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Comment by actinium226 | Hacker News Reader

According to Ashlee Vance's "When The Heavens Went On Sale" this was the inspiration for Astra (the book links to this same article in the relevant chapter). The company hoped to produce and launch >300 rockets a year without re-use. The goal was to get economy of scale in manufacturing.

Part of the business plan assumed that people would be using the rocket to launch replacement satellites for constellations, and so it wouldn't be such a big deal if a rocket failed every now and then. This would let them use automotive grade parts in some areas as opposed to aerospace grade and reduce costs.

However, it turned out that customers were actually using their rocket to launch prototype satellites and other one-off satellites where failure was actually a big deal. Long story short Astra did manage to make it to orbit, but is unlikely to survive into the future.

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What would another James Webb Telescope would have cost? Far far less then the first. Sure it is costly to destroy a prototype, but not as much as you think.

That only works when you're doing something like Starlink or Starship's development, where losing some prototypes is fine. However, that's not how JWST was designed, so losing many prototypes of it would be very costly. If JWST were designed with the consideration that it'd be mass produced, it would not be the JWST we know today and instead would be a completely different design (a rough comparison can be between OneWeb's more standard delicate satellite design and deployment procedure vs SpaceX's heavily optimized stack of less delicate satellites just drifted into orbit).

Most space companies are still doing their prototyping in the JWST style, so losing those prototypes is costly.

Another JWST would have cost 1 Billion, so it is more than an Order of magnitude less.

That number isn't really convincing coming from the project that was initially expected to cost $1B and over time ballooned to $10B.

In my ideal universe, we have a JWST assembly line.

I mean, there's no reason a Starship can't be turned into a space telescope, and it's pretty much an assembly line rocket.

Also no reason why it can't be an ISS, and no reason you couldn't link multiple together.

Pretty useful to have a reusable grain silo you can launch and land.

...in orbit. Imagine what a device could do you can just take a wrench to if it breaks. and how much cheaper you could build that.

Not so much.

It was a huge publicity boost for NASA, but not actually an efficient use of resources in terms of % shuttle missions * total cost of the shuttle program. That’s arguably unfair because of the sunk cost issue and how the budget was setup, but manned missions are inherently expensive and even more so if you’re trying to match arbitrary orbits.

It would have cost less sure, but it would have delayed the program years. And such a delay could easily shutter the program if political support faltered.

The companies launch prototypes because they want to test out technology and build methods that will go into the production satellite. Hence losing the prototype is a huge loss in time and/or increase in risk (if they decide to go ahead with certain technologies despite lacking on-orbit validation).

Isn't Astra developing a reusable launch system now?

They're running out of money and can't really get the kind of money needed to continue on the rocket R&D, so they're trying to stick to their satellite components business to stay alive until they can attract funding.

Plus, they're kind of at a bad point and time in the market as small launch is not as lucrative as they hoped but moving up to medium lift is a big hurdle. So far, SpaceX is the only 'new space' launch company to have managed it, with all other competitors in development hell.

Rocket Lab is doing alright.

Rocket Lab are in development hell at the moment and while their financials are decent, Electron has had a failure every few launches and Neutron is due NET 2024, but with no news of an Archimedes hot fire, it seems unlikely that we'll see anything before mid 2025.

By saying development hell I'm saying that other new space companies other than SpaceX are in that difficult in between point where they're burning cash on developing the rocket without yet being able to sell significant rides and without the leverage of knowing that the government will give you a blank check if you run out of money.

The important factor being that small launch doesn't make enough money to fully fund medium launch, there just isn't enough demand for small launch with rideshares being cheaper. However, medium launch can fund more medium launch or even heavy launch, as there is much more demand in the medium weight range.

they are selling off their assets and focusing on selling engine that could be "Reusable". I won't hold my breath.

Astra is functionally bankrupt. They ain't developing nuting anytime soon.

> Part of the business plan assumed that people would be using the rocket to launch replacement satellites for constellations, and so it wouldn't be such a big deal if a rocket failed every now and then. This would let them use automotive grade parts in some areas as opposed to aerospace grade and reduce costs.

Lets be real here. The business plan 'assumed' a whole lot of nonsense just so they could claim absurd totally unrealistic growth potential. The story shifted to whatever was 'hip' at the time.

It very much started with 'cube-sats' are the future. And when it was clear this was wrong, they started to make up other stuff.

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