April 2020
Replacing hydrazine fuel with a greener alternative
... in ground support. Doing so would save days in launch preparation, significantly opening up launch provider options and reducing costs. People also want to be able to test themselves and test often throughout integration. This means being able...
November 2021
Space launch emergency response
... emergency. The decision to outsource services may thus be driven by purely financial or economic motives, as LSOs seek to reduce costs and enhance their commercial competitiveness. The positive aspect of this is that outsourcing the firefighting and...
April 2026
Exploring Mars – the key issues
.... So, Musk’s most important insights were not designing rockets around ease of manufacturing to reduce costs, or reusing first stages to further reduce launch costs, or even building a rocket sized to launch almost anything, thus creating economies...
October 2020
Pandemic impacts - the state of the ground segment
... of antennas is capable of supporting many operators and missions simultaneously, while improving resiliency, enhancing efficiency and reducing costs for all users. There are many benefits with a multi-mission ground segment model, including massive...
January 2020
Satellite-based IoT - the race is on
...the issue of radio interference. Smaller antennas for example have big upsides, including reduced costs - but there are also downsides. As a side effect of reducing antenna size, for a fixed frequency, the antenna directivity suffers, because smaller...
March 2021
Building SLS - a contractual odyssey
... to the “evolvable Mars campaign”. NASA agreed to update SLS’s cost estimate and, as a result, moved the launch readiness date to...argued, NASA should have reduced its estimates accordingly. Comparing the reduced costs against the unreduced estimates...
