Technology

59534 readers

3195 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

Follow the lemmy.world rules.
Only tech related content.
Be excellent to each another!
Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
Politics threads may be removed.
No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

140

UN banned Apollo Fusion's business model of using mercury rocket propellant to launch satellites into space (spectrum.ieee.org)

submitted 10 months ago by L4s@lemmy.world to c/technology@lemmy.world

14 comments fedilink hide all child comments

UN banned Apollo Fusion's business model of using mercury rocket propellant to launch satellites into space::Startup Apollo Fusion was building thrusters that could have contaminated the upper atmosphere with the toxic metal

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] Cocodapuf@lemmy.world 5 points 10 months ago

Launching rockets is a competitive market? TIL, I thought there were only a handful of companies operating with very generous margins

Oh, it is definitely a competitive market at the moment, there are dozens of space startups with new rocket ideas trying to replace the old rocket companies. And many of these companies are seeing some great success, there's SpaceX and rocketlab of course, but firefly aerospace is also doing great, Stoke aerospace has the most innovative design I've seen in a while and may have a viable design for a fully reusable rocket. But there are many many more companies building rockets right now.

I've never heard of mercury propellent though, that sounds like a supremely terrible idea. And they would certainly need more than that to be competitive. Today, reusability and efficient construction techniques are the key to competitiveness, not novel propellants.