It should be concerning that we have to develop excuses for the smallsat
market not coming to bear, while believing the broader market isn’t prone
to the same inelasticity.
Small launchers should have a pretty high payload utilization and so should
come out cost-effective if it’s true that there’s economic utility to
smallsat (i.e., payloads seeking specific orbits vs space access at all)
and that seems… dubious to be generous.
IMO smallsat is hurtling right towards an Iridium bubble of their own and
the smart providers are looking at exiting the market as soon as possible.
Rocket Lab has first mover advantage and can afford to develop medium
lift. Others… grim.
On Mon, Dec 26, 2022 at 5:51 PM David McMillan <skyefire@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
On 12/25/2022 8:26 PM, Henry Spencer wrote:
On Mon, 26 Dec 2022, Ben Brockert wrote:
...Rocket Lab has never profited launching Electrons...
It is possible that a mass-produced small rocket could be cheaper, but
that has been the explicit claim of both Rocket Lab and Astra, and even
taking some different approaches ... both have failed to actually build a
cheap rocket. ... It’s not physically possible to get a small expendable
launcher down to some low price like $100/kg...
I think that last is a bit too strong. Not that I think it's necessarily
incorrect -- I'm firmly in the reusables camp at any size -- but I think
the evidence is weak: two data points doth not a curve make. Especially
when so much of the cost is not in the bent metal (or whatever) itself, but
in the organization doing it; differences there could be much more
important than choice of tank material, and are harder to assess from the
paperwork. Real cost reduction comes from doing things differently, not
from trying to do all the same things while somehow spending less on them.
This is a big reason that Relativity is my personal bet to win the
"cheap ELV" competition, assuming that any *ELV **can* be cheap enough to
compete with RLVs. Less due to the whole 3D-printing thing and more due to
the level of automation they seem to have in their production. Granted, a
lot of the automation *is* the 3D-printing setup, so... Also, production
automation is what I do, so I'm almost certainly biased. Still, IMO, most
aerospace production suffers from an *appalling* (remember, I'm biased)
lack of automation -- or, rather a surfeit of "touch labor" tasks that
could and gosh-darn-it *should* be automated. So from where I'm
standing, production automation (done well) has the strongest potential to
reduce production costs.
