What were the payloads of rocket maiden flights? How common are boilerplates?

With an upcoming launch of Falcon Heavy carrying boilerplate in a form of Tesla Roadster there’s been a lot of questions about how common such launches without carrying any real satellites are. We’ve decided to take a look and analysed all of the maiden flights looking back till 2010 (we’ve excluded most of the low-risk variants, such as Falcon 9 full thrust or sub-types of Antares, none of them carried boilerplate).

Out of 20 flights only 5 (25%) carried boilerplates, two of which – Antares and Soyuz-2-1v – carried an additional, useful satellites. So in fact only 15% of launches did not have any useful payload.

As it comes out – the practice of risking real, even expensive payloads is common, and both: commercial and institutional customers are willing to take that risk, which is quite significant: 5 (or 25%) of the launches on our list ended up with a failure (or 1 out of 5 boilerplate launches failed).

Launches are an opportunity too rare to pass up, and with Falcon Heavy launching on a rare heliocentric orbit it’s truly shameful that SpaceX did not attempt to reach out for a possible customers, yet alone offer CubeSat launch for free as ULA often does.

Long March 5

Shijian 17

Long March 6

20 micro- and nano-satellites

Kuaizhou

Kuaizhou-1
(this rocket’s payload is integrated with the upper stage)

Unha-3

Kwangmyŏngsŏng-3

GSLV Mk. II

GSAT-4