
Japan’s SS-520 CubeSat Launch Vehicle Achieves Success on Second Try - iamcreasy
http://spaceflight101.com/japan-ss-520-5-launch-success/
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avmich
This is major success, showing possibilities for launching small satellites
inexpensively.

Congratulations to JAXA!

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m_mueller
Weight and size miniaturization of this thing sound pretty badass to me. JAXA
seems in a good position here. Does this havr any effects on Electron, i.e.
grab away the low end of their market?

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azernik
This aims for an even smaller-sat market than Electron. Electron is going for
about 200kg, for $6M per launch - a bit impractical for cubesat manufacturers
unless they're willing to blow a lot of their propellant budget on an initial
orbit change. This is aiming at around 5kg to orbit for about 500k - more
expensive per kg, but allows a cubesat customer like Planet Labs to get their
preferred orbit per-satellite.

In the space business Electron payloads would be called minisats, while
SS-520-4 payloads would be called nanosats.

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planteen
Electron can launch many CubeSats at once with a dispenser. So saying it can't
do CubeSat class is not correct. This is what the upcoming NASA ELaNa XIX is
doing: [https://www.nasa.gov/content/upcoming-elana-cubesat-
launches](https://www.nasa.gov/content/upcoming-elana-cubesat-launches)

It also possible to have CubeSats in different orbits by timing the dispensing
of the CubeSats and also the attitude of the launch vehicle at dispensing
time.

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azernik
I didn't say it couldn't be used with CubeSats; I said that it could require
the customer to use a lot of propellant to change the orbit if they wanted a
different trajectory than the main customer or than the rest of the cluster.

That last option you mentioned could be helpful, but only for small orbit
variations. If you want 10 cubesats in orbit with wildly different
inclinations like many Earth Observation customers do, that's a bit
inconvenient.

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planteen
You can do quite a bit with timing on the launch vehicle. A delay of ~45
minutes in SSO is the opposite side of the planet.

And do any of the Planet CubeSats even have propulsion? It looks like the
Flock constellation deployed without it.

[http://space.skyrocket.de/doc_sdat/flock-1.htm](http://space.skyrocket.de/doc_sdat/flock-1.htm)

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THE_PUN_STOPS
Mechanical Engineer working with CubeSats here. No CubeSat launched to date
has carried a propulsion system. (Aside from air drag brakes to deorbit, I
think someone launched at least one of those)

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planteen
That's interesting none have launched with propulsion yet. I remember talk
about the VACCO system when I was doing CubeSats a few years ago but it
doesn't look like they are on-orbit yet.

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themodelplumber
This is so cool. Is there any information on e.g. transponder frequencies, if
available?

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digi_owl
This got me looking into something, and sure enough they have looked into
doing something similar at Andøya in Norway.

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tzakrajs
Is CubeSat like Open Compute for micro satellites?

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THE_PUN_STOPS
Essentially, yes. The CubeSat standard specifies dimensions, weight, and max
stored energy so that satellite users can focus on their payload and hand off
the end result to any launch provider without complicated
integration/negotiation.

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jcun4128
Gahh ad that forced me to close the window on mobile "Amazon Gift"

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taspeotis
If you're on iOS you can install content blockers...
[https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/purify-ad-blocking-
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perfected/id1030156203?mt=8)

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9desem
nice share

