# A Brazilian Space Launch System for the Small Satellite Market
## 3 Results and Discussion
Vehicle development effort for the configurations 1, 2 and 3 was 755, 754 and 782 WYr, respectively. We can see that development efforts for concepts 1 and 2 are quite similar and concept 3 claims about 4% more work and investment than the previous ones. Considering a WYr equivalent to 102,000.00 USD (Brazilian figures), the development cost in US dollars for concepts 1 and 2 would approach 77 million, while for concept 3, near 80 million. The replacement of the S-44 solid motor by a cluster of RD-843 liquid engine proved adequate by taking into consideration a 36% increase in launch mass capacity for less than three million dollars added to develop the launch system as compared to concept 1. Vehicle fabrication costs are in the range of 141 to 175 WYr, with the lowest value for the all-solid stages concept and the highest for the vehicle concept based on a cluster of RD-843 engines as the upper stage. In US dollars the effort would represent nearly 14, 16, and 18 million, for vehicle concepts 1, 2 and 3, respectively. The share of direct operation cost from the associated values of fabrication and operations (direct and indirect) is about 4.5% for concept 1, decreasing to 3.87% for concept 3. The share of propellants cost in the cost per flight is less than 2% for all the concepts. Amortization of development, nominal profit and additional costs amounted 18.6, 19.6 and 21.2 WYr, respectively for concepts 1, 2 and 3, representing about 10% of the respective cost per flight. As it can be seen from Table 4, the cost per flight, in dollars, varied from 19 to 23 million. In terms of specific transportation costs, the proposed vehicle configurations would charge about 43, 44 and 39 thousands of US dollars per kilogram of payload inserted into the reference orbit. For comparison, the Scout small launch vehicle, a four stage all-solid launcher that operated from 1961 to 1994, totalling 99 missions, had a specific transportation cost of 0.4 WYr per kg of payload inserted into LEO [16]. Thor Delta-E was another small launch vehicle (540 kg @ LEO) which operated in the 1960s with estimated specific transportation cost of 0.6 WYr/kg [16]. The calculated specific transportation cost for concepts 1, 2 and 3 would be 0.42, 0.43 and 0.38 WY/kg, respectively. Therefore, the proposed launch systems have estimated costs similar to retired launch vehicles of the same class. These figures also confirm the higher cost per kilogram for smaller launchers compared to heavy-lifters, for which the reported specific transportation cost is in the range of 0.04-0.1 WYr/kg [16]. Figure 7 shows a plot of satellite payload masses versus specific transportation costs for launch systems under development as well as in commercial operation [9] along with those proposed by this work, with a 20% error bar. Additionally, the figure shows plots of the specific charges for a broad range of satellite masses taken from an US company currently offering rideshare launch opportunities [19]. For payloads weighting 300 kg or less, there is a large variation in specific transportation costs ranging from 22 to 65 thousand dollars per kilogram, for both rideshare and the estimated figures of new projects and some already in commercial phase. Above 400 kg vehicle capacity, the price per kilogram is in the range of 25 to 50 thousands of US dollars, except for the Epsilon launch vehicle from Jaxa which charges 67,000 US$/kg for LEO missions [9]. \begin{table}
\begin{tabular}{c c c c c c c c c c c} \hline \hline
**LV** & \(\mathbf{C_{dev}}\) & \(\mathbf{C_{fab}}\) & \(\mathbf{C_{DOC}}\) & \(\mathbf{C_{IOC}}\) & \(\mathbf{C_{atz}}\) & \(\mathbf{C_{pft}}\) & \(\mathbf{C_{add}}\) & **CPF (WYr)** & **CPF (USD)** & **STC (USD/kg)** \\ \hline C-1 & 755 & 141 & 7.4 & 17 & 7.5 & 9 & 1.8 & 184 & 19,000,000.00 & 43,000.00 \\ C-2 & 754 & 156 & 7.7 & 19 & 7.5 & 10 & 2.0 & 200 & 21,000,000.00 & 44,000.00 \\ C-3 & 782 & 175 & 7.8 & 21 & 7.8 & 11 & 2.2 & 224 & 23,000,000.00 & 39,000.00 \\ \hline \hline \end{tabular}
\end{table}