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SpaceX's Falcon Heavy rocket seems to be a hit with satellite companies
When the Falcon Heavy rocket launched for the first time in February, some critics of the company wondered what exactly the rocket's purpose was. After all, the company's Falcon 9 rocket had become powerful enough that it could satisfy the needs of most commercial customers. One such critic even told me, "The Falcon Heavy is just a vanity project for Elon Musk."
[...] Last week, the Swedish satellite company Ovzon signed a deal for a Falcon Heavy launch as early as late 2020 for a geostationary satellite mission. And just on Thursday, ViaSat announced that it, too, had chosen the Falcon Heavy to launch one of its future ViaSat-3 satellite missions in the 2020 to 2022 timeframe.
[...] In explaining their rocket choice, both Ovzon and ViaSat cited the ability of the Falcon Heavy to deliver heavy payloads "direct"—or almost directly—to geostationary orbit, an altitude nearly 36,000km above the Earth's surface. Typically, rockets launching payloads bound for geostationary orbit drop their satellites into a "transfer" orbit, from which the satellite itself must spend time and propellant to reach the higher orbit. (More on these orbits can be found here).
[...] The demonstration flight of the Falcon Heavy apparently convinced not only the military of the rocket's direct-to-geo capability but satellite fleet operators as well. The Falcon Heavy rocket now seems nicely positioned to offer satellite companies relatively low-cost access to orbits they desire, with a minimum of time spent getting there in space.
See also: SpaceX heading to two to four Falcon Heavy paid launches per year
Related: How to Get Back to the Moon in 4 Years, Permanently
Falcon Heavy Maiden Launch Successful (Mostly)
SpaceX Confirms it Lost the Center Core of the Falcon Heavy
After the Falcon Heavy Launch, Time to Defund the Space Launch System?
NASA's Chief of Human Spaceflight Rules Out Use of Falcon Heavy for Lunar Station
SpaceX's Falcon Heavy Could Launch Japanese and European Payloads to Lunar Orbital Platform-Gateway
(Score: 2) by driverless on Sunday October 28 2018, @06:12AM (5 children)
Did the sentence continue:
(Score: 2) by takyon on Sunday October 28 2018, @06:45AM (4 children)
In some ways, Falcon Heavy is a bit of a distraction. It might have 2-4 launches per year in the upcoming years, which is not a lot. This number could go up, but it will probably require a government or military contract. There's no reason we couldn't use Falcon Heavy to build the LOP-G [soylentnews.org], except for pork politics. Maybe JAXA or ESA will use it for that purpose [soylentnews.org].
BFR will entirely replace Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy eventually, but some customers will opt for the proven Falcon 9 for at least a couple of years. But Falcon Heavy could bite the dust.
There's some speculation here [reddit.com] that the mostly reusable Falcon Heavy could be discounted, to discourage customers from picking an expendable Falcon 9 option. This could allow SpaceX to reuse more boosters and stop new Falcon 9 Block 5 booster production, saving some cash and shifting more focus onto BFR.
As it compares to SLS [wikipedia.org], Falcon Heavy originally compared well, but the capability of SLS Block 1 has been revised upward to 95 tons to LEO, from 70 tons to LEO. That doesn't make SLS cost-effective, but it probably means that SLS Block 1 and 1B are politically secure if the program does not face additional huge delays. In particular, Congress will say that the power of SLS is crucial for the Europa Clipper mission. I still think that Block 2, scheduled for 2029, will never fly, particularly if SpaceX's orbital and manned BFR demonstrations are successful and mostly on time.
Falcon Heavy could become more useful if BFR faces unexpected delays. And if Musk was not kidding about the "Falcon Super Heavy" [theverge.com], which would strap on two additional boosters, then that could act as a last ditch option to lift some payloads that would otherwise only be suited for the BFR.
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(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Sunday October 28 2018, @06:55AM (3 children)
Well, when SLS shows us what they've got - maybe. But, they may not take any business from the competitors because of cost. Sure, they probably get government stuff, despite cost, but not so much foreign and corporate business. First, they have to put a vehicle on the launch pad.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Sunday October 28 2018, @07:36AM (2 children)
SLS is a money hole. The backers know what Falcon Heavy can do, and know what BFR will do (as planned). They know that Falcon Heavy can take up LOP-G payloads (without crew). They know that fully reusable BFR is a complete SLS killer. They know that people are calling for SLS to be cancelled.
What Congress has been doing lately is accelerating the flow of money into SLS. You can get a sense of what's going on from these stories:
Leaning Tower of NASA [soylentnews.org]
NASA Gets Money it Didn't Ask for to Fund Second SLS Mobile Launcher; WFIRST Mission Receives Funds [soylentnews.org]
NASA Could Scale Down First Manned Flight of the SLS [soylentnews.org]
House Spending Bill Offers NASA More Money Than the Agency or Administration Wanted [soylentnews.org]
Having that mobile launcher sooner could shave off a year of delays (first two stories above). Launching payloads and astronauts on the Block 1 version instead of waiting for Block 1B (third story) gets SLS operating sooner. Mandating a speedy mission to Europa (fourth) gives SLS something to do other than build the LOP-G, and makes it harder to kill since Congressman John Culberson has been heavily evangelizing Europa Clipper. More on that here [planetary.org] and here [sciencemag.org].
The goal here is to enrich the military-industrial complex as much as possible before the SLS inevitably gets cancelled in light of reusable BFR (remember that SLS costs $500 million to $3 billion per launch, depending on how you figure it, while BFR would cost substantially less than $100 million per launch, with development costs not paid by the U.S. government). And they've found a great way to do that: throwing money at the problem in hopes of shortening the delays. If it works, they get to build more fully expendable SLS pork rockets before time is up. If it doesn't work, at least they tried, and still got to spend billions of dollars in the preparation phase.
SLS is not SpaceX's main competitor. But if SpaceX can kill SLS with public pressure, it can access lucrative NASA contracts, potentially tapping billions that would otherwise be going to the usual suspects, namely Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and Aerojet Rocketdyne.
I say that SLS Block 2 is uniquely vulnerable because if you look at the schedule [wikipedia.org], the first Block 2 mission is planned for 2029. That's years after SpaceX hopes to have BFR operating and even sending cargo and people to the surface of Mars.
Keep in mind that the very first mission on that schedule, the unmanned EM-1 test, is likely to be delayed beyond June 2020 according to the NASA Inspector General [spacepolicyonline.com].
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(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Sunday October 28 2018, @09:27AM (1 child)
I agree on the motivations for SLS: Making the military industrial complex richer. I wonder, though, if there is a tangential motivation. You can keep more secrets aboard a ship run by the government, than you can keep on a ship run by civilians. I suspect that if Musk's ships were involved in building a kinetic weapons platform, word would leak pretty quickly. A ship under government control might develop leaks, but they would probably take longer. I could come up with more scenarios requiring secrecy, but they would become more and more preposterous - right up to and including making contact with the Galactic Monitor crew hiding in the asteroids.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Sunday October 28 2018, @10:15AM
SpaceX is authorized to launch national security payloads. What more could the govt. want? The contractors behind SLS are companies as well. Publicly traded ones, in some cases, unlike the still-private SpaceX.
SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell has said [spacenews.com] that the company would launch weapons for the U.S. So it's a bit different than the Google situation [soylentnews.org] you might be thinking of, where Google's cooperation with the Pentagon seemed to go against the company's culture.
SLS isn't a great choice for secret launches. It's launching very infrequently, its entire roadmap is known, and it will be launching with astronauts in many cases. It will probably build the LOP-G, an international project in cooperation with the Russians, EU, Japan, and Canada. Several of the LOP-G payloads would launch with astronauts. What are they going to do, drop a secret payload into low-Earth orbit before continuing to the Moon? Maybe that's why SLS is so massively overprovisioned for the job of delivering ~10 ton LOP-G modules. But nah, the Russians would notice and cry foul. Even wrench-sized objects are tracked in orbit. So if a secret payload comes out of the SLS, it will be noticed.
The better option is to just do a secret national security launch with ULA or SpaceX. The Air Force also has the X-37B which they can use to get secret payloads into orbit. You do one of these launches. You can lie to SpaceX, and say that it is a spy satellite. You can make it outwardly appear like a spy satellite, although you don't even have to show it to SpaceX employees, because you get to implement it into the fairing however you see fit. The Russians look at the thing, and it appears to be a spy satellite. But it is actually a rod dropper.
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