Tag: competition

Boeing employees reject deal of union and company and go on strike

8:47 am

In another blow to the company, Boeing’s employees have gone on strike after overwhelming voting to reject a new deal their union officials had negotiated with the company that had called for a 25% salary increase across the board.

Members of the International Association of Machinists District 751, which represents about 33,000 Boeing workers in Washington state, walked off the job when their contract expired at midnight on Thursday night. Almost 95 per cent rejected the deal endorsed by their bargaining team on Sunday and 96 per cent voted to strike, easily exceeding the two-thirds majority needed to trigger a walkout.

Many of the union’s members expressed anger on social media, criticising the deal and accusing IAM leaders of settling for too little. Many had been ready to strike, partly fuelled by residual anger from a 2014 deal that eliminated defined-benefit pensions.

Boeing on Thursday said it was ready to renegotiate a deal to halt a crippling strike.

Right now Boeing’s credit rating is “one notch above junk” and if the strike isn’t settled quickly that rating could drop more. It will also prevent the company from taking any action to recover from its numerous problems that are limiting sales of its airplanes and its military and space products.

10 comments

SpaceX launches 21 more Starlink satellites

8:39 am

SpaceX last evening successfully placed another 21 Starlink satellites into orbit, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Vandenberg in California.

The first stage completed its eighteenth flight, landing on a drone ship in the Pacific.

The leaders in the 2024 launch race:

91 SpaceX
38 China
10 Rocket Lab
10 Russia

American private enterprise now leads the rest of the world combined in successful launches 106 to 58, while SpaceX by itself leads the entire world, including American companies, 91 to 73.

4 comments

Italian rocket company Avio outlines its future rocket plans

11:07 am

Link here. The plans include steady upgrades to its Vega-C rocket, including replacing the upper stage engine presently provided by a Ukrainian company with an engine built by Avio itself.

The bigger development will be a more powerful rocket, the Vega-E, to replace the Vega-C in 2027.

This version of the rocket will retain the first and second stages of the Vega C+ rocket and substitute the third and fourth stages for a single liquid fuel stage powered by the company’s new M10 methalox rocket engine.

The company is also hoping to begin test flights in 2026 of a Grasshopper-type small-scale demonstration rocket leading to the development of a reusable two-stage rocket that would eventually replace Vega-E.

3 comments

NASA receives 11 VIPER proposals from the private sector

10:58 am

NASA is now evaluating eleven different proposals from private companies to take over the agency’s canceled VIPER lunar rover.

Equipped with three scientific instruments and a drill, the rover was to be delivered to the Moon by a commercial lander, Griffin, built by Pittsburgh-based Astrobotic as part of NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) initiative. Astrobotic and several other companies have CLPS contracts to deliver NASA science and technology experiments to the Moon. NASA pays for delivery services for its payloads. The companies are expected to find non-NASA customers to close the business case.

NASA is paying Astrobotic $323 million for landing services on top of the cost of VIPER itself. NASA’s commitment to Congress was that VIPER would cost $433.5 million with landing in 2023. By the beginning of this year, that had become $505.4 million with landing in 2024.

It appears NASA canceled the VIPER mission because the agency had doubts Astrobotic would launch Griffin on time. The rover cost overruns, plus additional costs from that launch delay, made NASA management back out.

Though NASA has not revealed any details about the new eleven proposals, we know that Astrobotic’s competitor, Intuitive Machines, is one of those proposals. How it can get it launched to the Moon for less than it would have cost to launch on Astrobotic’s Griffin however is a mystery to me.

Meanwhile, Griffin is still going to launch, with Astrobotic now able to sell that VIPER payload space to others and NASA paying for the flight.

0 comments

The UK awards space removal contract to Astroscale/Clearspace partnership

10:49 am

The United Kingdom yesterday awarded a new $3 million contract to a partnership of the Japanese company Astroscale and the Swiss company Clearspace to further develop a mission to de-orbit two satellites in 2026.

The British subsidiaries of Japan-based Astroscale and Switzerland’s ClearSpace announced about 2.35 million British pounds ($3 million) each in funding before tax Sept. 11 to continue de-risking their robotic arm capture system and debris de-tumbling capabilities. The grants enable the ventures to continue working on their technologies until March, when the UK Space Agency is expected to decide which will conduct the demonstration mission.

Both consortiums passed preliminary design reviews for their mission earlier this year.

Both companies are positioning themselves as space junk removal operations, with Astroscale having already flown a partly successful mission to demonstrate rendezvous and capture technologies using its own proprietary magnetic capture system.

0 comments

Ispace targeting a December launch for its second attempt to softland on the Moon

10:41 am

Landing zone for Resilience lander

At a press conference yesterday officials of the Japanese company Ispace announced that they are now targeting a December 2024 launch of their second Hakuto-R lunar lander, dubbed “Resilience”, with the landing site located in the high mid-latitudes of the near-side of the Moon.

The map to the right indicates that location, inside Mare Frigoris. Atlas Crater is where Ispace attempted but failed to soft land its first lunar lander, Hakuto-R1, in April 2023.

This new lander will be launched on a Falcon 9 rocket. It carries six commercial payloads. It also appears the company decided to go for an easier landing site on this second mission. Rather than try to land inside a crater, it is targeting a very large and flat mare region, thus reducing the challenges presented to its autonomous software.

Ispace already has contracts both with NASA ($55 million) and Japan’s JAXA space agency ($80 million) for two more future landers, so a successful landing this time is critical to the company’s future.

0 comments

FAA attempts to justify its red tape

10:06 am

The FAA today responded to SpaceX’s harsh criticism of the licensing process that is delaying the next test orbital launch of Starship/Superheavy, claiming the delays were entirely SpaceX’s fault for changing the flight profile of the mission, likely involving the landing of Superheavy at the launch tower rather than in the Gulf of Mexico.

The agency also claimed that this change meant that the “environmental impact” would cover a wider area, requiring imput from “other agencies.”

An FAA official reiteriated these claims at a conference yesterday, stating that the delay was “largely set by the choices that the company makes.”

All crap and utter rationalizations. The FAA has decided that any change of any kind in the launch operations will now require major review, including bringing in Fish & Wildlife, the Coast Guard, and others to have their say. This policy however has nothing to do with reality, as there is absolutely no additional threat to the environment by these changes. Nor is there any significant increase in safety risks by having Superheavy land at Boca Chica. Even if there were, the only ones qualified to determine that risk are engineers at SpaceX. The FAA is merely rubberstamping SpaceX’s conclusions, and taking its time doing so.

This is America today. Unless something changes soon, freedom is dead. To do anything new and challenging Americans will have to beg permission from bureaucrats in Washington, who know nothing but love to exert their power over everyone else. Under these circumstances, we shall see the end of a great and free nation.

10 comments

SpaceX launches AST SpaceMobile’s first five operational cellphone satellites

9:45 am

SpaceX this morning successfully launched the first five operational satellites in the planned constellation by the company AST SpaceMobile’s for providing cellphone service from orbiting satellites, the Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Cape Canaveral.

The first stage completed its thirteenth flight, landing back at Cape Canaveral.

AST’s orbital cellphone capability is in direct competition with SpaceX’s own Starlink orbital cellphone service. By launching this competitor SpaceX demonstrates that it is not using its dominance in the launch industry to squelch competition.

The leaders in the 2024 launch race:

90 SpaceX
38 China
10 Rocket Lab
10 Russia

American private enterprise now leads the rest of the world combined in successful launches 105 to 58, while SpaceX by itself leads the entire world, including American companies, 90 to 73.

1 comment

Two astronauts on commercial Polaris Dawn manned mission complete spacewalk

9:37 am

Jared Isaacman during his spacewalk
Jared Isaacman during his spacewalk

Jared Isaacman and Sarah Gillis this morning each successfully completed short spacewalks outside their Resilience capsule, exiting about halfway into space but floating free except for a umbilical tether.

It was very evident that the goal of both EVAs was to check out the engineering upgrades created by SpaceX to make this spacewalk possible. Both astronauts worked very carefully to vent the capsule’s atmosphere, open the hatch, exit, then close the hatch, though Isaacman (who exited first) opened the hatch and Gillis closed the hatch. All in all it took a little less then two hours to complete both spacewalks, with Isaacman outside for about ten minutes, and Gillis for a little less.

Though the actual EVAs were relatively unambitious, they were very comparable to the first government spacewalks by America’s Ed White and Russia’s Alexei Leonov in the 1960s. The engineering data that SpaceX obtained from this spacewalk will allow it to refine its spacesuits, its capsule, and make later commercial spacewalks more complex.

This new SpaceX capability is now something the company can market to other future customers. It not only gives this American private enterprise another skill, it makes SpaceX’s commercial capabilities more valuable.

25 comments

A new study, commissioned by NASA, endorses giving NASA more power and money, even as NASA becomes more irrelevant

2:32 pm

NASA logo
It’s all about power and control.

Surprise, surprise! A just released report from the National Academies and paid for by NASA has concluded that the agency suffers from insufficient political and financial support, and that the agency’s recent shift to relying on private enterprise should be de-emphasized in order to grow NASA instead.

Two quotes from the report’s executive summary tells us everything we really need to know about its purpose and political goals:

NASA’s shift to milestone-based purchase-of-service contracts for first-of-a-kind, low-technology-readiness-level mission work can, if misused, erode the agency’s in-house capabilities, degrade the agency’s ability to provide creative and experienced insight and oversight of programs, and put the agency and the United States at increased risk of program failure.

In plain English, NASA’s transition to relying on the private sector for the development of rockets, spacecraft, and even planetary missions “erodes” the ability of the agency to grow. That those private companies are actually building and launching things and doing so for far less money, compared to NASA’s half century of relatively little achievement since the 1960s while spending billions, is something the report finds utterly irrelevant. If anything, that success by the private sector should recommend that NASA should shrink, not grow.

The second quote from this NASA-commissioned report underlines its effort to lobby for NASA:
» Read more

20 comments

Space industry and Congress blast FAA for its so-called “streamlined” regulations

9:32 am

At hearings yesterday before the House Science committee numerous space companies as well as elected officials heaped numerous complaints about the FAA’s regulartory framework, called Part 450, that it adopted in March 2021 supposedly to “streamline” and “speed up” the licensing required to launch.

The result has been the exact opposite, as predicted by many in the industry when the agency was writing these regulations.

Many in the launch industry have warned since the regulations went into force in March 2021 that it was difficult for companies to obtain licenses under Part 450. Industry officials raised concerns about Part 450 at an October 2023 hearing of the Senate Commerce Committee’s space subcommittee, with one witness, Bill Gerstenmaier of SpaceX, warning the “entire regulatory system is at risk of collapse” because of the difficulties getting licenses under the new regulations.

Witnesses at the House hearing made clear those concerns have not abated. “The way it is being implemented today has caused severe licensing delays, confusion and is jeopardizing our long-held leadership position,” said Dave Cavossa, president of the Commercial Spaceflight Federation, an industry group whose members include several launch companies.

He cited specific concerns such as a long “pre-application” process with the FAA where companies, he said, “get stuck in an endless back-and-forth process” with the agency to determine how they can meet the performance-based requirements of Part 450 with limited guidance. “This process is taking years,” he argued.

It first must be noted that this hearing was not called in connection with the FAA’s stonewalling of SpaceX Starship/Superheavy test program. It was called because since 2021 the entire new rocket industry in the U.S. has ground to a halt, with launches from new rocket companies practically ending because of the red tape imposed on them by Part 450. If something is not done to fix this, new companies in Europe and India will quickly grab market share, choking off profits for the new American companies.

5 comments

Polaris Dawn successfully reaches highest orbit for a human since Apollo

9:23 am

The view from 870 miles
The view from 870 miles. Click for video.

Polaris Dawn yesterday successfully climbed to an altitude of 870 miles yesterday, the farthest any human has been from Earth since the Apollo missions to the Moon, and the highest Earth orbit since Gemini 11 flew an apogee of 853 miles in 1966.

The four members of the Polaris Dawn mission, riding aboard SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft “Resilience,” climbed into an elliptical orbit with a high point, or apogee, of 870 miles (1,400 kilometers) on Tuesday (Sep. 10). They reached the record distance about 15 hours after lifting off at 5:23 a.m. EDT (0923 GMT) from Florida earlier in the day and circling the planet about eight times in an initial orbit of 118 by 746 miles (190 by 1,200 km).

They maintained this high orbit for about ten hours in order to gather radiation data for future exploration, and then dropped down to a lower orbit where the planned spacewalk will occur on September 12th.

0 comments
1 … 131 132 133 134 135 … 784