[AR] Re: The end of Virgin Orbit
- From: Henry Spencer <hspencer@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: Arocket List <arocket@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Fri, 31 Mar 2023 15:46:22 -0400 (EDT)
On Fri, 31 Mar 2023, Rand Simberg wrote:
747 for Virgin Orbit
L-1011 for Orbital Sciences
These are the only two currently to have made it. Stratolaunch is
still trying.
The market niche for air launch is rapid response and single-orbit
rendezvous...
Plus a side order of reaching low inclinations without having a
low-latitude launch site, and another of getting out from under spaceport
bureaucracies. The latter was reportedly quite a significant part of the
motivation for Pegasus.
However...
As Rand says, there isn't currently enough customer interest in rapid
response.
There's essentially no market yet for first-orbit rendezvous -- aside from
some hypothetical military cases, that would basically require intensive
space-station operations (note, "space station" doesn't necessarily mean
"ISS"). This was the only market that made sense to me as a rational
justification for Stratolaunch (assuming that there *was* a rational
justification), especially the original version with a SpaceX rocket --
why not just buy Falcon 9 launches?
There is a little bit of market for quite low inclinations, and for small
satellites, there's some market for moderate inclinations that currently
aren't readily available from rideshares. (The first Electron launch from
Wallops was an example of the latter.) But these aren't very big markets,
and there are alternatives -- India does some near-equatorial launches
that can have secondary payloads, and if you have a small payload and can
afford a big rocket, there's always the option of a brute-force plane
change (e.g. the use of a dedicated Falcon 9 to launch the 330kg IXPE
satellite into an equatorial orbit -- IXPE was originally built to launch
on Pegasus, because of that orbit requirement).
And the spaceport-bureaucracy problem, although still present, has been
reduced somewhat since the Pegasus days, notably by there being more
choices of spaceports now.
At least one of those markets has got to get a lot stronger to make a
successful business out of air launch. (It's hard to call Pegasus a real
success when it has flown only four times in the last decade.)
Henry
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