There have been some pretty big delays. I wonder when they will have enough satellites launched to compete with Starlink.
Not even a picture of the satellites? Lame. I’m curious if they’re using the same flat-pack approach as Starlink. That has seemed to work well for a variety of reasons.
I’m betting they get a waiver for the “half the constellation by 2026”. My impression is that waivers aren’t hard to get. The main reason for these rules is to prevent frequency squatting. But if they see some forward progress they can be reasonable.
I also wonder if they’re really ready or if they’re just shipping what they have. Nothing wrong with that, in principle. But they’ve very much taken the “keep polishing until it’s done” approach rather than SpaceX’s “ship something ASAP and iterate”.
What are they being launched with? (ETA: The Atlas V551) Falcon 9 is a hard act to beat for cost efficiency. If their launch cost is double SpaceX’s, how do they think they can be competitive?
First batch is on the Atlas V (as you just found), which is basically retired, but they bought some of the final remaining launches. But they’ll also be launching on Falcon 9, Ariane 6, Vulcan, and New Glenn.
Really only F9 and New Glenn are likely to be cost competitive. But NG is still a ways out, I think.
Good of SpaceX to be willing to sell launch to their commercial rivals 
. Or perhaps they’re glad enough of the business and that confident in their competitiveness.
This is 3 years old at this point, but here’s what the dispenser allegedly looks like:
Basically a corncob style, implying cuboid or wedge-shaped satellites. Seems like a waste to me, with that big pillar taking so much space. IMO the flat style also has manufacturing benefits (the spread out nature of the components means you can install them with greater parallelism). And dispensing doesn’t require any special actuators or anything–just spin and release the whole stack at once.
It’s quite possible they’ve totally revamped their satellite design since this picture, though.
They sold flights to OneWeb as well after Russia stopped flying and seized their satellites. I’ve never heard of them discriminating against a customer, either by not flying them or charging them more.
Booster landing from the circumpolar launch.
I thought maybe the droneship would be south of Cuba, but looking at the map I think it wouldn’t have traveled quite that far. Would have been cool to be in Cuba and see the landing booster overfly you. They probably got a good view nevertheless.
What flies over you might also, if things go wrong, crash down upon you.
It’s theoretically possible we might hear something about NASA plans tomorrow:
Jared Isaacman is set to participate in a hearing to become the next NASA administrator at 10 am EDT on Wednesday, April 9, before the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation. The agency will stream the hearing on NASA+, and the committee will stream it on its website and YouTube channel.
And for new technologies to fly to Mars:
Note the UK Space Agency is providing funding.
I am a bit pessimistic as to how soon fusion rockets will be traveling to Mars.
Especially when you read the details of how they’re supposedly going to get fusion to work. I read a lot of this in online discussions of aerospace technology: that even though no one has gotten close to a self-sustaining fusion reaction on Earth, there are lots of people convinced that with a few turns of a screw we could build a fusion rocket tomorrow.
I think they’re both quite far off, but in a lot of ways a fusion rocket should be easier than a fusion power plant. Fusion power plants have to breed their own fuel, and last for decades of neutron bombardment, and not irradiate the surroundings, and operate in steady-state fashion, and so on. A lot fewer constraints have to hold for a rocket! Just as a fission rocket is simpler than a fission reactor.
Still plenty of problems to solve. And I’m very dubious about that company. But it wouldn’t surprise me if (practical) fusion rockets appear sooner than fusion power plants.
I don’t think a fission rocket is simpler than a reactor: we have hundreds of the latter and only a handful of test articles for the former. The difference is that a nuclear-thermal rocket has to operate at the absolute limit of power output possible. That means high temperatures, little shielding, highly enriched fuel and a maximum of weight shaving. Ground based reactors operate at a slow smolder by comparison.
For some reason, space fusion enthusiasts seem convinced that alternate fusion geometries (Z-Pinch, et al) will of course work, and then proceed to design fanciful and elaborate space vehicles based on this presumption.
People get worked up about nuclear power in space, but the rockets are definitely relatively simple:
An Earth-bound power plant needs all sorts of shielding and safety systems and heat exchangers and stuff that just don’t exist for a rocket. Of course nothing is really simple in space–it’s all relative.
The highly enriched fuel, like tritium or helium-3 in a hypothetical fusion rocket, is a ground problem. Doesn’t complicate the rocket design at all. You can pick the fuel that works best rather than the one that’s cheapest or can be produced easily.
Gift link to Jared Isaacson’s testimony today:
During his testimony, Mr. Isaacman avoided direct answers to a number of questions while repeatedly saying that the space agency could work to send astronauts to both moon and Mars within its current $25 billion budget.
Big, if true.
Saying nonsense that Congress or the president or the co-president want to hear is not really what I want from my NASA administrator.
Well if NASA is going to gut its science budget (there are reports around of a 50% cut) that leaves more money for flying to the Moon and Mars.
The biggest problem with thermal fission, the deal breaker really, is that they never came up with a nuclear rocket design whose thrust/weight ratio was greater than 1. As a result, nuclear stages were only useful for upper stages or orbital transfer stages; you still needed a giant chemical booster for the liftoff so nuclear didn’t make launch cheaper or easier. Some economy of scale, if you were going to launch Saturn V or Nova-class missions; but then those missions had to be justified on their own merits rather than nuclear making the difference (other than “fantastically expensive” as opposed to “flatly impossible”).
Yeah, but we’re talking about cutting the time to Mars. No need for high thrust at all. I agree that NERVA, etc. didn’t quite justify their existence, but the same would be true of a fusion rocket (at least in the near-term).
Maybe a few decades from now they’ll return.