Main Engine Cut Off - T+130: SmallSat Launch Roundup

Episode Date: August 14, 2019

SmallSat was last week which meant a flurry of announcements. This year was launch heavy, so I break down some announcements from SpaceX, Arianespace, and Rocket Lab. This episode of Main Engine Cut Off is brought to you by 40 executive producers—Kris, Pat, Matt, Jorge, Brad, Ryan, Jamison, Nadim, Peter, Donald, Lee, Chris, Warren, Bob, Russell, John, Moritz, Joel, Jan, David, Grant, Mike, David, Mints, Joonas, Robb, Tim Dodd the Everyday Astronaut, Frank, Rui, Julian, Lars, Tommy, Adam, Sam, and six anonymous—and 259 other supporters. SmallSat - Home SpaceX - Smallsat Program Arianespace’s “GO-1” mission will provide small satellites with a direct flight to geostationary orbit - Arianespace Rocket Lab Announces Reusability Plans For Electron Rocket | Rocket Lab Electron Is Going Reusable - YouTube Here’s why Rocket Lab changed its mind on reusable launch | Ars Technica Can Rocket Lab really catch a rocket with a helicopter? - YouTube PDG Aviation Services - Mid Air Recovery - YouTube The Search for the Small GEO Sweet Spot - Main Engine Cut Off Episode T+123: The Noosphere of Influence - Main Engine Cut Off Episode T+124: Gateway Logistics Services, FY2020 NDAA, and Small GEO Satellites - Main Engine Cut Off Main Engine Cut Off Shop — Starhopper Ale Email your thoughts, comments, and questions to [e-mail] Follow @WeHaveMECO Listen to MECO Headlines Join the Off-Nominal Discord Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Pocket Casts, Spotify, Google Play, Stitcher, TuneIn or elsewhere Subscribe to the Main Engine Cut Off Newsletter Buy shirts and Rocket Socks from the Main Engine Cut Off Shop Like the show? Support the show! Music by Max Justus

Hello, hello, welcome to Managing Cutoff. I am Anthony Colangelo, and I want to talk a bit about some launch announcements that happened last week at SmallSat Conference out in Logan, Utah. There's usually a ton of news from that week, like there was last week. And this year, it was all about launch. Once again, this tends to go in cycles. I feel like there will be years of conferences where we will hear a whole bunch about launch vehicles, and then years where we will hear about satellite servicing or other on-orbit businesses. And this goes for not just small SAT, but IAC, the Space Symposium.

All these kinds of things tend to go in cycles. And we had yet another SmallSat launch cycle with a lot of talk and a couple of interesting announcements to break down. So I wanted to give some quick thoughts on this. I don't know how long this show will be. Like, I never really know going in. But there were at least three announcements that were worth discussing. The first one up is SpaceX announcing their new SmallSat launch initiative. So the idea here is

that starting in 2021, they say November 2020 to March 2021. So we're just going to go with 2021 to be easy, which we'll see in a sec. Starting then, they would do one launch per year out of Vandenberg Air Force Base up to 500 or 600 kilometers in a sun-synchronous orbit, and this mission would be entirely dedicated to small sat rideshares. So they've given pricing for different sizes, for different berths on their vehicle, for different times that you book. So if you book early, you can get a cheaper price. And the idea here is to fly missions once per year. So they say 2021, then first quarter 2022, first quarter 2023. And these would be entirely ride shared flights just in the same way that they flew a spaceflight launch, SSO-A. They flew that at the beginning

of this year, and that was an entirely rideshare stocked vehicle. This would be done directly through SpaceX, though. No going through spaceflight, no going through some aggregator. This would be all through SpaceX. And it's quite an interesting offering from them. If you go and look at the pricing, you'll see that they're offering for 150 kilograms, a launch price of 2.25 million if you're able to book a year out from launch. And then there's pricing for bigger berths. So 4.45 million for up to 300 kilograms with a bigger port. And then there's $15,000 a kilogram above the mass that you've signed up for. So there's all these different pricing options,

but the kind of headlining feature there is 150 kilograms for $2.25 million to sun synchronous orbit. Now what's interesting here, there's one other interesting bit about the actual agreement that you'd be signing on for this. And that's the fact that if you do get delayed, so if you signed up for a berth in 2021 and then you get delayed, you could apply all of the money that you've spent so far to a rebooking on the next flight, the year after. They do say that change rebooking fees may apply, which is so airline that it makes me laugh a little bit. But this is one of the key elements here that has been a pain for rideshares on this scale in the past, that if a certain amount of customers get delayed, that the entire flight gets delayed. What SpaceX

is saying here is that we are flying on this day, whether you're there or not. I assume if somebody got delayed, you know, in the weeks leading up to launch, they're going to try to find a replacement for that spot in the same way that there might be people flying on standby on a flight. If somebody doesn't show up for the flight, they can give it away. I assume there would be some sort of that that does apply here as well, but I'm curious to find out if there's a critical mass of customers that get delayed. If 40, 50, 60% of customers are delayed and not able to fly there, would they still go ahead with the launch? Is there a cutoff for that? That would be very interesting to see how they feel about that. Now, before I break down some of the more analytical side of this announcement, I want to bring in our second piece of news here, because

it's very, very similar. Arianespace announced that they would be doing a direct-to-geo flight opportunity called GO-1, G-O-1, Geosynchronous Orbit 1. And the idea here is to do a similar type of rideshare agreement, but this would be directly to geosynchronous orbit. And this would be in the first half of 2022. And they say this would be on an Ariane 64 launch vehicle. So that is the future version of the Ariane launch vehicle that they're working on now. It is the bigger variant of it. It would be able to fly two different satellites up to geosynchronous orbit in the same way that Ariane 5 does now. So this ride share could be up to 4,500 kilograms of payloads on this flight. So what it sounds like is they're going to take the smaller berth on this dual launch setup that they typically fly

and give that away to ride share opportunities. And again, this would be directly to geostationary orbit, which is an interesting offering. If you consider the past few months, we've talked about a couple of different instances where small geostationary satellites are kind of becoming a new trend. We've talked about it from the launch side with Firefly and their announcements. I'll have a link to these in show notes. We've talked about it from other sides of people actually buying satellite buses that are just a couple of hundred kilograms for geostationary orbit, which is a magnitude smaller than we typically see fly up to that altitude.

Now, the fact that Arianespace numbered this mission G01, I assume that means they have plans for G02 and three and so on. So this is a service that they intend to offer into the future, though they haven't laid out their specific plan in the way that SpaceX has done with these yearly flights to sun-synchronous orbit. So these are two different offerings, but for very similar services. It's a large launch vehicle coming into the small satellite rideshare realm and integrating payloads directly. They're not going through a company like Spaceflight or even NanoRacks, and integrating payloads directly. They're not going through a company like Spaceflight or even NanoRacks, somebody that tends to find launch opportunities for small satellites. This is a

company working with their own launch vehicle to get all of these different payloads attached to the rocket and deployed successfully in orbit. And that's a very similar offering just to different orbits, really, between these two here. So it presents the same kind of challenge to the industry at large. It is now seen as this kind of battle between, is it rideshare or is it dedicated launch? Those are your kind of two big forces here in the small sat launch realm. And I think everybody wanted to jump to the conclusion that while SpaceX is offering such a low price, $2.25 million for 150 kilograms, that is cheaper than Rocket Lab, which provides the same amount of payload on a dedicated launch.

So therefore, SpaceX will crush Rocket Lab and they will be the sole winner standing in launch services, which tends to be a storyline that everyone wants to kind of latch onto whenever SpaceX announces a new, very low cost thing. And I don't think that's right at all. I don't think SpaceX's offering here is the death knell for Rocket Lab or any other small launch company, in all honesty. I think these two things, rideshare and dedicated launch, do have their own spot in the industry. I do think both are valuable to have around. There are certain times when dedicated launch is going to be very valuable. If you're going to a very particular orbit or a very particular time of year, or you have a sensitive payload that you don't want anyone else kind of being nearby,

there's a lot of instances in which dedicated launch makes a lot of sense. And even in the case of dedicated launch, a lot of these small launch providers are offering launch prices that are significantly lower than there were opportunities before. So cutting the cost in half here with SpaceX's small sat launch program, being stuck on a yearly schedule with everybody else and you're there for the ride and you've got different constraints on where you're going or when you're going, that might not be that big of an advantage for certain people when they're looking at where they're going to launch their satellite. It might not be that big of a difference maker, just in the same way as we've

seen with SpaceX and ULA competing for billion-dollar satellite launches. Is $30, $40 million a big enough difference to win launches? In some cases, it has been. In some cases, it hasn't been. So there are a lot more intricacies here than just raw price alone. And I do think that's worth pointing out here. It is somewhat funny to me that I could see a lot of people out there that tend to make the argument that SpaceX dropping launch costs is going to increase the amount of things that want to launch to space. It's going to increase demand because of the lower price. And then also argue that since SpaceX has dropped their price below Rocket Lab, they're going to crush Rocket Lab and therefore there will be no business left

for Rocket Lab. I think you kind of got to pick one of those two storylines. Either lower prices increases demand, and you can fill any available launch vehicles with the payloads that need to go to orbit, or the lowest price wins and it crushes all other competitors, and then we're back to a very small dwindling industry with only the people that can afford it. I'm not exactly sure how those two things can coexist. But on the other hand, I do find it funny that Rocket Lab was approached for comments about the small sat offering here and pointed out the fact that one of the things I saw

that cracked me up was they don't think they're in trouble because they see dedicated launch as being a good offering for themselves, but they see others such as Firefly, which are a little bit higher up in the payload range. They can launch about 1,000 kilograms to low Earth orbit, and there's a couple other companies working on that payload range as well. They see those companies as somebody who would be affected that payload range as well. They see those companies as somebody who would be affected by the SpaceX smallsat program significantly because the bigger companies like Firefly depend on rideshare and Rocket Lab doesn't. That's really a funny kind of way to put it because there's been a lot of flights with Rocket Lab where they've been flying a handful of satellites.

And there's been a lot of missions with SpaceX that fly satellites that are in the Firefly range. So I think Firefly is in a position that is much closer to Rocket Lab than Rocket Lab wants to make it seem. So it was a very odd bit of deflection to say that, well, Firefly, there's not going to be any payloads for them to fly with a thousand kilograms to orbit. They've clearly got some sort of market figured out here when we see, like I was talking about, the small geostationary satellite trend. They've got these couple hundred kilogram satellites that are wanting to go up to orbit. They've now provided an offering with the orbital transfer vehicle that they've

shown off a couple of months ago. They provided an offering that can get a couple hundred kilograms directly into geostationary orbit. So they do seem to have some of these markets figured out that they're working towards. And I'm just using them as an example. I think all of the launchers in that thousand kilogram range are similar in this vein. I don't think they're at any more of a risk than Rocket Lab is because of the SpaceX SmallSat program. But I do think it's amazing to have these two different offerings, depending on your needs and your requirements, that you can choose whether you want to take the bus up to SSO once a year, beginning of the year, or if you want to get your own ride, you want to call yourself a Lyft. Those two offerings do exist. And those are the analogies

that you always hear launch executives making. And I think they are the right ones, because there are certain times when you do want to hop on a ride share, and there's certain times when you do want a dedicated ride. And those are really valuable things. And the fact that both of them are popping up shows that this industry, at least right now, can support those different options. And I think it's going to be interesting to see who takes advantage of which one and which ones are most attractive for the industry at large. There's one more thing on my mind about these two missions from Arianespace and SpaceX that I can't quite shake, and I don't know if this is a for-sure thing or just something in my head, but I kind of want to put it out there. Arianespace, it's not really much of a secret

that they've been having problems selling launches on Arian6. They just kind of basically got sign off from the European Commission that they have the launches needed to go ahead with the actual production of Ariane 6, but that was not an easy task in itself. And they haven't sold a ton of commercial missions. Most of the commercial missions that are on the books for Ariane 6, they've convinced people to switch over from Ariane 5. So there's not a lot of new business happening right now for Ariane 6, and even less so for those future launches of Ariane 64. The first launches of Ariane 6 are going to be the 62 variant, which just has two boosters, and that would only be able to take about one satellite up to geostationary orbit. Ariane 64 would have four boosters that would be able to take two satellites up in the same way that Ariane 5 does right now.

On the SpaceX side of things, Vandenberg has not been that busy after they've finished with all the Iridium launches and until they have a couple of more DoD launches coming up out of Vandenberg. It's a very quiet launch complex for Falcon 9. So I think in both of these cases, this could be a way to fill some payload holes in their manifest for these different launch vehicles in the case of Ariane 64 Ariane space really needs to get payloads for these flights if they want to fly them still especially with Ariane 64 if they want to dual launch satellites and they already sold one spot they need another payload to fly if they're going to make really any money off of that launch. And in the SpaceX case, it's expensive to have a pad sitting out at Vandenberg that

doesn't do anything for you. So if they've developed this program in a way that lets them kind of pay the cost of keeping that launch site active and essentially offer this as a way to be a really good offering for the market, yet also cover their own needs out at Vandenberg to keep that open and operational, that could be a good thing as well. I don't want to count out the fact that both of these are things that have come about because they see a need to fill their own manifest, to fill their own schedule, and they have the ability to offer these options to customers and fulfill their own need there. I do think that's probably a non-zero factor in both of

these announcements and something that I'm going to keep my eye on to see whether that does kind of prove out or not as a motivating factor for them to both put these offers out there at the front of SmallSat conference here in 2019. Now, there was one other bit of news from SmallSat that I want to get to. That's from Rocket rocket lab they are going to pursue reusability of their electron launch vehicle and we're going to get into that in one minute right after we thank everybody out there who made this episode of main engine cutoff possible there are 299 of you supporting this show every single month 299 there's one more of you out there i know that wants to be the 300th supporter so head over to mainenginecutoff.com slash support if you want to be that 300th person.

And this episode was produced by 40 executive producers. Chris, Pat, Matt, George, Brad, Ryan, Jameson, Nadim, Peter, Donald, Lee, Chris, Warren, Bob, Russell, John, Moritz, Joel, Jan, David, Grant, Mike, David, Mintz, Eunice, Rob, Tim Dodd,

the Everyday Astronaut, Frank, Rui, Julian, Lars, Tommy, Adam, Sam, and six anonymous executive producers. Thank you all so much for your support. This is an entirely listener-supported show, so if you like what I'm doing here, if you like having it in your feed every week-ish, however often I get a show out, if you like that and you want to see more of it, head over to mainenginecutoff.com slash support and help support the show. I also want to mention another great way to support the show. Head over to shop.mainenginecutoff.com slash support and help support the show. I also want to mention another

great way to support the show. Head over to shop.mainenginecutoff.com. I've got a new shirt up today as I record this. It is the Starhopper Ale shirt. I've been calling Starhopper the beer keg with legs, and I've put together a shirt that is just that. Something that is kind of fun and will really resonate with the beer and space nerds out there. So I know there's a lot of you from the other episode, the other show that I do off Nominal. So head over to shop.mainenginecutoff.com and check that out. If you also want to support the show, but get a shirt out of it rather than your name in the credits, both great ways to support the work here. All right, so let's get into this reusability talk. We always love reusability talk here. Rocket Lab has always

said that reusability was not on their roadmap for a handful of reasons. Number one, on the propulsive reusability front, in the way that SpaceX does it, they have a very small launch vehicle with a very small payload mass. So pursuing propulsive reusability with the current architecture of Electron wouldn't make the most sense because it would really cut into their payload margin quite a bit. So what they're going to do instead is pursue mid-air recovery. This is a model that has been done in the past for different kinds of missions. And they've got even a full video rendering, and even some source material that I think is kind of interesting to check out. So they did a series of interviews after this announcement. One I really liked was from

our friend Eric Berger over at Ars Technica about the Rocket Lab reusability stuff. And then Tim Dodd, who we just talked about in the producer segment there, he did a great video on this whole announcement and broke down some of the things that you should be thinking about. So check that out as well. I'll have links to those in the show notes if you're interested. But what is most interesting here is some of the source material here that I mentioned. So back in 2017, Lockheed Martin worked with a couple of different companies

to do this mid-air recovery test in Scotland, of all places. And what they did there was recovered a booster with a helicopter on a parachute, and it looks identical to what was in the video released by Rocket Lab. Now, there's a lot of interesting correlations there between Rocket Lab, Lockheed Martin, and Scotland. Lockheed Martin made an investment in Rocket Lab back in like 2014 or 15, I think it was. And Lockheed Martin also has been rumored to be a company looking into launching out of the Scotland spaceport that is kind of underway, sort of,

asterisk, whatever, something that we could see in the future. And one of the launch vehicles that was kind of, you know, rumored back then to be flown out of Scotland is Rocket Lab's Electron. So we kind of have this three-pointed thing here about how Rocket Lab, Lockheed, and Scotland all kind of get along. And then we see a mid-air recovery test in Scotland by Lockheed Martin that looks a lot like a Rocket Lab project. So there is definitely something going on here. It can't be a coincidence at this point. So anyway, check those videos out if you want to see what I'm talking about there, because it's quite interesting to look at. But the idea here is that they would get to this recovery over the next few launches. So on the 10th launch of Rocket Lab's Electron, which is coming up in just idea. First, they're going to do some reentry tests. I'm sure that's really the first big problem they got to knock down if they ever want to

deploy a parachute from Electron. Once they're able to handle reentry, then they'll start working on the actual parachutes and the power foils. And then once they kind of handle that, recover a couple of stages in the water, then they would work on actually capturing it with a helicopter launched from a boat. It would lay it down on the back of the boat, and they could reuse that vehicle in the future. Now, in the interviews that came out after the announcement, they talked a lot about the fact that this wasn't necessarily done, or the decision here to pursue this wasn't made for cost purposes, but maybe more so for production flow. So they could actually produce more vehicles more quickly and help out their backlog. Because at this point,

they're only able to produce like one stage a month or something like that. I saw in one of the interviews and they really need to up that if they want to fly more frequently than that. And one of the best ways to scale production is to get your vehicles back so you don't have to produce them as much. Now, I'm sure that's true, but I also would believe that this is for cost reasons as well. I've heard recently some talk of the launch price of Electron creeping up to the $7 million range. So that's about $1.5 million higher than we've heard publicly before. So that's something that, you know, maybe there's a little concern there that the launch cost is rising a bit as they get into the flow, they learn different processes, what they're actually doing launch to launch, and they can make a more realistic assessment of what they need to charge for their launches. So maybe that is something that they're

concerned about, and they want to bring down. But whatever the case here, I think this is a really good sign for Rocket Lab overall, because if they're able to pursue this kind of development, it means the back of the house stuff, the operations, the actual backlog that they're working with, who wants to fly on Electron, all of that is going well. If they are pursuing some sort of reusability, that means they are planning for the long haul and they are in a good position to be able to tackle this kind of thing. This isn't something that a company that is dying would undertake. So that's a really good sign if you're watching from the outside. It's a good indication of where Rocket Lab is, the health that they have. They've obviously got another launch site coming on sometime this year or next down in Virginia. So they seem to be doing

really well right now. And I think they're entering a critical year or two here where they're either going to make it or break it at this point. So I'm encouraged to see this kind of pursuit from them, and it's something I'm going to be watching very interestingly over the next few months to years as they pursue recovery and reusability for yet another reusable rocket in the world. So that is the SmallSat launch roundup. There's not a whole lot else coming out of SmallSat that was worth breaking down really too much. There was some news about Vector. Don't think that storyline's settled yet. They got an Air Force contract, and then they also folded up shop, and there's something interesting going on there, but I don't feel like that storyline has ended

yet enough to really talk about here. So maybe in the next week or two, we'll be talking about Vector on the show. But for now, that is all I've got for you on the small set launch roundup. If you've got any questions or thoughts, send them my way. Anthony at MainEngineCutoff.com or on Twitter at WeHaveMigo. And once again, thanks to everybody who supports the show over at MainEngineCutoff.com slash support. I'll talk to you next week. Bye.