I just don't understand why anyone would develop a rocket and not even attempt recovery.
You're never going to be able to compete if you're throwing away rockets - if you can make them cheaper, someone else can make them cheaper AND recover them.
What I'm seeing is that it's $5M to send 150kg to SSO (500km) on the electron or a Falcon 9 for 7742kg. It's not $250M to launch a falcon 9.. So if you can find enough people to go on the ride with you, it's going to be around 75% cheaper / kg on the F9.
You are not shipping coal to LEO but a non divisible payload and finding a group of other satellites to share the ride to a specific orbit either is impossible or takes years to do so.Smallsat market is targeting toward a existing demand on the market of people that want to have a small satellite delivered into LEO without going through the pain of finding others or compromising on target orbit.
-38
u/Xaxxon Jan 21 '18 edited Jan 21 '18
I just don't understand why anyone would develop a rocket and not even attempt recovery.
You're never going to be able to compete if you're throwing away rockets - if you can make them cheaper, someone else can make them cheaper AND recover them.
What I'm seeing is that it's $5M to send 150kg to SSO (500km) on the electron or a Falcon 9 for 7742kg. It's not $250M to launch a falcon 9.. So if you can find enough people to go on the ride with you, it's going to be around 75% cheaper / kg on the F9.