DARPA announces $10 million launch challenge for smallsat rocket companies
Capitalism in space: DARPA yesterday announced a new launch challenge competition for smallsat rocket companies, with prizes of $10, $9, and $8 million for first, second, and third prizes, respectively.
Contest rules call for teams to be given the full details about where and when they’ll launch, what kind of payload they’ll launch, plus what kind of orbit the payload should be launched into, only a couple of weeks in advance. And that’s just half the job. Teams will be required to execute another launch, from a different site, no more than a couple of weeks later.
The precise time frames for giving advance notice are still under discussion, but “I would measure the time scale in days,” Todd Master, program manager for the challenge at DARPA’s Tactical Technology Office, told reporters today.
Considering that we right now already have at least two smallsat rocket companies, Rocket Lab and Vector, on the verge of doing exactly this, without the need of government money, with a slew of other companies to soon follow, I wonder why DARPA is proposing this competition. It seems somewhat irrelevant at this point, making me wonder if its real purpose is not to encourage rocket development but to find a clever way to hand some government cash to these specific companies.
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
Capitalism in space: DARPA yesterday announced a new launch challenge competition for smallsat rocket companies, with prizes of $10, $9, and $8 million for first, second, and third prizes, respectively.
Contest rules call for teams to be given the full details about where and when they’ll launch, what kind of payload they’ll launch, plus what kind of orbit the payload should be launched into, only a couple of weeks in advance. And that’s just half the job. Teams will be required to execute another launch, from a different site, no more than a couple of weeks later.
The precise time frames for giving advance notice are still under discussion, but “I would measure the time scale in days,” Todd Master, program manager for the challenge at DARPA’s Tactical Technology Office, told reporters today.
Considering that we right now already have at least two smallsat rocket companies, Rocket Lab and Vector, on the verge of doing exactly this, without the need of government money, with a slew of other companies to soon follow, I wonder why DARPA is proposing this competition. It seems somewhat irrelevant at this point, making me wonder if its real purpose is not to encourage rocket development but to find a clever way to hand some government cash to these specific companies.
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
I was under the impression that Orbital ATK’s Pegasus is already capable of doing this. Their most rapid turnaround was four weeks (August 1, 1997 and August 29, 1997), but I am not sure that this timing was due to limitations in turnaround time.
It may be that the prize money is to encourage the competition to be for a lower priced rocket (closer to $5 million per launch) rather than the $40-ish million price tag of the Pegasus small satellite launch vehicle, but that seems to be around the price-point of the small launchers anyway.
The rocket companies listed are all positioned to launch different payload weights, so DARPA is not interested in a specific weight category. In addition, the article says that “Bigger launch providers such as SpaceX, United Launch Alliance and Blue Origin would be welcome to enter,” meaning that to DARPA size does not matter much.
Since SpaceX would be welcome to enter, and since SpaceX is already working on the high-cadence-multiple-launch-site model, it is unclear just what DARPA’s interest really is. Indeed, SpaceX has suggested that its launch price could eventually come down to $5 million per launch, matching the prize amount for the two launches. SpaceX (along with the other companies that Robert mentioned) seems to already be working toward DARPA’s goal. If SpaceX eventually launches virtually any payload for the same price tag as the small-sat launchers, then it seems that the competition would be over.
Could it be that this competition has been in the works for years, but now that the competition seems obsolete, the bureaucracy has only just now managed to come out with the announcement?
People have talked about being on the verge of this for decades but no one has yet shown they can do it. Being able to replace satellites during a war against another great power is well worth $27 million.
I came across the following essay a few weeks ago. I was having trouble finding it for another post a few days ago, here on BtB, but found it again today. It seems that there are a lot of companies now interested in providing launch services for small payloads. The last I heard, there were a whopping 20, too many to be likely to survive in the marketplace, but Jeff Foust has come across many more. There will be quite a bit of competition, even if only a low percentage survive the initial weeding out.
http://spacenews.com/foust-forward-riding-a-big-wave-of-small-rockets/
This suggests that SpaceX has had a greater impact on the space market than many have thought.
Perhaps this competition was created to ensure that the decades-old talk, that FC mentioned, finally turns into reality.
Maybe Falcon 9 can outcompete small launchers too? TESS’ launch mass was only 330 kg. It needed the large F9 to get to its inclined cis-Lunar orbit. But a satellite could make use of the same extra capacity to allow for a heavier, cheaper, longer lived satellite design with more station keeping fuel and redundancies. Cheaper because there would be no real mass constraint for the design. They could use cheaper less efficient but larger Solar arrays and batteries. Thick lead protection against micrometeorites and radiation so that some electronics won’t need to me radiation hardened. And more fuel to maneuver the heavier spacecraft.