3. OVERVIEW OF LAUNCH OPPORTUNITIES Regardless of the technical and management approach adopted, the success of an inexpensive, short-schedule Powersat demonstrator is fundamentally driven by launch costs and opportunities. The lower the launch costs and the greater the number of opportunities to launch, the lower the cost of the spacecraft, and the less chance the program will need to cope with the eventualities of long delays brought about by launch date uncertainties. Further, high launch costs dictate high spacecraft costs. An organization that is able to pay ”40 MAU" for a shared Ariane 4 launch would likely want to get the most from this investment, and therefore will spend at least 40 MAU on the payload. More importantly, perhaps, it would seem nonsensical to spend 40 MAU on transportation but only 5-10 MAU or so on the payload, to take an extreme example. In this respect, conceptualising a demonstrator that can work within the constraints of a low-cost launch opportunity is more critical than developing specific requirements for a demonstrator and then trying to find a suitable launch opportunity. This is provided that a worthwhile demonstrator experiment can be performed within the confines of such inexpensive launch opportunities. Ideally, it would be nice to be able to define the demonstrator requirements and then choose the most suitable launch option. In general, however, the very high cost of the limited number of launch opportunities does not permit this approach. Available low cost launch opportunities for a European-based Powersat demonstrator include: • The Ariane 4 Structure for Auxiliary Payloads (ASAP). (an Ariane 5 ASAP equivalent is likely by about 1998/99.)
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