# A Brazilian Space Launch System for the Small Satellite Market
## 1 Introduction  
At present, most small satellites are launched as secondary payloads on large launch vehicles. A remarkable example of piggybacking payloads took place on 19 June 2014, when the Dnepr launch vehicle, in a single mission, placed 33 spacecrafts in orbit, including the Brazilian nanosatellite NanoSatC-Br1. On 14 February 2017, the PSLV, from India, deployed a record of 104 satellites in a single mission, of which 101 spacecraft were cubesats. On 3 December 2018, Falcon-9 from SpaceX delivered 64 satellites in a sun-synchronous orbit from Vandenberg Air Force Base SLC-4. The dedicated rideshare launch was contracted by Spaceflight Industries for the SSO-A smallsat express mission. A major breakthrough in the small satellite launch service took place on 21 January 2018, as the Electron launcher placed three nanosatellites in the programmed orbit [1]. As for June 2019,the Electron launch vehicle had already delivered 28 satellites distributed in six different missions. The micro-launcher is capable of placing up to 150 kg of payload in a 500 km circular sun-synchronous orbit. At 45\({}^{\circ}\), elliptical orbit, with 180 km perigee and 500 km apogee, the payload capacity increases to about 220 kg. The launch system, operating from Rocket Lab Launch Complex 1 (Maha, New Zealand), can deliver satellites in orbit inclinations limited to 39\({}^{\circ}\) to 98\({}^{\circ}\), and customers may choose dedicated or rideshare launch. Small satellites have become a trend in the space segment. The benefit-cost ratio of such systems is now attractive to traditional and newcomer stakeholders that are populating the market with a variety of solutions and applications with growing levels of quality at competitive prices. Developers want to provide standalone services relying on small satellite constellations, such as remote sensing, communication, Internet of Things, and so on. As a result, there has been an increase in demand for space transportation of such small devices. More than a dozen launch vehicles, with LEO launch capacity ranging from a few kilograms up to a few hundred kilograms, are under development worldwide, mostly by private investors. Cubesats are a good case in point exemplifying this boom in the sector of small satellites, which will drive the launch services market. In less than a decade, the number of cubesat launches has grown from very few to more than a hundred per year, as displayed in Figure 1. The chart was produced using information from 1058 spacecraft available at the Cubesat Database Saint Louis University [2]. The market is observing the small satellite trend with great attention. When we examine the log data from the last decade of cubesats launched, from 2008 until the end of 2019, we see a scenario clearly dominated by American (USA), Indian, and Russian launch vehicles. If we sort these vehicles as a function of the number of cubesats inserted into orbit, we verify that PSLV, Atlas, Antares, Soyuz, Dnepr, and Falcon are leading this trend, as shown in Figure 2, but, except for the Electron launcher (Rocket Lab), none of these rockets was specifically designed to launch small satellites [2]. Rocket Lab started the commercial exploitation of the Electron launch vehicle in November 2018, after two qualification launches on May 2017 and January 2018. Since 2018, the company has conducted six missions, giving an average launch rate of three per year. The company was granted a license to perform a launch every 72 h, meaning more than 100 launches per year [3]. Figure 1: Distribution of cubesats launched yearly with data from launch vehicle by country [2]. The Brazilian system for the development of space activities is composed of three public entities, the Brazilian Space Agency, as the central organization, the National Institute for Space Research (INPE) and the Institute of Aeronautics and Space (IAE). INPE is responsible for the development, integration, and test of spacecrafts while IAE is concerned with the development of sounding rockets and launch vehicles.