Re: Rocket design up in air, says Marshall chief

From: John Schilling (schillin_at_spock.usc.edu)
Date: 02/21/05 

Date: 21 Feb 2005 11:53:23 -0800

henry@spsystems.net (Henry Spencer) writes:

>In article <1108915851.055508.133200@l41g2000cwc.googlegroups.com>,
>Ed Kyle <edkyle99@hotmail.com> wrote:
>>Isn't this a chicken and egg problem? Aren't comsats
>>simply built as large and heavy as the available
>>launch capacity?

>The heaviest ones, yes. But the owners of the big birds expect them to be
>expensive to launch. Arianespace's bread and butter have historically
>come from launching mid-range comsats two at a time.

Which is more difficult to arrange on a purely commercial basis than
Arianespace had expected. An error compounded by jumping the gun on
building the launcher for the biggest comsats, when most of customers
were satisified with midsized birds that can go up on any launcher.

Ariane V is not the right launcher for this decade, and it's going to
take some less than subtle political pressure on the market to keep
it alive. Ariane IV, single-manifesting the big birds and doubling
up the commodity mid-sized satellites, would be a nice thing for
Arianespace to have it its catalog right about now. Oops. 

-- 
*John Schilling                    * "Anything worth doing,         *
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