[ExI] Power sats and payload size was Small solar satellites

[Adrian Tymes]

On Sat, Feb 25, 2012 at 10:42 PM, Keith Henson <hkeithhenson at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sat, Feb 25, 2012 at 5:12 PM,  Adrian Tymes <atymes at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Ah.  So the ~1 kg sats would, at best, work as a demonstration so you
>> could get the investment needed to do a multi-ton launch.  Thanks.
>
> Hmm.  Not sure you grok the sheer scale involved.

No, I do.  The point is to demonstrate everything besides scale,
so that you can then win investment to scale with.  Scale is not
the only challenge - you may think it the biggest one, but it can
be tackled with brute financial force.  This reduces the problem
to, how to get said brute financial force.  A tiny demonstration -
enough to show that you can handle all the other challenges -
would go a long way towards that end.

> One would do it.  I don't think you appreciate just how little power
> is needed to be "measurable."

I thought that might be the case, actually.  But I figured you'd know for
sure.  Thanks for the confirmation.

> I don't exactly know what you mean in this context by "cheaper."  Just
> about any existing launch rocket is "cheaper" for a one off launch
> than designing, building and testing a new one.

The research effort this stems out of, is proposing to design, build, and
test a new launch system anyway.  This inquiry is just gauging how
useful it would be toward this end.  Answer: you wouldn't be running
many flights on it - a few at most, more likely just one.

>> And yes, it would offer a substantial discount.  The majority of launch
>> costs arise because the equipment involved is used so infrequently.
>> If you had ~250 launches, at 1/month or more frequently, you could
>> slash launch costs by over half, possibly to 10% or less.
>
> One per month would take 21 years.  Starvation will get here first.

Only if we started after oil runs out.  But yeah, you'd want to do it faster.

Careful, though: 1 launch per month is the fastest turnaround time many
in the rocket business can imagine.  This says more about how
ingrained they are in the slow, costly, and rather wasteful launch
procedures that exist today, than about what's actually possible.  But
asking them to push beyond that before you're actually launching at
that rate will get you dismissed out of hand.  You'd have to get to
1/month, keep that rate up for a few months, then start broaching the
topic of daily launches, then multiple-per-day.