Meet Helios, a new class of space tug with some real muscle
Meet Helios, a new class of space tug with some real muscle
"Just give us a sip. We'll take our 14 tons and we'll be glad to pay for it."
Posting this here because it's Tom Mueller and essentially a Falcon 9 third stage
I'm curious about the market for this. I guess it's basically every Falcon Heavy flight?
Yeah, it really removes the centaur advantage. I'm actually sort of surprised SpaceX hasn't done this in -house prior.
It's also a new methalox engine.
The main difficulty for this kind of tug is finding the market. There is currently only a very limited market for such missions:
- If the customer is big enough, then the rocket itself can do the injection. Otherwise, you can try to find another customer on the same orbit
- If it is a geo satellite, then it will have electric propulsion and adding a separate stage is hard to justify just by shortened transfer time
- If you are planning on reusing the same tug for multiple missions, you are fighting the rocket equation. This thruster here makes it really hard, you need more efficiency.
The market fit is quite difficult, and this requires high investment. So very hard problem until we have an actual space economy with people on the moon.
I wonder how much work it'll be to pipe methalox up to the payload on a Falcon pad...