Tag: capitalism

Boeing moving headquarters from Chicago to DC

2:23 pm

Rearranging deck chairs on the Titantic: Boeing today announced that it is moving its headquarters from Chicago to Washington, DC, so as to place its corporate executives closer to key federal officials.

Boeing is a major defense contractor, and the move will put executives close to Pentagon leaders. Rival defense contractors including General Dynamics, Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman are already based in the D.C. area. Company executives would also be near the Federal Aviation Administration, which certifies Boeing passenger and cargo planes.

Gee, for more than a half century Boeing was based entirely in Seattle, and somehow got lots of federal contracts and built great airplanes and spacecraft. It moved to Chicago in 2001 to be more centrally located, but instead put its top managers distant from its actual manufacturing and design headquarters. The result has not been very cheerful.

Now Boeing is moving even farther from Seattle, just so its executives can hobnob with politicians, go to fancy cocktail parties, and figure out easier who to pay off with political donations. Who cares if the actual design and manufacturing work continues to be shoddy and poorly supervised? What really counts is getting contracts to build bad stuff that either doesn’t work or is delivered late and overbudget for our corrupt federal government.

As proof, see this other story today: Starliner’s protective window cover falls off during capsule move to VAB.

From CBS space reporter Bill Harwood:

During the rollover to pad 41, as the Starliner neared the Vehicle Assembly Building, a protective window cover somehow fell off the capsule and tumbled to the road.

You can see video of this absurdity at the link. As this was not actually part of the capsule but a protective cover, it appears no damage to Starliner occurred. That it occurred at all however once again tells us of the serious quality control problems at the company.

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Axiom buys robot arm grapple points from the Canadian company MDA

10:33 am

Capitalism in space: For the first time, a private space station company, Axiom, has purchased 32 space station robot arm grapple points, or interfaces, from the Canadian company MDA that builds the robot arms on ISS for NASA.

The MDA interfaces aboard Axiom’s space station will also include those that allow the existing Canadarm2 on the International Space Station (ISS) to build and assemble the new Axiom Station. Once that stage is complete, MDA’s Canadarm3 interfaces will act as permanent robotic system fixture points on the outside of Axiom Station, forming the foundation for future robotic arm integration and utilization once it separates from the ISS and operates independently.

This deal means that eventually Axiom is going to purchase its own MDA-built robot arm.

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Stratolaunch completes 5th test flight of giant Roc airplane

10:21 am

Capitalism in space: Stratolaunch yesterday successfully completed the fifth test flight of its giant Roc airplane, now being designed for testing hypersonic vehicles in flight.

You can read the press release here [pdf], which stated the following:

The fifth flight debuted a new pylon on the aircraft’s center wing that will be used to carry and release Talon-A hypersonic vehicles. The hardware is comprised of a mini-wing and adapter that is constructed with aluminum and carbon fiber skins. It weighs approximately 8,000 pounds and occupies 14 feet of Roc’s 95-foot center wingspan, allowing for adequate space between the aircraft’s dual fuselages for safe vehicle release and launch. The state-of-the-art structure also features a winch system that will load Talon onto the platform from the ground, expediting launch preparation and reducing the need for ground support.

The company has been building two Talon hypersonic vehicles, and now has a third under construction. This third Talon is intended to be reuseable. All will be used as part of the company’s contract with the Air Force to test hypersonic technology, with the first flights now scheduled for ’23.

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Phantom Space orders more than 200 rocket engines from Ursa Major

9:58 am

Hadley engine from Ursa Major

Capitalism in space: The smallsat startup rocket company Phantom Space today announced it has ordered more than 200 rocket engines from the rocket engine company Ursa Major.

The order includes Ursa Major’s 5,000-Pound Thrust Hadley engines and the new 50,000-pound thrust Ripley engines. By using Ursa Major’s Hadley engines, Phantom’s Daytona rocket is slated for orbital launch in 2023, just three years after Phantom Space was formed. Under the terms of the agreement, Ursa Major will supply hundreds of its Hadley engines in different configurations including ground test and upper-stage vacuum variants, as well as numerous Ripley engines for planned upgrades to the Daytona vehicle.

The CEO of Phantom Space, Jim Cantrell, gave me a tour of its facility here in Tucson only three weeks ago, during which I took the picture above of a Hadley engine being tested and prepared for further static fire tests.

Cantrell had been the founder of Vector, his earlier failed attempt to create a smallsat rocket company. He clearly has not let that failure stop him.

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Endurance undocks from ISS for splashdown tonight; Watch here

9:29 am

SpaceX’s Endurance manned capsule today undocked from ISS carrying four astronauts with a planned splashdown off the coast of Florida at shortly after midnight (Eastern) tonight.

I have embedded the live stream for the splashdown below. It will go live about 11:00 pm (Eastern) in order to cover all the splashdown events:

11:48 p.m. Trunk jettison
11:53 p.m. Deorbit burn
12:04 a.m. Nosecone closed
12:43 a.m. Dragon splashdown
» Read more

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Fish & Wildlife documents now reveal its objections to SpaceX Boca Chica facility

9:32 am

We’re here to help you! Documents obtained by CNBC under a Freedom of Information request have revealed the specific objections of Fish & Wildlife that has helped delay the approval of the FAA’s environment reassessment of SpaceX’s Boca Chica facility for Starship launches.

SpaceX must take steps to track and mitigate its impact on endangered species and their habitat in order to gain approvals for testing and commercial launches of its Starship Super Heavy lift-launch vehicle in Boca Chica, Texas, according to documents from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service obtained by CNBC.

The documents, released by the federal agency in response to a Freedom of Information Act request, show that recent declines in an endangered bird species, the piping plover, have already been correlated with SpaceX activity at the South Texas facility.

The documents also reveal that SpaceX is, for now at least, reducing the amount of energy it plans to generate at a utility-sized natural gas power plant on the 47.4-acre launch site there.

According to a lawyer from the radical environmentalist organization the Center for Biological Diversity who was interviewed for the article, Fish & Wildlife’s demands are not tremendously restrictive, and might actually allow the project to go forward, since they appear to only require SpaceX to “monitor affected animal populations carefully, limit construction and launch activity to specific seasons or times of day and night, and use shuttles to reduce vehicle traffic of workers on location.”

I see it differently. I think Fish & Wildlife bureaucrats are struggling to come up with reasons to block SpaceX. They know that decades of data in Florida prove that rocket launches have no negative impact on wildlife. To claim such a thing in Texas is thus not justified. They are trying to do it anyway.

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South Korean smallsat rocket startup to launch first suborbital test flight

9:18 am

Capitalism in space: A new South Korean smallsat rocket startup company, Innospace, is now planning its first suborbital test launch in December, launching a Brazilian military payload from that country’s Alcântara Space Center.

The 16.3-meter, single-stage test rocket is a precursor to the company’s planned commercial satellite launcher Hanbit-Nano, a two-stage small satellite launcher designed to carry up to a 50-kilogram payload to a 500-kilometer sun-synchronous orbit. The first stages of the two rockets are powered by a 15-ton-thrust hybrid rocket engine that uses liquid oxygen and paraffin-based propellants. Hanbit-Nano’s upper stage is equipped with a 3-ton hybrid engine, according to the Sejong-based company’s website.

“If the upcoming test launch is successful, we will start preparing for a test launch of Hanbit-Nano,” Innospace spokesperson Kim Jung-hee told SpaceNews.

The company has so far raised almost $28 million in private investment capital. It also has an agreement with Norway to launch its rockets from there.

Since South Korea’s government has its own rocket program, it will be interesting to see which succeeds first in getting into orbit.

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Biden’s NASA administrator slams the cost-plus contracts he endorsed when he was a senator

12:48 pm

Bill Nelson, Biden’s NASA administrator and a former Democratic Party senator from Florida, made it clear during his testimony before a subcommittee of the Senate Appropriations committee today that he condemns cost-plus contracts and no longer wants to use them for any NASA project, even though he demanded NASA use such contracts when he was a senator.

Nelson was asked what, in his opinion, was the biggest threat to NASA’s goal of landing humans on the Moon by 2025. Nelson responded that the agency needed competition in its program to develop a Human Landing System. In other words, he wanted Congress to support NASA’s request for funding to develop a second lander alongside SpaceX’s Starship vehicle.

But Nelson didn’t stop there. He said Congress needs to fund this lander contract with a fixed-price award, which only pays companies when they reach milestones. This contracting mechanism is relatively new for the space agency, which traditionally has used “cost-plus” contracts for large development programs. Such awards pay contractors their expenses, plus a fee. “I believe that that is the plan that can bring us all the value of competition,” Nelson said of fixed-price contracts. “You get it done with that competitive spirit. You get it done cheaper, and that allows us to move away from what has been a plague on us in the past, which is a cost-plus contract, and move to an existing contractual price.”

The significance of Nelson’s remarks is that it bluntly signals that the Biden administration has now wholly bought into the ideas I put forth in Capitalism in Space. Nelson wants NASA to be a customer that buys what it needs from the private sector, and to do it as inexpensively as possible. He also wants to encourage competition by allowing that private sector to own and control what it builds.

In the past, a new administration would have abandoned the policies of the past administration. Instead, the Biden administration is accelerating the Trump administration’s policy of encouraging private enterprise and eliminating cost-plus contracts.

The future of the American space industry appears bright indeed.

This statement by Nelson also indicates that the future of SLS is now very precarious, especially because it is being built almost entirely on cost-plus contracts. Any serious failure could kill it. And even if its next launch succeeds, further launches hang now by a very thin political thread. And the more success private space has, the thinner that thread will become.

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Viasat once again demands government block its competitor Starlink

9:50 am

In a letter to the FCC submitted on May 2, 2022, Viasat once again demanded the government block the deployment of SpaceX’s full 30,000 Starlink satellite constellation.

SpaceX shouldn’t be allowed to greatly expand its Starlink network while light pollution issues surrounding its deployed satellites remain unresolved, Jarrett Taubman, Viasat vice president and deputy chief of government affairs, said in a letter to the regulator.

While calls for a thorough environmental review that Viasat made for Starlink’s current generation of satellites in December 2020 were largely rejected, Taubman said SpaceX’s plan to grow the constellation by seven times “would have significant aesthetic, scientific, social and cultural, and health effects on the human environment on Earth.”

In other words, rather than try to compete with SpaceX, Viasat wants the government to squelch that competition. Though Viasat’s previous complaints have been rejected entirely, there is no guarantee that the Biden administration will continue to reject them. Recent evidence suggests instead that it will instead use this complaint as another opportunity to limit SpaceX’s operations, for political reasons.

Meanwhile, the only possible harm to Earth the full Starlink constellation might do is cause a limited interference in ground-based astronomy. Since astronomers have made so little effort to get their telescopes into orbit, above such interference, few should sympathize with them. If anything, Starlink should be the spur to get all of its telescopes off the ground and into space. Astronomers will not only avoid light interference from Starlink, they will get far better data without the atmosphere smearing their vision.

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Space Force awards 125 small contracts to develop space junk removal and satellite repair

9:07 am

Capitalism in space: The Space Force yesterday announced the issuance of 125 small contracts, each worth $250,000, for developing new technologies for the removal of orbiting space junk as well as the robotic servicing of orbiting satellites.

SpaceWERX [a Space Force division] plans to award the 125 contracts over the next 30 days and each team will have about 150 days to deliver a product or study. Later this year they will have an opportunity to compete for second-phase awards of up to $1.5 million to continue development and prototyping.

The long-term goal is to select one or more teams two years from now to conduct an in-space demonstration of OSAM technologies, short for on-orbit servicing, assembly and manufacturing. This includes a broad range of technologies to repair and refuel existing satellites, remove and recycle orbital debris, and manufacture products in space.

Many of these development contracts likely went to already established companies like Northrop Grumman, Orbit Fab, Momentus, Launcher, and Spaceflight, which are all developing technologies for in-orbit transportation and servicing. These small contracts were also likely given to new startup companies that have not yet launched.

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Rocket Lab successfully catches first stage with helicopter

4:13 pm

Electron first stage on parachute just before capture

Capitalism in space: In successfully placing 34 smallsat into orbit today using its Electron rocket, Rocket Lab also successfully caught the first stage with helicopter as it descending by parachute.

The screen capture to the right from the live feed shows that first stage on parachute just before the helicopter hook captures it. That helicopter is now returning to land with that stage, which it will then gently deposit for study and refurbishment. Though it is likely this first recovered first stage will not get reused, that possibility remains, and regardless this success points to the future reuse of all Electron first stages.

UPDATE: Because of “different load characteristics” than seen during previous tests, the helicopter pilot released the stage for safety reasons, while still over the ocean. The company was then able to recover it, but though they can now study it no reuse will be possible.

The leaders in the 2022 launch race:

17 SpaceX
13 China
6 Russia
3 Rocket Lab
2 ULA

The U.S. now leads China 25 to 13 in the national rankings, with the U.S. leading all other nations combined 25 to 22.

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Watch Rocket Lab launch and attempt to capture first stage with helicopter

1:20 pm

I have embedded below the live stream of Rocket Lab’s launch today from New Zealand, scheduled for a 3:41 pm (Pacific) liftoff. The rocket carries 34 satellites for deployment.

More exciting however will be the attempt to recover the first stage. On this launch the Electron rocket’s first stage will control its descent using both thrusters and parachutes so that a helicopter can make the first attempt to snatch it out of the air before it hits the ocean.

If successful, Rocket Lab will then hopefully be able to reuse the first stage on a later launch.

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