ConkSat

ConkSat is sad to announce that, as of today, we will be moving our HQ from Long Beach, CA to Pyongyang, North Korea. Trucks containing ConkSat's export-control team rolled across the DMZ at 11:00am UTC yesterday. Casualties have been minimal so far. This move was necessitated by California's radical woke agenda. We at ConkSat can't stand for a tyrannical state government preventing us from the free exercise of our God-given liberties, including the right to environmental contamination and the right to workplace accidents. The DPRK may be the last bastion of liberty in the modern world. We expect to have zero problems with maintaining our hiring rate, thanks to the low housing prices in abundant twenty-story apartment blocks. This move was triggered by the recent congressional investigation into our safety record. From our CEO: "This is the last straw. The only way to fight this evil is angrily posting about it. With any luck, we'll be able to complete the move before Legal finds out."

Due to an ongoing Congressional investigation, ConkSat is being ordered to release documents pertaining to the history of Building J. ConkSat does not wish to put out a public statement at this time.

#OnThisDayInConkSatHistory over 20 years ago, we released a new safety video for our employees. Check it out for a bit of ConkSat history.

We've announced a lot of our projects in the R&D phase, but it's time to return to our roots. At Concrete Satellite Technologies Corporation (ConkSat), we bring the latest advances in civil engineering to aerospace. As such, we're proud to announce the first line of poured concrete satellite buses: CS-101. Concrete possesses many advantages that manufacturers have failed to take advantage of. First, concrete is cheap and does not require advanced manufacturing methods like CNC or 3D printing for complex shapes. Concrete is also an electrical insulator, decreasing the odds of a stray wire killing a billion-dollar GEO satellite. As a thermal insulator, concrete lowers the amount of multilayer insulation needed for long stays in space. Plus, as a porous material, you can forget about designing venting ports. The first flight article is in the works, and will be equipped with the most advanced technology that can be sourced from Amazon for <$100. We're pioneering out-of-house manufacturing, a unique COTS-focused approach that minimizes manufacturing effort. Equipped with GoPros and a cheap SDR, CS-101 will be the pinnacle of remote sensing, provided we can figure out how you get a license from the FCC. We're currently searching for a partner for this first launch. Is your company designing a launch vehicle, but considers it too risky to fly a commercial payload on the first flight? We've just upgraded our first-flight risk posture to "hold my beer" and would rather not fly on a vehicle that will force us to actually test this thing. Contact us today for the best mass simulator in the business. WE WON'T LIE TO YOU. PATENT IS NOT PENDING. PLEASE DON'T STEAL IT THOUGH.

For years, rocket companies have used performant yet incredibly expensive propellants. Spending hundreds of thousands of dollars per launch on fuels has become the norm, bogging down "old" space. At ConkSat, we're always looking to raise the bar. That's why we're proud to announce the first hotfire of the first ever rocket engine running on pure Bunker C heavy fuel oil. Using the waste products of petroleum refinement presents numerous benefits. The cost savings are immense - up to 30% cheaper per flight, which is significant for fully reusable launch vehicles. Money saved is payload earned. The cooling properties are another benefit. The residue coating the interior of the engine provides a natural boundary layer protecting your sensitive tubes. For reusable second stages, flowing thick oil over an actively cooled heat shield is even more effective than cryogens, practically forming an ablative heat shield. Bunker fuel's incredibly sticky, tar-like nature makes it easy to flow through an engine. Flow into the combustion chamber is maintained purely through the siphon effect, allowing us to ditch expensive turbopumps and pressure vessels. This is, perhaps, the first engine that needs no stoking. Take that. With the exhaust consisting mostly of tar, launch site damage is no longer a worry. The plume impingement on the pad lays a fresh coat of asphalt over the entire area each time the engines are lit. Have technical questions about the BE-6 (Bunker Engine 6)? Please post all of your thoughts and analysis below, no matter how poorly informed.

DELTA IV HEAVIER - THE NEXT GREAT LEAP Most rocket companies seek out some form of smaller early project to prove their capabilities before they design a truly gigantic vehicle - think Falcon 1, Terran 1, Electron, etc. At ConkSat, we just dream bigger. That's why, as a technical demonstrator and stopgap before we develop our own launch vehicle (TBA), we are requesting to purchase the Delta IV materials from United Launch Alliance and work to develop the new Delta IV Heavier ultra-heavy launch vehicle. With 4 Common Booster Cores as opposed to the standard Delta IV Heavy's 3, the Delta IV Heavier could feature unmatched performance. The extra booster adds thrust, delta-v, and even torque for pitching the vehicle downrange (important: always attach the extra booster to the uprange side). Gravity turn? We're thrust turning. This powered pitch-over maneuver eliminates the need for costly avionics and flight controls, allowing us to demonstrate our company goal of flying the first unguided orbital rocket. The benefits of this approach are numerous. With no flight computers, engine gimbals, or control systems, the only real complexity comes from the engine computers. These can be outsourced to the launch pad and disconnected once engine start-up reaches steady state. This allows us to use our patent-pending SMART (So Many Avionics can Remain on the Tower) strategy to be the first company to reuse our entire avionics system flight-to-flight. We could transform a notoriously costly and complex vehicle into one of the cheapest pathways to orbit available. Furthermore, with the future retirement of Atlas V, a market gap exists in the field of asymmetric rockets. Without this, customers seeking an asymmetric vehicle will be completely out of luck. Government and commercial customers alike have been reliant on the coolness factor of asymmetry in their launch vehicles ever since the days of the Space Shuttle (with which the asymmetry was a major draw), and it's unlikely that the raceways of future launch vehicles will be enough asymmetry to draw them. By occupying this niche, we guarantee commercial success. Tory Bruno, please let us do this to your beloved rocket. We promise we'll take good care of her. We cannot offer money but we can offer all the love in our hearts.

In recent years, rocket plumbing has only become more complicated. Engineers have hoodwinked investors for years with buzzwords like "full-flow staged combustion" and "gas generator," resulting in ever-more pipes being added to modern engines. With hundreds, possible millions of engineers being recruited straight out of college to toil away at what is essentially just plumbing, requiring years of development, we must ask if there is a better way. Now, there is. With ConkSat's PREMIX™ technology coming on our next-generation launch vehicle (TBA), you can say goodbye to the incredibly complex thermodynamics of an engine. We eliminate the most complex part of the engine: mixing the propellants. Why bother storing fuel and oxidizer separately only to create an incredibly complex powerhead devoted solely to mixing them? Our engineers have devised the solution: mixing the oxidizer and fuel in one large tank. SIMPLICITY AT ITS CORE. No need to duplicate tanks, pumps, or preburners. ConkSat PREMIX™ engines need only one propellant tank and one turbopump. Say goodbye to complex injector design - why worry about mixing the propellants when they're already blended? LEGACY HARDWARE, TODAY. Solid rockets already blend their fuel and oxidizer; all we're doing is bringing the most classic rocketry techniques to liquid fueled rockets. It's an innovation so simple, one has to ask why Old Space has never done it before? OPTIMIZED FOR MASS. Mass optimization is the perpetual problem of rocketry. PREMIX™ lets you eliminate a number of useless elements: common domes, half the powerhead, flight termination system, half the feed system, and the downcomer. NEXT-GEN RELIABILITY. Component elimination is the easiest way to guarantee reliability. As they say, the best part is no part. Excellent passive design precludes the need for complex sets of valves and control systems; PREMIX™ engines have no valves and are simply started by pressurizing the system to fracture a burst disk that starts propellant flow. TESTED TO DESTRUCTION. Every PREMIX™ engine is guaranteed to be tested to complete destruction before delivery to the customer. We believe our customers deserve to know every flight engine we deliver has been tested beyond its point of failure in every way. Contact your local ConkSat intern today to talk about putting your payload on our vehicles.

UPDATE FROM CONKSAT HQ: Unfortunately, business is hard. We have a proud history at ConkSat of shaming business majors, but as it turns out, engineers are just as incompetent. As such, we have a series of business updates to deliver. 1. The Etsy store is being temporarily closed. Capital expenditures became too great [turns out there are manufacturing costs] to justify continuous sales. Cashflow became an issue [you morons ran my bank account dry with shirt printing costs] and certain key investors [my parents] became concerned [told me I had to stop]. We are therefore pausing sales while we finish shipments of our >$1500 of merch [holy hell] and analyze our finances [look at a spreadsheet]. We will have more fabulous merchandise, including mission patches, as soon as business prospects improve [I get my first intern paycheck]. 2. We are on Twitter (formerly X), partly with the hope of being noticed by people who are actually important and partly as a hedge against LinkedIn realizing what we are. Consider following us there. https://x.com/ConkSat 3. The ConkSat headquarters has been established in Long Beach, CA out of the cheapest house we could find on AirBnB. Some of you will be our bosses for this summer's intern cycle. Any one of you (presuming you are an engineer in LA/Long Beach) could be the boss to a ConkSat founder. Stay worried. Thank you for your ongoing support as we work to forge our I-9 documents.

By popular demand, we sell merch now. Unfortunately, until Etsy allows arms deals, we'll just have household goods with our logo on them. No matter - let's get Conking! Is your entire wardrobe just aerospace merch? You should really get out more. Or, if you'd rather not, our merchandise is guaranteed to scare away all those who might steal your 80-hour work weeks away from you. You can be rest assured every dollar you spend will actively make the world a worse place. ConkSat promises to only use the profits from this to fund innovative research into programs optimized for catastrophe. Is there anything dumb you'd like to wear to the office? Would you like to have to explain a weird and dumb internet joke to everybody at the water cooler? Suggest anything you might like! Shop Link: https://lnkd.in/eh7ZssM6

Today, we'd like to honor our brave interns who gave their lives in defense of our bottom line. This one's for you, Spring 2024 Intern Group.