7 ms·

There are many small orbital launch vehicles proposed or under development

90 points by tectonic 7y ago

Sendotsh 7y ago
Stealing the swipe action like that is really scummy. Otherwise it’s a pretty interesting article. Lots of amazing space projects going on lately.
mrfusion 7y ago
Could we be at the very beginning of a Cambrian explosion for space exploration? Exciting times.
- ExodusOrbitals1 7y ago
  We pretty much are! Both nanosatellite and small launcher companies are booming hard in the last few years.
- kardos 7y ago
  With Kessler syndrome looming it may be the wrong kind of excitement
  - jdsully 7y ago
    Low earth orbit satellites decay very quickly. Without extra boost most satellites launched by these rockets will reenter within a year or two. On a wider note, I find the dramatic pessimism of our times rather unfortunate. It seems every technical advance is now met with some prediction of doom. I miss when technical forums were optimistic.
    - prestonh 7y ago
      I havent researched the orbital dynamics much here, but wouldnt it be possible for the satellite fragments resulting from a collision at orbital speeds to have much greater speeds, possibly ending up in elliptical orbits with lower total drag? Seems like just waiting for orbits to decay after a Kessler syndrome like event wouldnt be feasible.
      - jdsully 7y ago
        An elliptical orbit would require the perigee to be even closer to the earth further increasing drag. It is possible for small fragments to potentially be moved to higher orbits (with counter balancing mass being moved lower) But the conservation of momentum prevents the vast majority of fragments from suffering this fate. Baring exceptionally bad luck a collision in LEO would usually decrease the time before the orbit decays. Remember a debris field has more surface area than an intact satellite.
      - marcosdumay 7y ago
        Yes, it is possible. If you get an explosion, many fragments will be in an elliptical orbit where they can stay longer than on LEO. But there is a trade-off here, the time during what a fragment is dangerous is exactly the same time it is in a high drag region, so if it's not feasible to wait for it to fall down, it is also not really dangerous either.
- CydeWeys 7y ago
  By launched volume, it seems like. By diversity of launch platforms ... maybe not. SpaceX seems poised to dominate everything with Starship, even small launch.
- DuskStar 7y ago
  Either that or the beginning of a new dot-com bubble. Most of those smallsat companies are financially viable on the expectation that they capture a meaningful fraction of the smallsat market - like 1/5th or more. They can't all win - and that's assuming any of them win. SpaceX seems to be planning to own the rideshare market [0], and so unless a customer really cares about having a particular orbit that's going to be pretty tough competition. 0: https://www.spacex.com/smallsat https://www.spacex.com/smallsat
  - Narkov 7y ago
    > They can't all win - and that's assuming any of them win. While I agree with your general point, do we completely understand the opportunity that space launch/travel/exploration provides yet? The opportunity may be exponentially bigger than we currently understand.
    - DuskStar 7y ago
      But smallsat launchers only make sense if they have a lower cost/kg (unlikely vs the F9) or if they're being used for an orbit/launch time that doesn't have enough demand for a rideshare. And if the space launch market gets big enough to support 100 smallsat launchers, a F9 rideshare into that special orbit will probably have enough takers to make it cheaper than the smallsat launcher would have.
      - elil17 7y ago
        Smaller diameter rockets have a much worse fuel ratio (because of fuel tank geometry issues), so there’s no way they’ll ever be cheaper than larger rockets. They fundamentally must use more fuel per kg of payload than large rockets because fuel tank wet mass to dry mass ratio increases linearly with diameter.
        DuskStar 7y ago
        Right, and that's why smallsat launchers are only really viable for orbits/launches that can't be served by rideshares. Better to pay $5mil for an Electron to launch your smallsat than to book an entire Falcon 9, even if the $/kg is far higher.
trianglem 7y ago
This sounds like it may or may not be true. Is this all because of Elon Musk?
- Robotbeat 7y ago
  Not an insignificant part of it IS because of Elon Musk. SpaceX has been crazily successful, AND it has a high churn rate, so the know-how gets spread throughout the industry in startups like these. The latter may be bad for SpaceX (arguable?), but I think it's good for the industry.
ExodusOrbitals1 7y ago
There is direct link to a summary done by C. Niederstrasser, Northrop Grumman engineer: https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=4118&context=smallsat https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=4...
hirundo 7y ago
Toward the bottom: > How to make Plutonium [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-sh5XZo5wRE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-sh5XZo5wRE] tl;dw: First get a few gallons of a (radioactive, poisonous, pyrophoric) transuranic element called neptunium. I'm glad this didn't turn out to be an easy DIY video, since that would probably cause, you know, the end civilization. It's a possible solution to the Fermi Paradox: A civilization advances until someone posts simple instructions for making plutonium on shared hive mind storage. It seems like the best way to evade a similar risk is to get the heck away from Earth as fast as possible, like the top of this blog post describes. The fact that a not-small gold rush is developing to do just that is the most hopeful news I've heard in approximately ever.
- DuskStar 7y ago
  Ehhh, everyone (relevant) already knows the general process for making highly enriched uranium or Pu-239, and how to make a bomb with it once they get it. The issue is that actually implementing those things takes a ton of infrastructure, and until relatively recently that infrastructure was extremely visible. As gas centrifuges have replaced gaseous diffusion as the primary method of enrichment, though, the amount of - and visibility of - required infrastructure to refine uranium has decreased dramatically. 20 years ago enriching uranium in a cave would have been incredibly impractical, as the machines were just too large and required too much power. But today... :(
  - Animats 7y ago
    You need a nuclear reactor to supply the neutrons for transmutation into plutonium, so this isn't something you can do at home. That video just shows the preliminary step of making neptunium slugs to be irradiated. The processes are all difficult from a chemical engineering standpoint. Most of the materials involved are toxic or radioactive or corrosive or flammable or several of the above. Enrichment plants are smaller now. They used to be city-sized; now they're the size of a large WalMart.[1] But not garage-sized. Incidentally, there's a huge glut of depleted uranium in uranium hexaflouride solution form. Hundreds of thousands of tons. This is what uranium enrichment plants have left over after they've separated out the good stuff, which is under 1%. There's not enough demand for depleted uranium to run it through the chemical process to get metallic uranium out. Potentially it could be used in breeder reactors, if there were any that worked well. [1] https://earth.google.com/web/@32.43377912,-103.07864954,1041.7473604a,875.8466207d,35.00000098y,-0.77948261h,52.75406436t,0r?beta=1 https://earth.google.com/web/@32.43377912,-103.07864954,1041...
nine_k 7y ago
What I'm waiting for is orbital unlauch vehicles. That is, spacecraft that methodically collect and comoactify space debris. As we launch more and more cheaply and frequently, the few thousand miles above Earth become littered more and more, even with all deorbiting or parking provisions.
- whatshisface 7y ago
  Most satellites are on orbits that will eventually decay due to atmospheric drag.
  - saagarjha 7y ago
    While this is technically true for all satellites, what's important is the timescale on which their orbits will decay.
    - remarkEon 7y ago
      What is the distribution of the time scale of these orbits though? If 90% of these things take a couple months (or weeks or days or whatever) to decay and burn up it seems like a non-issue - or one that can be planned around. If the fat tail sits further out in time that seems like it could actually become an issue.
      - Rebelgecko 7y ago
        One of the junkiest places in orbit right now is around 800-1000km (mostly thanks to the Chinese ASAT weapon test 12 years ago and an unrelated collision between two satellites in 2009. There's also tens thousands of droplets of irradiated coolant that was ejected from Soviet nuclear reactors in 70s-80s). At 1000km it can take around 100 years for something to deorbit from drag (can vary a bit depending on unpredictable space weather events). 1000km is still in Low Earth Orbit, but lower parts of LEO decay more quickly, e.g. months years or decades depending on the orbit's height. When you get into orbits higher than LEO (MEO: medium Earth orbit, GEO), the timescales before something reenters can get more geological. A GPS satellite (~20,000km up, near the middle of MEO) left to its own devices will stay up for hundreds of thousands, if not millions of years.
plugger 7y ago
I expect 95% of these projects will never reach orbit. Here's something tangentially related. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nuGSTn_F0FE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nuGSTn_F0FE
- Rebelgecko 7y ago
  I saw a list elsewhere that was tracking ~200 companies building launch vehicles. I'd guess that 90% of them will be gone in a decade having never put anything in orbit.

90 points by tectonic 7y ago

Stealing the swipe action like that is really scummy. Otherwise it’s a pretty interesting article. Lots of amazing space projects going on lately.

mrfusion 7y ago

Could we be at the very beginning of a Cambrian explosion for space exploration? Exciting times.

ExodusOrbitals1 7y ago
We pretty much are! Both nanosatellite and small launcher companies are booming hard in the last few years.
kardos 7y ago
With Kessler syndrome looming it may be the wrong kind of excitement
- jdsully 7y ago
  Low earth orbit satellites decay very quickly. Without extra boost most satellites launched by these rockets will reenter within a year or two. On a wider note, I find the dramatic pessimism of our times rather unfortunate. It seems every technical advance is now met with some prediction of doom. I miss when technical forums were optimistic.
  - prestonh 7y ago
    I havent researched the orbital dynamics much here, but wouldnt it be possible for the satellite fragments resulting from a collision at orbital speeds to have much greater speeds, possibly ending up in elliptical orbits with lower total drag? Seems like just waiting for orbits to decay after a Kessler syndrome like event wouldnt be feasible.
    - jdsully 7y ago
      An elliptical orbit would require the perigee to be even closer to the earth further increasing drag. It is possible for small fragments to potentially be moved to higher orbits (with counter balancing mass being moved lower) But the conservation of momentum prevents the vast majority of fragments from suffering this fate. Baring exceptionally bad luck a collision in LEO would usually decrease the time before the orbit decays. Remember a debris field has more surface area than an intact satellite.
    - marcosdumay 7y ago
      Yes, it is possible. If you get an explosion, many fragments will be in an elliptical orbit where they can stay longer than on LEO. But there is a trade-off here, the time during what a fragment is dangerous is exactly the same time it is in a high drag region, so if it's not feasible to wait for it to fall down, it is also not really dangerous either.
CydeWeys 7y ago
By launched volume, it seems like. By diversity of launch platforms ... maybe not. SpaceX seems poised to dominate everything with Starship, even small launch.
DuskStar 7y ago
Either that or the beginning of a new dot-com bubble. Most of those smallsat companies are financially viable on the expectation that they capture a meaningful fraction of the smallsat market - like 1/5th or more. They can't all win - and that's assuming any of them win. SpaceX seems to be planning to own the rideshare market [0], and so unless a customer really cares about having a particular orbit that's going to be pretty tough competition. 0: https://www.spacex.com/smallsat https://www.spacex.com/smallsat
- Narkov 7y ago
  > They can't all win - and that's assuming any of them win. While I agree with your general point, do we completely understand the opportunity that space launch/travel/exploration provides yet? The opportunity may be exponentially bigger than we currently understand.
  - DuskStar 7y ago
    But smallsat launchers only make sense if they have a lower cost/kg (unlikely vs the F9) or if they're being used for an orbit/launch time that doesn't have enough demand for a rideshare. And if the space launch market gets big enough to support 100 smallsat launchers, a F9 rideshare into that special orbit will probably have enough takers to make it cheaper than the smallsat launcher would have.
    - elil17 7y ago
      Smaller diameter rockets have a much worse fuel ratio (because of fuel tank geometry issues), so there’s no way they’ll ever be cheaper than larger rockets. They fundamentally must use more fuel per kg of payload than large rockets because fuel tank wet mass to dry mass ratio increases linearly with diameter.
      - DuskStar 7y ago
        Right, and that's why smallsat launchers are only really viable for orbits/launches that can't be served by rideshares. Better to pay $5mil for an Electron to launch your smallsat than to book an entire Falcon 9, even if the $/kg is far higher.

trianglem 7y ago

This sounds like it may or may not be true. Is this all because of Elon Musk?

Robotbeat 7y ago
Not an insignificant part of it IS because of Elon Musk. SpaceX has been crazily successful, AND it has a high churn rate, so the know-how gets spread throughout the industry in startups like these. The latter may be bad for SpaceX (arguable?), but I think it's good for the industry.

ExodusOrbitals1 7y ago

There is direct link to a summary done by C. Niederstrasser, Northrop Grumman engineer: https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=4118&context=smallsat https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=4...

hirundo 7y ago

Toward the bottom: > How to make Plutonium [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-sh5XZo5wRE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-sh5XZo5wRE] tl;dw: First get a few gallons of a (radioactive, poisonous, pyrophoric) transuranic element called neptunium. I'm glad this didn't turn out to be an easy DIY video, since that would probably cause, you know, the end civilization. It's a possible solution to the Fermi Paradox: A civilization advances until someone posts simple instructions for making plutonium on shared hive mind storage. It seems like the best way to evade a similar risk is to get the heck away from Earth as fast as possible, like the top of this blog post describes. The fact that a not-small gold rush is developing to do just that is the most hopeful news I've heard in approximately ever.

DuskStar 7y ago
Ehhh, everyone (relevant) already knows the general process for making highly enriched uranium or Pu-239, and how to make a bomb with it once they get it. The issue is that actually implementing those things takes a ton of infrastructure, and until relatively recently that infrastructure was extremely visible. As gas centrifuges have replaced gaseous diffusion as the primary method of enrichment, though, the amount of - and visibility of - required infrastructure to refine uranium has decreased dramatically. 20 years ago enriching uranium in a cave would have been incredibly impractical, as the machines were just too large and required too much power. But today... :(
- Animats 7y ago
  You need a nuclear reactor to supply the neutrons for transmutation into plutonium, so this isn't something you can do at home. That video just shows the preliminary step of making neptunium slugs to be irradiated. The processes are all difficult from a chemical engineering standpoint. Most of the materials involved are toxic or radioactive or corrosive or flammable or several of the above. Enrichment plants are smaller now. They used to be city-sized; now they're the size of a large WalMart.[1] But not garage-sized. Incidentally, there's a huge glut of depleted uranium in uranium hexaflouride solution form. Hundreds of thousands of tons. This is what uranium enrichment plants have left over after they've separated out the good stuff, which is under 1%. There's not enough demand for depleted uranium to run it through the chemical process to get metallic uranium out. Potentially it could be used in breeder reactors, if there were any that worked well. [1] https://earth.google.com/web/@32.43377912,-103.07864954,1041.7473604a,875.8466207d,35.00000098y,-0.77948261h,52.75406436t,0r?beta=1 https://earth.google.com/web/@32.43377912,-103.07864954,1041...

nine_k 7y ago

What I'm waiting for is orbital unlauch vehicles. That is, spacecraft that methodically collect and comoactify space debris. As we launch more and more cheaply and frequently, the few thousand miles above Earth become littered more and more, even with all deorbiting or parking provisions.

whatshisface 7y ago
Most satellites are on orbits that will eventually decay due to atmospheric drag.
- saagarjha 7y ago
  While this is technically true for all satellites, what's important is the timescale on which their orbits will decay.
  - remarkEon 7y ago
    What is the distribution of the time scale of these orbits though? If 90% of these things take a couple months (or weeks or days or whatever) to decay and burn up it seems like a non-issue - or one that can be planned around. If the fat tail sits further out in time that seems like it could actually become an issue.
    - Rebelgecko 7y ago
      One of the junkiest places in orbit right now is around 800-1000km (mostly thanks to the Chinese ASAT weapon test 12 years ago and an unrelated collision between two satellites in 2009. There's also tens thousands of droplets of irradiated coolant that was ejected from Soviet nuclear reactors in 70s-80s). At 1000km it can take around 100 years for something to deorbit from drag (can vary a bit depending on unpredictable space weather events). 1000km is still in Low Earth Orbit, but lower parts of LEO decay more quickly, e.g. months years or decades depending on the orbit's height. When you get into orbits higher than LEO (MEO: medium Earth orbit, GEO), the timescales before something reenters can get more geological. A GPS satellite (~20,000km up, near the middle of MEO) left to its own devices will stay up for hundreds of thousands, if not millions of years.

plugger 7y ago

I expect 95% of these projects will never reach orbit. Here's something tangentially related. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nuGSTn_F0FE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nuGSTn_F0FE

Rebelgecko 7y ago
I saw a list elsewhere that was tracking ~200 companies building launch vehicles. I'd guess that 90% of them will be gone in a decade having never put anything in orbit.