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When it comes to the cost of the mission those differences are peanuts. I guess that at some point SpaceX will find out that the the price of the launch wasn't
by mnl 8y ago
When it comes to the cost of the mission those differences are peanuts. I guess that at some point SpaceX will find out that the the price of the launch wasn't the bottleneck after all.
- HeadsUpHigh 8y agoExcept it actually is. When a fully functioning satellite costs e.g. 200m$ and the launch is another 200m$ it makes sense to overbuild your satellite to 600m$ with crazy redundancies etc to make sure it won't fail early on it's mission life. At the same time the big dumb booster concept like Ariane 5 and 6 makes tradeoffs like no upper stage engine restart capabilities which are ok for GTO missions but mean that multi-sat LEO or MEO constellations are impossible( you can't change the orbit and drifting is expensive).