Spaceflight's 90-satellite mission, a boon for smallsats, is a nightmare for Orbcomm

摘要

The upcoming launch of 90 small satellites aboard Spaceflight's Sherpa tug atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket is widely viewed as a pioneering effort to establish a regular and reliable access to space for the smallsat industry. But for one commercial smallsat operator, machine-to-machine satellite messaging provider Orbcomm, the Sherpa launch is a threat. Orbcomm has asked U.S. regulators to stop the launch until Spaceflight demonstrates that releasing 90 satellites - most of them without on-board propulsion - into a single elliptical orbital plane overlapping Orbcomm's constellation does not raise orbital-collision issues.