5 ms·

Well, on the flipside, does this mean more money to US based launch companies?

Rebelgecko 5y ago
Not much of an impact. ULA is pretty much done with RD-180 engines (they have a handful sitting in a warehouse, but weren't planning on buying any more). Northrop might have a hard time if they plan on launching more Antares rockets, but it's already a pretty low volume launch vehicle, and IIRC it used to use a non-Russian engine anyways.
MPSimmons 5y ago
The current launch market is kind of weird. Years ago, there were basically two commercial markets: Low Earth Orbit (LEO) (below ~500km altitude) and Geosynchronous (GEO) (35,000km altitude). Because GEO sats stay in the same place in the sky relative to the ground*, they're great for communications companies, since the satellite is always overhead. They're also really far away, so they can serve entire regions of the planet at once. Also because they're so far away, they have historically been very expensive to launch (the farther from Earth you are, the more propellant it takes). Because it's more expensive, companies have engineered their GEO satellites to last for a very long time - typically 15-20 years. There are only so many slots available for GEO satellites (for too many reasons to mention here). The valuable slots, where the majority of the Earth's population can see them, are almost always full, so the GEO market tends to go in waves with the lifetime of the satellites. Over the past couple of years, we've been in a lull, with not too many GEO satellites being needed, built, or launched. For LEO, historically most of the commercial satellites were earth-observation, whether they were weather satellites, or special purpose communications satellites (Iridium, for instance). Most of the LEO market was for government agencies, either surveillance or science. Recently, the LEO market has exploded, particularly for smaller satellites. Starting with SpaceX, and then Rocket Lab following, with several other companies in the past couple of years, the cost to launch things to LEO has gone way down (SpaceX has lowered launch costs to all available orbits, but most small organizations don't want to launch to GEO). If you are an organization that wants to launch a small satellite, you have a great selection of launch providers, many from the US. However, if your satellite has a mass > a ton or so, then your launch provider selection goes way down. In the US, the only launch providers nominally capable of this are SpaceX, ULA, Northrup Grumman, and Blue Origin. SpaceX is obviously capable and launching as frequently as possible. ULA has two operative rockets (Delta IV and Atlas V), however both of these rockets are being retired, with no more vehicles planned to be made. I would guess that even the tooling for the Delta IV has been destroyed, which would mean that the rocket is truly gone. I don't know whether the Atlas V is in the same state, but even if it was possible to build a new one, the engines themselves are Russian, which is the topic of this thread. ULA is building a replacement vehicle capable of flying all of the mission profiles that the Delta and Atlas vehicles were taking on, and it's called the Vulcan. However, it's designed with the BE-4 engine provided by Blue Origin. Although the ULA president is publicly optimistic, Blue Origin is very far behind schedule on delivering flight-ready engines, and I don't know of a high-confidence projection for when the engines will be ready and delivered, or even what the state of the Vulcan vehicle will be once they're ready. Most people don't think it will happen this year, and given the typical methodical tendencies of ULA, even if they were delivered today, a flight would be unlikely this year, in my opinion. Blue Origin themselves are working on the New Glenn rocket, which will also be capable of flying all of the commercial mission profiles, but the actual delivery date is completely up in the air. The only hardware we've seen publicly from them is a fit-test mockup of the rocket. Nobody outside (or probably inside) knows when the vehicle will launch. As for Northup Grumman, they only make the Antares rocket, and it seemingly only exists to fly the Cygnus resupply spacecraft to the ISS. The Antares also uses a Russian engine. An Antares rocket suffered an explosion on lift-off in 2014, and during the investigatory period, they flew the Cygnus on the Atlas V, which is no longer an option, so nobody really knows what Cygnus will do going forward. This is a very, very long way of saying, literally the only US company capable of launching new rockets is SpaceX. So, it may(?) increase the amount of income to SpaceX, but they have such a huge amount of the global launch market anyway, I would estimate that they won't get a lot of traffic from this. I imagine the big winners here will be the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO), who also offers very cheap flights, tend to have a scrappy mentality, and probably look like a viable launch provider for organizations who don't want to do business with SpaceX for some reason. * - not /really/ true unless the satellite is in geostationary orbit, which is a special case of geosynchronous, where the orbit is also equatorial. Most communication satellites like the DirectTV ones use this, so the antennas don't have to move to point to a different location). Geosynchronous but non-geostationary satellites have an orbit that is inclined relative to the equator, so throughout the day, they move north and south (called declination), but stay in the same place east and west (called right ascension) - https://skyandtelescope.org/astronomy-resources/right-ascension-declination-celestial-coordinates/ https://skyandtelescope.org/astronomy-resources/right-ascens...

Not much of an impact. ULA is pretty much done with RD-180 engines (they have a handful sitting in a warehouse, but weren't planning on buying any more). Northrop might have a hard time if they plan on launching more Antares rockets, but it's already a pretty low volume launch vehicle, and IIRC it used to use a non-Russian engine anyways.

MPSimmons 5y ago

The current launch market is kind of weird. Years ago, there were basically two commercial markets: Low Earth Orbit (LEO) (below ~500km altitude) and Geosynchronous (GEO) (35,000km altitude). Because GEO sats stay in the same place in the sky relative to the ground*, they're great for communications companies, since the satellite is always overhead. They're also really far away, so they can serve entire regions of the planet at once. Also because they're so far away, they have historically been very expensive to launch (the farther from Earth you are, the more propellant it takes). Because it's more expensive, companies have engineered their GEO satellites to last for a very long time - typically 15-20 years. There are only so many slots available for GEO satellites (for too many reasons to mention here). The valuable slots, where the majority of the Earth's population can see them, are almost always full, so the GEO market tends to go in waves with the lifetime of the satellites. Over the past couple of years, we've been in a lull, with not too many GEO satellites being needed, built, or launched. For LEO, historically most of the commercial satellites were earth-observation, whether they were weather satellites, or special purpose communications satellites (Iridium, for instance). Most of the LEO market was for government agencies, either surveillance or science. Recently, the LEO market has exploded, particularly for smaller satellites. Starting with SpaceX, and then Rocket Lab following, with several other companies in the past couple of years, the cost to launch things to LEO has gone way down (SpaceX has lowered launch costs to all available orbits, but most small organizations don't want to launch to GEO). If you are an organization that wants to launch a small satellite, you have a great selection of launch providers, many from the US. However, if your satellite has a mass > a ton or so, then your launch provider selection goes way down. In the US, the only launch providers nominally capable of this are SpaceX, ULA, Northrup Grumman, and Blue Origin. SpaceX is obviously capable and launching as frequently as possible. ULA has two operative rockets (Delta IV and Atlas V), however both of these rockets are being retired, with no more vehicles planned to be made. I would guess that even the tooling for the Delta IV has been destroyed, which would mean that the rocket is truly gone. I don't know whether the Atlas V is in the same state, but even if it was possible to build a new one, the engines themselves are Russian, which is the topic of this thread. ULA is building a replacement vehicle capable of flying all of the mission profiles that the Delta and Atlas vehicles were taking on, and it's called the Vulcan. However, it's designed with the BE-4 engine provided by Blue Origin. Although the ULA president is publicly optimistic, Blue Origin is very far behind schedule on delivering flight-ready engines, and I don't know of a high-confidence projection for when the engines will be ready and delivered, or even what the state of the Vulcan vehicle will be once they're ready. Most people don't think it will happen this year, and given the typical methodical tendencies of ULA, even if they were delivered today, a flight would be unlikely this year, in my opinion. Blue Origin themselves are working on the New Glenn rocket, which will also be capable of flying all of the commercial mission profiles, but the actual delivery date is completely up in the air. The only hardware we've seen publicly from them is a fit-test mockup of the rocket. Nobody outside (or probably inside) knows when the vehicle will launch. As for Northup Grumman, they only make the Antares rocket, and it seemingly only exists to fly the Cygnus resupply spacecraft to the ISS. The Antares also uses a Russian engine. An Antares rocket suffered an explosion on lift-off in 2014, and during the investigatory period, they flew the Cygnus on the Atlas V, which is no longer an option, so nobody really knows what Cygnus will do going forward. This is a very, very long way of saying, literally the only US company capable of launching new rockets is SpaceX. So, it may(?) increase the amount of income to SpaceX, but they have such a huge amount of the global launch market anyway, I would estimate that they won't get a lot of traffic from this. I imagine the big winners here will be the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO), who also offers very cheap flights, tend to have a scrappy mentality, and probably look like a viable launch provider for organizations who don't want to do business with SpaceX for some reason. * - not /really/ true unless the satellite is in geostationary orbit, which is a special case of geosynchronous, where the orbit is also equatorial. Most communication satellites like the DirectTV ones use this, so the antennas don't have to move to point to a different location). Geosynchronous but non-geostationary satellites have an orbit that is inclined relative to the equator, so throughout the day, they move north and south (called declination), but stay in the same place east and west (called right ascension) - https://skyandtelescope.org/astronomy-resources/right-ascension-declination-celestial-coordinates/ https://skyandtelescope.org/astronomy-resources/right-ascens...