So, having dispensers like this one shown, what can one assume is the shape of the packaged sat?
More or less a square or rectangular? The dispenser obviously looks more like what SX uses for its Transporter delivery system (mostly cubesats, or something similar in shape) than for its Starlink sats.
I remember seeing the boxes the test kuipers came in, and they suggested more square or cube type vehicles.
One wonders then why SX has migrated to flatpack; possibly because they are more easily handled and more can be carried within such a volume?
SpaceX flatpack came when the Starlink team got fired for being slow (and many of those fired team members ended up at Kuiper). Flatpack does avoid some deployer mass, but at its core tenet the phased array antenna is the most important aspect of the sat and needs the most area. If you want a non-folding phased array, that's really the only way to increase the area of one dimension easily. Having the array upright introduces other inconveniences in design.
We know from OneWeb and Iridium designs that trapezoidal cross section sats pack tighter around a central deployer column style so it may be that, otherwise fairly rectangular. This assumes no big deployable antennas, such as a folding phased array similar to SAR sats, or a large deployable reflector of some kind.
There was a novel Blue Origin patent for a clipped diamond style flatpack sat allowing three sats per layer, but that's unlikely to fly with this deployer.
Busy fourth quarter at SLC-41:
Project Kuiper update
We expect to ship our first completed production satellites this summer, and we’re targeting our first full-scale Kuiper mission for Q4 aboard an Atlas V rocket from ULA.
United Launch Alliance Successfully Launches 100th National Security Mission
July 30, 2024
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ULA’s next launch is the second certification flight (Cert-2) of the Vulcan rocket from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida [ currently Sep 16]. Vulcan will also launch USSF-106 and USSF-87, two critical NSS missions, to orbit later this year.