Japan’s SS-520 CubeSat Launch Vehicle Achieves Success on Second Try | Hacker News Reader

Japan’s SS-520 CubeSat Launch Vehicle Achieves Success on Second Try

spaceflight101.com

127 pointsiamcreasy19 comments

This is major success, showing possibilities for launching small satellites inexpensively.

Congratulations to JAXA!

Weight and size miniaturization of this thing sound pretty badass to me. JAXA seems in a good position here. Does this havr any effects on Electron, i.e. grab away the low end of their market?

This seems to be a JAXA (Japanese NASA) project, so I am guessing commercializing isn't a priority, which is sad. But now that they've shown that an overgrown sounding rocket built with pretty standard technology can get to orbit, maybe there will be others closely following.

Note: Although the Electron has heritage from a sounding rocket, it is a completely new breed of animal.

Much more on Chinese solid fuel lvs from X-Space and Russian second hand, repurposed icbms

This aims for an even smaller-sat market than Electron. Electron is going for about 200kg, for $6M per launch - a bit impractical for cubesat manufacturers unless they're willing to blow a lot of their propellant budget on an initial orbit change. This is aiming at around 5kg to orbit for about 500k - more expensive per kg, but allows a cubesat customer like Planet Labs to get their preferred orbit per-satellite.

In the space business Electron payloads would be called minisats, while SS-520-4 payloads would be called nanosats.

Electron can launch many CubeSats at once with a dispenser. So saying it can't do CubeSat class is not correct. This is what the upcoming NASA ELaNa XIX is doing: https://www.nasa.gov/content/upcoming-elana-cubesat-launches

It also possible to have CubeSats in different orbits by timing the dispensing of the CubeSats and also the attitude of the launch vehicle at dispensing time.

I didn't say it couldn't be used with CubeSats; I said that it could require the customer to use a lot of propellant to change the orbit if they wanted a different trajectory than the main customer or than the rest of the cluster.

That last option you mentioned could be helpful, but only for small orbit variations. If you want 10 cubesats in orbit with wildly different inclinations like many Earth Observation customers do, that's a bit inconvenient.

You can do quite a bit with timing on the launch vehicle. A delay of ~45 minutes in SSO is the opposite side of the planet.

And do any of the Planet CubeSats even have propulsion? It looks like the Flock constellation deployed without it.

http://space.skyrocket.de/doc_sdat/flock-1.htm

Mechanical Engineer working with CubeSats here. No CubeSat launched to date has carried a propulsion system. (Aside from air drag brakes to deorbit, I think someone launched at least one of those)

That's interesting none have launched with propulsion yet. I remember talk about the VACCO system when I was doing CubeSats a few years ago but it doesn't look like they are on-orbit yet.

That delay leaves you halfway around the planet, in the same orbit. Unless you give the satellite a good chunk of a kilometer/second of delta-v, you're not going to have any different of an inclination, and waiting half an orbit doesn't save you any propellant on apogee raising/lowering maneuvers for either permanent change of orbit or for phasing purposes.

This is so cool. Is there any information on e.g. transponder frequencies, if available?

This got me looking into something, and sure enough they have looked into doing something similar at Andøya in Norway.

Is CubeSat like Open Compute for micro satellites?

Essentially, yes. The CubeSat standard specifies dimensions, weight, and max stored energy so that satellite users can focus on their payload and hand off the end result to any launch provider without complicated integration/negotiation.

Gahh ad that forced me to close the window on mobile "Amazon Gift"

If you're on iOS you can install content blockers... https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/purify-ad-blocking-perfected...

I've had that one so many times lately. One time I accidentally clicked OK on the modal. Hopefully it's nothing too nasty.

nice share

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