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Space Science

Boeing/SeaLaunch Loses British Satellite 76

Posted by Hemos from the no-good-for-sealaunch dept.
koziarz wrote to us about the failure of Boeing's SeaLaunch system yesterday. The rocket was actually a Ukranian-Russian rocket, being launched on the SeaLaunch system. It should be noted as well, however, that SeaLaunch has succesfully completed two launches. But losing a USD100 million satellite system is gonna hurt. Boeing has issued a press release concerning the loss.
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Boeing/SeaLaunch Loses British Satellite More

Boeing/SeaLaunch Loses British Satellite

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  • I ate it. (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I'm sorry. I was hungry. If it's any consolation, it didn't taste nearly as good as the mars probe. But I do have a soft spot for seafood.

    Can I make it up to you guys? Dinner on me next time?

  • Re:Not if you're sitting in it. :) (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Normal manned rockets (I mean Soyuz and Apollo and don't mean Challenger) have emergency propulsion capable of throwing the capsule far enough away? Never heard about manned Russian rocket that exploded 2 seconds before start? Crew, of course, survived.

  • Why is everyone here so attached to the notion of saying "it's not the launch platform, just the rocket?" The rocket is an integral part of the whole sea launch program.


    Besides, even though the launch platform itself may not be at fault, from an operations standpoint it may be a complication. Shipping the rocket from the FSU to wherever their home base on the West Coast is, doing payload integration either there and shipping to Christmas Island, or shipping to Christmas Island and doing the integration there shipboard, then doing the rocket checkout and launch completely isolated from manufacturing and other infrastructure, may not be a good idea.

    For the most part, in the US, I'm fairly sure that although the stages were manufactured elsewhere, the rocket launchers have been integrated together at the launch site itself, or relatively close nearby. It seems to be the plan Beal has settled on, for instance.


  • What if some h@x0r takes control of your satellite?

    Flying computer controlled aircraft is much easier than trying to control a car completely by computer. Every jet liner is fly by wire these days.

  • The design doesn't need to vent helium as no ballast is being burned off.

    The weight of solar cell is irrelevant, the lifting capability of a lighter than air vehicle increases with the volume of helium. The surface area increases as the square of the size, the volume increases as the cube of the size. Bigger is better. Take a look at the CargoLifter web site (http://www.cargolifter.com/) for an example of an airship that's going to be used to lift 160 tonne cargos. The solar cells are still way less expensive than launching rockets into space.

    I Am Not A Meteorologist (IANAM), but I understood that thunderstorms were limited to the troposphere and the stratosphere was relatively unaffected.

  • The ships'll fly at 20Km (64,000 feet) which is twice as high as your regular airliner.

    The metro/roaming argument is a fair one but ground based coverage started patchy and I now have to work hard to get out of regular ground based GSM coverage. With an airship, you just build it and tell it to fly out to where you want coverage, even easier than building a network of towers. The one thing that might be a problem is the use indoors. Satellite phones pretty much need line of site to the satellite and you'd typically switch to ground based mode to use it indoors.

    I think the 'cover the world' attempts are misguided and pretty much doomed to failure at the moment. I can see satellites providing intercontinental routing for calls, but I just don't see a market for the mobile phone users.

  • Development has started fairly recently:
    http://www.skystation.com/ is one company I've come across.

    Until now the thinking has been fairly blinkered; ground or satellite. The problem is that both are very expensive to put in place and very expensive to upgrade.

    Airships have had a bad rap since the Zeppelins crashed and burned, but it's gradually dawning on people (100 years of dawning) that they do have some features that no other aircraft can match.

  • It's a cheap, innovative launch platform and the thing is insured. However they'll have to do better than 66% success.

    More I say, More.
  • I predict that by the time the satellites are operational and they are selling a service to customers, the ground based systems will have bypassed them in terms of cost and coverage.

    They'll go broke. A much cheaper and more flexible solution is stratospheric airships:

    http://www.skystation.com/

  • Don't need 100% coverage of the whole earth surface, just 100% coverage of 99% of the population. The ground based systems already provide this (in Europe). They just need to updgrade to GPRS.

    15 years ago I'd have though this would be a great idea but not any more.

    These satellite systems only apply to the 1% of the population who don't have ground based coverage. Not a lot of people.

  • The problem with the satellites is the launch costs. The satellite itself is $100 million, the launch is another $300 million. It's getting close to half a billion, and you need to launch 10 of them successfully for this particular network. That's several billion dollars outlay before you even get a customer.

    Each airship is a few million dollars.

    Thing is, you don't need to cover every inch of the planet. Start with the population centres; 1 for Milan, 1 for London, 1 for New York, 1 for Tokyo, 1 for Washington etc etc. As demand increases you fly more ships and the cost per unit goes down.

    Each airship itself is an unmanned drone which flies at 20Km, there isn't a surface to air missile in existence which can fly that high. The gas bags are divided up so that a single failure can't bring the thing down. It gets a leak, put up a replacement and bring the damaged ship down for repair. What do you do when some space garbage hits a satellite at 50km/hr? Hope your spare will survive till you spend another $400 million to get a replacement up.

    As to the technology to keep it up there. That's been around since the 19th century. Helium and a gas tight envelope.

    One of the really cool features is the ability to upgrade such a network a bit at a time without having to spend billions of dollars in advance.

    And at least the guy who forgot to let go would get in to the Darwin awards. :)

  • I've been to the Sea Launch facility and have spent some time on the command vessle. It's pretty incredible to see in person, especially the launch platform--the pontoons are enormous. I was there integrating an optical tracking system used to track/film the launches.

    Anyway... I'm fairly certain that the Russian built rockets are part of the Sea Launch "package". In that case, it really was a Sea Launch failure.
  • Not that this helps much directly, but there was an article about SL and its merits a few years back in IEEE Spectrum. I think it was going to take a few years of successful launches to amortize the costs. After that I believe the cost to launch was comparable or cheaper.

    Like I said, I read a few years ago so I could be totally off.
  • As far as monopoly goes, cellular (another McCaw thing) was expensive, but then competition came. Since Teledesic/ICO will need to continuously upgrade their system to stay competitive with land-lines, it will presumably be possible to

    Why would you want the birds brought to earth safely? It's so much cheaper to just deorbit them and let them burn up in the atmosphere. Provided that the orbital people designed the deorbits properly, it's not difficult to get something the size of a VW bug to burn up in the atmosphere (BTW, do you have a public source for that size?)

    I think you're missing the value proposition of LEOs though... they cover the low-population-density areas of the planet for zero marginal cost. Sell some bandwidth in high-population areas, make a killing off of those not covered by GSM/UMTS...
  • You still have worries (or at least I hope you do) of software going bonkers and such. Especially with an unmanned vehicle. Evil Linux hackers might h@x0r your blimp and run it into Air Force One. Seriously though, I'm not even comfortable with 100% computer controlled cars, much less aircraft.

    As for covering the world, if you're ever in the middle of the ocean, you'll know why you need to cover the world with high availability. Of course, there are GEOs for such situations, but...
  • If satellites|cable|fiber|your-choice-of- technology-to-reach-the-planet is so good, why don't YOU get the funding and do it yourself? The blimp idea is viable, it's just that the FAA would hate you, the FCC would be a pain, you'd only be able to cover metro markets, and your main market is mobile users, who can't roam without a massive blimp network. The point I'm trying to make is that any kind of reach the planet solution is going to cost big bucks and have tradeoffs, and to rip one strategy without seeing whether or not it affects other strategies is uninformed at best.

    BTW sparing for blimps is a heck of a lot easier than sparing for satellite constellations because you only need one spare which can be flown to the city with the failure, as opposed to one or two spares _PER PLANE_ (ICO is only two planes, but that means twice the sparing requirement) After all, fedex next-flight-out latency is a lot better than scheduling a launch latency.
  • Is there some fundamental flaw in it that I'm missing?

    Yeah, mass of the tether is one. Then you have to find a way to get the blimp thru the jet stream without shreading it. Then you have to have a tether capable of withstanding the stess. And you're going to piss off a bunch of airlines who now have to worry about not hitting your tether. Then you have to deal with atmospheric electrical charges.

    And terrorists don't need a rocket that can travel 20 KM up to kill it. They just need to attack the ground station...

    The devil is in the details...

    James

  • Oh I'm sorry I forgot that the web was just an outlet for porn.


    Also I fail to see how providing a link is akin to calling someone stupid, if you want to follow the link it's there, if you don't read the text.

  • Don't forget corrosion from exposure to salt water spray. I remember going on a cruise with the USMC. We loaded our Harriers onto the carrier, and within two days, every tiny scratch in the paint on a metallic object had a little bloom of oxidation. They ended up repainting a significant portion of every aircraft...
  • The main problem, IMHO, is that they tested the system with a completely different rocket than what they have launched the last couple of times. The test was an outstanding success, so perhaps they feel it's ok to stress an already complex system by introducing untested equipment loaded with expensive satellites at the last minute.
  • I've seen figures that suggest a 20% increase in payload weight on the same size rockets.
  • SPEEA [speea.org], a union-like organization of engineers at Boeing, is currently on strike in Seattle. I think this includes most of their "Rocket Scientists."

    I wonder if Boeing was trying to prove that they could pull off a successful launch without these people?

  • The press release really didn't give many specifics, but mentioned the launch of a "Russian-Ukranian Rocket" and a loss of the rocket 2600 miles down range.

    Call me silly, but that sounds more like a *rocket* failure rather than platform/control specific issues. I hope companies looking at Sea Launch view it that way as well.

    One thing I'm curious about now: how do the costs of Boeing's Sea Launch compare to the French Guiana ESA launch center? (anybody know?)

  • There are too many PCS (digital cellular) technologies out there. My telco has chosen "800 MHz CDMA" as the technology to use. When I roam outside of my two-province telco, I fall back to analog mode. (On my mini phone, analog roars through the microscopic battery in a few hours)

    We can be assured of worldwide service when your phone is willing to autoswitch between GSM/TDMA/CDMA and then find the frequency at 800/900/1700/1900 MHz.

  • Well, I haven't been able to find much directly related to launch insurance but I know some of the concepts, for example: The shuttle has fully insured payloads (if it blows up there is a 100% payout for the satellite). But a booster such as the Arriranne 5 has only recently become insured (The first Mk5 booster was destroyed on launch and the payload literally went up in smoke).

    The Boeing system is more than likely uninsured at the moment due to the fact that it is new - it usually takes 3 successful payload launches before you can get Lloyds or any other underwriter interested. Companies will still pay to send their payloads up on initial launches because the launch price is greatly reduced

    As for parachutes on payloads; you would need a Saturn/Soyuz/Gemini style emergency egress system to get the payload far enough away from the LOX booster for your parachute to be any use to you: this sort of system doubles (or more) the cost of a rocket therefore is prohibitive. Also, the rocket was quite a way downrange and as such at a very high altitude; any returning payload would need a re-entry system. I think the Boeing/Sealaunch is designed to be a cheap (relatively) and chearful delivery system and nothing more.

    As for spate of mishaps :) Its just the media interest changing the way things look, payload delivery is vastly more reliable to day that it has ever been since the first development of rockets: it only ever gets better :)

  • This where they discover that the 2600mile downrange was actually in the inland direction:
    (everybody find that satelite :)

    I wonder if Boeing pays salvage?
  • The engineers are the guys who designed the things in the first place. They aren't required in order for a successful launch.

    An interesting note, my dad is an engineer (non-union...former McDonnell Douglass) for Boeing in St. Louis. They're shipping him and other engineers off to Seattle for a 2 or 3 days at a time to temporarily replace the striking engineers.

  • This idea (as well as the idea of high altitude circling planes) has been around for quite some time now. I would have thought that somebody would have invested the money in developing it. Is there some fundamental flaw in it that I'm missing?
  • It was a ground missle. The Russians shot several of them at different ranges Ahead of him and got lucky.
  • Skystation [skystation.com]
  • They'll fly at 21Km(70,000 feet).
    Use the 47 GHz frequency band (47.2-47.5 GHz stratosphere-to-earth and 47.9-48.2 GHz earth-to-stratosphere) was selected for several reasons. First, it is a general principle of spectrum management to place new technologies in the highest and least occupied frequency bands consistent with their necessary operating characteristics and table of frequency allocation classifications.
    Second, new technologies should use the minimum amount of bandwidth necessary to provide the required service. The requirement for Stratospheric Telecommunications Service is universal broadband wireless access to low-cost, consumer-oriented user terminals. Using the most advanced techniques of spectrum efficiency, the service requires a paired band of 300 MHz.
    www.skystation.com
  • thank you
  • Can anyone point me to where I can get a basic explanation of spacecraft insurance? Is the whole rocket insured? Will Boeing in fact get all of the costs back without losses? How much do premiums cost? Is this so risky that insurance companies ask for 30 to 50 percent of value? Who accepts this type of risk? With the spate of mishaps lately, I would think that the risk would be high enough to ask for 50 percent and up on premiums. Also, why can't they have some sort of parachute arrangement on the payload itself so that there is at least some chance for recovery? Or do they allready try this and it failed with this explosion? Mark

  • I believe from other news sources that they lost contact with the rocket and believe it was a second stage failure. So something not directly related to the launch method.

    But the failure might have been indirectly caused by the difficulties in transporting the rocket to the launch site. It is going to be at sea for days/weeks and this may cause problems with vibration and motion that a land based system would not have.

  • Ah, I see -- a continuously-powered airship. Which means you have to:

    A. Provide a means for refueling, which in the practical world means bringing it back down periodically (this is true even if you use solar, because the solar cells need replacing -- and they're damned expensive, not to mention pretty heavy for this "lighter than air" application!).

    B. Navigate through the jet stream altitudes both ways, which means you spend a while coming back to station (airships are not known for being fast). Both of these, BTW, mean that you need spares for this cycle time, to keep the calls coming through.

    C. Vent helium (expensive helium!) to keep at the design altitude, while you burn the fuel (read, "ballast") off.

    D. Worry about thunderstorms, which peak out a lot higher than you're flying these airships -- which means every now and again one of 'em is going to blow off to Kansas or farther. In this case, spares aren't gonna do you any good, because they'll either not make it to altitude in time, or they'll just join the first one in Kansas. ("I'm sorry, your call can't go through -- it's too windy!")

    I hope you'll excuse me if I say this seems rather unlike a "cheaper alternative" -- it looks to me like you've just traded upfront costs for ongoing operational costs, and have a system which isn't particularly robust.

    Also, notice that the biggest expense of the airline industry isn't the equipment, but the fuel for it... (not that you're flying that far, but you're flying continuously).

    ---

  • Maybe the navigation system got programmed with the data Boeing used to lose the space station parts in the local rubbish dump a week or two back.

    Could be a new company policy.
  • The 2 'extra' satellites were not to allow for loses during launch, but rather to allow for fast replacement of satellites due to failure once the system was live. It is done this way because of the very long lead time in windowing a launch (even if the satellite is prepped on the ground).

    This is the equivalent of having spare lightbulbs and batteries at home so you don't have to go all the way to the shops when they fail. If it was going to take several month or even years before you could get them then you'd make sure you had enough spares.

    They will probably now have to prepare another satellite and launch it at the end of the sequence. Also they will now be later getting the necessary ten satellites into orbit for their initial network.
  • It would certainly be nicer to get higher success rates, but if the venture provides launch prices that are a couple hundred million dollars cheaper than the alternatives, it can be worth losing a $100M satellite more often than merely "once in a while."

    And they'll doubtless be looking to learn some things from the failure too, which may improve future chances of success...

  • Actually, we know because "SeaLaunch" is the name of both the launch platform and the rocket system, a specially modified version of the Zenit.
  • While commercial satellite launches are a good starting point I'd like to see some manned vehicles, and that needs near 100% success. :)

  • GPRS will deliver 128K to the handset within a year or so. More later.

    A much better solution for telecoms is stratospheric airships. They can be put on station for months and be brought back down for maintenance and upgrades. You'll need more of them than you would of satellites, but they don't cost half a billion dollars each.

    All these satellites are silly. Good for the launchers though.

  • I got this from a High Level Engineer that works on the Project. (not me)

    It seems to be be a third stage problem with the rocket. The third stage is by the Russians. The first and second stages are by the Ukraine. There have been problems with both systems before. A failure investigation is being done now

    They have Delta rockets which work well. The Lauch platform could be modified to for the Deltas ... timeframe unknown. In his mind its a better launch system anyways.

    But there is the possibility that this could shutdown SeaLaunch.

  • Well, SeaLaunch is the name of the company, not just the launch method. Any failure would reflect badly on them and make it more difficult for them to get customers. This will definitely do nothing to decrease the insurance rates for using SeaLaunch! The risk vs. low-cost factor is the real question here, not "bad press". Only a string of successful launches will keep SeaLaunch, er, afloat.

    Yes, it's a neat way to do it, but as long as they rely on the Zenit (one of the most failure-prone rockets in the business -- Zenit-2 was 81%), they will be a risky way to launch.

    Remember, the customer didn't select their own rocket for launch on this platform, they bought an entire launch package. SeaLaunch has to deliver the goods ... literally deliver them to orbit ... or it has failed.

    I have high hopes, too, but their customers are fully aware of the risks in the launch business, and are going to evaluate those risks closely. I don't think we need to worry about misinterpreted news articles.
    ----
  • I guess there's no such thing as a free launch.
  • IRRC China loses 1 in 4, Russia about 1 in 15 and the US about 1 in 30 (I cant remember the ESA rate but its somewhere around NASAs) so a success rate of 1 in 3 is not that bad for a relativly untested system. Its quite a neat idea (espeacially for those countries that dont have land on/near the equator) so I hope they get it sorted.

    bil
  • My Mobile phone does 800/900/1900 at the moment, all GSM as that is the standard everywhere in the world but the technological backwater that is the US (but they are catching up using 1900). I don't think that there are many analogue mobile phones left in Europe now, everything is digital.

    Of course, this all goes wrong with with the standard GPRS system that will be introduced this year. That is a lot faster than GSM (120kbps vs. 9.6kbps) and allows mobile video applications and web access and all the other gubbins that will be cool to have when it is affordable, and phones have larger screens, like the Ericcson phone shown off at the Symbian stand at CeBIT.

    Of course, I might be wrong with a few things here, but at least Europe can keep to a single standard for communications, unlike the USA. Digital Television is better in Europe, mobile technology is better, we have more freedom, no guns, etc. Okay, so taxes are higher, and the cost of living is higher, but America seems to be tending towards a view of life describes in the L. Ron. Hubbard Mission Earth series! :-)

  • Luckily the satellite was insured, and the group that was launching it planned for 10 successes out of 12 anyway - bet they are miffed that the first one went down though!

    A 1 billion pound system, 12 satellites providing around 115kbps links to mobile systems anywhere on the globe at any time!

  • Hmmm, coverage better provided by ground based solutions? I would return that crack if I was you!

    This system will provide 100% Earth coverage. I doubt if you can get 10% coverage using normal ground based solutions, at most 30%. For most people this is okay, but there are a lot of people out there who need this kind of thing. It just depends on how competant the company is, and whether they want to do another Iridium...

  • "they don't cost half a billion dollars each"

    Neither do the Satellites :-)

    If these airships are so good, why don't you get funding and do it yourself? I would estimate that you would need several thousand to get global coverage, so you had better hope that they cost less than a million each. Also imagine customer support: "Why can't I get a signal", "Sorry, a we had a burst - someone launched a rocket at it, and it didn't crash into the sea". Worse would be for the guy that didn't let go of the rope when launching the damn thing. And where are you going to find material light enough to keep the damned contraption in the stratosphere?

  • Iridium will be deorbited because it is the only way that they can take the satellites as a tax write off [www.spacedaily.com], something which I just find damn funny.

    If Iridium showed us anything, it's that the pace at which telecommunications technology is advancing is leaps and bounds beyond the pace at which you can build and put up a satellite constellation. Consider what we thought 5 to 10 years ago about the state of communications today and the problem becomes pretty evident.

    More importantly though, Iridium clearly demonstrated that the market for cell phones on the top of Mt. Everest is not enough to support the huge overhead of putting up and maintaining a satellite constellation. I'm fairly confident that if the market in backwater Tibet was strong enought to support $5k phone service, Bell-South would have already run cable. The reality is If you look at ICO's target market, "Maritime, Remote fixed, Handheld, Transportation, and Government", it's no different than Iridium's. What Iridium found was that the only sub-market of any of these willing to fork over the cash for there service was the handheld market for relief workers. If none of these markets materialized for Iridium, I'm not sure why they will for ICO.
  • It turns out that ICO was insured against launch failure. Furthermore, they took out the policy before the recent round of launch failures, so they paid far less for insurance for all twelve of their satellites than a company would currently have to pay to insure just one - basically, they got such a deal.

    Furthermore, one reason why nobody's interested in the Iridium constellation is that it can't move data, and doesn't move voice all that well - sound quality is pretty bad. ICO's satellites, while not exactly state-of-the-art, can at least move both voice and data. And at ten satellites instead of 66, their system's a lot simpler.

    Result: Last I heard, McCaw is still interested in pulling ICO out of the weeds, but is not interested in Iridium any longer.
  • Each airship itself is an unmanned drone which flies at 20Km, there isn't a surface to air missile in existence which can fly that high.

    You may wish to mention this to a certain Gary Powers.

    Powers had engine problems. He dropped to a lower altitude to get enough air into his engines to restart them. (though I guess when your engines are out, dropping to a lower altitude is inevitable). Eventually he dropped into range of the routine fighter jets that the USSR had trailing him. I don't remember if he was shot down by a chase jet or a ground missile, but he wasn't flying at the intended altitude at the time.

  • Are u sure?: it was my understanding that Lloyds (the only office that is interested) only underwrite payloads on launch systems that have provided 3 successful, consecutive launches.
  • The only needed to launch 10 out of the 12 satellites to complete their system, so this launch failure has not resulted in a scrapped network.

    Putting a highly delicate instrument on a giant firecracker is still a dangerous business folks - and its likely to stay that way for a very long time.

  • While Iridium does use Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellites about 800 kilometres up, ICO are using Medium Earth Orbit (MEO) satellites about 10,000 kilometres up. That's why they can get away with using less of them (12 as opposed to Iridium's 66) but each needs to be larger.

    ICO are insured against the loss of up to two satellites and are using Proton, Delta III, and Atlas IIAS as well as Sea Launch. So they should still be able to get a functional network up in a reasonable time (no, I don't work for them).

    All the information came off the websites: ICO [ico.com], Iridium [iridium.com]

  • Though they don't know what went wrong, it seems pretty clear that it was the Russian/Ukrainian rocket, not the launch pad itself, that was problematic.

    See the space.com article [space.com]

  • Re:How do we know this is SeaLaunch's fault? (Score:3)

    by RocketRay ( 13092 ) on Tuesday March 14, 2000 @06:23AM (#1204088)
    It's the Zenit, which has (I believe) only a 60 or 70 percent success rate. It was a Zenit that failed for Globalstar that got us (Delta II) a lot of business. But it's a cheap rocket that has a medium-heavy launch capability, so customers are willing to risk it.

    BTW, I'm not speaking for Boeing, I just work here, blah blah blah.

  • Moonraker.. (Score:3)

    by EasyTarget ( 43516 ) on Tuesday March 14, 2000 @05:17AM (#1204089) Journal

    I'm sorry, but everytime I see a picture [bbc.co.uk] of the Launch platform I just want to stroke a white cat and say 'Good Evening Mr.Bond..'

    It just looks like a 60's Bond evil genius's secret base..


    EZ
    -'Press Ctrl-Alt-Del to log in..'
  • Iridium [iridium.de] is heading for liquidation after Teledesic [teledesic.com]'s McCaw pulled out of the funding and Nippon Iridium ceased their funding and now ICO Global [icoglobal.com] have suffered a launch failiure on a $100million pound satellite.

    Now call me a cynic but doesn't this tell you something about the immediate future of LEO communications? Craig McCaw efectivelly controls all the cards now that Iridium is gone He was there from the beginning in Teledesic and has stepped into ICO effectively making the market a monopoly. In my experience monopolies do nothing to drive prices down so ICO and Teledesic are going to be far from affordable for a good long while - and what if both fail to meet expectations?

    I just don't want to see 100 odd LEO birds up in the sky with no one paying for them to be brought to earth safely and their orbits decaying and either disrupting other services or burning up in the outer atmosphere. I saw a quote saying that these satellites are the size of a Volkswagen Beetle [volkswagen.com] so that's quite a lot to burn up safely.

    Don't get me wrong, I'm all for wireless fast Internet access but I feel strongly that earth based UMTS or 3rd Generation GSM is going to be the way to go - it offers speeds around 3 times that of ISDN while moving and upto 2Mbps while stationary and doesn't need handsets that take us back to the old Motorola [mot.com] brick phones.

  • Re:A few million dollars vs a few billion dollars? (Score:3)

    by stras ( 49620 ) on Tuesday March 14, 2000 @08:22AM (#1204091)
    The problem with the satellites is the launch costs. The satellite itself is $100 million, the launch is another $300 million.

    Where are you getting these figures from? The launch costs that you are quoting are almost an order of magnitude too large!

    Modern launch vehicles range from the Orbital Sciences Pegasus XL, which will put 300 lbs into LEO for $15 million, to the Russian Proton, which, IIRC, will do like 30 tons to LEO for $75 million. Even the Shuttle, which is the most expensive way to fly these days, is only $100 million per launch.

    Each airship is a few million dollars.

    Don't forget development costs. We have nothing like this now --- you'll have to shell out big bucks for R&D.

    Each airship itself is an unmanned drone which flies at 20Km, there isn't a surface to air missile in existence which can fly that high.

    You may wish to mention this to a certain Gary Powers.

    What do you do when some space garbage hits a satellite at 50km/hr?

    Nothing. You design it to take low-speed impacts -- you build robustly, and include sufficient redundancy to ensure you can take a failure. I haven't heard of any LEO satellites which got taken out by impact with debris. Sure, the LEO environment is quite dirty, but most of it consists of very small particles (paint flakes, etc) which probably won't do too much damage to a suitably redunant satellite. And anything larger is tracked by NORAD anyways, so you can figure out if you're going to hit, and maneouver around it if necessary.

    As to the technology to keep it up there.

    And how are you going to keep it in place? Don't forget that stratospheric winds can get quite fast.

    Engines? What about powering them? Maybe a tether? The FAA will love you, as will the pilots who have to avoid them.

    The blimps are a nifty idea, but not really practical. Satellites are proven technology, and work.

    Now, as for the feasibility of the LEO comsats, that's an entirely different issue.

  • How do we know this is SeaLaunch's fault? (Score:4)

    by Phizzy ( 56929 ) on Tuesday March 14, 2000 @04:26AM (#1204092)
    The article says nothing as to the cause of failure for this launch. I don't think everyone should be jumping to conclusions about the SeaLaunch's effectiveness. But.. of course they are : "The international Sea Launch program suffered a major setback Sunday"
    I'm by no means a rocket expert, but just from a troubleshooting point of view, I would think that if the rocket got off the ground/SeaLaunch and flew for a little while before having problems, it would seem to point to the Rocket as a more likely point of failure than the Launch Pad. The SeaLaunch seems to be some pretty sweet tech [sea-launch.com], from the safety factor of launching things in the middle of the ocean to the ability of it to carry larger loads due the physical advantages of being at the equator. I hope it doesn't get abandoned/given a bad name because of bad press.

    //Phizzy

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