On 12/26/2022 11:47 PM, Matthew JL wrote:
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.I'm not sure what this has to do with what you quoted. No one is "making excuses" for anything.
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.Small satellites (depending on your definition of "small") certainly seem to have utility, based on what's happening in the world right now. Certainly the current trend seems to be towards meshes of many small (and cheap and relatively easily replaceable) birds as opposed to a smaller number of "flagship" birds.
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.
