SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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 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.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]