And with only 47 years to do it in...

I am more referencing desired capacity. A Saturn V could get 1,400x as much into LEO in 1967 but that's far larger than most people really needed.

That’s a similar payload to the modern Electron rocket. There’s a good market for launching small satellites. Much more so today than in 1970, of course.

Fair point, though the Electron rocket has 2 launches and 1 successful so I am not sure how large the market is.

The problem is you can generally stuff 2+ payloads into a single rocket which means small payloads can usually find some spare capacity on another launch at a discount. However, you can't really scale up a rocket that's not large enough.

Looks like they have a decent number of flights booked for the near future. It’s not a huge market, but there are small satellites that need to be in a unique orbit or can’t wait around for a matching payload to ride with. Time will tell just how big of a market that really is.

I think it was said that the Electron is capable of carrying something like 97% of all satellites launched last year.

Actual communication satilies are still several tons. Cube sats are 1kg and you can toss hundreds of them with a tiny rocket. Thus the median satilite is light, but most payload capacity is taken up with big satellites.

Many early rockets had tiny payloads. The Atlas ICBM could be used as a stage-and-a-half orbital launcher, which was the first US satellite, payload being 68 kg (the whole rocket was in orbit, just without the booster engines): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCORE_(satellite)

That’s an outgrowth of using ICBM’s to get stuff into orbit.

In 1961 Gagarin‘s flight was followed by Alan Shepard also in 1961 and they each required much larger payloads. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vostok_(spacecraft)#Vostok_3...

Alan Shepard didn't go to orbit though.

Sure, 1962 Glenn is probably a better comparison.

> These things had a ~100kg payload to LEO which is tiny in terms of space flight. For comparison a Falcon 9 v1.0 could take 100 times as much stuff into LEO and a Falcon Heavy can take 630 times as much stuff into LEO.

~100kg is a comparable payload to the Falcon 1 (particularly given it launched from a less equatorial site). It makes perfect sense for an organisation's first orbital rocket, and is more than enough to launch useful satellites.