Tag: competition

UK Space Agency proudly grows

9:27 am

The United Kingdom Space Agency today announced that it is opening four new offices in four different cities, giving it a brand new headquarters as well as a total of five regional offices.

The new HQ at Harwell is due to open in June, while offices at William Morgan House in Cardiff and Space Park Leicester will open in April, with the office at Queen Elizabeth House, in Edinburgh, opening later in the summer.

In addition, the agency will retain its offices in London and Swindon.

Will this expansion alleviate the serious red-tape issues in the United Kingdom that killed Virgin Orbit and have delayed launches at its two new spaceports in Scotland? I have my doubts. The licensing problems in the UK have centered on the number of different agencies and offices that must issue approvals to private space companies. While it might make sense for the UK Space Agency to hire more people, if anything it should be streamlining its operations to one central place.

It appears instead that this bureaucracy is doing what all government bureaucracies do, expanding and growing at the cost of private enterprise. I don’t see how opening many different small offices can possibly help make the licensing procedure faster or easier.

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Boom’s one-third-scale prototype supersonic jet finally takes off

9:05 am

The private startup Boom has finally flown its third-scale prototype supersonic jet, dubbed XB-1, on its first short flight, taking off on March 22, 2024 from the flight test facility in Mojave, California.

Following behind was Test Pilot Tristan “Geppetto” Brandenburg in a T-38 chase plane to observe the flight and confirm altitude and speed. With a length of 62.6 feet (19 m) and a wingspan of 21 ft (6 m) , the XB-1 achieved an altitude of 7,120 ft (2,170 m) and speeds up to 238 knots (273 mph, 440 km/h) under the force of its three GE J85-15 engines generating a maximum thrust of 12,300 lbs.

According to Boom, once its aerodynamic characteristics and flight worthiness are confirmed, the XB-1 will increase speed until it is flying on later tests in excess of Mach 1.

This prototype supersonic test plane was first unveiled in 2020, four years ago, but runway taxi tests did not begin until 2023. I suspect the Wuhan panic contributed to the three year delay between unveiling and first tests, though this is speculation.

The goal is to build the first commercial superonic passenger plane since the Concorde. At present Boom has a contract from United for fifteen Boom 12-passenger planes, plus development deals with Boeing, and Japan Airlines.

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SpaceX launches more Starlink satellites

9:17 am

The beat never ends: SpaceX last night successfully launched another 23 Starlink satellites, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Cape Canaveral.

The first stage successfully completed its nineteenth flight, landing successfully on a drone ship in the Atlantic. This stage is now the third that has completed a record nineteen flights. One wonders when a stage will reach twenty.

The leaders in the 2024 launch race:

29 SpaceX
12 China
4 Rocket Lab
4 Russia

American private enterprise now leads the rest of the world combined in successful launches 34 to 22, while SpaceX now leads the entire world, including American companies, 29 to 27.

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ISRO completes second drop test runway landing of its own mini-reusable shuttle

8:56 am

Pushpak about to land
Click for original image

India’s space agency ISRO yesterday successfully completed the second runway landing of its own mini-reusable shuttle, dubbed Pushpak, after the vehicle was dropped from a helicopter at an altitude of 2.8 miles.

This mission successfully simulated the approach and high-speed landing conditions of RLV returning from space. With this second mission, ISRO has re-validated the indigenously developed technologies in the areas of navigation, control systems, landing gear and deceleration systems essential for performing a high-speed autonomous landing of a space-returning vehicle. The winged body and all flight systems used in RLV-LEX-01 were reused in the RLV-LEX-02 mission after due certification/clearances. Hence reuse capability of flight hardware and flight systems is also demonstrated in this mission. Based on the observations from RLV-LEX-01, the airframe structure and landing gear were strengthened to tolerate higher landing loads. [emphasis mine]

The highlighted sentences I think are the most significant. ISRO is pushing hard for reusability.

The concept of this spacecraft is somewhat comparable to the X-37B, though all the engineering can be applied to larger shuttles that can carry cargo and humans in and out of orbit. At the moment however Pushpak is simply an engineering test prototype, not yet ready for orbital flights. For example, the landing gears are too large and cannot be retracted, something unacceptable for orbital flights.

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SpaceX launches a cargo Dragon to ISS

2:18 pm

SpaceX today successfully launched a Dragon freighter to ISS, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Cape Canaveral in Florida.

The cargo Dragon was flying for the fourth time. It will dock with ISS on March 23, 2024. The first stage completed its sixth flight, landing back at one of SpaceX’s landing pads at Cape Canaveral.

This was also the first Dragon launch from this particular SpaceX launchpad in four years. The company only recently reconfigured it for Dragon flights, both manned and unmanned, so that it has two options for launching NASA manned missions. NASA had demanded this before it would give SpaceX permission to launch Superheavy/Starship from that rocket’s new launchpad in Florida. The agency thought it was too close to SpaceX’s first manned launchpad, and wanted an option in case a Superheavy launch failure damaged the Dragon launchsite. With this success SpaceX is one step closer to flying operational Superheavy/Starship flights out of Cape Canaveral.

The leaders in the 2024 launch race:

28 SpaceX
12 China
4 Rocket Lab
3 Russia

American private enterprise now leads the rest of the world combined in successful launches 33 to 21, while SpaceX now leads the entire world, including American companies, 28 to 26.

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Six launch companies give updates on the status of their rockets

9:03 am

Link here. The event was a panel at a conference where officials from SpaceX, ULA, Mitsubishi, Arianespace, Relativity, and Rocket Lab gave presentations.

Based on what is reported at the link, the Mitsubishi update was the most significant:

Mitsubishi Heavy Industries (MHI) successfully launched its H3 rocket Feb. 16 after the rocket’s inaugural launch failed nearly a year earlier, a setback that Iwao Igarashi, vice president and general manager at MHI, called a “nightmare.” “There were no major problems with the rocket” on its second flight, he said.

We will have to see. Though everything worked as planned on the second flight, the true test on whether Mitsubishi has overcome the issues from the first launch will be the rocket’s third launch, presently scheduled for sometime next year.

A Relativity official said their Terran-R rocket is still targeting a first launch in 2026, while Rocket Lab was hopeful that the first launch of its larger Neutron rocket would occur by the end of this year.

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China Long March 2D launches “group of satellites”; Russia scrubs manned Soyuz launch

8:45 am

China today successfully launched what it simply labeled as “a group of satellites”, its Long March 2D rocket lifting off from its Jiuquan spaceport in the northwest of China.

No other useful information was released about the payloads. Nor was there any word as to the crash site of the rocket’s first stage, which uses toxic hypergolic fuels and landed somewhere in China.

Meanwhile in Russia a launch of a Soyuz-2 rocket carrying three astronauts to ISS was aborted at about T-20 seconds for reasons that as yet remain unclear. According to NASA the next launch opportunity is March 23, 2024.

The leaders in the 2024 launch race:

27 SpaceX
12 China
4 Rocket Lab
3 Russia

American private enterprise still leads the rest of the world combined in successful launches 32 to 21, while SpaceX remains ahead of the entire world, including American companies, 27 to 26.

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Rocket Lab launches classified smallsat for National Reconnaissance Office

12:36 am

Rocket Lab in the early morning hours of March 21, 2024 successfully launched a classified payload for the National Reconnaissance Office, its Electron rocket lifting off from Wallops Island in Virgina.

For this launch Rocket Lab made no attempt to recover its first stage. As of posting the payloads had not yet been deployed.

A Chinese Long March 2D launch was also scheduled to occur just prior to the Rocket Lab launch, but as of posting there was no word on whether that launch had taken place.

The leaders in the 2024 space race:

27 SpaceX
11 China
4 Rocket Lab
3 Russia

American private enterprise presently leads the rest of the world combined in successful launches 32 to 20, while SpaceX leads the entire world, including American companies, 27 to 25.

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Spanish high-altitude balloon company to fly fullsize prototype capsule from Saudi Arabia

10:20 am

The Spanish high-altitude balloon startup Halo is now planning to fly from Saudi Arabia the second test flight of its fullsize prototype tourist capsule.

Headquartered in Madrid, the company, which specialises in stratospheric commercial flights, will embark on its sixth test flight from the kingdom in June, the company said in a release, with conditional approval from the Communications, Space and Technology Commission (CST), the Saudi Arabia authority responsible for space regulation.

Halo Space CEO Carlos Mira said in a statement that this test will validate the integrated operation of all critical systems, “bringing us one step closer to our goal,” which includes plans to begin commercial flights in 2026.

The company plans to set up bases for flights in Saudi Arabia, the U.S., Australia, and Spain, where it hopes to do high altitude tourist balloon flights to about 20 miles elevation. We should also not be surprised if it does classified reconnaissance flights for Saudi Arabia as well.

Whether it will do what it says however still depends on the final outcome of a lawsuit against it by another Spanish company, Zero 2 Infinity, which claims Halo stole its technology. The courts have ruled in Zero 2’s favor, but whether a final settlement has occurred is unclear.

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SpaceX’s next Superheavy/Starship launch, according to SpaceX

10:06 am

According to SpaceX’s CEO, Gwynne Shotwell, the company hopes to be ready to fly its fourth orbital test flight of Superheavy/Starship in about six weeks, and will not attempt to deploy any Starlink satellites, as I speculated earlier this week.

“We’ll figure out what happened on both stages,” she said, not discussing what may have gone wrong with either, “and get back to flight hopefully in about six weeks,” or early May. She added that the company doesn’t expect to deploy Starlink satellites on the next Starship launch, as some had speculated. “Things are still in trade, but I think we’re really going to focus on getting reentry right and making sure we can land these things where we want to land them.”

The story however provided one very important tidbit of information about the launch license process from the FAA. Kelvin Coleman, FAA associate administrator for commercial space transportation, noted that after the second test flight in November 2023 “the company completed that report in several weeks.”

That statement confirms my conclusion in late December that SpaceX had been ready to launch in early January, but couldn’t do it because the FAA had to spend another two months rewriting SpaceX’s investigation report.

We should therefore not be surprised if the same thing happens on the next test flight. Shotwell says SpaceX hopes to be ready to launch in early May. That means it will likely submit its report to the FAA around then. Expect the agency to then spend at least one to two months retyping the report, as it has done now after both the first and second flights.

Based on this information, we should now expect the fourth flight to occur sometime in the June-July timeframe, with July more likely.

I am sure that the people at the FAA want to move as quickly as possible. I am also sure their bosses in the White House are demanding they dot every “i” and cross every “t”, with meticulous care, so that things cannot move as fast as desired. That has been the pattern since Joe Biden took office, and I have seen no evidence of that changing now.

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Orbit Fab announces price tag for installing its refuelling port on satellites

9:40 am

Orbit Fab has now set a price of $30,000 for its satellite refuelling port, should companies decide to install one on their satellites.

Orbit Fab on March 19 … unveiled pricing for the RAFTI refueling ports, setting the price tag at $30,000 per unit. Executives said the number was based on market research into the pricing of fill and drain valves widely used across the satellite industry. “With a qualified port design, satellite manufacturers can now incorporate RAFTI with more confidence, knowing it has passed rigorous testing,” said Adam Harris,Orbit Fab’s chief commercial officer.

Clearing these tests paves the way for Orbit Fab to deliver the first 100 RAFTI units to U.S. government and commercial customers over the next year, Harris said.

Once in orbit, an Orbit Fab refueling tanker will rendezvous with the satellite, dock at the port, and pump new fuel into the satellite.

While no actual refueling missions are presently scheduled, the company is negotiating with both the Air Force and Space Force to fly such a mission to satellites they have already outfitted with this port.

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Indian rocket startup to attempt suborbital test launch this week

9:30 am

India's spaceports
India’s spaceports

Agnikul, one of the two rocket startups in India attempting to enter the launch market, is targeting March 22, 2024 for the first suborbital test launch of its Agnibaan rocket, lifting off from its own private launch site off the eastern coast of India.

Agnikul Cosmos is all set to conduct the maiden launch of the Agnibaan launch vehicle on Friday. The maiden test is aimed at validating the working of the first stage of the rocket that will power the vehicle in future missions.

Dubbed Agnibaan SOrTeD, the Sub Orbital Technology Demonstrator mission will see the maiden launch from India’s first private launchpad which has been developed with assistance from the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO).

The map shows the location of Agnikul’s launch site, south of ISRO’s long established spaceport at Sriharikota. The third spaceport at India’s southern tip is a new facility being built by ISRO.

If this launch is successful, Agnikul will have caught up with the other Indian rocket startup Skyroot, which conducted its own suborbital test launch in November 2022.

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