Space Ship Two micro sat launcher update

Whitehorn suggest a comparative advantage with ground-based launcher, but what about the existing air launched competitor?

Pegasus initially offered ~$3 million for a payload the size of what WhiteKnight Two could fly.

Pegasus, flying an average twice a year now for almost twenty years, can loft 443 kg to LEO, double WhiteKnight Two's projected capacity.

Total charge for the 443 kg Pegasus launch, including related services, is ~$30 million.

It will be great to have another data point beyond Orbital's Pegasus for smallsat launch price elasticity of demand.

Posted by John Kavanagh at 07/30/09 10:23:24

What, you mean apart from Falcon-1/1e?

Posted by Stellvia at 07/30/09 10:29:26

Good point. Falcon 1 can loft 670 kg to LEO for $7 million, roughly in line with Virgin Galactic's projected price per kg.

Where's the uptick in launch demand? The emptiness of SpaceX's Falcon 1 manifest is surprising.

Posted by John Kavanagh at 07/30/09 10:39:46

John is right to draw the attention to the F1/F1e manifest. I don't know if its emptiness is surprising, but it definitely is glaring. There's just no market. Where are all the smallsats?

Posted by Pete Zaitcev at 07/30/09 12:16:15

There's virtually no money to build or launch smallsats. For US Government customers there is already a 100% reliable launcher (Minotaur 1) that costs about $12-14M, essentially the same as the F1e once mission assurance costs are factored in. That launcher flies perhaps once per year. It carries spacecraft that cost $50-70M to build. Lower launch prices won't change the spacecraft costs in the current government market.

I don't see any way that VG will be able to generate revenue from smallsat launches that compares to the suborbital tourist market, which is what they suggested in comments yesterday at Oshkosh. They should focus on people, not smallsats.

Posted by Gary C Hudson at 07/30/09 12:49:35

Hi Gary,
The Minotaur is still too expensive for many small sat owners. (BTW: Does Orbital get those Minuteman motors for free?) That's why they launch on Dneprs and other foreign launchers instead, e.g.
http://www.spaceflightnow.c...

For the really cheap satellites, e.g. cubesats, there has long been the problem of getting funding sources to pay for a launch when its pricetag is many times the cost of the spacecraft.

Even several cubesat projects bundled together may not cost more than a couple of million dollars. It's unlikely they would get $12M to spend on a launcher.

I think that people in the nano/microsat business, especially university types such as Bob Twiggs, would say that they could get many more nanosat projects funded if a launcher was available with a price comparable to the cost of their spacecraft. Also, if they could launch them on much shorter time scales, it would greatly benefit the viability of nanosat projects.

Maybe even a robust university/research lab nanosat market would be a small business for a $2M launcher but it will be interesting to see how the SS2 launcher business develops.

If every large and medium sized country funded a couple of university/research lab satellites per year, that could mean a lot of launches. I agree that it will still most likely be a lot smaller than the space tourism market, but I'm a big optimist on the size of the latter.

- Clark

Posted by TopSpacer at 07/30/09 14:09:37

One more thing: Elon's criticsm of Pegasus applies in a large measure to WK2 based launcher. Some things mitigate the cost centers that Elon mentioned.

- The fixed price burden of the aircraft and pilots may be less, if WK2 is shared with tourism program (but how much less?)
- There may be no hypersonic airplane involved if the first stage of Virgin rocket has no wings (But then, how does it turn? Unless Virgin buys patents from defunct AirLaunch, I see performance losses)

But otherwise, there's no way for this to be cheaper than Falcon-1e. I refuse to believe the 2-million launch claim.

Posted by Pete Zaitcev at 07/30/09 16:30:15

Clark, Minotaur is restricted to US Gov't payloads, so in that respect it is not an option for commercial customers. but just look how few payloads are going on Dneprs or equivalent cheap boosters these days.

To answer your other question, the upper stage motors aren't free, only the lower stage. For Minotaur IV (the MX) essentially all the motors are free.

But my bottom line point is about launch rate and revenue. At $2M a launch let's say that creates a launch market of ten flights per year. This would be a major feat. That's the same flight rate flown off in one week of two per day flights of the SS2, which is reusable (not expendable as the $2M launcher will be). Each SS2 flight generates over $1.5M of revenue, throwing nothing away. This ELV business is simply not profitable. Much better to buy one more SS2 with the money and lower the price per seat.

Posted by Gary C Hudson at 07/30/09 17:36:27

Hi Gary,
You're becoming a market elasticity pessimist! ;-)

I agree that VG/Scaled shouldn't let the nanosat effort interfere with the tourist effort. But just for the sake of argument, let's say that a LEO constellation project like Thunderbird Communications
http://hobbyspace.com/nucle...
becomes viable if it can launch really cheap nanosats every two years on a really cheap launcher as well as replace a bad sat within a week or two if need be? In such a case, VG could be launching a dozen satellites per year just for one customer alone.

Other projects like the Google backed O3b
http://www.o3bnetworks.com/...
or the Aprizesat (which launched prototypes on the Dnepr today)
http://www.aprizesat.com/
might be more viable if they could launch cheaper and faster.

Yes, it's a Field of Dreams approach but there is also a chicken and egg conundrum to deal with. I think there are a lot of good ideas for nanosats, including a number of constellation concepts, that are not getting backing because there is no really cheap ride available.

- C.

Posted by TopSpacer at 07/30/09 21:08:31

I have always been a bit of a pessimist when it comes to market elasticity, if the price reductions are not dramatic. Also, I don't think that VG can get to $2M a launch if they intend to operate out of any established range or have any conventional government customers. I think $5-10M or more is far more likely. The other big problem is the supply of small spacecraft, even in a world with cheap launch. You need hundreds of launches to make the $100M investment pay off.

I don't see any markets out there that would justify a new launch system, so I fail to see how the traffic models add up.

I'm a fan of human spaceflight, since the payloads are already built, self-loading and there are millions of them...but you can't do orbital human spaceflight with WK2. It would be better in my view if VG concentrates on one business and makes it pay, to build a market for what comes next.

Posted by Gary C Hudson at 07/30/09 23:11:11

I just am not sure quite how you get to $2M
per launch. WK2 is a good initial platform
but throwing away missiles doesn't lead to cheap launch.

Posted by anonymous at 07/31/09 21:25:32

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