Tag: commercial

California Tesla factory reopens, defying local officials

2:23 pm

Go get ’em! As he promised, Elon Musk has reopened his California Tesla factory, defying the demands of local officials who wanted it to remain closed until June.

Not only did he institute some stringent employee rules in connection with the Wuhan flu, he also as promised had Tesla initiate a lawsuit against those local officials.

Tesla filed a lawsuit against Alameda County on Saturday after the Fremont plant was shuttered amid the statewide lockdown on March 23. The suit claims that county officials ignored Gov Gavin Newsom’s allowances for ’16 crucial infrastructure industries,’ including transportation, to continue operating.

Personally I think the company’s stringent new health rules are ridiculous, but Musk has to play this “feel-good” game while fighting to survive against this government power-grab.

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Successful static fire Raptor engine test on 4th Starship prototype

9:19 am

Capitalism in space: SpaceX yesterday successfully completed the first static fire Raptor engine test on its fourth Starship prototype, laying the foundation for a planned 150-meter vertical hop later this month.

The test lasted about three seconds.

I want to make a quick comparison between SpaceX’s approach for developing Starship, and NASA’s development of SLS. The differences are stark.

First, SpaceX began cutting metal a little over one year ago, and is already testing a full scale prototype, fully fueled, with its planned flight engine.

SLS began development officially around 2011. It uses the engines from the Space Shuttle, so those are already flight proven. However, even after almost a decade of development NASA as yet to do a single static fire test with those engines actually installed on an SLS rocket, either a prototype or the real thing.

Second, in the past year SpaceX has been aggressively testing the fueling of Starship, using a series of prototypes. With this fourth iteration they have apparently gotten the fueling process and the tanks to work effectively. Further tests of course will increase their confidence in the system’s reliability.

SLS, even after almost a decade of development, has yet to do any similar tank tests. Instead, NASA has done separate individual tests of the rocket’s tanks, but never with everything fully assembled. The agency, and its lead contractor Boeing, hope to finally do their first full scale SLS tank test and static fire test sometime later this year. As they have never filled the tanks in this manner before, they have admitted that problems could arise, including the possibility that the tanks could leak.

Note the big difference. SpaceX has done this testing very early in development. NASA is doing it very late in development. Which to you seems the better approach?

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Blue Origin to deliver first BE-4 engines to ULA this summer

8:42 am

Capitalism in space: Development of Blue Origin’s BE-4 engine, to be used in both its New Glenn rocket as well as ULA’s new Vulcan rocket, appears to be finally reaching its conclusion with the planned delivery this summer of two operational engines to ULA.

The bulk of the article at the link is mostly a summary of stuff that had already been revealed about the development of the New Glenn rocket. The only new piece of information that I could glean was this engine delivery date. It is significant, however, because no rocket company can ever really design its rocket before it has finished building the rocket’s engines. With the BE-4 now complete, I would expect the development of both New Glenn and Vulcan to proceed with great speed.

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Trump administration drafting new space agreement to supersede Outer Space Treaty

2:49 pm

The new colonial movement: According to this Reuters article, the Trump administration is presently drafting a new space agreement, which they have dubbed the “Artemis Accords,” that would allow private property ownership in space and thus supersede Outer Space Treaty’s restrictions on sovereignty.

The Artemis Accords, named after the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s new Artemis moon program, propose “safety zones” that would surround future moon bases to prevent damage or interference from rival countries or companies operating in close proximity.

The pact also aims to provide a framework under international law for companies to own the resources they mine, the sources said.

In the coming weeks, U.S. officials plan to formally negotiate the accords with space partners such as Canada, Japan, and European countries, as well as the United Arab Emirates, opening talks with countries the Trump administration sees as having “like-minded” interests in lunar mining.

They at the moment are not including Russia or China in the discussions, since those countries have little interest in promoting private enterprise and ownership in space.

Back in 2017 I proposed in an op-ed for The Federalist that Trump do almost exactly this:

Trump should propose a new Outer Space Treaty, superseding the old, that would let nations plant their flags in space. This new treaty should establish the rules by which individual nations can claim territory and establish their law and sovereignty on other worlds or asteroids.

The American homesteading acts of the 1800s could work as a good guide. Under those laws, if an American citizen staked a claim and maintained and developed it for five years, that claim and an accompanying amount of acreage would then become theirs.

In space, Trump could propose that in order for a nation to make a territorial claim, a nation or its citizens must establish a facility. If they occupy and use it for a minimum of five years, that nation can claim it, plus a reasonable amount of territory around it, and place it under that nation’s sovereignty.

Now consider this quote from the Reuters article:

The safety zones – whose size would vary depending on the operation – would allow for coordination between space actors without technically claiming territory as sovereign, he said. “The idea is if you are going to be coming near someone’s operations, and they’ve declared safety zones around it, then you need to reach out to them in advance, consult and figure out how you can do that safely for everyone.”

In other words, the safety zones would essentially be the claimed property of the colonizers, a completely reasonable position.

It is hard to say at this moment whether the Trump administration will succeed in this tactic, of side-stepping a renegotiation of the Outer Space Treaty by working out a new agreement with other interested players. Canada for example has expressed reservations about the Trump administration’s recent public announcement encouraging private ownership of resources in space.

Regardless, that the administration now appears to be addressing the limitations of the Outer Space Treaty is very heartening news. Let us hope they can make it happen.

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Japan tests new engine for new rocket

8:43 am

Capitalism in space: Mitsubishi has successfully tested the new engine it will use in the new rocket, the H3, that it is building for Japan’s space agency, JAXA.

JAXA reports that the engine fired for the planned duration of 240 seconds (4 minutes) at the space agency’s Tanegashima Space Center. It was the seventh hot fire of the new engine, which is powered by liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen.

JAXA plans H-3’s first test launch by the end of the nation’s 2020 fiscal year, which began on April 1 and will end on March 31, 2021. It is not known whether work slow downs resulting from the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic will affect the schedule.

The two-stage H3 is intended to be a more affordable and flexible replacement for the H-IIA and H-IIB boosters now in use. The new rocket is designed to place payloads weighing 4,000 kg (8,818 lb) or more into sun-synchronous orbit at 500 km (310.7 miles) or 6,500 kg (14,330 lb) into geosynchronous transfer orbit.

I do wish JAXA or Mitsubishi would give this rocket a more interesting name. It would help their woeful marketing attempts to sell it to other customers.

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Sierra Nevada names its first Dream Chaser spacecraft “Tenacity”

7:52 am

Capitalism in space: Sierra Nevada yesterday announced that it is giving the name “Tenacity” to its first Dream Chaser spacecraft.

Though the press release does not say so, this decision essentially confirms the company intention to build more Dream Chaser spacecraft, once this one proves itself in flight. And I would expect those later craft will be aimed at manned flight.

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SpaceShipTwo Unity makes first New Mexico glide flight

7:42 am

Capitalism in space: Virgin Galactic’s Unity suborbital spaceship successfully completed its first glide test flight from its New Mexico launch site yesterday.

They still have not set a date for their first commercial flights, so the company still claims those first flights will occur this year. I will believe it when I see it.

There does appear to be one apparent positive development for Virgin Galactic. It increasingly appears as if Blue Origin is slowly abandoning its effort to compete for suborbital tourism with its New Shepard spacecraft. Blue Origin has not said so, but the extreme slow down in test flights the last two strongly implies it. Moreover, that company’s success in garnering big government contracts, a billion from the military for its orbital New Glenn rocket and about a half billion from NASA for its proposed Blue Moon manned lunar lander, reinforces the sense that the company is shifting its focus away from suborbital space.

If so, that will clear the market for Virgin Galactic, assuming a viable market still exists with the coming of private commercial orbital spaceships like Dragon and Starliner.

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Funding breakdown for three lunar landing contracts

3:47 pm

Capitalism in space: The contracts awarded by NASA yesterday to build manned lunar landers totaled almost a billion dollars, distributed as follows:

  • Blue Origin: $579 million
  • Dynetics: $253 million
  • SpaceX: $135 million

That Blue Origin got the biggest amount might have to do with the bid’s subcontractors, Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman. This gives these traditional big space partners, who normally rely on these kinds of government contracts and have little ability to make money outside them, some financing. This will also please their political backers in Congress.

For SpaceX, this is the first time they have taken any government money in connection with Starship. It also appears that NASA is going to stay back and generally let SpaceX develop it without undue interference.

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Starlink satellites, not aliens, are those strings of lights in the night sky

1:12 pm

Apparently many people have been seeing the reflected strings of SpaceX’s new Starlink satellites in the night sky, and are calling news organizations asking about them.

Some viewers have noticed the “lights” in the sky will go dark, one by one. This is due to the reflection of light from the moon and Earth and how the position of the satellites change.

Elon Musk, the founder and CEO of SpaceX, detailed a plan this week to “mitigate the impact of their Starlink satellite constellation on night sky observation,” according to an article on Tech Crunch.

In that Tech Crunch article, Musk describes how they are installing sun visors on the satellites to prevent the reflections and make them hopefully invisible to the Earthbound observers.

This will make the astronomy crowd happy, which wants its new big ground-based telescopes to be useful. I think they should instead be focusing their effort in building more space-based telescopes.

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NASA contract award for manned lunar landers rejects SLS

12:12 pm

Capitalism in space: NASA today announced the award of contracts to three different private companies to develop manned lunar landers for the 2024 Artemis Moon mission, all of which will not use the SLS rocket to get to the Moon.

The press release described the awards as follows:

  • Blue Origin of Kent, Washington, is developing the Integrated Lander Vehicle (ILV) – a three-stage lander to be launched on its own New Glenn Rocket System and ULA Vulcan launch system.
  • Dynetics (a Leidos company) of Huntsville, Alabama, is developing the Dynetics Human Landing System (DHLS) – a single structure providing the ascent and descent capabilities that will launch on the ULA Vulcan launch system.
  • SpaceX of Hawthorne, California, is developing the Starship – a fully integrated lander that will use the SpaceX Super Heavy rocket.

All, including NASA and the Trump administration, are aiming to get these landers built and launched by the Trump administration’s 2024 deadline.

The first thing that stands out like a beacon is the exclusion of SLS as the rocket to launch any of these landers. Instead, the aim is to use the cheaper privately built rockets of either SpaceX, ULA, or Blue Origin.

The second thing that stands out is the commitment by SpaceX to use its Super Heavy/Starship rocket, not its Falcon Heavy. This means they are directly telling the world that they expect this rocket to be in operation much sooner than most expect. It also suggests that they hope this rocket will supplant SLS as the main rocket to get to the Moon. The award also means that NASA is agreeable to this.

The third thing that stands out is the exclusion of Boeing, which submitted a bid but did not win. Not only does this exclusion reinforce the sense gotten from an earlier report that NASA was very dissatisfied with Boeing and was thus going to rank it very low in future bidding considerations, it also indicates once again that NASA is seriously looking at other options to SLS. Boeing’s rejected bid was apparently the only one linked to SLS, and was rejected.

In fact, that SLS was not mentioned as the rocket for any of these landers strongly indicates that NASA and the Trump administration is finally abandoning SLS as the rocket to get Americans to the Moon.

Which immediately raises the question: Why the hell are we spending any money building it? It no longer has any purpose at all.

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Air Force study rubber-stamps Air Force desire to limit launch companies

10:33 am

Garbage in, garbage out: An Air Force commissioned RAND study released yesterday has confirmed the Air Force’s desire to restrict the award of launch contracts for the next decade to only two companies.

“We asked RAND to independently double check the assumptions we used to build our acquisition strategy,” said Col. Robert Bongiovi of the Air Force’s Space and Missile Systems Center in California. “What we found was that our acquisition strategy encompasses RAND’s recommendations as we are already making prudent preparations for a market that will only sustain two providers with our phase two contract structure.”

…Part of the RAND report also recommended that the military closely watch companies over the coming years to see which are the most stable. “The U.S. Space Force should make prudent preparations for a future with only two U.S. providers of NSS-certified heavy lift launch, at least one of which may have little support from the commercial marketplace,” RAND Corporation said of its first main recommendation.

Though the report does suggest that the military continue its development program to help three companies through 2023, it reiterates the military’s belief that there simply isn’t enough business to support more than two companies.

For this reason, the Air Force space division, now the Space Force, had wanted to restrict bidding in the 2020s on its future satellite launches to only two companies out of the four (ULA, SpaceX, Northrop Grumman, Blue Origin) that hope to compete for this business. This report is their attempt to justify that decision.

However, the decision has been repeatedly delayed, partly because of a protest of the plan by Blue Origin and partly because a lot of political pressure in the background from those four companies, none of which want to be excluded from future bidding. It was originally going to be made last year, and is now delayed to later this year.

With the release of the report, the military also suggested that if Congress gives it more money, it might be able to open up bidding to more companies. How typical. Instead of trying to trim costs by allowing competition, the Space Force is now maneuvering elected officials to pump up its budget so that these companies all get more cash while picking the pockets of the taxpayer.

This is the same thinking that caused Boeing and Lockheed Martin to merge their launch operations into ULA and for the Air Force to give that new company a monopoly on launches in 2005. The Air Force assumed then that there wasn’t enough launch business for both companies. Rather than compete to lower costs so that both the Air Force and the private sector could afford more launches, the two companies agreed with this Air Force conclusion and teamed up with the Air Force to form a cartel to control the bulk of the U.S. launch market, while charging the Air Force $200-$500 million per launch.

Then SpaceX comes along and proves them completely wrong. It not only gets more than enough business to make a lot of money (in the billions), it charges only $60 million per launch. When the Air Force tried to deny it the right to bid against ULA for military launches, SpaceX sued, and won.

Now the Space Force wants to do the same thing in the 2020s, limiting to two the number of companies that can bid on contracts. All this will do is raise launch costs, and limit competition.

In the end, I doubt seriously if the Space Force effort here will work. All four companies are developing rockets, and all four should have the right to bid on all future launches. If the military tries to exclude any, they will sue, as SpaceX did, and win. Moreover, the military’s assumption that all four companies cannot survive because it doesn’t have enough business for all four is patently false. SpaceX proved them wrong. All these companies have to do is what SpaceX did, keep their launch costs low enough so that other private customers can buy their services.

There will then be more than enough business to go around, for all.

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Small rocket start-ups disqualified by SBA for Wuhan flu relief loans

9:56 am

Capitalism in space: Because of its arcane rules for defining what makes a small company, the Small Business Administration (SBA) has disqualified hundreds of small rocket start-ups from relief loans being issued to help companies whose business has been suspended due to the government-imposed shut downs due to Wuhan flu.

[Space industry groups] claim that hundreds of U.S. startups have been disqualified from loan programs — created under the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act and the Paycheck Protection Program — because of the way the SBA defines “small business.”

Many startups are funded by venture capital firms that typically invest in a portfolio of companies. To be eligible for the SBA loan program a business has to have fewer than 500 employees. When defining a small business, the SBA applies an “affiliation rule,” requiring companies to include in their worker count all the employees of companies with which they are “affiliated.” That rule requires venture-backed startups to aggregate the employees of all the unrelated companies in which their investors have equity positions, pushing many beyond the 500-employee threshold.

According to the industry groups, 98 percent of U.S. startups have fewer than 100 employees.

In other words, the SBA counts the employees of the venture capital firms as part of the company, when all they are essentially are investors. The start-up itself generally has far less than 100 people employed.

What really has to happen is to shut down the government shut downs. The government has got to get out of the way, and allow freedom to function again. Sadly, I do not see that ever happening, which means that many of these companies will fail, not because they couldn’t get it done but because our fascist new government rulers killed them.

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Rocket Lab completes new launchpad at Wallops

9:43 am

Capitalism in space: Rocket Lab has signaled the completion of new launchpad at Wallops Island in the U.S. by the first roll out of an Electron rocket.

The actual launch of a Space Force test satellite is set for sometime in the summer.

Meanwhile, the company is ready to resume launches in New Zealand, but is stymied by the Wuhan panic.

Beck tells the Herald that his company’s Mission Control centre in Auckland is now fully operational with NZ’s move to level 3.

However, its “Don’t Stop Me Now” mission from Launch Complex 1 on the Mahia Peninsula – originally planned for March 24 – is still on hold, with no estimated launch date. “We’re now ready to launch, but currently border restrictions are preventing specialists from entering the country, which is having a negative impact. Our team is on standby to launch as soon as those restrictions are eased,” Beck says.

I hope the company has the resources to weather these government-imposed delays.

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Arianespace to resume launches in June

9:34 am

Capitalism in space: Arianespace now plans to resume launches from French Guiana in mid-June with the first Vega launch since that rocket’s first failure in July 2019.

That launch will place 40+ cubesats in orbit. Arianespace hopes to follow with an Ariane 5 launch near the end of July. Of that mission’s three payloads is MEV-2, Northrop Grumman’s second Mission Extension Vehicle to launch, planned to dock with another defunct geosynchronous communications satellite and reactive it for five years.

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Europe turns to private enterprise for future space transportation

8:42 am

Capitalism in space: The European Space Agency (ESA) has announced a permanently open call for private companies to develop “space transportation to space, in space, returning from space, or any combination of these.”

To be eligible, the economic operator should demonstrate that its space transportation service is a ‘complete offering’. This means that customers should not need to procure any additional essential service elements such as access to facilities, transport or logistics, to obtain the full service.

The economic operator should take full responsibility for the service project, including finding the funding and resources necessary to develop and deploy the service.

The new space transportation services should justify commercial viability, oriented toward private sector customers, without relying on a guaranteed European institutional demand during the operational phase and with a long-term vision of service provision. Preference will be given to such service projects that are conceived, developed and commercialised in the Participating States.

Though the announcement is filled with the typical hard-to-translate bureaucratic language typical of ESA’s projects, the intent here seems clear. The ESA no longer wishes to do any designing and developing of its rockets, as they have done from the beginning of the space age. This also means they are facing the reality that the Ariane 6 rocket, developed for them by the joint partnership of Airbus and Safran dubbed ArianeGroup, is going to be a financial failure, unable to compete against the lower cost SpaceX and Russian rockets now on the market.

Instead, they are now following what appears to be NASA’s path — the path I outlined in Capitalism in Space — to have ESA act merely as a customer, buying these services from competing private companies (not just ArianeGroup) who will develop the rockets themselves and (most important) own the rockets themselves.

If this is so, it is very good new for the future of space travel. It ups the competition, and it will allow for the development of European rockets able to provide this service at low cost.

The one wrench in the process is that this announcement also includes a bidding process for allowing these new private companies to get development money and technical assistance from ESA. That process appears to have some strings attached that might in the end prevent competing private companies to grow, independent of this governmental body. For example, the submission process allows “ESA to check compliance with Programme objectives and general eligibility. After a positive assessment, ESA will invite the economic operator to submit a full service proposal.” In other words, if you want ESA’s help, you will have to have ESA’s stamp of approval.

Still, this proposal does not require ESA’s help. The agency does appear to be willing to now entertain the use of any rocket system developed by any private operators within the participating ESA’s member nations of Germany, Italy, Norway, Portugal, Romania, Sweden and the United Kingdom.

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4th Starship prototype passes tank pressure test

8:41 am

Capitlism in space: SpaceX’s fourth Starship prototype has successfully passed a tank pressure test, the first to do so, allowing engine testing to now begin.

In the end, SN4 passed the cryogenic proof test – hitting 4.9 bar. SpaceX CEO Elon Musk admitted in a tweet that this was “kind of a soft ball…” However, “that’s enough to fly,” he added. It is now expected to move on to engine testing within the coming days.

Currently, SpaceX has three flight-ready Raptor engines waiting for the opportunity to participate in the testing. One of these engines will be installed on SN4. A Raptor engine is not installed until after the cryogenic proof test, as that test uses hydraulic pistons to simulate the forces created by Raptors during flight.

After SpaceX performs the Raptor installation on SN4, teams will need to conduct checkouts of the engine on the vehicle. These will include gimbal, ignitor, and fuel pre-burner tests, among others. Only then will SpaceX be ready to attempt a static fire. April 29 was originally the target for a static fire test, but a one day delay with the cryogenic proof test means that the static fire is now likely targeting no earlier than April 30

All in all, the company’s target of doing a hop with this prototype this summer appears increasingly likely.

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SpaceX rolls out next Starship prototype

9:59 am

Capitalism in space: SpaceX has completed construction of its next Starship prototype and has moved it to its test stand in preparation for further tests.

This is the fourth prototype. If the tank pressure tests go well, they hope to add engines and do a twelve mile hop with this prototype, landing vertically. If not, they will try again with later prototypes. Regardless, the goal is to do that hop this year.

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Swarm and Momentus team up to launch and position satellites

9:37 am

Capitalism in space: Swarm, builder of the tiny cubesats dubbed SpaceBees, has teamed up with Momentus to use that company’s Vigoride cubesat upper stage to position its satellites in different orbits after launch.

Under an agreement announced April 22, Momentus will arrange rides for 12 Swarm SpaceBee satellites on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rideshare mission in December 2020 with additional SpaceBee launches scheduled in 2021 and 2022.

To offer global coverage for customers seeking to relay messages through the internet, Swarm satellites must be stationed in different orbital planes and spread out within those orbital planes like a string of pearls, Sara Spangelo, Swarm co-founder and CEO, told SpaceNews.

For the Falcon 9 launch in December, Momentus will not move Swarm SpaceBees to a new orbital plane. In the future, Momentus’ Vigoride in-space shuttle will offer Swarm the option of moving SpaceBees from the rocket’s drop-off point to different locations, Negar Feher, Momentus vice president of product and business development, said by email.

Both companies have raised significant investment capital.

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