A new company enters the smallsat business
The competition heats up: Firefly Space Systems, a new company aimed at the small satellite market, successfully test fired its first rocket engine today.
This company is aiming for the same market that Virgin Galactic is going for with its LauncherOne rocket. It will be interesting to see if either can make money selling launch services to these small satellites.
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The competition heats up: Firefly Space Systems, a new company aimed at the small satellite market, successfully test fired its first rocket engine today.
This company is aiming for the same market that Virgin Galactic is going for with its LauncherOne rocket. It will be interesting to see if either can make money selling launch services to these small satellites.
The support of my readers through the years has given me the freedom and ability to analyze objectively the ongoing renaissance in space, as well as the cultural changes -- for good or ill -- that are happening across America. Four years ago, just before the 2020 election I wrote that Joe Biden's mental health was suspect. Only in this year has the propaganda mainstream media decided to recognize that basic fact.
Fourteen years ago I wrote that SLS and Orion were a bad ideas, a waste of money, would be years behind schedule, and better replaced by commercial private enterprise. Even today NASA and Congress refuse to recognize this reality.
In 2020 when the world panicked over COVID I wrote that the panic was unnecessary, that the virus was apparently simply a variation of the flu, that masks were not simply pointless but if worn incorrectly were a health threat, that the lockdowns were a disaster and did nothing to stop the spread of COVID. Only in the past year have some of our so-called experts in the health field have begun to recognize these facts.
Your help allows me to do this kind of intelligent analysis. I take no advertising or sponsors, so my reporting isn't influenced by donations by established space or drug companies. Instead, I rely entirely on donations and subscriptions from my readers, which gives me the freedom to write what I think, unencumbered by outside influences.
Please consider supporting my work here at Behind the Black.
You can support me either by giving a one-time contribution or a regular subscription. There are five ways of doing so:
1. Zelle: This is the only internet method that charges no fees. All you have to do is use the Zelle link at your internet bank and give my name and email address (zimmerman at nasw dot org). What you donate is what I get.
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3. A Paypal Donation:
5. Donate by check, payable to Robert Zimmerman and mailed to
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You can also support me by buying one of my books, as noted in the boxes interspersed throughout the webpage or shown in the menu above. And if you buy the books through the ebookit links, I get a larger cut and I get it sooner.
I doubt whether there is enough pipeline of smallsats available to warrant a separate launch platform. Creating a better secondary payload system would be a much better solution. Looking at the various platforms i think the indian one would be cheaperst/lbs
These folks are just down the street from me.
Pretty impressive that they’ve gone from zero to first engine firing in ~15 months.
We should start a new rocket company–Z-Space. Named, of course, for our desert leader. Financed by crowd-funding? We could paint our rockets black.
Maurice,
There may be more of a pipeline than you think. OneWeb, for instance, wants to put 700 small satellites into orbit, and another constellation proposal — by Elon Musk — is to put up a constellation of 4,000 small satellites.
It will be interesting to see if these constellations come to fruition, but there is also a growing market for cubesat launches. There is a growing market for small satellites, whether in constellations or on their own; they are less expensive, and the technology is maturing for smaller, lighter satellite components.
Overall, there are more potential small satellites than can be reasonably launched as secondary payloads, and many of them will want to be in specific orbits, not the arbitrary orbits that many secondary payloads have to be satisfied with.
You could be right, Maurice, that there may already be too many proposed small-sat launchers for all of them to survive, but that just means that the more innovative and resourceful companies are the ones more likely to survive. Competition is a good thing — for the customers, not for the losing competitors.
Another way to look at it is that these companies may lose money on each launch, but they will make up for it in launch volume. ;-)