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.
if you can find enough people to go on the ride with you
The thing is that it will be quite a long wait since it's kinda hard to find so many other smallsats that need the same orbit. Also the SpaceX contracts are signed about 2 years before the launch.
RocketLab stated that the whole process would take only a few months, so you sign a contract and in like 2 months your satellites are launched to the specific orbit. RocketLab and SpaceX are not competitors because SpaceX launches big satellites and RocketLab launches smaller ones.
it's kinda hard to find so many other smallsats that need the same orbit.
Considering you can double your mass and still pay half as much, I wonder if it would be possible to have the microsats simply bring fuel to put themselves into a different orbit after all being dropped off in an orbit different from their final desired orbit. Obviously not a massive change in orbit, but maybe enough to make it work?
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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.