Stoke are starting with reuseable 2nd stage then booster. Strange way of doing things for startup. Better to build booster first along with low cost expendable 2nd stage and start earning money, then tackle more difficult reuseable 2nd stage. While recovering 2nd stage is quite feasible the issue is more what is payload hit and cost of turning stage around.
I think ABL is still lurking in the shadows.
A new podcast from "Space in 60" interviewing the president and VP of Vaya Space. Appears to have been recorded late last year. Many bold claims are made throughout.http://www.spacein60.com/episodes(Seems that I can't link to just this episode, but you can find it by searching for 'Vaya Space')
Most conference panels are fairly anodyne affairs. Participants, even competitors in the same field, stick to their talking points and, at most, only politely disagree with one another. It often requires prodding from the panel’s moderator, or audience questions, to bring differences among the panelists into sharper focus.Sometimes, though, such prodding isn’t required. The right mix of personalities on a panel can turn it into something like MTV’s “The Real World” from 30 years ago, “when people stop being polite and start getting real.” That was the case a couple times during the SmallSat Symposium earlier this month in Mountain View, California, amid discussions about the hypercompetitive launch market for smallsats.
Smallsat launch and the real worldQuote from: thespacereview.comMost conference panels are fairly anodyne affairs. Participants, even competitors in the same field, stick to their talking points and, at most, only politely disagree with one another. It often requires prodding from the panel’s moderator, or audience questions, to bring differences among the panelists into sharper focus.Sometimes, though, such prodding isn’t required. The right mix of personalities on a panel can turn it into something like MTV’s “The Real World” from 30 years ago, “when people stop being polite and start getting real.” That was the case a couple times during the SmallSat Symposium earlier this month in Mountain View, California, amid discussions about the hypercompetitive launch market for smallsats.
It does make sense to consider a market for single satellite launches to replace individual satellites in a large constellation. Replacing a single satellite in a plane can be messy.
The Chinese company Galactic Energy has launched their second Ceres-1 rocket to orbit today.I believe they are only the 5th orbital launch service provider to reach orbit more than once that are generally described as majority privately funded.1. Orbital Sciences Corporation (July 17, 1991 - Pegasus)2. SpaceX (July 14, 2009 - Falcon 1)3. Rocket Lab (November 11, 2018 - Electron)4. Virgin Orbit (June 30, 2021 - LauncherOne)5. Galactic Energy (December 7, 2021 - Ceres-1)2 others have reached orbit once so far:a. iSpace (July 25, 2019 - Hyperbola-1)b. Astra (November 20, 2021 - Rocket 3.3)Correct me if I’m wrong.
Quote from: su27k on 02/22/2022 11:14 amSmallsat launch and the real worldQuote from: thespacereview.comMost conference panels are fairly anodyne affairs. Participants, even competitors in the same field, stick to their talking points and, at most, only politely disagree with one another. It often requires prodding from the panel’s moderator, or audience questions, to bring differences among the panelists into sharper focus.Sometimes, though, such prodding isn’t required. The right mix of personalities on a panel can turn it into something like MTV’s “The Real World” from 30 years ago, “when people stop being polite and start getting real.” That was the case a couple times during the SmallSat Symposium earlier this month in Mountain View, California, amid discussions about the hypercompetitive launch market for smallsats.Astra continues to discuss their vision of a launch market where megaconstellation operators churn out hundreds of identical satellites (so losing a few is unimportant), but apparently those operators want to launch the satellites one at a time, rather than any sort of plane-at-a-time deployment. There's a lot of uncertainty about the future of small satellites, how many megaconstellations will exist beyond Starlink, and whether dedicated rides will have value over rideshares for any but the most specialized missions once rideshares become more frequent and standardized, but it's hard to see Astra's hypothesized future as self-consistent, let alone plausible.(I'm posting in this thread vs. the Astra one because I'm thinking about the future of the small launch market generally, just using Astra's perspective as a jumping-off point.)
I would also throw out that every time there have been wide-spread predictions of a massive growth in the size of the satellite market, it has turned out to instead be a relatively small increase in the satellite market. Remember back when the all the satellite for the many many new massive geo-constellations were gonna pay for the development of the EELVs?
Quote from: trimeta on 02/22/2022 05:38 pmQuote from: su27k on 02/22/2022 11:14 amSmallsat launch and the real worldQuote from: thespacereview.comMost conference panels are fairly anodyne affairs. Participants, even competitors in the same field, stick to their talking points and, at most, only politely disagree with one another. It often requires prodding from the panel’s moderator, or audience questions, to bring differences among the panelists into sharper focus.Sometimes, though, such prodding isn’t required. The right mix of personalities on a panel can turn it into something like MTV’s “The Real World” from 30 years ago, “when people stop being polite and start getting real.” That was the case a couple times during the SmallSat Symposium earlier this month in Mountain View, California, amid discussions about the hypercompetitive launch market for smallsats.Astra continues to discuss their vision of a launch market where megaconstellation operators churn out hundreds of identical satellites (so losing a few is unimportant), but apparently those operators want to launch the satellites one at a time, rather than any sort of plane-at-a-time deployment. There's a lot of uncertainty about the future of small satellites, how many megaconstellations will exist beyond Starlink, and whether dedicated rides will have value over rideshares for any but the most specialized missions once rideshares become more frequent and standardized, but it's hard to see Astra's hypothesized future as self-consistent, let alone plausible.(I'm posting in this thread vs. the Astra one because I'm thinking about the future of the small launch market generally, just using Astra's perspective as a jumping-off point.)Launch costs vs time costs. Launching in a batch and phasing to active orbits takes time. Starlink for example is on the order of 2 months for 'single ring' launches, and 4 months for 'dual ring' launches (2 months for the first wring, and another two for the second) between launching and the satellites being in their final slots and actively serving customers. How much is 2/4 months of revenue generated vs. the launch costs saved by launching in batches vs. direct injection? The fewer satellites par plane (and thus more phasing time per batch) the greater the lost revenue opportunity from waiting for your satellites to drift to their operational slots.
I guess it's time to update the list with ZK-1A
