A Green, Safe, Dual-Pulse Solid Motor for CubeSat Orbit Changing, Phase I

The most obvious use of a dual-pulse solid motor would be for performing Hohmann transfer orbits from a lower altitude (higher atmospheric drag) to a higher (lower atmospheric drag) orbit, thus increasing the mission duration of the satellite. Note that such a maneuver requires two, nearly equal, delta-v maneuvers to complete. Such a maneuver would require two of the state of the art motors, but a single, dual-pulse motor that could be packaged in the same volume while being able to perform the same function as two current state of the art motors. A current market for this kind of motor would be a Cubesat secondary payload on an Orbital Sciences' Antares rocket. Such a rocket drops off CubeSats in a 250 km circular orbit, where they then have approximately one week on orbit before deorbiting due to atmospheric drag. The 1U+ dual pulse motor would be able to increase the orbit to a circular orbit altitude of about 465 km. This kind of maneuver increases the satellites lifetime from a few days to a few months; so would become much more useful to any customer. We have already teamed with the standard CubeSat bus manufacturer, Pumpkin Inc., and in-space propulsion manufacturer, Moog-ISP, for commercial introduction of our thrusters into the small satellite community. Raytheon Missile Systems is also supporting DSSP for ESP related applications to kill vehicles and boost phase propulsion. Commercially, most interest in these electric solid propellants comes for the oil and oil field services companies. DSSP's smart energetic materials technology was select by "Oil and Gas Innovation" as one of the Top Ten Technologies for 2009. DSSP LLC is in negotiations with Shell Corporation as a "Game Changer" technology for down-hole oil field application. More »