Hey everyone.
I’m down in Pasadena today covering the afternoon sessions of the AIAA Space 2012 Conference & Exposition. There was a plenary session on NASA’s beyond Earth orbit exploration plans earlier, and then there are individual sessions for the rest of the day. A few things to note:
SLS and Orion
- Everything is on course for an Orion test flight aboard a Delta IV rocket in late 2013
- NASA will be able to scale the Space Launch System as needed for capacities of 70, 105 and 130 metric tons — tooling and production being designed to accommodate different cargo functionality
- Officials expect the SLS launch rate to be two to three flights per year in early 2020s
Tauri Group Analysis of Suborbital Market
[Earlier PA Story]
- Market over next 10 years largely driven by tourism flights (80 percent)
- Rest of demand is research, tech demonstration, etc.
- Technical obstacles to point-to-point (New York-Tokyo, for example) are insurmountable over the next decade — shorter flights (KSC to Cecil Field, for example) more likely but not much of a market
- A lot of success driven by how well flights go — Ashton Kutcher flies and says its great, then interest will surge — Angelina Jolie comes back with vomit all over her Pradas, then business will suffer
Athena RideShare Program
- Dedicated RideShare flights for small payloads
- Smallsats and P-PODS (Cubesats)
- Smallsats at $10 million apiece and P-PODS at $300,000 each at firm-fixed prices
- Launched out of Kodiak on an annual basis
- Joint Lockheed Martin-ATK effort to bring Athena rockets out of retirement with upgrades to service smallsat market
- Athena I rockets flew seven times from 1995 to 2001 (five successes, two failures according to Wikipedia)
- Most famous payload was Lunar Prospector in 1998 (Wikipedia)
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