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

[Adrian Tymes]

On Sun, Feb 26, 2012 at 8:24 AM, Keith Henson <hkeithhenson at gmail.com> wrote:
> There are scale problems.

Yep.  Those are being addressed by the research effort.  Not your
problem - unless you want to help me realize a delivery service
that's focused on making space far more accessible to low budget
folks by developing a launcher that gets just 1 CubeSat to LEO.

If you want to help, our current challenge is surveying the
commercially available rockets to see what good "mid sized"
options are available.  Most of the rockets are either multi-ton (too
big to be economical) or amateur (too low specific impulse to do the
job, even in bulk).  But I've found a few.  Specifically, we're looking
at 200-400 kg total rocket mass, to get a 1 kg payload into LEO.
For example, the HM-7B is close but probably a bit much:
http://cs.astrium.eads.net/sp/launcher-propulsion/rocket-engines/hm7b-rocket-engine.html

If that sounds like too much work, then just let me worry about it.
I am well aware that scale is one of the problems, but there is
no reason to believe it is insolvable.

> While there might very well be a month between the first test launch
> and the second, the project makes no sense without a rapid ramp up to
> 3 per hour.  It just takes that many for it to make economic sense.
> And there are people, at Reaction Engines in particular, who already
> think in these terms.

Of course.  But you'll need to plan on taking it slow and then ramping
up.