3 ms·

>Before Elon came up with StarLink, even the Falcon 9 was a relatively boring concept, from the economical perspective. http://personal.ee.surrey.ac.uk/Persona

>Before Elon came up with StarLink, even the Falcon 9 was a relatively boring concept, from the economical perspective. http://personal.ee.surrey.ac.uk/Personal/L.Wood/constellations/teledesic.html http://personal.ee.surrey.ac.uk/Personal/L.Wood/constellatio... I'm pretty sure that the idea behind huge fleets of commercial LEO internet communication satellite constellations had existed long before Elon tried his hand at it (first proposed in 1994). Even starlink was only brought in-house after a cancelled project with OneWeb (formerly WorldVu) https://www.wsj.com/amp/articles/elon-musks-next-mission-internet-satellites-1415390062 https://www.wsj.com/amp/articles/elon-musks-next-mission-int...

myself248 6y ago
Iridium (1987) doesn't count as a huge enough fleet to warrant reusable rockets? It took them a LOT of launches...
- Gravityloss 6y ago
  It's basically a two minima space. You can get 10 launches per year and pretty high reliability and high cost. Satellite cost is maybe 10x the launch cost. Government and commercial operations are possible. Europe has to maintain this for strategic reasons, no matter the cost. And then there's the "newspace" strategy. Low cost launch achieved by reuse brings more demand, satellite cost goes down. When price goes low enough, completely new markets become possible. You enter a virtuous spiral. This is at least the theory. Requires a large amount of political capital to do this, as it will be lossy for a long time and there will be high profile failures (because you do so many launches and iterate). So this is probably only doable by mega billionaires who "get it" (the newspace way of thinking), not by public companies or governments. Even Elon Musk didn't "get it" originally, they were trying to fish the rockets from the sea and refurbish them. At some point he turned around completely. Grasshopper and vertical landing was done.

myself248 6y ago

Iridium (1987) doesn't count as a huge enough fleet to warrant reusable rockets? It took them a LOT of launches...

Gravityloss 6y ago
It's basically a two minima space. You can get 10 launches per year and pretty high reliability and high cost. Satellite cost is maybe 10x the launch cost. Government and commercial operations are possible. Europe has to maintain this for strategic reasons, no matter the cost. And then there's the "newspace" strategy. Low cost launch achieved by reuse brings more demand, satellite cost goes down. When price goes low enough, completely new markets become possible. You enter a virtuous spiral. This is at least the theory. Requires a large amount of political capital to do this, as it will be lossy for a long time and there will be high profile failures (because you do so many launches and iterate). So this is probably only doable by mega billionaires who "get it" (the newspace way of thinking), not by public companies or governments. Even Elon Musk didn't "get it" originally, they were trying to fish the rockets from the sea and refurbish them. At some point he turned around completely. Grasshopper and vertical landing was done.