A new company enters the smallsat businessThe 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.
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 print edition can be purchased at Amazon or from any other book seller. If you want an autographed copy the price is $60 for the hardback and $45 for the paperback, plus $8 shipping for each. Go here for purchasing details. 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
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.
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 print edition can be purchased at Amazon or from any other book seller. If you want an autographed copy the price is $60 for the hardback and $45 for the paperback, plus $8 shipping for each. Go here for purchasing details. 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 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. ;-)