Communication Satellite Launch Wars
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- Опубликовано: 25 июл 2024
- For many years the bulk of commercial launches was communications satellites destined for geostationary orbits
Who competed for those launch contracts, and who won?
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It's weird that the 2000's list does not mention Sea Launch at all. 28 Zenit 3SL launches between 2000 and 2009, all commercial comsats.
maybe those launches were not to gto?
@@rainer9825, all of those launches were to GTO.
Argh! How could I have missed sea launch? Great story there.
@@yosischarf6641 are you sure? Wikipedia seems to show in its Zenit launch entry at least one Medium Earth Orbit for March 2000, which ended up a failure. Then two GTO missions also failed later on - in January 2007 and February 2013.
Fraser Cain from Universe Today recommended you and he was right. Love your channel!
Thanks. I'm honored.
Not mentioned was Ariane 5 was originally designed to fly the ESA Hermes Spaceplane. Hermes was cancelled, but the rocket was still there. It's really overbuilt for civilian satellites, but great for putting 2 into GTO.
LOL the geo transfer orbit shirt, you crack me up. love your stuff man
Alas, I don't have the budget to send the t-shirt to a geosynchronous transfer orbit.
Minor corrections... thor-delta is specifically a NASA LV based off the Thor. The original thor and thor-ables were indeed military usage, but delta was the NASA spinoff. And Intelsat 1 is the first commercial geosync satellite, but not the first overall. Syncom 1/2/3 were launched in '63 and '64 and were all geosync (2/3 were geostationary as well), but were not commercial. Also, Delta II did not get the centaur upper stage, Delta II had the Delta-K upper stage which was in incremental improvement of the Delta-P stage found on prior deltas and was still a A50/NTO stage. But otherwiswe, good video!
Thanks for the clarification.
The early days were so chaotic I missed that.
And yes, there were early test flights of geo comsats and lots of military launches after that.
good stuff as always
Phenomenal vid.
Great video, would've liked to see full list of players outside US, EU, RU
India has launched satellites to GTO but they are all their own satellites - no commercial comsats as far as I can tell. Japan flew the HII which is derived from the Delta II and they have more advanced rockets but I couldn't find detailed launch info. I can say they aren't a major player.
I don't know how to deal with Chinese.
@@EagerSpace Chinese launcher info is difficult to come by?
@@tygerbyrnchinese and indian launchers mostly launch their own satellite. India even crams military and public payload on the literal same sat so 'commercial' sort of loses its meaning
@@EagerSpace China enter commercial launch market in middle 80s, CZ-2E/3/3B launch some geosynchronous commercial satellites in 90s, but follow satellite incorporate ITAR, China lost most international launch market until now.
Yeas, keep the good stuff coming! I love these
Thanks, I appreciate the feedback.
Great vid
It would be good to have a final score board at the end of the vid
And if it wasn’t for the EELV program, there would have been no Delta or Atlas, completely relying on the troublesome Shuttle. And we all know what happened to that.
Atlas II and Delta II were flying at that time, and Delta II kept flying for a number of years after Delta IV showed up.
Lockheed Martin would have kept flying the Atlas III which used the RD-180 but was smaller than the Atlas V.
McDonnell Douglass tried a Delta III and had two failures and a partial success before they cancelled it. They probably would have stuck with Delta II.
MityFine as always :)
The falcon 9 is such a game changer...
mainly just took launches away from other providers and didn't create too much new demand that wasn't latent from ariane 5 launch availability and proton reliability issues
If ESA had a more flexible manufacturing arrangement they would have sopped up all the flights that would have flown on proton or Falcon 9 - one of the downsides of their multi-country structure.
F9's success - and it has only had limited success in GTO launches - was mostly customers looking at F9 and saying "anybody but proton, sign me up"...
Wth! I had no idea the use of Ariane 4 and 5 was so deemphasized in the news/forums I've read during the rise of Falcon 9. I knew they were flying but heard mostly about F9 overtaking Atlas V. The narrative about Ariane 5 was that it's too expensive and only flies because it's subsidized by the ESA countries. Thank you so much!
Ariane is expensive in per-launch costs, but the dual launch makes it fairly competitive, and over the years they have just launched and launched and launched. It wasn't talked about in the US much because before Falcon 9 nobody in the US wanted to talk about how they had essentially no commercial launch business, especially when ULA was charging over $400 million for a Delta IV Heavy launch.
The question about subsidies is a complex one and hard to discuss. It's true that the european government invests in ESA programs, just as it's true that DoD and NASA only fly their payloads on US launchers.
Ariane 5 was just an exceptional GTO rocket, running on hydrolox instead of kerolox and a supreme launch site to boot.
IIRC, Ariane held the record for mass to GTO for many years, until in 2022 SpaceX spent an entire FH (!) to launch over 9 tons to GTO. (Edit: FH put 9,1 tons into GSO, which is much harder than GTO.)
Everyone subsidizes their launch sites. That is even the case for Falcon. People seem to forget that Ariane was the most commercially successful rocket until Falcon came and also Falcon is currently basically the only flying rocket.
@@debott4538 FH was expended to take the Viasat directly to GEO; the satellite didn't have to travel up from GTO, therefore leaving it with full propellent tanks for stationkeeping.
Are you referring to the mass to GEO or GTO for Ariane 5's record?
@@donjones4719You are right. I got them confused. (doh!)
FH did put that satellite into GSO, which is much more delta-v intensive to than GTO, of course.
I am pretty certain that Ariane 5 never put enything directly into GSO, as its upper stage was unable to re-light, I think.
My previous comparison is therefore very much faulty. Although the fact remains that Ariane is very efficient for GTO launches.
I love the historical part. From this perspective, it seems to me that the United States has made launches much more expensive by choosing a vehicle that is not optimized for the job. Still, the space shuttle was so technologically advanced.
A kitty cat wants to help with the narration.
There was a dog walking around in some of it as well.
👽🌏
The reason for the Ariane program was that the US would only launch communication satellites if they weren't commericially used.
In 1969, Delta launched three intelsat satellites, all commercial.
@@EagerSpace Yes, an american company.
The US wanted to protect the business of their companies.
You might want to put your X handle in the channel description.
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first meow?
This channel is on par with Scott Manley imo
Thanks.
@@EagerSpace I’m all for the PowerPoint stuff man , to me it’s easier to follow the specs and various details ,isp tonnage dimensions etc. Don’t get me wrong graphics are great video editing as well but when it comes to delivering the facts, PP and a healthy dose of your humor beats it
What kind of space nerd doesn't know how to pronounce Vulcan? For shame.
*edit, I was an idiot, it is Vulcain*
You mean, Vulcain? That's the engine used in Ariane 5 and 6.
@@bwjclegoYeah, I was about to say. The pronunciation is a little different
@bwjclego Ah, crap, I'm an idiot. I was only half listening as I drove, I heard Vulcain and thought he was talking about ULA's Vulcan rocket.
what kinda space nerd forgets how to spell nerd :)
@@FourthRoot At least you owned your mistake.