Quote from: jongoff on 09/30/2010 04:05 pmSmall FYI, Altius signed its first contract last night. I'll need to get clearance from the company we're contracting for before I can share details, but I should hopefully have something to say by early next week.~JonCongratulations, Jon! Have you settled into your new diggs yet?
Small FYI, Altius signed its first contract last night. I'll need to get clearance from the company we're contracting for before I can share details, but I should hopefully have something to say by early next week.~Jon
Good news! Now where is the scoop?
Fairly boring details for the most part (like getting an office in Louisville), but we did sign our second contract yesterday (which means I get paid again--w00t!):http://blog.altius-space.com/2010/11/nov-2nd-update-joining-the-vault/More details once I've had a chance to figure out what the customer will allow me to say about the project. :-)~Jon
Reading through, sounds like things are progressing well!
Thanks for the news, and congrats on the contracts. Hope you found a place to stay in Denver.
Monoprop hydrazine?
Depending on the size of payload attached, you could be talking over 700-1200m/s of dV potential.
Quote from: jongoff on 12/10/2010 05:03 pmDepending on the size of payload attached, you could be talking over 700-1200m/s of dV potential. Wow, really? Combine that with a Falcon 1e/similar and you're most of the way to GLXP lander...
No, but it's enough to get from LLO to the surface. If you use a Star 24 (or so) to capture into a dirty orbit, you could then clean it up with the lander before descent.
And given the creativity shown by current micro/nanosats, I'm sure there are lots of other ways to use it.
Quote from: simonbp on 12/11/2010 02:01 amNo, but it's enough to get from LLO to the surface. If you use a Star 24 (or so) to capture into a dirty orbit, you could then clean it up with the lander before descent.Well, if you had another stage to do part of the deceleration from lunar orbit (about half of it), then yeah this could work as is. dV from LLO to the lunar surface is on the order of ~1.8-2.0km/s. It should be pretty readily scalable though, so we could easily do a bigger tank if the situation merited it. I'm mostly using this to prove out the general manufacturing technique.But yeah, it could be part of a GLXP solution.