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[Ether_Snake]

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/arti...t-s-startup-readies-small-rockets-for-takeoff

Before Elon Musk started SpaceX, he held a series of salons in Los Angeles and Silicon Valley, asking experts in the field for ideas on what a new-age rocket company should look like. A handful of people advising Musk urged him to make small, cheap rockets that would bring the cost of getting something into orbit down to $5 million from the going rate of about $100 million. In the years that followed, Space Exploration Technologies Corp. did manage to lower launch prices drastically, but it stuck to making bigger spaceships instead of pursuing the radical approach that some of Musk's advisers desired.

A couple of these space dreamers, who helped get SpaceX off the ground, have now turned up with their own rocket startup called Vector Space Systems. They have radical plans and then some. Vector's goal is to make a $1.5 million rocket that can carry small satellites into orbit. It expects to conduct 100 launches per year—a figure that would match the annual capacity of the entire aerospace industry.

The rockets Vector has started building in a factory in Tucson, Arizona, are tiny compared with the Falcon 9's. The company's first spacecraft, the Vector-R, stands just 42 feet high and can take only 132 pounds of stuff to orbit at a cost of $1.5 million per flight. This means Vector cannot address the bulk of the launch market, which centers on sending satellites that weigh thousands of pounds up for commercial and government customers.

Vector, though, is betting on the coming wave of smaller, cheaper satellites known as CubeSats to be the core of its business. These devices are about the size of a shoebox and have just started becoming popular in recent years as improvements in electronics and software have made it possible to shrink satellites drastically. Planet Labs Inc., a startup in San Francisco, is the best-known CubeSat maker. It has a constellation of 160 satellites circling the Earth, taking daily pictures of the planet's landmass. Other small satellite makers are rushing to market with machines that take pictures, perform communications and conduct experiments in zero gravity.

More at the link. They mention they have a lot of competition around the world and in the US from other companies actually, some deliver more payload too. Clearly a range of delivery mechanisms will be needed over the next few years, for big and small payloads, the later usually not being serviced at all until recently.

Like the drones revolution over the past few years, which is really still in its infancy, I think we are starting to see a new beginning for this sector.

Drones, AI (self driving cars are basically drones with AI), VR, the space sector; there's a lot of new opportunities for so much expansion ahead. If you are looking for a field of study, you can't go wrong with getting an education in something related to those.

Please be excited!

edit: That being said I am worried about pollution, something needs to be done to clean up all those debris.

 

[Escape Goat]

I gossip about small rockets with the girls when I'm down at the salon.

 

[bsp]

Happy to see more companies try to fill in the coming gap left by the big companies like Blue Origin and SpaceX as they (rightfully and hopefully) continue to work on bigger projects such as trips to the Moon, Mars, and beyond. We'll still be mainly on Earth for quite a while, so putting stuff into LEO et al. will remain an important aspect of research and technology.