Former SpaceX Rocket Scientist Starts 'In-Space Propulsion' Company (arstechnica.com) 25
Ars Technica looks at the "in-space propulsion company" Impulse Space, which just announced $20 million in seed funding this week to help it build something called an "orbital transfer vehicle."
The company was founded by rocket scientist Tom Mueller, who the article describes as the first employee hired by Elon Musk for SpaceX, leading the development of SpaceX's Merlin rocket engine.
Impulse Space is apparently positioning itself for its own role in a future with lots of reusable rockets and cheaper launch costs: Founded last September, Impulse Space will initially seek to provide "last mile" delivery services for satellites launched as part of rideshare missions, likely including on SpaceX's workhorse Falcon 9 rocket.... While the company is not ready to discuss its specific technology, the goal is to deliver the most delta-V capability [velocity from fuel-burning] in the most efficient manner.
Impulse Space released a teaser video on this earlier this month. [The video's title? "Hello, Solar System...!" And it concludes with the words "Big things have small beginings."]
Impulse Space will seek to complement launch services with sustainable delivery in space, using green propellants and having vehicles with de-orbit capability. Barry Matsumori, who recently joined as the company's chief operating officer, said the company recognizes that if tens or hundreds of satellites will be launching on these heavy-lift rockets, they're going to need to reach different orbits and have different purposes... The company's initial business strategy involves low Earth orbit, but it envisions the need for sustainable transportation from the Earth to the Moon — in the form of a tug — and the storage and movement of propellant in both low Earth orbit and the lunar environment.
Once a company mines a space resource, after all, it will have to go somewhere.
The company was founded by rocket scientist Tom Mueller, who the article describes as the first employee hired by Elon Musk for SpaceX, leading the development of SpaceX's Merlin rocket engine.
Impulse Space is apparently positioning itself for its own role in a future with lots of reusable rockets and cheaper launch costs: Founded last September, Impulse Space will initially seek to provide "last mile" delivery services for satellites launched as part of rideshare missions, likely including on SpaceX's workhorse Falcon 9 rocket.... While the company is not ready to discuss its specific technology, the goal is to deliver the most delta-V capability [velocity from fuel-burning] in the most efficient manner.
Impulse Space released a teaser video on this earlier this month. [The video's title? "Hello, Solar System...!" And it concludes with the words "Big things have small beginings."]
Impulse Space will seek to complement launch services with sustainable delivery in space, using green propellants and having vehicles with de-orbit capability. Barry Matsumori, who recently joined as the company's chief operating officer, said the company recognizes that if tens or hundreds of satellites will be launching on these heavy-lift rockets, they're going to need to reach different orbits and have different purposes... The company's initial business strategy involves low Earth orbit, but it envisions the need for sustainable transportation from the Earth to the Moon — in the form of a tug — and the storage and movement of propellant in both low Earth orbit and the lunar environment.
Once a company mines a space resource, after all, it will have to go somewhere.
Big things have small beginnings. (Score:2)
Worst pick-up line of the year ... :-)
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Let me show you my Ion Thruster could be another bad line, but good business proposal
Ion thrusters in operation typically consume 1–7 kW of power, have exhaust velocities around 20–50 km/s (Isp 2000–5000 s), and possess thrusts of 25–250 mN and a propulsive efficiency 65–80%[3][4] though experimental versions have achieved 100 kW (130 hp), 5 N (1.1 lbf). [wikipedia.org]
Given enough solar panels and a dedicated thruster, this could make for a decent space tug, and it fits with the small start s
Excellent! (Score:4, Insightful)
I've long been a proponent of "orbital tugboats" for moving stuff around as needed. There's no reason to send a dedicated rocket all the way from surface to orbit every time you want to move something around, it's far more efficient to refuel a tugboat that never lands.
I suppose you could make it possible to land for maintenance to extend its operating life, but then you're hauling a bunch of heavy reentry hardware between orbits during normal operations.
I suppose the ideal option would be if you could simply service it in orbit. A Shuttle-like Starship with a small crew module and a large pressurizable cargo bay could make for an excellent shirt-sleeves environment to comfortably service a wide range of satellites and tugboats without any of the danger, discomfort, or awkwardness of a spacewalk.
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That breaks down when you realize that each tugboat would be in given orbit, making it useless for anything going into a significantly different orbit. It could potentially work for something like geosynchronous orbit, where you need to go a long ways up, and you just adjust the timing to determine where it ends up. Then you wouldn't have to relaunch the rocket, but you would have to refill it (whether on the same launch or a separate one would depend on various mission dynamics).
Of course, if the cost to
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Once in orbit, satellites use ion thrusters, powered by solar panels to move between orbits
I suspect that a "space tug" would carry a vastly larger solar array to power an ionic thruster with a capability to move between LEO (drop off from chemical rocket) and MEO, GEO or lunar transfer
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From LEO to pretty much *any* orbit within roughly the same orbital plane will take *far* less delta-V than getting from the surface to LEO. Or even just from second-stage separation to LEO. You'd have to rotate your orbital plane pretty dramatically to even begin to rival the delta-V needed to reach orbit. I want to say the breakeven point is somewhere around a 90-degree change in inclination? Even if you assume only a handful of tugboats in operation you could then dedicate each to its own range of or
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The downside of ion thrusters is that they're slow. That's why Starlink satellites take months to reach their final orbits. But considering that Space/X already uses ion thrust
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"The downside of cars is that they are slow", said somebody in the late 19th century
I think that the entire point of this company is to scale ion thrusters up into an appropriate tool, hence: "Big things have small beginnings."
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Those are slow because a more powerful engine is more expensive, and there's no need for them to be any more powerful.
NASA and others have already developed a range of much more powerful engines, and arrays look very promising as well. With a couple megawatts of power from an acre of solar panels you could get a *lot* more acceleration You'd still probably be talking a tiny fraction of a g, but a 1/100th-g thruster will do the same job in a day that would require a 1g thruster running for 14 minutes. And
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I see them more like "JDAM" style additions - you launch a hundred of them on a "waiting" orbit (LEO-like) where they wait for Starships. Once the Starships are launched, they attach to a satellite and propel it to the desired orbit.
For satellites that do not need orbital maneuver capability, it's an easy choice - it would work something like a third or fourth stage.
For satellites that need maneuver capabilities, the thruster could stay attached while in the parking orbit.
The idea is to cut hardware that is
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You probably don't need that many though - after all they're highly reusable (more like a taxi than a missile) and can return to their original orbit for the next job once one payload is delivered. (Or more likely a fleet management system just tries to keep them fairly evenly distributed)
For now at least, even with just a small handful you're probably talking months between jobs for any given OV - not really a great return on the up front costs. To justify hundreds you'd probably need demand for thousan
THe future is here (Score:2)
Once a company mines a space resource, after all, it will have to go somewhere.
I don't know how viable this company can be, though I wish them good luck; however, until not long ago you'd only talk about the logistics of space resource mining in plots of science fiction books or in speculative discussions of space fan groups. For me at least, the fact that people are starting to put together business models for those scenarios and they're creating companies to provide those services is amazing.
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Yeah, it's a wonderful thing to see these long-deferred dreams finally being pursued. And by private enterprise that presumably believes it can be done profitably, and not just as a symbolic monument to our greatness (and cost-plus government contracts).
Once we have a profitable foothold, there will be plenty of time, space, and resources for dreamers of all stripes to found independent city-states to pursue their vision of Utopia for millenia to come, without the fear that a loss of enthusiasm on Earth wo
Is this something called a "website" ? (Score:1)
So for us "Something called an "orbital transfer vehicle"" is an orbital transfer vehicle.
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It does seem to be a particularly patronizing turn of phrase.
It doesn't even offer any additional information as you might when educating someone. It just says "I'm not going to bother to explain this term, but I am going to take the time to point out that I don't think you'll know what it means".
If the intent was to point out that these people invented the name, then you'd want something like
>...to help it build something they're calling an "orbital transfer vehicle."
But in this case it's a pretty self
Green propellants? (Score:1)
Seriously touting "green propellants" for use in space? Are they utter retards, doesn't matter how un-green a propellant is up there, we can use fission fragment rockets that blow their exhaust out of the solar system, it doesn't matter.
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Propellants have to handled on earth before the can be used in space. Many of the current hypergolic propellants are quite nasty and deadly.
In addition, any greenhouse gases created during the production of propellants is released in the earth's atmosphere. Currently that is a negligable drop in the bucket, but if we were to scale up space access to the levels that Space X and Impulse would like to see, then it will become non-negligible. So it is good if the technologies that create economics of scale, are
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It's just BS marketing.
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Well, not really. It is a valid concern. Unless the gas particles reach or exceed escape velocity - and in a direction they can escape - they will be trapped by the Earth's gravitational field and eventually end up in the atmosphere.
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Of course they will be traveling greater than escape velocity when exhausted by rocket in orbit (which will in itself by > 17K miles per hour. There is zero concern here, doesn't matter whether the propellant is "green" or not, just empty virtue signalling marketing bullshit.
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You're hilarious when Space X is a hydrocarbon fuel engine. Guess again, not green at all.
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SpaceX chose methane as the fuel for Starship in part because it can be synthesized from carbon-dioxide, water and solar panels. They pretty much have to do this to fuel any return trips from Mars, and plan on maturing the technology by using it to produce fuel for their terrestrial launches.
Here is a confirmation tweet. There are many more detailed articles if you search for them.
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/s... [twitter.com]
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the methane isn't from green sources on this Earth, so thus far they're only polluting. Liquid hydrogen can be made on Mars, in fact there are even plans by other groups to make it from water and martian soil perchlorates and ship to orbit around Earth. LOX and hydrogen beat the pants off Musk's pollution gas.