James Brown & Luciano Pavarotti – It’s A Man’s Man’s Man’s World
An evening pause: Hat tip Doug Johnson
Tag: commercial
NASA changes have cost Northrop Grumman $36 million on its Lunar Gateway module
Northrop Grumman yesterday revealed that unexpected requirement changes to the specifications of its HALO module for NASA’s Lunar Gateway space station has raised its cost for this fixed price contract by $36 million.
In the company’s fiscal second quarter financial results released July 27, the company announced an unfavorable estimate-at-completion adjustment of $36 million for its work on the Habitation and Logistics Outpost (HALO) module, one of the first elements of the Gateway. The company blamed the charge on “evolving Lunar Gateway architecture and mission requirements combined with macroeconomic challenges” that caused cost growth on the program.
…“We think that is best applied for commercial items or production programs with stable requirements and mature designs,” [the company’s CEO] said of fixed-price contracts. “As it’s turning out on the HALO program, the requirements are not as stable as we or the government anticipated, and we’re working with them to address that change management as we go forward.”
The HALO module was an upgrade of the company’s Cygnus cargo freighter, with its original fixed-price contract for $935 million.
On a fixed-price contract, NASA is not supposed to change its specifications. The company gets somewhat general requirements from NASA, and then builds the product to its own specifications. It appears that either NASA managers don’t seem to understand this and are causing the company problems, or the company itself had not anticipated some design and construction issues before bidding and are struggling to address them now. In the latter case Northrop Grumman managers might have themselves not understood the nature of fixed-price contracts, and had assumed NASA would simply pick up any increase in the project’s budget, as it does in cost-plus contracts. It apparently is not, and thus this old big space company is now suddenly forced to face reality.
Rocket Lab revises design of its new Neutron rocket
Rocket Lab has revised the design of its new Neutron rocket, reducing the number of fairing shells from four to two, and shifting the location of the first stages fins.
One of the major changes shown is how the payload fairing operates. In prior concepts, the fairing was comprised of 4 quarters that opened outward to allow second stage and payload separation. The new design shows two halves of the fairing opening. Moving from four to two fairings will provide more reliability for the rocket and fewer moving parts.
Another change is a slight design to the forward strakes (fins) that help steer the rocket back to its landing site. Unlike SpaceX, which uses grid fins, the Neutron rocket will use fins that provide more lift and can return to the launch site from further downrange. The forward fins also appear to have moved further up on the rocket, and the fairing halves size made a bit smaller.
The landing legs have also been redesigned, apparently to more closely match the design used on SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket.
These are all relatively minor changes, none of which change the fundamental design that calls for the rocket to be almost entirely reusable.
SpaceX’s Falcon 9 launches another 22 Starlink satellites
SpaceX tonight successfully put another 22 Starlink satellites into orbit, with its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Cape Canaveral.
The first stage completed its fifteenth flight, landing safely on a drone ship in the Atlantic. The two fairing halves completed their second flight.
The leaders in the 2023 launch race:
50 SpaceX
29 China
9 Russia
6 Rocket Lab
American private enterprise now leads China in successful launches 57 to 29, and the entire world combined 57 to 48, with SpaceX by itself leading the entire world (excluding American companies) 50 to 48.
Justin Johnson – Ghost of the Mountain
An evening pause: Haunting.
Hat tip Judd Clark.
FTC will not block the purchase of Aerojet Rocketdyne by L3Harris
How nice of them! The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) said yesterday that it will not block the planned purchase of Aerojet Rocketdyne by L3Harris, which the company expects to now complete in mere days.
The deal, if finalized, would place L3Harris on a solid footing to achieve Kubasik’s long-stated goal of positioning the company as the sixth major defense prime.
The forthcoming acquisition has also garnered support from an unlikely source: RTX, the parent company of missiles giant Raytheon. Executives from the company, which rely on Aerojet to deliver crucial parts, have been open in recent weeks that while they don’t love strengthening a competitor, they feel Aerojet is in desperate need of new leadership. “We’ve obviously always been concerned about Aerojet. But I would say some of these things have been magnified by all these external inputs,” Wes Kremer, Raytheon president, told Breaking Defense during last month’s Paris Air Show.
Aerojet has had problems for years, especially because the rocket engines it makes are very expensive. It has failed to garner any market share in the new emerging rocket industry, remaining dependent entirely on very generous government contracts and the older big space contractors. But even here, it lost out to Blue Origin when ULA was looking for engines for its new Vulcan rocket.
It is likely that after this merger, the name Aerojet Rocketdyne will vanish, a sad end to a company whose roots go back to the very beginning of the space age.
Boeing’s total losses due to Starliner now equal $1.5 billion
According to CNBC, the total losses for Boeing due to its on-going and persistent engineering problems flying its manned Starliner capsule now equal almost $1.5 billion, not $1.1 billion as estimated yesterday.
Since 2014, when NASA awarded Boeing with a nearly $5 billion fixed-price contract to develop Starliner, the company has recorded losses on the program almost every year. The charges total $1.47 billion, according to its annual reports and the company’s most recent quarterly filing.
The annual losses have ranged from $57 million in 2018 to $489 million in 2019.
At this moment, the only way Boeing can make a profit on Starliner is to garner a lot of other tourist customers, outside NASA. The problem is that SpaceX’s already operational fleet of four manned Dragon capsules has captured that market, with a capsule and rocket that has demonstrated remarkable reliability. To convince others to fly on Starliner it will have to fly it a lot beforehand in order to convince others its problems have really been fixed. This will take time and money, which will only add to the red ink.
Steve Ibsen – The Kitty Cat Dance
An evening pause: I posted this as an evening pause a dozen years ago. Diane found it again and said it must be posted again. I agree. It is absurdly silly but I guarantee that once you watch you will never forget it. It also appears, from the comments on the youtube page, that young children — who understand the importance of silly — like it especially.
A Dragon cargo capsule had a valve issue at ISS in June
The Dragon cargo capsule that had been docked to ISS in June apparently had a faulty valve that impacted no operations but has required SpaceX to review similar valves on all manned and cargo Dragon capsules.
The valve — known as an isolation valve — is designed to come on in case of a thruster leak, Reed said during the press conference. Since no leak was happening at the time it was stuck open, the valve “didn’t have to serve any purpose.”
The affected spacecraft, known as CRS-28, otherwise returned to Earth normally on June 30 after 25 days in space. After checking into the valve on CRS-28, SpaceX looked at its entire spacecraft line. They found “corrosion among certain units,” Reed said, which SpaceX is looking into identifying and addressing.
Knowing SpaceX, it will now not only find out the root cause, but fix it so that the corrosion never appears again, thus making its Dragon spacecraft even more reliable.
A third spaceport approved in Scotland
Despite some local opposition, a third spaceport has been approved in Scotland, allowing up to ten suborbital launches per year.
During launches, a 155m (250km) exclusion zone will be placed on the seas around St Kilda, the world-heritage site and archipelago north west of the site. It will be the third of its kind in Scotland, after spaceports were launched in Sutherland and Shetland.
The project, spearheaded by Comhairle nan Eilean Siar – Western Isles Council – has been met with opposition from locals with more than 1,000 people signing a petition rejecting the plans.
…Comhairle nan Eilean Siar had previously bought Scolpaig Farm for £1m and is developing it with private military contractor QinetiQ alongside space industry firms Rhea Group and Commercial Space Technologies.
It is unclear if the spaceport will eventually upgrade to providing orbital launch facilities. It will also have to compete with the two other spaceports in Scotland, as well as get launch approvals from the UK’s Civil Aviation Authority.
Dusty Henricksen’s snowboard run in 2020 U.S. Open
A evening pause: Let’s go downhill fast again, but in an entirely different manner.
Hat tip Judd Clark.
NASA awards 11 small development contracts to a variety of companies
Capitalism in space: NASA today announced that it has awarded small contracts to eleven different companies, ranging from big established companies like ULA and Lockheed Martin to small startups like Varda and Zeno, for developing a range of new technologies, from power production on the Moon to making building materials from lunar soil.
Five of the technologies will help humanity explore the Moon. For astronauts to spend extended periods of time on the lunar surface, they will need habitats, power, transportation, and other infrastructure. Two of the selected projects will use the Moon’s own surface material to create such infrastructure – a practice called in-situ resource utilization, or ISRU. Redwire will develop technologies that would allow use of lunar regolith to build infrastructure like roads, foundations for habitats, and landing pads.
Blue Origin’s technology could also make use of local resources by extracting elements from lunar regolith to produce solar cells and wire that could then be used to power work on the Moon.
Astrobotic’s selected proposal will advance technology to distribute power on the Moon’s surface, planned to be tested on a future lunar mission. The company’s CubeRover would unreel more than half a mile (one kilometer) of high-voltage power line that could be used to transfer power from a production system to a habitat or work area on the Moon.
The contracts range in price from $1.6 to $34.7 million, with Blue Origin getting that largest award.