The heat of competition: In describing the damage and repair plans for the Wallops Island launchpad, this article notes that a hot fire test of the reconfigured Antares rocket, with new first stage engines, is presently scheduled for the end of 2015.
No word yet on what those new engines will be, however.
For the next few days you can get the ebook “How to be a rocket scientist” for free, by an engineer who has been one. As Hoffstadt correctly notes,
We are still very far from having all of the answers and seeing all of the possible technologies that can help humans travel through the air and space, and to live beyond our planet Earth. There are important questions to ask, problems to solve, and things to build. We haven’t figured everything out yet and don’t know where the next ideas and accomplishments are going to come from. In other words … we need more rocket scientists! [emphasis in original]
According to spaceport officials, it will take a year to repair the damage sustained by the launchpad at Wallops Island from the Antares launch failure last month.
The damage didn’t look that serious in the initial assessments. I wonder if this long repair schedule isn’t a negotiating ploy for funding.
Faced with stiff competition from SpaceX, Europe has handed the construction its next generation rocket, Ariane 6, from Arianespace to a joint venture between the European companies Airbus and Safran.
The new venture will be dubbed Airbus Safran Launchers, and will take over as Europe’s launch company.
I had known that Airbus and Safran had proposed this venture to build Ariane 6, but until I read this press release I hadn’t realized that the agreed-to deal to build Ariane 6 means that Arianespace has essentially been fired by Europe as the company running Europe’s rocket operations. Arianespace, a partnership of the European Space Agency’s many partners, was never able to make a profit, while its Ariane 5 rocket costs a fortune to launch. They have now given the job to two private companies who have promised to rein in the costs. We shall see what happens.
The company for cheaply mass-producing cubesats and their components — formed by two brothers while attending college last year — has shipped its first product.
RadioBro, the company founded by Mark and Eric Becnel, reached its first product milestone with a mini-satellite communications transceiver. “We prototyped it in June and did a production run,” says Mark Becnel, company president, who is also finishing up his aerospace engineering master’s degree at UAH. His brother, Eric, who is RadioBro vice president and chief engineer, graduated in 2013. “We accomplished some pre-sales and then did a full run of 100 units,” Becnel says. The MiniSatCom is offered in a variety of kits.
They now are developing a cubesat core that
will save cubesat developers the six months to two years of development time that’s normally required to make a disparate stack of various products work together to serve the same function, Becnel says. If the cubesat is built to generally accepted standards, the core will be plug and play, he says.
These guys have the right idea for space development. Instead of looking for jobs with other companies or NASA, they found a need in the aerospace industry and are filling it, cheaply and efficiently and thus saving everybody time and money. The result: They make money themselves selling their product.
An evening pause: Thanksgiving and Black Friday might be over, but there still is Christmas dinner!
Hat tip Diane Zimmerman.
The heat of competition: Faced with a stiff challenge from SpaceX, the European partners in Arianespace have worked out a deal to replace the Ariane 5 rocket with Ariane 6.
The official announcement will be made in next few days, but with Germany agreeing to the French proposal, the partnership can now proceed.
The result will be a government rocket which will likely only launch government payloads, since it will likely also cost too much to compete with SpaceX and the other new lower cost commercial companies like Stratolaunch, now developing in the U.S.
The competition heats up: The website SpaceFlightNow takes a close look at SpaceX’s effort on the next Falcon 9 launch on December 16 to recover the rocket’s first stage.
Musk estimates a 50% chance of success on this launch. Though I think his estimate is reasonable, I also think that this number is a testament to the skill and success of his company. Imagine: in less than three years, since Musk first proposed the idea of landing the first stage vertically, they have come so close to doing it! NASA certainly couldn’t have moved that fast. Neither could most of the experienced launch companies like Arianespace, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, or Russia.
Instead, it takes a new company, a fresh outlook, and freedom to change the world. Who would have guessed?
The heat of competition: Russian engineers have scrubbed Friday’s commercial Proton launch due to a gyro issue with the rocket’s Briz upper stage.
They have begun to destack the rocket to get at the upper stage in order to repair the problem, with the new launch date expected to be no earlier than mid-December.
The problem once again raises questions about the quality control generally within the Russian aerospace industry and specifically in the companies that build Proton and its upper stage. At the same time, it is a good thing they spotted the problem before launch, allowing them to correct it. That is what a company with good quality control does.
Astronauts on ISS have used a 3D printer, shipped to the station on the last Dragon flight, to print the first item ever manufactured in space.
“Everything worked exactly as planned, maybe a little better than planned,” Kemmer told NBC News. He said only two calibration passes were needed in advance of the first honest-to-goodness print job, which finished up at 4:28 p.m. ET Monday and was pulled out of the box early Tuesday. “It’s not only the first part printed in space, it’s really the first object truly manufactured off planet Earth,” Kemmer said. “Where there was not an object before, we essentially ‘teleported’ an object by sending the bits and having it made on the printer. It’s a big milestone, not only for NASA and Made In Space, but for humanity as a whole.”
The part made was a faceplate for the printer itself. This printer is a demonstration project, launched to test the engineering and to see how 3D printing operates in weightlessness. Eventually the goal is to have most of the spare parts on a interplanetary vehicle manufactured in space in this manner, using a supply of standard material, called feedstock, that would be much cheaper to ship from Earth.
The lunar rover that one of the competitors wants to use to win the Google Lunar X-prize was unveiled on Monday.
The rover was built by students as part of a college school project. Whether it ever flies is entirely unknown. The effort, however, has helped train a new generation of space engineers.
The heat of competition: Industry rumors now suggest that Orbital Sciences’s first choice for launching its next ISS freighter Cygnus is SpaceX’s Falcon 9.
The articles offers this explanation for why Orbital is favoring its chief competitor:
While flying on a competitor’s launch vehicle might be viewed as awkward, the decision could boil down to one simple determining factor – cost. It has been estimated that a flight on a F9 would set a customer back $62 million. By comparison, United Launch Alliance’s (ULA ) Atlas V 401 launch vehicle, a booster with similar capabilities to the F9, costs an estimated $100 million per mission. Moreover, SpaceX has a proven track record with the Falcon 9.
All true, but I can think of two more reasons SpaceX is the top choice.
» Read more
The competition heats up: An Air Force official on Wednesday admitted that SpaceX will likely be certified to launch military payloads.
The politics guarantee it. The Air Force can’t refuse this very successful and increasingly powerful company.
Posted from the West Bank settlement of Alon Shvut.
The heat of competition: Space News takes a close look at five space companies that will face critical challenges in the next two years.
Some of the companies on the list will surprise you. The article also gives some good background on the entire industry and the challenges it all faces in the coming year.
Posted from Tucson International Airport.
The heat of competition: A television industry trade journal looks at Arianespace’s future plans and finds them wanting, when compared to SpaceX.
Compare that [SpaceX’s] success with the money that’s been poured into Arianespace, and the lack of progress (perhaps wholly understandable when being managed by a Euro-committee!). Ariane’s mid-way ME version (for Midlife Extension) has been on the drawing board since 1995. And at a considerable investment, and for an initial scheduled flight of only 2017-2018.
The Ariane-62/64 concept calls for as much of the “ME” design to be incorporated into the 62/64 versions. But the planned launch of the first A-62 is not for some time; some observers suggest at best 2021-22. That’s more than 20 years of planning, development and immense costs.
Read the whole thing. It illustrates the almost impossible challenge faced by Arianespace — a company designed by a committee of nations and run to distribute funding as widely as possible to those nations. For that company to successfully reshape its approach quickly so that it can successfully compete with SpaceX seems quite unlikely, and will likely result in Arianespace evolving into Europe’s government launch service, with the commercial market shifting back to the U.S.
The competition heats up: SpaceX has begun the construction work necessary to convert the launchpad it will use at the Kennedy Space Center for its first test flight of the Falcon Heavy rocket, now scheduled for summer 2015.
Most of the current work appears to be taking place on the perimeter area of the pad, with the construction of a hanger building – known as the Horizontal Integration Facility (HIF) – that will house the Falcon Heavy rocket and associated hardware and payloads during processing. During rollout, the Falcon Heavy will be transported atop the Transporter Erector (TE), which will ride on rails, up the famous 39A ramp that once saw Space Shuttle and Apollo stacks arrive via the Crawler Transporters.
The July launch date is considered preliminary and a target date only and is of course subject to change.
The billionaire investor in the company Excalibur Almaz is suing the lawyer in charge for fraud.
Using the $49 million the billionaire invested, the lawyer purchased several Soviet-era capsules and a Almaz space station module from the Russians, claiming they would use this equipment, once refurbished, to establish a commercial space company. What the lawyer, Art Dura, did not tell anyone was, as the lawsuit explains:
“The purchase contracts had to be approved by the Russian government, and unbeknownst to plaintiff … expressly excluded the right to modify the Russian hardware, thus relegating it to display uses only! The items were only museum pieces, a secret Dula would keep until well after he acquired control of plaintiff’s investment.”
Dula’s vehicle for the scheme was Excalibur Almaz Limited, an entity he set up in the Isle of Man, into which he transferred Horie’s $49 million investment, according to the complaint.
What I find amazing is that the company, Excalibur Almaz, also put out a lot of press releases describing how they were going to use this Russian equipment as part of their space effort. I reported on these releases myself. That Dura was able to keep the contract terms secret, that even the Russians didn’t publicly protest his false statements, is most interesting. Apparently, the Russians were glad to take his money and even help with the fraud, by not revealing the truth when Dura made public claims that were impossible according to the contract.
This story illustrates one of the less obvious investment risks inherent in a new industry such as commercial space. Not only can vehicles crash and burn, there are also a lot of con artists out there willing to take advantage of naive individuals who are so passionate about space exploration that they don’t look closely at what they are doing.
The competition heats up: Elon Musk yesterday revealed that he is in negotiations to team-up with a venture that would put in orbit a constellation of 700 satellites to provide low-cost internet access.
The venture was originally linked with Google, but that partnership has faded. Musk meanwhile said that his deal will be announced within the next three months.
The competition heats up: Google subsidiary Planetary Ventures has signed a $1 billion 60-year lease with NASA for use of Moffett Field in California.
This Aviation Week story provides a detailed update on China’s effort to build a new family of Long March rockets that are less expensive to operate and can effectively compete with SpaceX.
Two main take-aways from the article. First, the first flight of the Long March 7, a direct competitor with the Falcon 9, has been seriously delayed. Originally expected to fly in 2013, that first flight has apparently been pushed back to 2015.
Second, even with extensive cost savings, the Long March 7 will still cost a customer more than a Falcon 9, $70 million vs $61 million.
