I’m always in favor of increased competition (and anything that forces ULA to admit to overpricing their flights is alright by me) but the fundamental problem at the small satellite launch arena is that costs have to be low enough to support a nascent industry and the venture capitalists investing in it, but high enough that a company can make a return on investment and profit in the near term. So far, no one has yet made a profit in commercial spaceflight without subsidy or deep pocket government payloaders to help defray the costs of infrastructure and staff, and while I haven’t seen a specific projection on the number of flights per year that RocketLabs would have to achieve to get to breakeven, my off-the-cuff guestimate would be 20 to 30 per year, or essentially one every two weeks.
There are some particular efficiencies with small satellites that can drive costs down below the traditional thresholds. For one, the payloads are smaller and require less complex equipment and labor to transport and handle them. They tend to be more self-contained and generally don’t require site-load of propellants (a major processing and integration issue), often not requiring even on the ground health and status monitoring, which allows them to be encapsulated at leisure and integrated as a vehicle comes together, which means that payloads could potentially be stored and launched as opportunity arises rather than having to be specifically manifested between other payloads and suffer delays because of integration or technical issues with other missions. Most importantly, small payloads tend to have relatively minor mass modal contribution to vehicle stability and controllability, and thus, there is not a need to perform extensive modal testing and multiple coupled loads analysis cycle analyses peculiar to the payload. (The small size limits the need for displacement-limited testing and the general lack of flexible deployable elements that are not securely locked down during flight often means that analysis alone can demonstrate that payload dynamic response is well away from or above vehicle modes.)
On the down side, however, is the fact that New Zealand is logistically difficult to reach (although again, the compact size and low mass makes this less of a problem in terms of payload transportation), the size of the payload envelope will force design restrictions or eliminate certain types of payloads, unknown reliability is challenging for payloaders who need to meet specific business objectives or timelines to demonstrate viability, and the vehicle design itself appears very limited in terms of upgrading capability, which means if it falls just below a sweet spot in payloader needs it may not be competitive in the market place even against significantly more expensive launchers.
Rideshare does suck for payloaders, and while the situation is better than the days when you had to rely on ‘Big Daddy’ to get you a lift on a ULA rocket, it still means having to compromise science or mission objectives. It is basically suitable for space science experiments or educational projects that just need to get to someplace in LEO, but not good for anyone who needs to achieve specific orbital arguments. And while SpaceX gotten a particularly bad reputation for dumping CubeSats and other payloads at the last minute to make up differences in mass budget or concerns about reliability, this is going to be the case with any commercial space launch provider who has to serve their primary payloader first. (ULA and other government-sponsored vehicles have mandates to carry a certain number of rideshares and so are a little more dilligent about sticking with a secondary payloader unless there is a genuine risk, but if you aren’t on-pad come integration time there will be a mass simulator flying in your place. Nobody waits for hitchhikers.). Dedicated space launch is crucial for commercial smallsat, but the costs are still prohibitive without a solid plan for a large return on investment that is hard to demonstrate.
High grade kerosense (RP-1) and liquid oxygen (LOX) rocket engines may seem “easy” to build, but that is only because we’ve had decades of prior experience learning (through failure as much as success) how to build and operate them, and even then there are a lot of phenomena that are not fully understood in the combustion of such a complex hydrocarbon fuel that requires a lot of trial and error in design. A liquid-to-gas-phase fuel such as methane is actually easier to design for despite the lower specific energy. However, the thermodynamic limitations of combustion-based engines are always going to dictate pretty small payload mass margins just because most of the vehicle has to be propellants and the systems to store and pressurize them. The next evolution in chemical propulsion technology will be the development of continuous wave detonation engines (CWDE), also sometimes known as rotating detonation engines (RDE), which can substantially improve thermodynamic yield and offer greater compactness than conventional combustion chamber and de Laval nozzle engines. CWDEs are particularly desirable for small launch applications because of the compactness, but simluating and controlling detonation phenomena is another challenging problem in propulsion.
Stranger
