The intellectual skills are probably more valuable than the hardware itself
- the cost of re-engineering all that from imperial sizes to metric is
nothing to sneeze at, either.
My guess is one of the usual DoD suspects buys it out for some black
project or another.
On Fri, Mar 31, 2023 at 6:41 PM David McMillan <skyefire@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
On 3/31/2023 7:32 AM, Ben Brockert wrote:
VO was in a difficult part of the market where they spent a lot of
money (~$1B) to build a fairly expensive rocket, and that’s not the
corner of the development vs. operational cost diagram that you want
to be in.
It would be great to see their engines find a new home, they seemed to
work well. But that’s not how the industry usually works. At least the
lessons learned by their engineers will propagate.
I heard someone joke that maybe the UK would buy VO in order to
have *some* sort of domestic launching capability, maybe to maintain
OnWeb. I doubt it extremely, but it did make me think: what parties,
particularly nation-states, might be at the intersection of wanting a
cubesat launcher of their own, having sufficient resources to buy a
somewhat-proven launch system, and *not* sufficient resources to roll
their own from scratch. Plus *not* be on any sanction lists or
otherwise legally encumbered.
Spain just announced standing up a space agency, but with only a
700M Euro budget. And they're already members of ESA. Israel might be
interested in getting a secondary launch capability that gets around
their geographic limits, but some parties would definitely object.
Canada or Australia?
I can't think of any likely candidates at the intersection of that
Venn diagram, but it *is* a (somewhat) proven launcher, and if the
company goes on the auction block, it could be picked up fairly cheap.
Getting the critical *personnel* back would probably be the hardest part.
