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SeeMe cheapo disposable satellites

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23-01-2013 8:39pm

#1

Capt'n Midnight

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http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/01/23/seeme_disposible_satellites/

The fighter-deployed satellites in DARPA's latest plan - which will deploy them in orbits so low they burn up in a month - will be built by Raytheon, which reckons it can do the job for $2m a pop.

SeeMe* was announced last March, as an intermediate step between surveillance drones, which have limited airtime, and spy satellites which are rarely in the right place. The idea is to launch 24 of the SeeMe birds in an orbit which overflies the battleground every 90 minutes, burning up a month or two later when the mission has been accomplished.

The satellites themselves will weigh less than 12kg and be about the size of a cylindrical wheelie bin, and will only cost half a million dollars each. Getting them into orbit will be a little more expensive, Raytheon puts that at $1m a time based on the shiny-new Airborne Launch Assist Space Access (ALASA) platform currently being developed by DARPA.
...

So launching 24 of them is going to cost $36m, which seems like a lot of money but would only buy a handful of Predator drones (at $4m a time) or a fraction of manned observation platform, even if neither of those burn up after use.

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