I’d love to believe that…

..and that, I suspect, was the sole reason for Amazon doing this. The brazenness almost beggars belief.

A Blessed Easter to everyone.

From Amazon LEO’s response letter:

But these types of changes require substantial lead time. Launch vehicle providers generally require at least months—and typically one year—to retarget insertion altitude due to the complexity of final mission analysis, which encompasses trajectory analysis, coupled loads analysis, and integrated thermal analysis. Arianespace, for example, requires three to six months for final mission analysis when changing target orbit parameters.

Amazon LEO (then known as Kuiper) bought three Falcon 9 launches, which occurred only a few months after the purchase. SpaceX can plan an entire launch in a matter of months — not a year — including scheduling a launcher and finding a place within its busy launch schedule.

The Air Force has asked launch companies to be able to schedule an entire launch within a matter of days, and then to schedule another launch within a few days later. If doing the work for the whole launch (planning, complex final mission analysis , setup, execution) only takes days, then a small change in the launch profile — the destination altitude — cannot take so very long.

For Amazon to be giving such a low expectation of Arianespace’s capabilities should anger Arianespace. And it should anger its sister company, Blue Origin, because we can only surmise that Blue isn’t any better than LEO’s excuses. Thank God that the Air Force relies upon competent American launch companies for its launch services.

With the exception of its regular space writers, Eric Berger and Stephen Clark, Ars Technica is a sewer of woke progressivism, Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS) and Musk Derangement Syndrome (MDS). Anything written about Musk or any of his companies by any of their other writers will be a bubbling cauldron of bile and lies-by-omission. Pay these no mind.

As to SpaceX having procedures in place to quickly revise scheduled launches, it certainly does. I’ve seen many SpaceX launches delayed repeatedly by anywhere from a few minutes to several hours several times on a given day and still launch at the last established T-0. It takes SpaceX minutes at most to revise a launch. That it apparently takes Arianespace weeks or months doesn’t speak very well of their technical capability, especially in the area of launch control software. This would have been insanely slow even back in my college days when we submitted computing jobs on decks of 80-column Hollerith cards for batch processing.

If you read the Ars Technica article on this subject, they also have those same facts. But the spin, oh my God the spin, is so over the top anti-SpaceX that it’s hard to believe. Full of sneering “SpaceX claims” and “according to SpaceX”, followed by admissions from the FCC and Amazon three paragraphs later that, yes, the “SpaceX claims” are entirely true.

If it’s true that it takes most launch providers multiple months to deal with something simple as changing the target orbit from 480 to 400km, that’s just an amazing piece of information. I can understand that it’s not just change one value in the program and launch, but a competent provider would have the procedures in place to deal with it days at most. I bet SpaceX does.