Really cool that they were essentially a bunch of volunteers working together to try something innovative like this - and that was before SpaceX was founded! It's a shame their rockoon prototype didn't succeed, though.
Out of curiosity, what do you think will make then not viable economically? There's a lot of advantages they have compared to rockets, particularly for smallsats.
You don’t get to actually save on the expensive bits of rockets.
Within a small rounding error you need just as many and just as large rocket engines. Sure, you save a little fuel, but that’s the cheap bit. Structurally you need to handle dangling from the balloon, which means your cargo capacity is about the same size and possibly worse.
On top of that you need to both pay for the balloon and extra R&D for a complex system. If everything worked perfectly you might see a small savings per launch except the market is tiny so just breaking even on R&D is difficult. On top of that the more complex launches mean more can go wrong, meaning higher insurance costs.
Finally this is not the 80’s. Compare it to SpaceX’s reusable first stage that gives not just altitude but also velocity. Something like that is a huge advantage reducing the number of expensive bits needed to manufacture.
PS: As to dangling. When you fuel a rocket on the launch pad all the stages sit on top of each other. This means you can build a rocket that would break if sitting on it’s side, because all the forces are down before and after the engine fires.
That whole partial sum taken to infinity thing. You’re trunking off not enough of it fast enough with a balloon. Ie balloon ballast isn’t as efficient in lift as burning actual fuel. Just my off the top of my head with little knowledge thoughts though.
Sure seems viable without thinking it through at first! But I think the scale of space travel just makes it easy for intuition and first impressions to be off.
I don't work for Z2I (I run Space Bandits) but that's a good point and definitely would have been worth including in the interview.
I found this explanation in their payload user guide of an example flight profile (excerpt):
The first stage burns for 110 seconds, upon which the vehicle reaches an altitude of 80 km and an inertial speed of 2.3 km/s. After ejecting the first stage, the vehicle reaches 400 km and 4.4 km/s in 230 seconds. Upon third and final stage separation, the third stage performs multiple firings, the first one lasting 340 seconds and reaching 600 km of altitude while still slightly below the target orbital speed. Then, after coasting and later finalizing the orbit, the payload is released.
I don't disagree with the guy on the "clock watchers" point but he should appreciate that in some cases people's circumstances push them to become "clock watchers". If they commit and produce excellent work during the time they are there then they should last.
Also, yeah, that doesn't make sense at all! It suggests they didn't a) read the job spec or b) believe in the company's values or c) perhaps the phrase was really "We value [when you] work [your] life [out of] balance" ;)
I don't remember the last time I saw a company with a "CIO". It seems to be a dying trend.
Interesting fact: CIOs are also known as Chief Investment Officers (mainly in finance) and play an integral role to the company, perhaps in importance second only to the CEO.
At many finance shops, the CIO can even outrank the CEO, in reality if not on paper. For instance, during his glory days at PIMCO, Bill Gross was CIO while others, such as Mohammed el-Erian filled the CEO role, even when Gross was basically calling the shots.
