Small Space News Story Roundup 31

As usual, small stories I found interesting.

Starship could upend the small launch vehicle market

I think Rocket Lab with Neutron, Relativity Space with Terran R and the other small launch companies are seeing it and doing their best to not get destroyed, but Starship with its ability to launch over 100 tons to Low Earth Orbit has the potential to really shake up that market.    

“Starship for sure will disrupt further the launch business and the space business in general,” said Marino Fragnito, senior vice president and head of the Vega business unit at Arianespace, during a panel at the Satellite 2024 conference March 20. “One scenario is that [SpaceX Chief Executive Elon] Musk could really monopolize everything.”
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Later in the panel, though, he suggested one way Starship could be used to disrupt the smallsat launch markets by pairing the rocket with orbital transfer vehicles, or OTVs. “With Starship, OTVs can become the best option for smallsats,” he said. If Starship is able to achieve the very low per-kilogram launch prices proposed for it, “then it will be difficult for small launch vehicles.”

That certainly seems to be a possibility, but an interesting counter to that view was put forward by Stella Guillen, chief commercial officer of Isar Aerospace, a German company developing the Spectrum small launch vehicle. 

“Starship will open up opportunities for satellites to grow the same way that they shrunk when there was more capacity for smallsats. The industry may shift to launching larger satellites.” 

It's an interesting vision - when Cubesats go down from thousands of dollars to launch to maybe tens of dollars, an alternative is to add more functions. Do more with your payload than the bare minimum. If they get bigger, well, hey, there's room!  

Hard to say, though.  Certainly Moore's law is dead and semiconductors have stopped their exponential growth, but bigger, older chip geometries have advantages; things like being more resistant to the effects of radiation particles (Single Event Upsets).

Astronomers calling for a radio silent zone on the far side of the moon.

It's not uncommon to have radio quiet zones around radio observatories on Earth, like the Green Bank National Radio Astronomy Observatory, or for the groups building the observatories to seek out quieter locations because of their small populations.  Ultimately, though, they can't enforce the quiet zones on transmitters far away that end up being heard due to the vagaries of radio signal propagation. 

One of the potential uses for the moon is to use the far side for astronomy.  The moon will act like a giant block to potentially interfering signals. Now it turns out there's a growing international call to establish a radio quiet zone on the far side. 

A first-of-its-kind international symposium is being held this week, turning up the volume to mull over the prospect of protecting real estate on the moon's far side exclusively for dedicated scientific purposes. Despite the moon being surrounding by a vacuum, there's an air of urgency to the meeting. 

Held under the auspices of the International Academy of Astronautics (IAA), the first IAA Moon Farside Protection Symposium is taking place March 21-22 in Turin, Italy. The goal of the gathering is to set off a wake-up call that engages the global scientific, political, and industrial community to be aware of a growing list of concerns.

It's a fact that the Earth is embedded in a fog of electromagnetic noise that extends into space and radiates outward. Of course it gets weaker as it radiates away, but radio telescopes are extremely sensitive. Imagine building the largest radio telescope in history, partially made possible because of the moon's gravity being 1/6 of Earth's, and having it ruined by radio signals generated by other groups on the moon. 

The IAA established a permanent committee devoted to the moon's far side in December of 2021, chaired by Claudio Maccone of the Istituto Nazionale di Astrofisica (National Institute for Astrophysics) as technical director. The IAA contends that the moon's far side is a region of paramount scientific interest as it provides an environment free from the electromagnetic pollution typical on Earth.

Some of the branches of science that would greatly benefit from operating on the farside, Maccone explains, are cosmology, astrobiology, planetary defense, as well as the search for other intelligent life that might populate the heavens.

It's an interesting article that goes over the issues and goals.  

Efforts like Breakthrough Listen could employ the radio silence of the moon's far side to scan the universe for signs of intelligent life. (Image credit: Breakthrough Listen/Danielle Futselaar)