Comments on: Virgin Galactic relaunches its smallsat launch business http://www.newspacejournal.com/2012/07/11/virgin-galactic-relaunches-its-smallsat-launch-business/ Tracking the entrepreneurial space industry Fri, 12 Sep 2014 14:33:32 +0800 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=4.0.38 By: mzungu http://www.newspacejournal.com/2012/07/11/virgin-galactic-relaunches-its-smallsat-launch-business/comment-page-1/#comment-636461 Tue, 17 Jul 2012 17:03:04 +0000 http://www.newspacejournal.com/?p=1762#comment-636461 Small satellite market is unfortunately a myth.

The Pegasus launcher is being consider shutting down by Orbital itself:
>>> http://www.spacenews.com/launch/100115-pegasus-fate-decided-next-year.html

AeroAstro(Small sat builder) is being closed down for no contract:
>>> http://www.spacenews.com/military/120716-comtech-shutting-down-small-satellite-builder-aeroastro.html

Small sat are mostly government funded, and with all the budget cuts, best of luck.

]]> By: Jo Tan http://www.newspacejournal.com/2012/07/11/virgin-galactic-relaunches-its-smallsat-launch-business/comment-page-1/#comment-633900 Wed, 11 Jul 2012 14:29:44 +0000 http://www.newspacejournal.com/?p=1762#comment-633900 I guess it’s possible that the demand for such a launcher has moved on since SpaceX decided to focus on larger payloads.

But I note that most of these customers are ‘planning’ smallsats; do we know if many (any?) are very far along in development? Eg financing in place, committed contracts to actually build them etc

IIRC VG’s original ambition was $1 million per launch? (although, to be fair, I think they said they didn’t know whether that would be achievable) So either the less than $10M is very conservative, or a lot has changed.

I want VG to succeed, so if they can get significant extra revenue from this great – but as you imply unproven yet.

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