Tag: commercial

NASA pulls funding from private asteroid hunter

10:57 pm

Because of a failure to meet its developmental deadlines, NASA has cut its ties with the privately funded Sentinel satellite, designed to spot 90% of all near Earth asteroids that might pose a threat to the Earth.

The problem for the B612 Foundation, the private company committed to building Sentinel, is that they haven’t clearly laid out a way any investors could make money from the satellite. Thus, they have so far raised only $1.6 million from private sources. They need almost half a billion to build it, according to their own budget numbers.

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Congress places additional limits on Russian rocket engine use

10:48 pm

Bad news for ULA and the Atlas 5: A defense bill approved by the Congressional negotiators has placed further limits on the number of Russian rocket engines ULA can use in future Atlas 5 government launches.

The bill, which still faces an Obama veto, only allows ULA to use 9 more Russian engines. The company however says it needs to have at least 18 available to keep its ability to launch government payloads while it develops its new Vulcan rocket.

Read the whole article. The political complexity of this whole situation does not bode well for ULA or its Vulcan rocket. Too many players with too many conflicting goals appear to make it difficult for the company to push the development forward efficiently.

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Smallsat company buys its own Falcon 9 rocket to launch 20 satelites

10:40 pm

The competition heats up: Spaceflight Industries has purchased a single dedicated Falcon 9 rocket launch to launch 20 small satellites sometime in 2017.

Buying a dedicated launch, rather that seeking excess capacity on other launches, provides Spaceflight with more than just additional payload capacity. Secondary or “rideshare” payloads are subject to the schedule of the primary capability, and can be bumped off the launch if the mass of the primary payload grows. With a dedicated mission, Spaceflight is in greater control. “It helps us establish a regular cadence of launches,” Blake said. “We can book all kinds of rideshare passengers onto something that is going to be there at a certain time to a certain orbit.”

This purchase also indicates the growing strength of the smallsat industry. These companies are beginning to gain the investment capital to buy their own launches rather than fly as secondary payloads.

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Development of Blue Origin’s BE-4 rocket engine moves forward

10:33 pm

The competition heats up: Blue Origin has completed more than 100 development tests of its new BE-4 rocket engine, being developed for ULA.

Much of this announcement sounds like public relations blather. However, it contained this nugget of information that is crucial to understanding why this engine is likely to get built quickly:

The BE-4 engine is also the leading candidate to be used in the first stage of ULA’s Vulcan vehicle. Speaking to reporters after the Sept. 15 Florida event, Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos said that while he was aware of competing engines for the Vulcan, like the AR-1 under development by Aerojet Rocketdyne, he was focused on completing the BE-4. “We’re going to build the best 21st century engine that we can for ULA,” he said. “Ultimately they will make the decision about what they want to do.”

Bezos also noted that, unlike the AR-1 or other concepts, Blue Origin was not seeking funding from the U.S. Air Force to help pay for development of the BE-4. “The most unique feature of the BE-4 engine is that it’s fully funded,” he said. “It’s not something you see in rocket engine programs very often.” [emphasis mine]

Aerojet Rocketdyne wants the government to pay for its new AR-1 engine. To get that done, they need to lobby Congress for funds that are simply unreliable in these days of budget-cutting. Moreover, it means that Aerojet Rocketdyne is not fully committed to the engine: if the funds don’t arrive they won’t build it.

Blue Origin is going forward, fully committed, and will likely deliver, if only because they can’t get their investment back until they do.

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Creeping towards commercial and private weather satellites

10:13 pm

Link here. The editorial at Space News outlines the effort in Congress to force NOAA to buy weather data supplied by private commercial satellite companies rather than build its own satellites. It also outlines what might be the major reason private companies have never been able to make a profit in the field:

The agency [NOAA] is obliged as a member the World Meteorological Organization [WMO] to share weather data openly and freely with other nations. If that obligation applies to commercially procured data, as NOAA insists, it could dramatically shrink the addressable global market for commercial weather data — to the point that it could shatter business models. – See more at: http://spacenews.com/editorial-inching-toward-a-commercial-weather-policy/#sthash.vG9fs3Sj.dpuf

In other words, private companies can’t sell their data because of the U.S.’s membership in the WMO, which requires that data to be made available for free. To make the commercialization of weather work, the U.S. is going to have to pull out of WMO, something I think will be difficult to sell to Congress.

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Virgin Galactic tests new rocket engine

10:04 pm

The competition heats up? Virgin Galactic has released video of a test burn of a new engine designed to work with its LauncherOne rocket.

I put a question mark above because I have become very skeptical of any press announcements out of Virgin Galactic. They might have made progress on this new engine, and it also appears that they are doing engine work first for developing LauncherOne, a wise plan. However, their track record with SpaceShipTwo makes me doubtful about their ability to follow through. They need to produce to make me a believer once again.

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The modern glassmaker

6:01 pm

An evening pause: Though the last two minutes are a commercial and can be ignored, the rest of this video shows the modern way glass is produced for our technological society. Most fascinating, especially because the way it is done surprised me.

Hat tip Rocco.

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First rocket arrives at Vostochny

8:25 am

The competition heats up: The Russians have now delivered to Vostochny the first Soyuz rocket for launch from that spaceport.

The launch is still planned for December, though no one would be surprised if it got delayed.

One minor but interesting thing to note at the link above. The pictures of the train and the containers holding the rocket sections were taken by none other than Dmitry Rogozin, the Russian deputy prime minister whom Putin himself has placed in charge of the construction of Vostochny. This is as if Obama put Biden in charge of NASA’s SLS program, and Biden himself took pictures of some construction event for the news media.

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Aerojet is considering increasing its $2 billion offer to buy ULA

9:29 am

The competition heats up: A news report today suggests that Aeroject Rocketdyne is considering increasing its $2 billion bid to buy ULA, thus forcing that company to use its rocket engines rather than Blue Origin’s.

The article contains a lot of information that helps explain the background behind Aerojet Rocketdyne’s offer as well as ULA’s recent switch to Blue Origin. For one thing, ULA apparently dumped Aeroject because the company refused to invest any of its own money in developing a new rocket engine.

Last summer, Aerojet’s board also rejected ULA’s request that Aerojet invest $300 million to accelerate work on the AR-1 engine it is developing as an alternative to the Russian RD-180 engine that powers ULA’s Atlas V rocket, the sources said. … Aerojet’s refusal to invest more in the AR-1 engine ultimately drove ULA to opt for the BE-4 engine being developed by privately held Blue Origin, which is owned by Amazon.com founder and billionaire Jeff Bezos, the sources said.

More significant, it appears that the Rocketdyne portion of the company is owned by the Russians!

An Aerojet takeover of ULA would also require Russia to give its regulatory approval and transfer a technology license for use of the RD-180 engines, according to two of the sources. Russia refused to transfer the license to Aerojet when it bought Rocketdyne from Pratt & Whitney, a United Technologies Corp (UTX.N) unit in 2013, forcing Pratt to retain control of a small company that brokers RD-180 sales, and could be more reluctant to do so now, the sources said.

While the quote above is somewhat confusing, it certainly suggests that, with Congress banning the use of Russian-built engines in American rockets, using Aerojet Rocketdyne engines by ULA has become problematic.

In related more bad news for Aeroject Rocketdyne, the company has just agreed to pay Orbital ATK $50 million in connection with last year’s Antares launch failure. In addition, they will take back the Russian-built engines they refurshed and sold to Orbital. The agreement also ends the company’s part in Antares.

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China debuts another new rocket

9:10 am

The competition heats up: China successfully completed the first launch of another new rocket today, putting three technology satellites into orbit with its solid-fueled Long March 11 rocket.

The Long March-11 (Chang Zhwng-11) is a small solid-fueled quick-reaction launch vehicle developed by the China Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology (CALT). It’s goal is to provide an easy to operate quick-reaction launch vehicle, that can remain in storage for long period and to provide a reliably launch on short notice. Very little is known about the rocket, with only one badly taken photo available on the internet. However, LM-11 is known to be a solid-fueled launch vehicle equipped with a liquid-fueled trim stage.

Moreover, the three satellites the rocket put in orbit are cubesats designed to test formation flying technologies. This puts China in the forefront of the effort to make these tiny satellites capable of doing what larger satellites now do, thus making possible the eventual replacement of those more costly larger satellites.

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Boeing reveals landing sites for Starliner

11:33 pm

The competition heats up: Boeing has revealed the prime landing sites for its manned Starliner capsule.

Boeing is still finalizing a list of five candidate landing sites in the Western United States, but the U.S. Army’s White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico and the Army’s Dugway Proving Ground in Utah will initially be the prime return locations, said Chris Ferguson, deputy manager of the CST-100 Starliner program. The capsules will parachute to airbag-cushioned landings after each mission, beginning with the CST-100’s first test flights in 2017.

The article also outlines the overall status of Starliner, including what sounds to me like some scheduling and design concerns:

Boeing is taking a different approach to development of its human-rated spacecraft than SpaceX, which has already completed a pad abort test and plans an in-flight abort demo in late 2016. SpaceX is testing as it goes, while Boeing is doing more design work up front. “A lot of focus is on ensuring, at this phase, that we’ve got full rigor in all our processes and all of our designs, really trying to buy down the risk that something could come up downstream to perturbate either our design or our schedule,” Mulholland said.

Boeing plans no such in-flight escape test, and Mulholland said it can prove out the CST-100 abort system through wind tunnel analyses. “That’s our philosophy — to make sure we don’t run a test just to go run a test,” Mulholland said. “We make sure we fully understand all the requirements that we need to certify to, and we pick the best approach.”

Mulholland said the sequence of test flights in 2017 is tight, but Boeing’s schedule has margin to achieve the start of operational missions by the end of that year. Managers decided to move the pad abort test from early 2017 to August, a change that Mulholland said created more margin in the schedule leading to the first crew flight. [emphasis mine]

The lack of an in-flight test of the abort system is worrisome. This sounds just like NASA and Boeing in the shuttle era when they repeatedly made overconfident claims about the shuttle’s reliability and safety that were completely unrealistic, based not on tests but on computer simulations. The tight schedule also is a concern, especially because of the corporate culture of Boeing, which has a history of using these contracts to squeeze money from the government while putting a low priority on actually building anything.

I fear that might be what is happening here, especially since Boeing, unlike SpaceX, refused to build much of anything prior to the announcement of its Starliner contract. The company does not like to take any risks at all.

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GAO criticizes the staff and budget request of FAA’s commercial space office

11:12 pm

A GAO report has concluded that the FAA has not provided sufficient justification for its 2016 requested budget and staff increases for its Office of Commercial Space Transportation (AST).

AST requested an additional $1.5 million more plus an increase of its staff by 13 to handle what it expects to be an increase in commercial launches. However,

The GAO report cautioned about using predictions of launches as a reason for hiring additional staff because, in recent years, “the actual number of launches during those years was much lower than what FAA projected.” In one example, the FAA projected it would license more than 40 launches and reentries in 2014, but the actual number was about 20.

The report also revealed a split among companies in the commercial launch business about the importance of increasing AST’s budget. While industry organizations like the Commercial Spaceflight Federation have expressed their support for the proposed budget increase, only three of the nine companies surveyed by the GAO believed the office has insufficient resources to deal with its workload. Three other companies thought the office has sufficient resources, and the remaining three expressed no opinion. The report did not identify which companies held those opinions, but did list the nine companies contacted by the GAO: Blue Origin, Boeing, Masten Space Systems, Orbital ATK, SpaceX, United Launch Alliance, Virgin Galactic, Vulcan Aerospace and XCOR Aerospace.

The second paragraph in the quote above suggests that a majority of the private companies that AST would regulate are not enthused about giving that government agency more resources or abilities. To me, I suspect that the phrase “We’re here to help you!” and what it usually signifies about the government has something to do with that lack of enthusiasm.

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ULA and Orbital ATK ink new rocket motor contract

10:55 pm

The competition heats up: ULA has signed a new contract with Orbital ATK to provide solid rocket motors for its Atlas 5 and Vulcan rockets.

This deal is another nail in the coffin of Aerojet Rocketdyne, as it strongly suggests that the corporate leadership at ULA is very uninterested in doing any business with that rocket engine builder. Recently they have been taking their business every where but to Aerojet.

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Around the World in 80 Days

6:01 pm

An evening pause: Hat tip to Phil Berardelli, author of the new edition of Phil’s Favorite 500: Loves of a Moviegoing Lifetime, who notes, “Producer Mike Todd lured dozens of stars to appear in cameos in his still-glorious take on the classic Jules Verne novel, and nowhere were they more delightful than in the San Francisco saloon scene.”

How many well known actors and performers can you spot doing cameos in this short clip?

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Long March 6 launch a success

9:12 pm

The competition heats up: The first launch of China’s smallsat rocket Long March 6 was a success on Saturday, putting 20 satellites into orbit.

This rocket is part of a new family of Chinese rockets, modularly designed so that can be reconfigured depending on payload or mission. The big launch however will be next year, when they attempt the first test flight of the largest member of this family.

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China to launch new rocket today

7:54 am

The competition heats up: With the expected first launch of China’s new Long March 6 rocket today, this report nicely outlines the status of the country’s rocket program.

Like Russia’s Angara and SpaceX’s Falcon, the new generation of Long March rockets are modular and use the same rocket engine. This has reduced cost and allows for faster assembly. The launch today is the maiden flight of the smaller member of this family. The key launch will be that of the larger Long March 5, scheduled for next year. Capable of putting 25 tons in orbit (five more than Proton), this is the rocket they plan to use to launch the modules for their full-sized space station.

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Philomena Cunk’s Moments of Wonder: Time

6:01 pm

An evening pause: This hilarious parody of BBC science documentaries, which are not much different than many American PBS science documentaries, captures perfectly the typical empty-headed interviewers that I myself have sometimes had to deal with during too many of my television and radio appearances. They are not only often ignorant of some basic science, they are also ignorant of their own ignorance. They think they know a lot, and thus are easily confused and defensive when suddenly confronted with that ignorance.

I especially like her description of “the famous Greenwich Marillion line.”

Hat tip to Danae.

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ULA rejects Aerojet Rocketdyne $2 billion bid to buy company

4:41 pm

The competition heats up: Boeing today said that it has rejected Aerojet Rocketdyne’s $2 billion bid to buy ULA, the Boeing/Lockheed launch partnership.

“The unsolicited proposal for ULA is not something we seriously entertained,” Boeing spokesman Todd Blecher said. Boeing said it remained committed “to ULA and its business, and to continued leadership in all aspects of space, as evidenced by the agreement announced last week with Blue Origin,” a company owned by Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos that is designing the engine for a new rocket being designed by ULA.

Lockheed declined comment, saying it did not discuss transactions with other companies. A source familiar with the matter said Lockheed’s refusal to comment did not reveal any disagreement between Lockheed and Boeing, and both companies agreed to reject the bid.

This might not end the issue, as Aerojet Rocketdyne officials might still follow up with a more formal proposal.

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NASA delays first Orion manned flight two more years

4:02 pm

Surprise, surprise! NASA today announced that the first manned flight of the Orion capsule will likely be delayed two more years to 2023.

Orion has been under development since 2006, and is expected to have cost more than $17 billion when that first mission flies in 2023. SLS, once called Constellation but with a different configuration, has been under development since 2011, and has cost about that much through today. All told, I would estimate that by the time that flight occurs in 2023 (assuming it doesn’t get delayed again) NASA will have spent more than $40 billion.

This is a joke, but a very painful one. It is going to take NASA almost two decades to get one capsule off the ground. Compare that with the 1960s space race, where we went from nothing to landing on the Moon in a little more than eleven years.

If NASA had been spending this money on planetary missions, they might actually have been doing something worthwhile with it. Meanwhile, the private companies, SpaceX, Blue Origin, Boeing, Orbital ATK, are building capsules and rockets that are as capable, if not more so, and are getting them built now for less than a quarter that price, in the range of about $6 to $8 billion.

If our elected officials in Congress had any brains, they would shut Orion/SLS down now, and save the taxpayers an awful lot of money.

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Aerojet Rocketdyne lobbies its rocket engines to Congress and ULA

8:39 am

The competition heats up: Officials at Aerojet Rocketdyne yesterday lobbied hard for Congress and ULA to finance and buy their new AR-1 engine, designed to replace the Russian engines used in the Atlas 5 rocket.

More here, including the threat by those officials that the development of the engine could slip past 2019 if Congress doesn’t give the company more money.

The first comment at the bottom of the page of the first article above I think possibly outlines some of the reasons behind Aerojet Rocketdyne’s bid to buy ULA.

The development of the Blue Origin BE-4 is underway, and a launch vehicle like the proposed Vulcan would certainly be an asset to national security and commercial space development. But, as was stated, such a LNG/LO2 vehicle would need a different infrastructure to support it. ULA’s Atlas V is the most mature and reliable [launch vehicle] we have. The problem with it is a political one, because of its using the Russian RD-180 engine. From what has been published, plugging the BE-4 into an Atlas V is a non-starter; the BE-4 is meant for the Vulcan…if ULA can obtain funding on something more than a per-quarter schedule! Aerojet-Rocketdyne’s AR-1 would be a more logical choice to replace the RD-180, BUT…ULA won’t release the Interface Control Documents (ICD’s) to Aerojet-Rocketdyne. Hence, AR’s attempt to buy ULA.

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