Tag: commercial

Rocket startup ABL lays off a significant number of staff

9:52 am

As a result of a launchpad fire that destroyed its rocket — just before it was going to make the second attempt to achieve orbit — rocket startup ABL has now laid off a significant but unstated number of staff in order to save money.

In a post on LinkedIn Aug. 30, Harry O’Hanley, chief executive of ABL, said the company was laying off an unspecified number of people. He included the email he sent to company staff after an all-hands meeting to discuss the layoffs.

In 2021 the company had raised almost $400 million in private investment capital, but it is possible that the loss of its first two rockets, one mere seconds after launch and the second before the launch could even occur, has possibly caused some investors to pull their money from the company. It is also possible those investors also recognized that the increased red tape imposed on all rocket companies since the FAA instituted its new “streamlined” Part 450 regulatory rules in 2021 was likely going to delay the next ABL launch attempt so much it made investments in the company no longer viable.

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SpaceX resumes launches with a bang!

9:29 am

Within hours of the FAA clearing SpaceX to resume launches, the company did so most emphatically, launching twice in little more than an hour apart from opposite coasts.

First the company placed 20 Starlink satellites into orbit, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Cape Canaveral. The first stage completed its eighteenth flight, landing on a drone ship in the Atlantic.

Then, one hour and five minutes later, the company launched 21 Starlink satellites, the Falcon 9 lifting off from Vandenberg in California. That first stage completed its ninth flight, landing on a drone ship in the Pacific.

This fast return to flight underlines the unnecessary delay of at least one day in launches caused by the FAA’s red tape. SpaceX had scheduled at least one of these launches the previous night — and was clearly ready to launch — but had to cancel it because the FAA stood in the way.

The leaders in the 2024 launch race:

86 SpaceX
36 China
10 Rocket Lab
9 Russia

American private enterprise now leads the rest of the world combined in successful launches 101 to 54, while SpaceX by itself leads the entire world, including American companies 86 to 69.

2024 is now the second year in a row the U.S. rocket industry has completed more than 100 launches, something it could not do for the first three-quarters of a century after Sputnik, when our precious government used NASA to run our entire space program. Now that freedom and capitalism has managed to wrest some control away from NASA, Americans are finally doing what they would have done in the 1960s, had Congress and President Kennedy not stepped in, first requiring all space exploration be run under a “space program” controlled by NASA, and then passing the Communications Satellite Act in 1962 which forbid Americans from running private profit-oriented launches without government participation.

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FAA gets out of the way

8:54 pm

My heart be still! The FAA today cleared SpaceX to resume launches, after grounding its fleet for two days because a Falcon 9 first stage, flying on its 23rd launch and having successfully placed 21 satellites into orbit, fell over after landing softly on its drone ship in the Atlantic.

The FAA statement was short but to my mind illustrates again the growing effort of the administrative state to require Americans to obtain its permission to do anything at all.

The SpaceX Falcon 9 vehicle may return to flight operations while the overall investigation of the anomaly during (Wednesday’s) mission remains open, provided all other license requirements are met. SpaceX made the return to flight request on Aug. 29 and the FAA gave approval on Aug. 30.

That the FAA even grounded SpaceX for one second, and then required SpaceX to ask permission to fly again, is all unacceptable and a great abuse of power. There was no reason for this grounding at all. Even as the FAA announced it two days ago the agency admitted the failed landing posed no threat to the public. It should have immediately said the company had every right to continue flying.

Even though there are people at the FAA with good intentions, the overall trend there and everywhere within that Washington bureaucracy is to expand its power, to make demands of Americans in every way, and to insist it must be the gatekeeper for any action by any American. Only today for example the FDA declared unilaterally that all retailers now have to obtain photo ID from anyone under thirty who wishes to buy tobacco. It claims it has the right to mandate this based on a legislation passed in 2019, but without question this is a very liberal interpretation of that law, which merely raised the minimum age for buying tobacco from 18 to 21. I am sure it did not give the FDA the outright ability to declare such mandates without any review by anyone.

Power grabs like this are only going to get worse, unless Americans vote in new legislators and support them when they act to neuter these agencies. It remains however strongly doubtful whether most Americans are willing to do this. It would require a love of freedom and the risks it entails to abandon the regulatory state, and right now I don’t think most people have that kind of courage. They have grown used to having a big daddy acting to protect them, and appear willing to accept that gentle tyranny more and more.

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Rowan Atkinson on free speech

6:01 pm

An evening pause: A different way to enter the weekend. This speech by this comedian was given about a decade ago as part of a campaign to change British law to get the word ‘insulting’ removed from Section 5 of the Public Order Act, as part of the Crime and Courts Bill. The campaign succeeded, but it appears the modern police and governments (from both sides of the political spectrum) in Great Britain have recently decided to ignore it. If you are conservative and criticize illegal immigration or Islam, those governments have decided that this speech is now illegal. I like this quote most of all:

“For me, the best way to increase society’s resistance to insulting or offensive speech is to allow a lot more of it. As with childhood diseases you can better resist those germs to which you have been exposed.”

Too bad we appear to have decided to abandon this wise philosophy, not only in regards to speech, but to infectious diseases as well.

Hat tip Rex Ridenoure.

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NASA names revised crew for next manned Dragon mission to ISS

9:34 am

NASA today named the two astronauts who will fly on the next manned Dragon mission to ISS, to be launched on September 24, 2024 for a six month mission, where they will be joined by the two astronauts who launched on Boeing’s Starliner in June but now will return with them when their Freedom capsule returns in February 2025.

NASA astronaut Nick Hague and Roscosmos cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov will launch no earlier than Tuesday, Sept. 24, on the agency’s SpaceX Crew-9 mission to the International Space Station. NASA astronauts Zena Cardman and Stephanie Wilson, previously announced as crewmates, are eligible for reassignment on a future mission. Hague and Gorbunov will fly to the space station as commander and mission specialist, respectively, as part of a two-crew member flight aboard a SpaceX Dragon.

The updated crew complement follows NASA’s decision to return the agency’s Boeing Crew Flight Test uncrewed and launch Crew-9 with two unoccupied seats. NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, who launched aboard the Starliner spacecraft in June, will fly home with Hague and Gorbunov in February 2025.

With Starliner now scheduled to return on September 6th and Freedom not arriving until around September 24th, there will be an eighteen day period when Wilmore and Williams will have a limited and more risky lifeboat option on ISS. If an incident should occur that requires station evacuation there is room to squeeze them inside SpaceX’s Endeavour Dragon capsule presently docked there, but they will return without flight suits. Their Dragon flight suits will not arrive until September 24th, on the next Dragon. The suits they used on Starliner will not work on Dragon.

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First New Glenn launch, set for October 13, 2024, only has an 8-day launch window

9:16 am

According to an article from Aviation Week today, in order for Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket to get its payload of two Mars orbiters on their way to Mars it must launch within a very short window lasting only eight days, beginning on the present launch date of October 13, 2024.

The Oct. 13-21 launch window is an ambitious goal. The aft and mid modules of New Glenn’s reusable first stage were recently attached, clearing the path for installation of the vehicle’s seven methane-fueled BE-4 engines, CEO Dave Limp noted in an Aug. 23 update on the X social media site.

A static hot-fire at New Glenn’s Florida launch complex is planned prior to launch. The company did not release the status of the New Glenn upper stage, which is to be powered by a pair of BE-3U engines fueled by liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen. A hot-fire of the second stage is also pending.

This launch will be the first ever for New Glenn. To get ready for that tight launch window it appears a great deal of work must be done in the next six weeks, some of which Blue Origin engineers will be doing for the very first time.

If there are any issues and that launch window is missed, the two NASA Escapade orbiters, built by Rocket Lab, will face a two-year delay until the next window to get to Mars re-opens. At that point New Glenn will likely do this launch with a dummy payload, since it needs to get off the ground in order to fulfill other launch contracts, including a 27-launch contract with Amazon for its Kuiper satellite constellation.

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NASA awards Intuitive Machines a new lunar lander contract

8:55 am

NASA yesterday announced that it has awarded Intuitive Machines a new lunar lander contract for $116.9 million to carry six NASA/ESA payloads to the surface of the Moon.

The announcement stated that the landing will be in the south pole region of the Moon, but did not reveal the specific location. Of the six science packages, the most important is a European Space Agency-led drill that will obtain samples from as much as three feet down and then analyze them.

The contract calls for a 2027 landing, and will be the fourth targeting the south pole region, following Intuitive Machines first attempted landing there early this year that landed but then tipped over, preventing its science instruments from functioning as planned.

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Starliner to return unmanned on September 6

8:44 am

NASA today announced that Starliner will undock from ISS on September 6, 2024 at about 6:00 PM (Eastern) and will then land six hours later at White Sands in New Mexico.

The announcement touts Starliner’s ability to fly autonomously, but based on what we know this is really not something to brag about. All Dragons do this routinely whether they are manned or not. Starliner required an upload of software to reconfirgure it for this, since it had originally been configured for a manned return and apparently that original software was not designed for an unmanned return.

In other words, the spacecraft as presently designed doesn’t have the ability to switch from autonomous to manned in a simple manner.

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Has the FAA grounded SpaceX?

9:59 am

The FAA statement yesterday seemed quite clear — that the agency was grounding all SpaceX launches until the investigation into the failed landing of a Falcon 9 first stage was completed. That clarity was further accepted by numerous news organizations today, all of which clearly described in their reporting the FAA’s action as a grounding of further SpaceX launches for an unspecified amount of time, from days to weeks. (See here, here, and here for just a few examples.)

Nonetheless, there are strong indications that the FAA’s grounding will be very short. For example, though no dates are presently firm, SpaceX continues to list at least two Starlink launches as well as the Polaris Dawn private manned mission as targeting launches over the next few days, with one Starlink launch still aiming for a 10:18 pm (Pacific) launch tonight from Vandenberg. That liftoff might be tentative, but that SpaceX is still pushing for that launch date suggests it is trying to pressure the FAA to back off.

And SpaceX has good reason to expect that pressure to work. The FAA has already admitted there were no public safety issues from the first stage failure. In the past it has allowed launches to proceed under that condition, even if the investigation was on-going. SpaceX is almost certainly making this point known to the FAA, if its managers don’t know it already. We will find out I think by the end of today.

Even if the FAA backs down, that it even attempted any grounding in this situation was an egregious abuse of its regulatory power. There was no rational reason for it to even hint at doing so, even based on its own regulations as well as its statutory authority. If the goal was to do its job and not to harass SpaceX and Elon Musk, it would have immediately announced that no grounding was required because no issues of public safety were involved in the failure. Instead, it pushed its power, forcing SpaceX to push back.

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Lockheed Martin testing its own inflatable module design

9:40 am

Lockheed Martin recently successfully completed a test of its own inflatable module design, conceived in this case not as a full-scale module but as an airlock for ingress and egress from a space station.

In the Aug. 14 test, the inflatable airlock design was put through multiple, gas-in/gas-out cycles — essentially inflations and deflations with enough nitrogen gas to pressurize the airlock to the point it becomes as rigid as steel — to assess the extent to which its Vectran material strains over time, a process called creep. Knowing how creep affects a Vectran structure will allow Lockheed Martin to properly assess its operational life potential. Test engineers here have also put subscale softgoods habitat designs to the test, purposely bursting them to spotlight their robust nature and determine their pressure thresholds.

With the addition of Lockheed Martin, there are now at least four companies building inflatable modules for sale to space station companies. Sierra Space has the most developed module design, but a company in India recently announced it will build and sell its own. In addition, an American startup dubbed Max Space is building its own test module and hopes to launch next year.

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