I had lunch with Mitchell Burnside Clapp a few months ago, when he told me about this program. This doesn’t seem true, though:
Today there’s one way to get a satellite into space: launch it from the ground on a booster rocket, which is expensive and can take weeks or months between missions to prepare the launch pad.
What’s Pegasus, chopped liver? Not that we couldn’t stand to get the cost way, down, of course.
Actually, Pegasus hasn’t been launched since ’08. Not sure why they stopped, the rocket and its L-1011 carrier are still listed on Orbital Sciences’ site.
Probably hard to find customers at their prices.
11 mil for a max of 900 pounds? Yeah, that’s pretty safe bet.
Pegasus is pretty expensive for what it does. IIRC, a Pegasus launch costs upwards of $20 millon to put up about 800-1200 pounds into LEO. There isn’t much of a market yet for small payloads which is why SpaceX has suspended their Falcon 1 program.
Years ago, Rutan talked about launching small satellites from WhiteKnight One. IIRC, he was talking about payloads of up to 80 pounds. I think there is more serious discussion of using the much larger WhiteKnight Two to do the job. Here’s an old BBC article on the idea. I have not heard anything about this in a while.
To put some nuance, I think the problem is there isn’t much of a market to launch singularly small satellites. One satellite in LEO doesn’t cover a lot of the earth’s surface. Unless you are just doing science in space, you’ll need a system that covers ground more often. So if you are not GEO, then you need a constellation. In that case, your 100 lb satellite will need to be launched with a few of its friends.
Is Burnside his middle name or the first part of a double surname? Would he be listed under Burnside or Clapp in the phone book?
Look under B. It’s a two-word surname.
Thanks! Should people use the full surname, or just the first? Where I live some people with a double surname typically use only the first, except in very formal circumstances, but I don’t know if that’s usual in English.
The reason I ask is that I’ve sometimes referenced your full name in forum postings and didn’t know how to shorten it in subsequent occurrences. Using a person’s full name all the time sounds odd, and using MBC makes you sound like a politician.
Among English-speaking cultures with double surnames, both are used. Spanish-speaking cultures tend to drop the second one. Since my family doesn’t hyphenate, sometimes the first one gets dropped anyway (the Air Force does that to me sometimes). Anyway, feel free to refer to me as MBC, Mitchell, Mitch, or however you like. I’m pretty much indifferent as to the details.
Someone called me “Dr.” at a meeting last week and I had to respond that “Dr.” was incorrect, “Lt Col” was intermittent, and “Your Imperial Majesty” was premature.
Your impending imperial majesty?
Once somebody mistakenly called me Doctor, I just looked at a buddy and we started doing the whole Doctor…Doctor….Doctor skit from ‘Spies Like Us’.
More funny than the time somebody called me ‘Your Honor’.
Is there some particular reason it takes weeks to months to prepare a rocket and launch pad, or just an inefficient way that’s become the norm?
So, Gary H… are you going to revive Air Launch Corporation and go for it?
I’ve never understood why a Black Horse prototype was never built.