bases in the U.S..


Their home page is here http://www.sea-launch.com/ where they report
sixteen launches to date. Excellent! However their launch vehicles
are modifications to vehicles developed by the Soviets.

Boeing is also getting into the act with their Delta system.

And if you need to put up something really massive, there are several
companies
in Russia who have access to updated military launch facilities, and,
of course,
the Russian government will be happy to help you as well.

Which obviously are using vehicles and infrastructure deleloped
by the old Soviet Union.

IOW none of those are examples of launch vehicles developed by
private industry. I think those programs area good thing. However
they do not show industry doind something better than government,
they show something industry could not have done at all if
governments had not done the precursor work.

The Chinese will also launch commercial satellites with the Long
March.


Launches planned for the next few months may be viewed at
http://spaceflightnow.com/tracking . As you can see, there are 40
scheduled. One
is NASA. A few others are U.S. military.

I see two NASA launches, one joint NASA/NOAA, and one NOAA launch
scheduled as well as a number of USAF GPS lauches. Several launches
are for support of the ISS.