Ssms smms smss
The acronym misses in this article! Cmon Ed!
If you've got an application for a small satellite and a stomach for risk, the European Space Agency wants to hear from you. Next year, it's planning a multi-launch demonstration from its Vega spacecraft on a proof-of-concept flight for the Small Satellites Mission Service. The test launch of the Small Satellites Mission …
The "reumbursment" is the reduced cost of launch, and added bonus of earlier launch now.
In simple terms, launch now for a small amount of money and start making use of your skyborne asset early (while accepting the risk the the launch might fail)...or wait, all the while losing the opportunity to exploit your satellite's value, and pay more money for a more reliable launch (which, to be fair, could still fail).
It's all about how the customer views risk versus reward - even if you aren't prepared to take that chance, there will always be somebody who will.
Titanium and radiation hardened electronics don't exactly come cheap, you know.
There's expensive and there's expensive. For example, an off-the-shelf radiation-hardened, flight-proven processor usually starts in the vicinity of $80,000. That could buy you an ingot of several tons of wholesale titanium.
The big cost for titanium or almost any other material going into a spacecraft is not the purchase price, but the design, labor, testing, and reworking, which are usually less sensitive to the underlying material.
With the large amounts of space junk already threatening satellites any proposal for increasing the ease in which such stuff is launched should be looked at very carefully indeed.
Given that cubesats are by definition small it seems to me that it would be nigh on impossible for the owners to guarantee that they were capable of being disposed of safely. An 800 Km orbit would probably take a long time, if ever, to decay and where would you put the equipment for a controlled re-entry?
Does a cubesat need a _controlled_ re-entry. If it dips back into the atmosphere there aren't going to be any pieces worth worrying about reaching aircraft flight levels or the ground, surely?
If I've misunderstood the risk, my apologies - I've only skimmed "DIY Satellite Platforms" (O'Reilly) since picking it up in Humble Bundle.
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