3/10/2023 - Written By Caleb Henry
The announcement by startup K2 Space that it is designing massive satellite platforms with up to 15,000 kilograms of payload space – around three times the mass of a completed GEO communications satellite – shows how Starship’s radical increase in mass and volume to orbit is fostering new business ideas. Historically GEO satellites maxed out at around 6,500 kilograms (for the full satellite, including the payload, the bus and a couple thousand kilograms of fuel). EchoStar’s soon-to-launch Jupiter-3 weighs an unprecedented 9,000 kilograms, making Falcon Heavy the only viable option pre-Starship. Per MIT, Starship’s payload fairing has twice the inner diameter of other heavy-lift rockets, and is projected to carry four-to-10 times as much upmass. All of that added volume and mass, combined with equal or lower pricing, has engineers contemplating the art of the possible. So far four new applications have emerged that hinge heavily – sometimes directly – on Starship to succeed:
- Commercial space stations. Two companies, Gravitics and Vast, have business plans that hinge on larger, more powerful rockets than those flying today. Both have name-dropped Starship as a vehicle that could be integral for their plans
- Massive satcom. First evinced by K2 Space, we believe more satellite communications networks will be architected around Starship’s capabilities. This includes not just massive GEO satellites, but lower cost constellations in LEO and elsewhere that take advantage of Starship’s lower cost per kilogram
- Very large telescopes. Astronomers have long dreamt of telescopes with mirrors bigger than what can fit under the dome of modern rockets – James Webb was painstakingly folded like origami just to get around these limitations. With Starship, astronomers are already designing new telescopes sporting larger apertures and science instruments
- Military cargo. Though farfetch’d today, the U.S. Department of Defense awarded SpaceX $102 million last year to advance Starship as a point-to-point cargo delivery vehicle. If DoD wants this capability and is willing to pay for it, the odds of Starship filling this role are nontrivial
SOURCE: https://www.cnbc.com/2023/03/10/k2-space-startup-building-massive-spacecraft.html