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Rocket Lab's Modest Launch Is Giant Leap for Small Rocket Business:
The company's Electron rocket carried a batch of small commercial satellites from a launchpad in New Zealand, a harbinger of a major transformation to the space business.
A small rocket from a little-known company lifted off Sunday from the east coast of New Zealand, carrying a clutch of tiny satellites. That modest event — the first commercial launch by a U.S.-New Zealand company known as Rocket Lab — could mark the beginning of a new era in the space business, where countless small rockets pop off from spaceports around the world. This miniaturization of rockets and spacecraft places outer space within reach of a broader swath of the economy.
The rocket, called the Electron, is a mere sliver compared to the giant rockets that Elon Musk, of SpaceX, and Jeffrey P. Bezos, of Blue Origin, envisage using to send people into the solar system. It is just 56 feet tall and can carry only 500 pounds into space.
But Rocket Lab is aiming for markets closer to home. "We're FedEx," said Peter Beck, the New Zealand-born founder and chief executive of Rocket Lab. "We're a little man that delivers a parcel to your door."
Behind Rocket Lab, a host of start-up companies are also jockeying to provide transportation to space for a growing number of small satellites. The payloads include constellations of telecommunications satellites that would provide the world with ubiquitous internet access. The payload of this mission, which Rocket Lab whimsically named "It's Business Time," offered a glimpse of this future: two ship-tracking satellites for Spire Global; a small climate- and environment-monitoring satellite for GeoOptics; a small probe built by high school students in Irvine, Calif., and a demonstration version of a drag sail that would pull defunct satellites out of orbit.
So, there's SpaceX, Blue Origin, and ULA (United Launch Alliance) in the US as well as Russia, India, and China working on heavy-lift rockets. There are companies that will even buy an entire launch and parcel out space for smaller payloads such as Spaceflight Industries out of Seattle, WA.
Is there enough of a market for all these kinds of rockets? Will smaller companies get bought out and assimilated by the heavy hitters, or will the big guys also develop smaller rockets to fill the need at that end of the market?
If you are interested in what rocket launches are scheduled, the best site I've found so far is: https://spaceflightnow.com/launch-schedule/.
Whatever may happen, if you have a payload to launch, things sure are looking... up!
See also: Rocket Launch in New Zealand Brings Quick, Cheap Space Access
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Monday November 12 2018, @09:11AM
Consider the weight of the payloads that the Saturn I could orbit, and that the Saturn V could send to the Moon, then back into orbit, then out of the moon's orbit back to Earth.
The ratio between the weight of its payload and the entire system at launch is quite small.
Now consider that the computer that IBM built for the Saturns - I expect it was mostly a real-time SCADA system: Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition, SCADAs are common in industrial control systems - was built into a ring seventeen feet across and three feet thick. That's 5.1816 by 0.9144 metres for those who aren't Proud Americans.
Now consider that that much computing power can _now_ be built into a System-on-Chip the size of your pinky's fingernail.
There is also nanotechnology so I expect the mechanical components of rockets and their payloads can often be much smaller.
But I'm quite certain that the greatest savings in commercial space travel as opposed to the Apollo Program is the result of all the research having been done at taxpayer expense, as well as the patents from private inventions having expired.
It happens that I disagree with Richard quite strongly about patents: that patents must always document how to build the claimed invention leads to many such inventions falling into the public domain rather than being held for centuries - even millennia - as trade secrets.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]