Joint Industry/Government Demo Mission: Green Propellant Infusion Mission (GPIM)

[yg1968]

Green propellant successfully demonstrated on NASA mission:
https://spacenews.com/green-propellant-successfully-demonstrated-on-nasa-mission/

[Comga]

Green propellant successfully demonstrated on NASA mission:
https://spacenews.com/green-propellant-successfully-demonstrated-on-nasa-mission/

Sheesh!
An interesting definition of "success"
Six and a half years after the announcement, they declare victory and retreat hastily.

Note that the original plan was to demo four 1 lbf  thrusters for attitude control and a 5 lbf main thruster.
(Gotta love those Imperial units.)
Aerojet could not deliver the larger thruster so a fifth 1 lbf thruster was put in that center position.
(My friend just learned the term RUD.  Aerojet could have taught him that years ago.)
In the meantime, Rocketlab debuted Curie, a 120 N (~27 lbsf ) green monopropellant thruster.
Rocketlab followed that with Hyper-Curie a larger green bipropellant system.
(Anyone know the thrust of the Hyper-Curie engine?)
So whatever was demonstrated by GPIM is now pretty far off the leading edge.

In the article Aerojet talks about getting into the nanosat propulsion game.
Nanosats are commodity items. 
Pricing on all sorts of subsystems that used to cost millions now cost thousands.
Aerojet could not compete with Blue Origin for Vulcan's engine,
How are they going to compete with the large number of low overhead groups also doing nanosat propulsion like nPulsion?

However, NASA got something they value quite highly: a cool acronym - ASENT!
And Ball got sponsored to debut their BCP-100 smallsat.  That went well.

And hey! I know Chris McLean of Ball Aerospace. He's a good guy!  Congrats, Chris.

[Steven Pietrobon]

However, NASA got something they value quite highly: a cool acronym - ASENT!

Even cooler when its spelt right! :-) The acronym is ASCENT (Advanced Spacecraft Energetic Non-Toxic).

[Comga]

However, NASA got something they value quite highly: a cool acronym - ASENT!

Even cooler when its spelt right! :-) The acronym is ASCENT (Advanced Spacecraft Energetic Non-Toxic).

A long post and THAT’S your comment?

Who really cares?
Unless one agrees that nifty acronyms are more important than developing useful technology.

And Someone Created Even Newer Technology

[VSECOTSPE]

Green propellant successfully demonstrated on NASA mission:
https://spacenews.com/green-propellant-successfully-demonstrated-on-nasa-mission/

Sheesh!
An interesting definition of "success"
Six and a half years after the announcement, they declare victory and retreat hastily.

Note that the original plan was to demo four 1 lbf  thrusters for attitude control and a 5 lbf main thruster.
(Gotta love those Imperial units.)
Aerojet could not deliver the larger thruster so a fifth 1 lbf thruster was put in that center position.
(My friend just learned the term RUD.  Aerojet could have taught him that years ago.)
In the meantime, Rocketlab debuted Curie, a 120 N (~27 lbsf ) green monopropellant thruster.
Rocketlab followed that with Hyper-Curie a larger green bipropellant system.
(Anyone know the thrust of the Hyper-Curie engine?)
So whatever was demonstrated by GPIM is now pretty far off the leading edge.

It’s worse than that.  SSC developed HPGP, another green propellant, and demonstrated it aboard their Prisma mission way back in 2010.  HPGP has been used by everyone from Skybox to USAF to NASA.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/HPGP
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisma_(satellite_project)

Forget that RocketLab and others have lapped NASA’s agonizingly slow development of GPIM with their own green propellants.  There were demonstrated green propellant alternatives at the time NASA decided to develop GPIM.  There was no need for NASA to blow $50 million on GPIM.  It demonstrated little to nothing that hadn’t already been demonstrated elsewhere in the industry.

Of all the technology gaps NASA STMD needed to be focused on demonstrating over the past decade, green propellant was never one.

[jbenton]

...

Of all the technology gaps NASA STMD needed to be focused on demonstrating over the past decade, green propellant was never one.

Fair Point. Given that Congress never gives STMD as much funding as they ask, it's important to make the most of what they have.