Why America Needs India's Rockets (bloomberg.com)

Since 2005, U.S. satellite manufacturers have been prohibited from hiring India's space agency to launch their equipment. Private American launch companies, such as SpaceX, are quite happy with this arrangement, which was intended to protect them. But the ban is not only wrong in principle -- it's actually impeding an exciting new American industry, according to Bloomberg. From the article: Last month, under pressure from satellite operators and manufacturers, U.S. trade officials began reviewing the decade-old policy. They should heed the pressure and overturn it. Emerging India may seem like an unlikely competitor for Silicon Valley rocket companies. Yet since 1969, the Indian Space Research Organization has consistently punched above its modest weight class, racking up a series of cheap and practical achievements. One of its most important feats was the development of the Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle, which was designed to carry satellites for monitoring agriculture and water resources, among other things. What made the PSLV unique was that it was designed to launch small satellites. And that's a good niche to occupy at the moment. Over the past few years, the small-satellite market has boomed as advances in miniaturization made space accessible to governments and companies that might never have considered it. The uses for such gear seem almost limitless, from shoebox-sized climate-monitoring devices to Samsung's plan to use thousands of micro-satellites to provide global internet access. Some $2.5 billion has been invested in the industry over the past decade. But getting all those satellites into space is now proving to be a problem, and U.S. policy is partly to blame.The article adds that apart from SpaceX, no other U.S. company has offered a rocket for small satellite launches, even though the demand has surged. This in turn, has resulted in American satellite companies with few choices. Though the U.S. Trade Representatives has offered occasional waivers from the moratorium, India continues to offer a far cheaper reliable option, and it's not even being considered.

To offer more context, India's Mars mission has a budget of $73 million -- making it far cheaper than comparable missions including NASA's $671 million Maven satellite. Further reading on Vox.com, "India's mission to Mars cost less than the movie Gravity."

Comments

I'm not surprised they're cheaper

[rsilvergun]

India has a massive and largely abandoned underclass combined with lax environmental laws (and we're not talking the 'save the whales' kind we're talking the cancer villages kind). I don't expect our want American businesses to compete with that. You'll notice we're not blocking German rocket launches..

money can be exchanged for goods and services

[Pseudonymous Powers]

From the article:

In the 1980s, Ronald Reagan's administration sought to protect nascent private launch companies from subsidized foreign competition by setting up Commercial Space Launch Agreements. The idea was simple: In exchange for the chance to put U.S. satellites into space, foreign governments agreed to launch quotas and set fees. Both China and Russia signed such agreements. In 2005, India was asked to do the same. While the U.S. waited for an answer (it was and continues to be "no"), it imposed an export moratorium on satellites for Indian launch.

So it sounds like it was a trade deal that fell through. Like, the U.S. offered India the same terms as China and Russia, but they weren't interested. If that's indeed the case, well, China and Russia aren't really known for their laid-back attitude toward these things, so if India's requirements are even more stringent then perhaps we shouldn't be in business with them anyway.

Mind you, I don't know anything about the specifics. Can anyone provide more background on this?

What is "small"?

[legRoom]

...from shoebox-sized climate-monitoring devices to Samsung's plan to use thousands of micro-satellites to provide global internet access.

Those are both way smaller than the PSLV's LEO payload capacity of 3.8 tons, or even its GTO payload capacity of 1.4 tons. Even a shoebox-sized gold brick (~250 kg) doesn't weight nearly that much.

So, the PSLV has the same fundamental problem for such missions as U.S. commercial launchers: it's too expensive to launch tiny satellites one at a time on a huge rocket, which means they have to be launched in batches. But, satellites launched in batches are all deposited in the same orbital plane. That's problematic because different missions require different orbital planes, and making large plane changes after achieving orbit is very, very expensive - especially in LEO.

So, I'm not sure what problem the author thinks the PSLV solves for people launching micro-satellites - it's actually sized for launching medium or mini satellites.

Mostly in their dreams

[DerekLyons]

From TFS:

The article adds that apart from SpaceX, no other U.S. company has offered a rocket for small satellite launches, even though the demand has surged.

Well, no. The demand for smallsats hasn't actually surged, at least not outside the press release, PowerPoint, and blog industries. (There's been a short term spike, but not a long term surge.) The surge has been in demand for microsats - and in a large part that surge has been powered by the availability of cheap rides as a secondary payload on someone else's flight. That being said, there are a number of US companies working towards smallsat launch capability, but it remains to be seen whether their attempts will pan out.

Re:BS

[Anonymous Coward]

The Indian Mars mission was tiny, about a quarter of the size and weight of the MAVEN, with about 1/4 of the science payload. Hence, 1/4 the cost.

Sending weight into space is nonlinear, so probably more like 1/10th the cost.

You got Russia and the US backwards.

[cbhacking]

Um... where the hell did you get the idea that the Russians use gas generators (inefficient) and the US uses staged combustion? That is almost perfectly backward.

Staged combustion was invented by a Russian, Aleksei Mihailovich Isaev.
The first staged combustion rocket engine built was the Soviet S1.5400, first flown in 1960.
The (ill-fated) Soviet N1 moon rocket used staged-combustion NK-15 and NK-33 rocket engines (the American Saturn V moon rocket used gas generator rocket engines).
The first western (German, not US) staged combustion engine was in 1963, and it was a laboratory test only.
The Russian Proton rocket family was using the staged combustion RD-253 rocket engine in 1965.
The US buys staged combustion RD-180 engines from Russia for United Launch Alliance's workhorse Atlas rocket family.

As far as I can tell, the first US-built staged combustion rocket to fly was the RS-25, better known as the SSME (Space Shuttle Main Engine), which first flew in 1981. It was a fuel-rich staged combustion cycle, made possible by the use of non-coking H2 fuel. However, by that point the Russians had been using oxidizer-rich staged combustion (which requires advanced metallurgy that the US could not duplicate for over two decades.

Now, both SpaceX and Blue Origin are US companies working on staged combustion rockets, but those are recent projects. In SpaceX's case, it is a full-flow staged combustion rocket, which is extremely tricky; no FFSC rocket has ever flown, although the Russians built and test-fired the RD-270 in the late 60s. SpaceX's Raptor has successfully fired on a test stand, the first FFSC rocket engine to do so since 1970 and the only US-built one to do so ever. The US (through private contractors Rocketdyne and Aerojet) experimented with FFSC in the "Integrated Powerhead Demonstrator", which wasn't even a full rocket motor; the front-end ("Powerhead") component was tested at full capacity in 2006, but then canceled; no full rocket engine was ever built using that design.

So yeah, the US historically didn't have shit on the Russians when it came to advanced rocket combustion cycles. That may be changing now, but it's driven primarily by private industry.