On Monday 29 October 2007 17:07:53 Tony Langdon wrote:
At 05:26 AM 10/30/2007, Robert McGwier wrote:
First, I have to say this is fantastic!
Intelsat offers both! We are asking for Piggy back for us and will ask for secondary payload should it be required for P3E.
I'm curious why they're going for it. What's in it for Intelsat? Not being picky, just curious how it looks from their perspective.
In addition to the policy issues Bob mentioned, the biggest change is that the launch vehicles have gotten significantly larger. They've grown and standardized to the point where the price/kg to orbit is not so much driven by mass but by engineering and production costs. The result is that Intelsat can host payloads of our expected mass without having to off load a compensating amount of fuel. Since they can launch fully fueled the impact to the spacecraft lifetime and their ability to generate revenue is minimized.
During my talk at the Symposium I used the WGS and AEHF satellite programs as examples of GTO launches with excess capacity. They have 1500 lbs and 1000 lbs respectively and there will be multiple flights of each. So there are also other avenues being explored as well.
73, Lee-KU4OS