The box that built the modern world.
A really fascinating, detailed, and well-written article about something none of us thinks about but has made our lives infinitely better.
Chicken Little report: Aerospace defense contractors Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and Raytheon all show better than expected profits despite sequestration.
It seems that each of these companies, finding their profits from defense pork to be relatively flat or dropping slightly, worked harder to sell their other products to other customers, and were generally successful. What a concept!
The developmental engineering successes of the new commercially-built private spaceships, Dragon, CST-100, and Dream Chaser, appears to be winning over Congress.
The article linked above is mostly about Boeing’s effort with its CST-100 spaceship, but within it was this significant paragraph:
Last week, the House Appropriations committees approved $500 million and Senate appropriators $775 million for commercial crew development as part of NASA’s 2014 budget. The first figure is well below the Obama administration’s $821 million request, a figure NASA Administrator Charles Bolden has characterized as essential to meet the 2017 objective. Nonetheless, agency and company managers believe legislators are losing their skepticism over a program that has so far committed $1.4 billion to competing vehicle designs from SpaceX, Sierra Nevada, Boeing and others. [emphasis mine]
Congress is still insisting that NASA spend far more for the Space Launch System (SLS), but they do appear to be increasingly less interested in cutting the new commercial crew program. Eventually, a light will go off in their dim brains and they will realize how much more cost effective this program is compared to SLS. I expect this to happen sometime in the next three years, It is then that SLS will die.
Note that I don’t have any problems at all with the above cuts to the commercial program. It is far better to keep these private efforts on a short leash, thereby forcing the companies to stay lean and mean, than to give them a blank check (as has been done in the past and with SLS) and thus allow them to become fat and lazy.
The competition heats up: India has set August 19 as the launch date for its home-built Geosycnchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle (GSLV).
Their last attempt to launch this rocket three years ago ended in spectacular failure. A success here would allow India to become a serious player in the launch market, thereby increasing the competition and thus helping to lower prices and encourage innovation.
The competition heats up: SpaceX has begun assembly of the upgraded Falcon 9 rocket that will launch its first commercial payload in early September.
This launch has been significantly delayed because the company was testing the actual engines to be used in the rocket, and had a series of engine aborts during testing (as outlined in the article above). Once the engines completed a full duration burn last week, however, the way was cleared for launch.
The article is very detailed, and also outlines the other new features of the upgraded Falcon 9 rocket to be flown for the first time in September. I must admit that this list makes me nervous. A lot rides on the success of this launch, both for SpaceX and for the entire new commercial space industry.
The competition heats up: Bigelow Aerospace announces prices for visiting or renting their space station modules.
For countries, companies, or even visiting individuals that wish to utilize SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon capsule, Bigelow Aerospace will be able to transport an astronaut to the Alpha Station for only $26.25 million. Using Boeing’s CST-100 capsule and the Atlas V rocket, astronauts can be launched to the Alpha Station for $36.75 million per seat. In stark contrast to the short stays of a week or so aboard the ISS that we have seen wealthy individuals pay as much as $40 million for, astronauts visiting the Bigelow station will enjoy 10 – 60 days in orbit. During this time, visiting astronauts will be granted access to the Alpha Station’s shared research facilities. Examples of available equipment include a centrifuge, glove-box, microscope, furnace, and freezer. Also, potential clients should note that as opposed to the ISS, where astronauts dedicate the lion’s share of their time to supporting station operations and maintenance, astronauts aboard the Alpha Station will be able to focus exclusively on their own experiments and activities, ensuring that both nations and companies can gain full value from their investment in a human spaceflight program. [emphasis in original]
The release also describes price plans whereby the customer can rent part of a module for a period of time, as well as the prices for the naming rights to a module.
I hadn’t heard about it elsewhere and do not remember if this is old news or not. The announcement on the website is undated. Nonetheless, as the release notes, these prices undercut the fees charged by the Russians and provide far more opportunities for the customer.
A review and analysis of China’s space program.
The review’s one fault is that it ignores the military aspects of China’s effort. Nonetheless, its conclusions on China’s reasons for building this program illustrate once again why I repeatedly say, “The competition is heating up.”
The competition heats up: Boeing today unveiled a full scale mock-up of the interior of its CST-100 manned capsule.
From one of my readers: The Plundering of NASA: an Expose, How pork barrel politics harm American spaceflight leadership. You can buy the ebook edition here, and the print edition here.
I just finished reading it. Boozer’s introduction and opening two chapters provide one of the best detailed summaries explaining clearly why the United States today cannot launch its own astronauts into space, and why we are threatened with the possibility that we won’t be able to do it for years to come. And while his perspective is mostly from an engineering perspective, he also gives some of the political background behind this situation.
His later chapters are not as effectively written, but the opening is still worth it.
I will give a hint about his thesis: it involves comparing the Space Launch System (SLS) with private commercial space. And SLS does not fare well.
Robot engineers have successfully built a fleet of small flying robot helicopters that can fly individually or as complex large arrays. With video.
Applying this biologically-inspired solution to swarms of robots could enable a wide range of applications. Swarms of robots could be used to explore other planets, or search a large area for a missing person. When a larger payload needs to be lifted, groups of robots would combine to make a larger flying platform and when that job was done, disperse into smaller groups that can cover a larger area. The advantage of distributed control in these scenarios is that there is no vulnerable central control unit which, if taken out, could bring down the entire mission.
The competition heats up: With Proton rocket’s most recent launch failure, Inmarsat looks for alternatives.
The failure and its spectacular nature, all caught on video — oscillating trajectory on liftoff before tipping over, bursting into flames and then crashing — cast a harsh light on Inmarsat’s sole-source decision for the Global Xpress satellites. The company’s stock tumbled on the London Stock Exchange but has since recovered as details emerged about the relatively easily addressed causes of the rocket’s failure.
Inmarsat officials said at the time of the ILS contract award that they received an exceptionally low price in return for booking all three launches on Proton and that the vehicle’s record justified the choice not to include a second vehicle in the Global Xpress mix.
NASA and Jeff Bezos today confirmed that one of the Saturn 5 first stage engines recovered from the ocean floor by Bezos’ expedition was from the Apollo 11 launch.
The Russians admitted today that, due to the Proton launch failure two weeks ago, only five more Proton launches can occur this year.
Before the crash they had hoped to get in about nine launches, more than one per month, all of which were commercial in nature. It was my impression that this launch rate was an effort to provide service to their customers as fast as possible, in order to hold on to them. The crash, like the previous Proton failures in the past few years, has given their competitors a window of opportunity to grab the Russian market share. If SpaceX is successful in its first commercial launch in September the competition in this industry will certainly heat up.
Russia confirms that a Proton rocket failed at launch two weeks ago because three of six sensors were installed upside down.
They are going to subject the personnel involved to lie detector tests in order to find out who did what. We should then expect them to prosecute those individuals. Unlike the U.S., they won’t simply fire them.
The private plan to put a telescope on the Moon.
The competition heats up: SpaceX has renegotiated its lease with the city of McGregor, Texas, in order to begin testing the Falcon Heavy rocket.
What I found stunning about this article is this quote:
The Falcon Heavy will have commercial, civil and national security applications, Ra said, adding that customers will pay $81 million to $135 million per launch, depending on the weight of the payload and the rocket’s destination. That is about twice the price of a Falcon 9 launch.
These prices for the Falcon Heavy are actually comparable or cheaper than that charged by most other rocket companies for geosynchronous launches. If SpaceX succeeds in doing this — launching Falcon Heavy at these prices — they will certainly open deep space to private enterprise. And even if their prices end up being twice this, those prices will still be anywhere from one fourth to less than a tenth of what it will cost NASA to launch its SLS rocket.
Which should make us all wonder: Why is anyone in Congress still voting to fund SLS?
The competition heats up: SpaceX has successfully completed a full duration test firing of 9 upgraded Merlin engines.
The full mission duration firing of the next generation Falcon 9 booster was completed on Sunday. The booster’s nine Merlin 1D engines fired for approximately three minutes, simulating what the booster may experience in flight before stage separation.
With this success, I suspect they are finally ready to begin their commercial launches. The first is presently scheduled for September 5.
The competition heats up: Orbital Sciences has issued an update on its Antares launch schedule, with the launch window for the Cygnus demonstration mission to ISS now set for September 14-19.
They announced this on July 10, but I am only now catching up. The launch could happen sooner, if there are delays to the launch of NASA’s LADEE moon probe. Right now the two launches are coordinated to have LADEE launch first.
The competition heats up: Sierra Nevada has completed its first tow tests of its Dream Chaser engineering test vehicle, now officially named “Eagle.”
These tests were merely to check out the craft’s landing systems, with it being pulled along the runway at 10 to 20 mph. Faster tests, followed by actual drop tests, are to follow.
The article has some great information about Dream Chaser itself.
Got $125? You can do an experiment in space.
The competition heats up: It appears that SpaceX has completed another test firing of its new Merlin engine.
The Russian investigation into the crash of their Proton rocket on Tuesday now includes a criminal prosecutor.
“The investigative department of the Russian Investigative Committee at the Baikonur complex has opened a criminal case on this incident over evidence of a crime, put forward in the Russian Criminal Code Article 216 Part 1. The Baikonur prosecutor’s office is overseeing the investigation,” the statement said.
There is also another story from this news service claiming that the crash occurred because the rocket launched a half second early, confusing its computer systems.
For July 4th: Legitimacy.
The competition heats up: This week’s launch failure of the Proton rocket leaves two satellite communications firms in a quandary.
Luxembourg-based SES joins London-based Inmarsat among the commercial customers awaiting Proton launches later this year, a prospect that almost certainly disappeared in the fireball that engulfed Proton shortly after liftoff from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. Inmarsat’s entire next-generation high-speed mobile communications product offer is booked on three Proton launches.
It appears that their only other launch options are Arianespace, which is booked up, and SpaceX, which is not yet ready to take on this much new business.
In other words, the launch industry has a need for more launchers from companies willing to compete for that business.
Update: Arianespace has said that if they get the orders quickly, they might be able to fit the launch’s into their 2014 launch manifest. That has the sound of a company that wants to make money, and is willing to do whatever it takes to capture the business.
Throw away those batteries! A fifteen year old has invented a flashlight that runs on body heat alone.
The Proton rocket is now grounded pending an investigation into today’s launch failure.
This is no surprise. What is more significant is that the crash today will likely delay all launches out of Baikonur for at least three months.
[C]ontamination will likely suspend activities at Baikonur Cosmodrome for two or three months, Ria Novosti reported, citing an unnamed source within the Russian space industry. The launch of a robotic Progress cargo ship to the International Space Station from Baikonur, currently scheduled for July 27, will probably be delayed as a result, according to this source. The next manned launch from Baikonur is Soyuz 36, which is slated to blast off on Sept. 25 to take three new crewmembers to the International Space Station.
The competition heats up: Both SpaceX and Boeing say that they are on schedule to make their first test flights of their manned capsules before 2016.
Boeing claims they will be able to make their first manned flight in 2016. SpaceX says it will fly manned by 2015.
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The competition heats up: The Kickstarter campaign by the private company Planetary Resources has made its $1.5 million goal.
That campaign reached its $1 million goal on June 19, opening the way for one of Planetary Resources’ Arkyd-100 space telescopes to be used for educational and personal imaging projects. The biggest crowd-pleaser was a $25 offer that will let backers take “space selfies” — orbital pictures showing a display on the telescope with an image submitted by a backer in the foreground, and Earth in the background.
The Asteroid Zoo plan was [the $1.5 million] stretch goal for the campaign. Planetary Resources will partner with Zooniverse to create a game-like online program to identify asteroids, modeled on other Zooniverse citizen-science efforts such as Galaxy Zoo, Moon Zoo and Planet Hunters. Users would be recruited to join in, and then trained to spot the telltale signs of an asteroid’s movement — for example, by “blinking” multiple images of the same patch of sky, or using more sophisticated techniques. The search would draw upon more than 3 million images from the Catalina Sky Survey.
The competition heats up: India today successfully launched the first satellite in its own homegrown GPS constellation.
This launch was with their very reliable but smaller Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle rocket (PSLV). They still need to get their more powerful Geosynchronous Satellite Launch rocket (GSLV) into operation to be truly competitive.
A Russian Proton rocket went out of control and crashed mere seconds after launch today at Baikonur.
Video below the fold. It appears the rocket’s avionics had completely failed so that the engines could no longer control its flight. Obviously that is speculation. What is clear is that the failure was not because of a problem with the rocket’s Briz-M upper stage, which has been the source of the five Proton failures during the past three years.
This is very very very bad news for the Russian commercial rocket effort. They have been trying to recover from those earlier failures, and with the string of successes this year had appeared to doing so. Instead, they now have had their worst and most spectacular launch failure in decades, so spectacular it is reminiscent of the rocket failures of the 1950s. Worse, the failure is not because of the relatively new Briz-M upper stage, but in their well established, decades old first stage, indicating that there are some fundamental quality control problems in their manufacturing process that they have not fixed.
This cannot be good for their business, especially as they have some serious competition. Arianespace, though expensive, is very reliable. SpaceX, though new and essentially untried, is very competitive in price. So is Orbital Sciences.
Expect a lot of heads to roll.
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