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Virgin Galactic Announces New Satellite Launch Vehicle
An anonymous reader writes "Virgin Galactic has announced a new craft called LauncherOne, which it will use to put satellites into orbit. 'It appears to leverage some of the hardware already developed for SpaceShipTwo, Virgin's suborbital tourist vehicle. Like SpaceShipTwo, the new rocket rides up underneath Virgin's big carrier aircraft, WhiteKnightTwo, to about 50,000 feet. After release, the rocket drops for approximately four seconds before the first stage ignites. After the first stage burns out, a second stage takes the satellite to orbit.' Launching from a moving airplane eliminates many cost and scheduling concerns inherent to ground-based launches, and it's much easier to reach a broad range of trajectories for putting objects into orbit. According to the press release, LauncherOne will get objects up to 225kg into orbit for less than $10 million."
Orbital Sciences build something very similar, called Pegasus. It's air launched, is quite reliable, can throw 440kg into LEO, has a very good launch record -- and costs roughly as much ($11m a pop, if memory serves correctly.)
Branson is nuts if he thinks he can prevail against Orbital in this segment of the launch market.
... and to some extent he is as the CEO and the figurehead for Virgin. But he does ambitious stuff nobody else is doing.
I hope he makes mad profits in the space business and other companies see the potential.
I am not an expert but some quick calculations reveal that if they can launch 225kg payload for $10M that puts it at pretty close to the same cost other vehicles have been providing for years, like an Athena 2 or Taurus launch vehicle (which can also support much heavier payloads). Is this unique in that it is specifically for smaller payloads? Or, is the ability to do launches "wherever, whenever"? This has interesting implications but doesnt seem like it would shake up the market too much given that most satellites are planned out pretty far in advance of going to orbit.
$10M for 225 kg is more than $40000 per kg. That's even more than Shuttle's effective price-to-orbit for its payload. Once they get their price at least 10 times down then they can start thinking about competing with real rockets.
Say you got a 200kg sattelite you want in orbit. How do you get it to launch on a normal rocket? Not alone for sure, it may be the same kilo price but those rockets are not going to go up for just you. Which means you got to fit yourself around the schedules and requirements of others. Want an odd orbit? Sorry, our rocket ain't going there.
Sending cargo by ocean vessel is insanely cheap. Pity if you got a parcel to be delivered to Switzerland. The right vehicle, at the right cost.
Lets just assume for a second that a self-made billionaire knows more about making money then all of slashdot put together.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
The Concorde will never be replaced. It was horrendously expensive and in the same league of complexity as the SR-71. It was given to private industry for a song and a dance after a horrifically expensive government-funded development and build process. The Concorde was always horrifically expensive to fly on, more than first-class tickets on conventional airliners.
The super-rich will have supersonic private jets soon enough, but there will certainly never be another supersonic airliner. Us proles will never fly supersonic, although Boeing is working on a near-sonic design that could actually make sense.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
When I met Richard Branson he was living on a houseboat on the Thames. Unlike many of the people who have made a lot of money, he didn't start off rich. He seems to have been successful because he is good at delegation, focusses on the bottom line, and looks after his managers. If he wants to sell space tourism, some very clever people will have worked out how it will get to the bottom line.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
That's just enough to orbit my mother in law.
Dug around in Wikipedia a little and found that White Knight 2 has a carrying capacity of 35,000 lbs (~16k kilos). The X-37B is listed at 11,000 (5k) fully loaded, the crewcab version X-37C should be under 25,000 and even the old pre-composite X-15 was 34,000(15.4k). Now the X-15 was far shy of orbital velocity, but rocket design has advanced some in the 40+ years since the end of the program and building a standby vehicle for quick launch to orbit might be getting feasible.
I, like many, have mourned the decline of manned space exploration. However, I see the work of Virgin Galactec and SpaceX as reasons to hope that not all is dead.
Maybe the parts are coming together.
-Xanthos
Average Intelligence is a Scary Thing