That is my concern. Large numbers of cubesats in long lived orbits.
ULA @ulalaunch 21 hours ago@SteaphanyW @smallsats @SpaceRef #ULACubeSats deployment must comply w/orbital debris mitigation guidelines. ULA will facilitate compliance.
Isn't free cubesat rides a blow to the likes of Firefly, RocketLab, and the like? - Ed Kyle
Quote from: kevin-rf on 11/20/2015 01:03 pmThat is my concern. Large numbers of cubesats in long lived orbits. QuoteULA @ulalaunch 21 hours ago@SteaphanyW @smallsats @SpaceRef #ULACubeSats deployment must comply w/orbital debris mitigation guidelines. ULA will facilitate compliance.Not surprisingly, ULA will require that cubesats comply with the orbital debris guidelines. For satellites in LEO, that generally means decay within 25 years.
Quote from: edkyle99 on 11/22/2015 02:33 amIsn't free cubesat rides a blow to the likes of Firefly, RocketLab, and the like? - Ed KyleIf they were all free, seems like it would be -- but 'low cost' and 'affordable' are used in the presser, so the six per A-V likely won't be free. Not sure ULA needs to spend effort under-cutting the list you've presented... the more likely scenario is a P.R. opportunity that may be cost neutral.
I assume most of these will be dropped off in GTO after the paying customer is dropped off first. With these new multi-burn mission profiles the perigees have been quite high. Much longer than 25 years.
How useful are GTO orbits for cubesats? I'd think that most cubesat operators would prefer LEO. In GTO you'd need a more powerful transmitter due to the much further average distance (or accept to drastically limit your communication windows to only the perigee part of the orbit), the frequent passage of radiation belts would fry the cheap electronics of typical cubesats, and GTO is useless for things like remote sensing. Perhaps this rideshare will be mostly used on sun-synchronous flights.
Quote from: obsever on 11/23/2015 12:28 pmHow useful are GTO orbits for cubesats? I'd think that most cubesat operators would prefer LEO. In GTO you'd need a more powerful transmitter due to the much further average distance (or accept to drastically limit your communication windows to only the perigee part of the orbit), the frequent passage of radiation belts would fry the cheap electronics of typical cubesats, and GTO is useless for things like remote sensing. Perhaps this rideshare will be mostly used on sun-synchronous flights.Well, that depends entirely on one's objectives. If one of your development objectives is to improve low-cost fast-turnaround-design smallsat technologies to survive in higher-Earth orbits, then the opportunity to have your cubesats carried up into that environment for component-level, subsystem-level and system-level testing at low cost might be extremely useful.The smallsat/cubesats of the future need not be constrained by the design decisions of the early generations of cubesats.