SpaceX gets NASA contract to launch gamma-ray space telescope
NASA yesterday announced that it has awarded SpaceX a contract to launch a new gamma-ray space telescope, dubbed the Compton Spectrometer and Imager (COSI), using its Falcon 9 rocket and targeting an August 2027 launch date.
The firm-fixed-price contract has a value of approximately $69 million, which includes launch services and other mission related costs. The COSI mission currently is targeted to launch August 2027 on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station.
This wide-field gamma-ray telescope will study energetic phenomena in the Milky Way and beyond, including the creation and destruction of matter and antimatter and the final stages of the lives of stars. NASA’s COSI mission will probe the origins of the Milky Way’s galactic positrons, uncover the sites of nucleosynthesis in our galaxy, perform studies of gamma-ray polarization, and find counterparts to multi-messenger sources. The compact Compton telescope combines improved sensitivity, spectral resolution, angular resolution, and sky coverage to facilitate groundbreaking science.
The stated launch price gives us a sense of what SpaceX is charging these days for launches. The contract award also illustrates once again why the delays in developing ULA’s Vulcan and Blue Origin’s New Glenn rockets — caused by Blue Origin’s difficulties in manufacturing its BE-4 rocket engine — has ended up costing both companies a lot of money in sales. SpaceX keeps getting these launch contracts because Vulcan and New Glenn are not yet flying operationally. Vulcan has flown once, but it is probably isn’t capable of adding additional launches to is manifest. More important, the rocket is not yet reusable, and probably could not match SpaceX’s price.
As for New Glenn, it supposedly will make its first launch this fall, but we shall see. It remains four-plus years behind schedule, and though it is described as reusable, its first stage landing vertically like a Falcon 9, it is doubtful it will become doing this on its first launches. It needs to prove out its systems first.
The support of my readers through the years has given me the freedom and ability to analyze objectively the ongoing renaissance in space, as well as the cultural changes -- for good or ill -- that are happening across America. Four years ago, just before the 2020 election I wrote that Joe Biden's mental health was suspect. Only in this year has the propaganda mainstream media decided to recognize that basic fact.
Fourteen years ago I wrote that SLS and Orion were a bad ideas, a waste of money, would be years behind schedule, and better replaced by commercial private enterprise. Even today NASA and Congress refuses to recognize this reality.
In 2020 when the world panicked over COVID I wrote that the panic was unnecessary, that the virus was apparently simply a variation of the flu, that masks were not simply pointless but if worn incorrectly were a health threat, that the lockdowns were a disaster and did nothing to stop the spread of COVID. Only in the past year have some of our so-called experts in the health field have begun to recognize these facts.
Your help allows me to do this kind of intelligent analysis. I take no advertising or sponsors, so my reporting isn't influenced by donations by established space or drug companies. Instead, I rely entirely on donations and subscriptions from my readers, which gives me the freedom to write what I think, unencumbered by outside influences.
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NASA yesterday announced that it has awarded SpaceX a contract to launch a new gamma-ray space telescope, dubbed the Compton Spectrometer and Imager (COSI), using its Falcon 9 rocket and targeting an August 2027 launch date.
The firm-fixed-price contract has a value of approximately $69 million, which includes launch services and other mission related costs. The COSI mission currently is targeted to launch August 2027 on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station.
This wide-field gamma-ray telescope will study energetic phenomena in the Milky Way and beyond, including the creation and destruction of matter and antimatter and the final stages of the lives of stars. NASA’s COSI mission will probe the origins of the Milky Way’s galactic positrons, uncover the sites of nucleosynthesis in our galaxy, perform studies of gamma-ray polarization, and find counterparts to multi-messenger sources. The compact Compton telescope combines improved sensitivity, spectral resolution, angular resolution, and sky coverage to facilitate groundbreaking science.
The stated launch price gives us a sense of what SpaceX is charging these days for launches. The contract award also illustrates once again why the delays in developing ULA’s Vulcan and Blue Origin’s New Glenn rockets — caused by Blue Origin’s difficulties in manufacturing its BE-4 rocket engine — has ended up costing both companies a lot of money in sales. SpaceX keeps getting these launch contracts because Vulcan and New Glenn are not yet flying operationally. Vulcan has flown once, but it is probably isn’t capable of adding additional launches to is manifest. More important, the rocket is not yet reusable, and probably could not match SpaceX’s price.
As for New Glenn, it supposedly will make its first launch this fall, but we shall see. It remains four-plus years behind schedule, and though it is described as reusable, its first stage landing vertically like a Falcon 9, it is doubtful it will become doing this on its first launches. It needs to prove out its systems first.
The support of my readers through the years has given me the freedom and ability to analyze objectively the ongoing renaissance in space, as well as the cultural changes -- for good or ill -- that are happening across America. Four years ago, just before the 2020 election I wrote that Joe Biden's mental health was suspect. Only in this year has the propaganda mainstream media decided to recognize that basic fact.
Fourteen years ago I wrote that SLS and Orion were a bad ideas, a waste of money, would be years behind schedule, and better replaced by commercial private enterprise. Even today NASA and Congress refuses to recognize this reality.
In 2020 when the world panicked over COVID I wrote that the panic was unnecessary, that the virus was apparently simply a variation of the flu, that masks were not simply pointless but if worn incorrectly were a health threat, that the lockdowns were a disaster and did nothing to stop the spread of COVID. Only in the past year have some of our so-called experts in the health field have begun to recognize these facts.
Your help allows me to do this kind of intelligent analysis. I take no advertising or sponsors, so my reporting isn't influenced by donations by established space or drug companies. Instead, I rely entirely on donations and subscriptions from my readers, which gives me the freedom to write what I think, unencumbered by outside influences.
Please consider supporting my work here at Behind the Black.
You can support me either by giving a one-time contribution or a regular subscription. There are five ways of doing so:
1. Zelle: This is the only internet method that charges no fees. All you have to do is use the Zelle link at your internet bank and give my name and email address (zimmerman at nasw dot org). What you donate is what I get.
2. Patreon: Go to my website there and pick one of five monthly subscription amounts, or by making a one-time donation.
3. A Paypal Donation:
5. Donate by check, payable to Robert Zimmerman and mailed to
Behind The Black
c/o Robert Zimmerman
P.O.Box 1262
Cortaro, AZ 85652
You can also support me by buying one of my books, as noted in the boxes interspersed throughout the webpage or shown in the menu above. And if you buy the books through the ebookit links, I get a larger cut and I get it sooner.
Just by being available Space x is taking all the business.
By being cheaper than anyone else they are just standing there eating their lunch in front of them.
Still looking forward to the day when they put these things up on Starship and size/weight restrictions are no longer as crucial.
pzatchok wrote: “Just by being available Space x is taking all the business. By being cheaper than anyone else they are just standing there eating their lunch in front of them.”
By being cheaper, SpaceX is generating even more customers; there is more lunch to eat. The reduced launch cost means that many space companies that had previously missed being profitable can now be profitable and can attract investors; the recent enthusiasm for telecommunication constellations is an example. The availability allows those companies to get their hardware into space so that they can make those profits. It takes both the low price and the availability to make this happen. Reusability provides both. Because SpaceX is the low-cost provider, these new customers are largely dependent upon SpaceX for launches, but other lower-cost launchers are also becoming available.
The reduction in satellite size has had a similar effect. Companies that could never have existed before are now able to make a good living by making or buying smaller, lighter, cheaper satellites that do not cost as much to build and launch, making them even more profitable.
These factors also reduce the cost of doing space science, meaning that more science can be performed — more launches can be performed — for the same budget.
These reasons are why we see so many launches and why Rocket Lab is doing so very well in ramping up its launch cadence. There are plenty of customers for small launch vehicles, too.
Looking at Robert’s latest annual launch report, we can see that if we exclude China (which launches it own satellites for its own growing space industry) and SpaceX, the world’s launch market was fairly close to 50 launches per year for the past couple of decades, including the past three years.
https://behindtheblack.com/behind-the-black/essays-and-commentaries/the-global-launch-industry-in-2023-a-record-third-year-in-a-row-of-growth-with-dark-clouds-lurking/
Some people say that SpaceX has taken launches away from the heritage companies, but it looks to me that SpaceX has created an additional demand that it is capable of fully supplying. The large number of Falcon launches may have made the relatively stagnant launch cadences of the other launchers seem to shrink. Arianespace’s launches are back down to the cadence of twenty years ago,* but United Launch Alliance (ULA) seems to have lost about half a dozen launches annually. That seems to be a little more than the number of Space Force (nee Air Force) launches assigned to SpaceX instead of ULA. This tells me that the new companies chose very few of the expensive — and now out of production — Atlas V and Delta IV launch vehicles.
Once these and other companies become competitive, they may begin taking launches away from SpaceX. There does seem to be plenty of lunch for everyone.
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* Arianespace’s major customers are companies sending communication satellites to geostationary orbit (GEO). Their launches fluctuate, depending upon this market, which has declined with the increase in communication constellations. The GEO companies are concerned that their future market will suffer, so they have launched fewer com-sats in the last few years. Twenty years ago was another lull in com-sats, but for a different reason.
I just wish computer chips had come later—it was precisely because Soviet electronics and atomics were behind the West that they pushed LV growth.
The computer chip should have been invented on a moonbase.
We went down the wrong path of trying to shave everything down to the last ounce. The engineering equivalent of MacDoug beam counters
We got balloon tanks/Centaurs out of that…but had to come from behind:
Truax should have been listened to
https://thehighfrontier.blog/2016/02/16/sea-dragons-skycycles-the-life-and-rockets-of-bob-truax/
https://arc.aiaa.org/doi/abs/10.2514/6.2008-7600
Jeff Wright wrote: “… it was precisely because Soviet electronics and atomics were behind the West that they pushed LV growth. … We went down the wrong path of trying to shave everything down to the last ounce. The engineering equivalent of MacDoug beam counters. We got balloon tanks/Centaurs out of that…but had to come from behind …”
I agree that the smaller, lighter atomics were the reason for less powerful rockets, in the 1950s. The driving factor for the capacity of U.S. early rockets was the weight and size of our atomic and hydrogen bombs. Jeff is right about that. The U.S. had smaller and lighter bombs than the Soviets, so the Soviets had to make rockets that could carry their larger and heavier bombs.
However, the integrated circuit (IC) is not why our early rockets had such little payload capacity. The IC was developed through NASA grants, after NASA was formed and after the development of our early launch vehicles, the ones used for Explorer 1, Project Mercury, and Project Gemini. The IC circuit enabled us to make much lighter, faster, and efficient computers that could operate aboard a moonship, both the mothership and the daughtership. Without the IC, much more computing for the landings would have had to been performed on Earth, with a 2½-second lag time, making the landings much more difficult and dangerous.
If we hadn’t been behind, if our rockets were as big and powerful as the Soviet rockets, Kennedy would never have had the incentive to choose to go to the Moon and do the other things.* If the Soviets hadn’t beat us to orbit with an artificial satellite, NASA would never been formed. If we had been the leader in 1960, even a little ahead, we wouldn’t have had the urge to innovate more and faster than the Soviets, because we would have already been ahead. We may have delayed sending probes throughout the solar system, and today we may not be trying to colonize Mars but still thinking about how hard and dangerous it is to put a man on the Moon. Even today, people are seriously concerned about sending anyone on the perilous journey to Mars, and we have plenty of experience with man in space.
I agree that Truax should have been listened to. He would have created a commercial space launch industry a quarter century before we finally did. Others had an opportunity to create commercial launches even earlier, in the 1960s, but for them, as well as for Truax, government policies discouraged commercial launches. At least in the U.S., the bastion of freedom, free markets, and capitalism.
Well, maybe not the bastion we had all thought.
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* Counterfactuals are difficult to prove, but my evidence for being this sure on this point is that the only reason for Kennedy’s meeting in which the decision was made was because we were seen as being very far behind the Soviets — the world thought they were eating our lunch — giving the world the impression that communism was superior to free markets and capitalism, and Kennedy wanted to change that impression.