Good summary Dan.
I have nothing major to add, but would like to make two statements:
1) through the VT/AMSAT partnership in the past we explored
opportunities for both HEO and GEO missions. The most 'real' of those
opportunities involved a possible GEO mission on an Air Force satellite,
with VT engineers bridging the military/ham radio sides. HEO was a
briefer opportunity, and sadly neither of the opportunities panned out
(though technically GEO is 'on hold indefinitely'.....). From my work
with the Hume Center at VT and the Space@VT group, I will attempt to
keep my eyes open for similar opportunities in the future, and if
something appears to have 'meat on the bone' as a target of opportunity
and potential rideshare/secondary payload, I'll bring it to AMSAT's
attention. I would encourage others to do the same if they are in a
similar position........it may be we don't pay for a HEO/GEO, but rather
an odd confluence of events makes something materialize in our
favor....and we should be ready, willing, and able to take advantage of
those situations....
2) I also constantly remind folks (from students to gov't officials
when the opportunity presents itself) about Dan's last statement that
Ham radio made the secondary launch market. OSCAR-1 launched 4 years and
change after Sputnik-1, and I love watching eyes widen when folks
realize what that means (especially the gov't types).
-Zach, KJ4QLP
P.S. LOVE the positive direction of this thread...
--
Research Associate
Aerospace Systems Lab
Ted & Karyn Hume Center for National Security & Technology
Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University
Work Phone: 540-231-4174
Cell Phone: 540-808-6305
On 7/29/19 10:08 AM, Daniel Schultz via AMSAT-BB wrote:
> On July 28, 2019 6:46:20 PM CDT, Ev Tupis via AMSAT-BB
amsat-bb@amsat.org
> wrote:
>> What are the top barriers to revisiting highly elliptical and AO-40 type
> goals?
>> Ev, W2EV
> We would all love to have another HEO satellite, however the ecosystem in
> which we live today has changed a great deal since AMSAT built AO-10, AO-13
> and AO-40 a couple of decades ago:
>
> 1. The launch market has become saturated with small satellites. In the
> 1970's, 80's and 90's, AMSAT was often the only entity that was willing to put
> a satellite on top of a new untested launch vehicle. Today every university on
> the planet has its own satellite project, along with more and more high
> schools and even a few elementary schools. AMSAT is working with some of these
> universities to carry ham radio transponders on their satellites, but the
> university satellite mission is different from our mission, they just want to
> throw together something fast and cheap that can launch before the students
> graduate, and they don't need to get to HEO to do that. Long term reliability
> is not part of their equation.
>
> Commercial and Government entities have also discovered the value of small
> satellites, and the launch market has reacted to that by charging market-based
> prices for launches that AMSAT used to get for free or at highly discounted
> rates. We have to compete against commercial enterprises funded by venture
> capital, and because of the non-commercial nature of amateur radio, we can't
> use the same business model of charging the end users to recover our costs.
> NASA can and does launch small Cubesats for educational and scientific
> purposes that fit into the NASA mission, but amateur radio communications by
> itself does not advance the NASA mission. We need to find partners in the
> educational and scientific world to get launches through this program.
>
> Because Cubesats have dominated the satellite market, there are no more
> affordable launches for satellites the size of AO-13, let alone AO-40. We are
> now faced with the need to cram the functionality of an AO-13 satellite into a
> 3U (or possibly 6U) Cubesat. We may or we may not be able to do that, there is
> a limit to the ability to cram 50 Kg of payload into a 5 Kg box. While Moore's
> Law has enabled today's electronics technology to be smaller and lighter than
> it was two decades ago, remember that satellites are driven by Shannon's Law,
> not by Moore's Law. We need to generate electrical power and we need antenna
> gain to carry out a satellite communications mission. AO-13 was a simple
> spinning satellite that was big enough to accept the inefficiencies of
> off-pointed solar arrays. On a Cubesat we would need to keep the smaller solar
> arrays precisely aimed at the Sun and the antennas aimed at the Earth, and
> this requires sophisticated three axis control systems.
>
> 2. The International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR) that came into force
> about 20 years ago have placed severe restrictions on our ability to work with
> foreign partners. AO-40 was built by a partnership of more than a dozen
> countries all contributing parts, subsystems and money to get it done. Today
> we are cut off from the rest of the world. Building a wall around the USA has
> never made us safe or prosperous.
>
> 3. Orbital debris regulations now require satellite builders to prove to the
> FCC that the satellite will reenter in 25 years or less. In highly inclined
> elliptical orbits such as AO-13 we can possibly exploit solar and lunar
> resonances that will bring down the satellite in a decade or two, but in the
> lower inclination GTO launches that are more common, we would be dependent on
> rocket thrust to provide the delta-V to lower the perigee. If you look at the
> NORAD catalog, most of the spent rocket bodies left in GTO remain there for a
> long time unless they are deliberately de-orbited.
>
> All of these factors have lined up to make the AMSAT mission much more
> difficult than it was 20 years ago. Spaceflight is hard, and if we don't have
> the fortitude to meet the new challenges, than we will not be part of it in
> the future. I believe that we can and we will have new HEO satellites but we
> won't be doing it under the rules that we operated under in the past. If
> somebody wanted to write a check for $20 million, we could buy a HEO launch to
> whatever orbit we wanted, but in the absence of such support we will have to
> use cleverness and guile to get it done. I have constantly reminded the
> satellite professionals that it was the hams who created the secondary launch
> market that they now enjoy, but I have have so far not seen much interest from
> them in reciprocating that favor.
>
> 73, Dan Schultz N8FGV
>
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