Several months ago we were made aware of a shift in policy in the United States government that now has potential to have a lot of impact. Almost no one knew of it but Rick and I went to the Pentagon and went pretty deep inside and talked to people who knew this policy was about to be pushed out the door. The U.S. government is a large subsidizer of the launcher business in the US since it uses a lot of them. The DoD grew tired of having lots and lots of excess capacity on board vehicles they paid for but unused when a bit of fuel could allow them to carry extra payloads. They started making loud noises about making it have the force of law or regulation that these things had to have secondary payloads on them for U.S. paid for launches. The commercial satellite vendors rapidly stepped in to fill this with ways for them to get paid for this!
In addition to this, if we consume solar energy efficiently and radiate it RF, we are a help to them and the amount of energy becomes significant over 15 years!
As always, we will have to argue a business case for ourselves that includes more than just paying a big fee, but you can begin to take direction on your thinking from my comments. There are others doing this as well.
Bob
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.
We just have to face some very very hard realities. There has not been a high earth orbit bird from us for years because of the lack of launches available to us. We have to be creative to get them launched. We are attempting to do exactly that. In our case, what makes us attractive to funding is piggyback.
A fantastic effort from all involved no doubt. I'm certainly looking forward to these sats seeing the light of day. And as for linking, I agree that Earth -> Sat -> Earth -> Sat -> Earth (as opposed to Earth -> Sat -> Sat -> Earth) is going to be easier to manage in the longer run. keep the complicated bits on the ground where they can be serviced. :) Also means we don't need another set of antennas pointing out into space.
73 de VK3JED http://vkradio.com