11 thoughts on “The Commercial Space Race”

  1. I would say it’s worse to call the spaceport “MARS.”

    Because, on the radio, “MARS” sounds a lot like “Mars.”

    Have we learned nothing from Orson Wells? 🙂

  2. The nice new aerostructure components and Cygnus payload vehicle might be champing a bit at the bit, so to speak, but the veteran Russkie first stage engines and the demobilized ICBM motors in the upper stages are no doubt explaining patiently to their more excitable younger colleagues how nice it is to be part of any sort of real vehicle again after sitting, forlorn and forgotten in musty warehouses for decades before being wiped down, spit-shined and given real jobs to do. “You think it’s taking a long time to get to the pad? Let me tell you about waiting a long time…” On balance, I think the Antares is waiting patiently.

  3. Unless something has changed I am unaware of, SpaceX doesn’t really have any competition until Orbital more announces competitive pricing. The Satellite Cos. aren’t going to pay them a premium over SpaceX them like NASA does.

    1. Do they want to market the Antares to other customers or are they happy with just NASA? It seems like the Antares was developed with one purpose, to make deliveries to the ISS.

      1. You may well be right. Except for their original Pegasus bird, the rest of the Orbital product line looks like it was designed by the late Andy Griffith in his short-lived role as the genial proprietor of a high-tech scrapyard in Salvage One. I misremembered some details for my previous post in this thread – the Antares upper stages are based on the ATK Castor solids usually used as strap-on auxiliaries and not on retired ICBM motors – but most Orbital vehicles are prodigies of recycling. The Antares first stage is powered by a pair of Soviet-era surplus NK-33 engines originally designed for the ill-fated N-1 moon rocket. The Russkies apparently have quite a few of these in storage as the N-1 design used 30 of them for the first stage alone. That’s enough to build 15 Antares. But this engine is no longer in production and it is problematical whether production could ever be economically restarted. When the shelves of the Leonid Brehznev Army Navy Store go empty, the Antares is over. Much the same is true of the various vehicles in Orbital’s Minotaur family of rockets. The lower two or three stages of each are Cold War-surplus Minuteman or Peacekeeper parts that are, again, out of production and in limited supply. I got my Antares and Minotaur wires crossed earlier, but the general point is that Orbital builds very little of its own vehicles, relies for crucial major components on surplus parts in decidedly finite supply and is, in general, a long way from being master of its own future.

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