Tag: competition

Japanese rocket startup scrubs first launch attempt

9:11 am

The first Japanese rocket commercial rocket company, Space One, today scrubbed the first launch attempt of its Kairos rocket, scheduled to take off from its own launchpad in the south of Japan.

“We informed the public in advance that we wanted to make the area free of people, but even 10 minutes before the launch, a vessel remained in the area, so we decided to cancel the launch because it would have been impossible for them to leave promptly,” Space One executive Kozo Abe told a news conference in the afternoon.

Abe said there were no technical problems with the launch and that the next attempt could come as soon as Wednesday, with the company likely to give a more detailed schedule at least two days before the new date.

The rocket has four-stages, the first three solid-fueled and the last liquid-fueled. Its capacity is comparable to Rocket Lab’s Electron rocket, and the company hopes to eventually ramp up to as many as twenty launches per year.

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First manned Starliner mission slips to May

8:53 am

The first manned mission of Boeing’s Starliner capsule has now been delayed another few weeks, to early May, due to scheduling conflicts at ISS.

The delay was revealed as an aside in a NASA press release detailing the schedule of press briefings related to the mission. There appears to be no technical reasons for the delay. The quiet way NASA revealed it probably just indicates the agency’s embarrassment at Boeing’s overall problems with this spacecraft that have caused a four year delay in its first manned mission.

The flight will dock with ISS, last two weeks, and carry two astronauts, Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams. Its goal is to complete the final check out of Starliner prior to the initiation of operational missions. Once done, Boeing will not only begin to fly paid flights to ISS for NASA, it will be free to offer this capsule to others, including commercial tourists. Don’t expect customers to flock to buy seats, considering the many problems both Boeing and Starliner have had. Instead, it will likely take Boeing several years of NASA missions to reassure customers the spacecraft is reliable.

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Update on rocket startup Stoke Space’s effort to make completely reusable rocket

10:07 am

Link here. This Nasaspaceflight.com article provides an excellent update on the status of the development of Stoke’s Nova rocket, which will have a radical new engine design in its upper stage, using a ring of small nozzles rather than one single central one. That design will allow the upper stage to return to Earth for reuse, something that no other rocket now in use at present can do.

Stoke Space recently carried out the first test of the full-size 30-thruster version of the innovative engine that the company is producing for its in-development second stage. This will be an integral part of its future Nova rocket, which aims to be a fully reusable medium lifter.

The engine test took place on Feb. 26 and follows the engine’s first test flight on its prototype vehicle, Hopper 2, in September 2023. Although fitted with only 15 chambers for that flight, Hopper 2 flew for 15 seconds, achieved a maximum altitude of 30 feet, traversed to a landing site, and touched down softly.

The article includes a lot of interesting technical details about this upper stage and what engineers are learning about this radical engine design. Worth reading. At present Stoke is the only company other than SpaceX attempting to make its upper stage fully reusable. If successful it will jump ahead of everyone else.

No launch schedule however for its new rocket was revealed in this report, so it might be awhile, if ever, before any of this bears fruit.

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Budget bill includes very short extension of commercial space “learning period”

9:39 am

The budget bill that Congress has just passed and awaits signature by the president included a very short extension of commercial space “learning period” that supposedly prevents heavy safety regulation by the FAA of the new commercial space industry.

That learning period was first established in 2004, and has been extended several times since. This new bill extends that period until May 11, 2024, only two months, supposedly to allow Congress time to pass a new commercial space act.

The truth is that, at present, the Biden administration has long since abandoned that learning period exemption, and has been applying a much stricter safety regulatory framework from space companies than required by law, as best illustrated by its treatment of SpaceX’s Superheavy/Starship launches. The FAA now expects all launches to function perfectly, even if testing a prototype, and should anything not go perfectly it treats the failure the same as an airplane mishap that requres any investigation to get full government approval before further launches can resume.

Unless there is a change in leadership in Washington, it is very likely we shall see few new American rocket companies from here on out. The existing companies with lots of money and power will survive, but under this heavy regulatory atmosphere it will be hard if not impossible for new companies to get established.

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Astra’s board agrees to deal to take the company private

9:24 am

The board of directors of the rocket startup Astra have finally agreed to a cut-right price offer from the company’s two founders to buy the company and take it private once again, rather than declare bankruptcy.

The company announced Thursday that its board had accepted an offer from its CEO, Chris Kemp, and its CTO, Adam London, to purchase the remaining Astra stock at a price of $0.50 per share. The deal is expected to close in the second quarter of 2024, at which time Astra will cease trading on the Nasdaq.

This offer was significantly less than their first offer in November, when Kemp and London offered to buy the company for $1.50 per share, suggesting the company’s value has declined significantly in the interim as its cash assets declined. This decline suggests that any recovery will be difficult and long, and could easily fail.

Freedom is wonderful in that it allows for the greatest amount of creativity, competition, and achievement, from everyone. It also carries great risk that everyone must face. Astra has now illustrated the risk. Not all creative gambles are going to succeed.

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Sierra Space confirms its Tenacity spacecraft successfully completed vibration testing

9:16 am

Sierra Space yesterday confirmed that its first Dream Chaser reusable mini-shuttle Tenacity, being readied for a hoped-for April launch, successfully completed vibration testing last month.

Key accomplishments in this first critical phase of pre-flight testing included: the completion of Sine Vibration Testing (in all three axes or directions), a Separation Shock Test that simulates the separation of the Dream Chaser from Shooting Star and a test that involved deploying the spaceplane’s wings. These tests evaluated Dream Chaser’s performance under the stresses of launch, operation in orbit and ability to communicate with the International Space Station (ISS).

What I find revealing about the press release at the link is that it really adds nothing from a NASA press release from a month ago. Then NASA said that Tenacity was about to move to a vacuum chamber for environmental testing. According to this new press release, that move has still not occurred and the environmental test still must begin.

That engineers didn’t move Tenacity to environmental testing while they were reviewing the vibration test data suggests there was something in that test data that prevented it. It appears that unstated issue is resolved, but it caused a pause in testing.

As a result, it appears that an April launch is unlikely delayed by a month or more, assuming my attempt to read between the lines is correct.

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NJ man arrested for trafficking 675 Starlink terminals illegally

10:00 am

A New Jersey man was arrested on December 4, 2023 while driving a vehicle carrying more than two hundred Starlink terminals, and later charged with trafficking 675 Starlink terminals that he obtained illegally using “stolen credit card accounts or hacked Starlink billing accounts.”

The man, 35-year-old Kelvin Rodriguez-Moya, was stopped by police Dec. 4 while driving 223 Starlink terminals in a pickup truck and trailer after leaving a residence in Lawrence Township, New Jersey, a criminal complaint said. The terminals had shipping labels addressed to multiple different names at the same address.

Lawrence Township police had been tipped off about a suspiciously large number of Starlink terminals being shipped to that home, the complaint said. Detectives then witnessed Rodriguez-Moya loading a FedEx shipment of terminals onto the truck and trailer.

SpaceX is working with the police to determine how Rodriguez-Moya obtained so many terminals. I suspect it was because so much of Starlink operations are automated. The computer programs that issue terminals to new customers aren’t smart enough to notice such things.

This case might also help explain the stories in both Russia and Botswana of unauthorized terminals being sold.

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Blue Origin completes first round of launchpad/New Glenn tanking tests

9:52 am

Link here. In the past week or so Blue Origin has done three tanking tests of its assembled engineering test rocket, simulating fueling of a New Glenn rocket on the launchpad, and now intends to roll that test vehicle back to its rocket assembly building.

From here, it is most likely that the rocket will be prepared for the next round of testing, which will include a static fire of the seven first-stage BE-4 engines. This test will mark the first time that Blue Origin’s BE-4 engines will ignite while integrated with a New Glenn first stage. It will also be the first time that the new launch pad supports an engine firing.

The company continues to aim for a first test launch of New Glenn before the end of the year, and these tests strengthen the likelihood that this schedule is realistic.

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UK government to invest £10 million in Saxavord spaceport

9:45 am

Proposed spaceports surrounding Norwegian Sea
Proposed spaceports surrounding Norwegian Sea.

The government of the United Kingdom announced yesterday that it will directly invest £10 million in the Saxavord spaceport being built on one of the Shetland Islands, as shown on the map to the right.

Coming in addition to around £40 million of private investment, the government funding will allow SaxaVord to accelerate its capital works programme to ensure it is ready to support the first orbital launch.

That capital works program was forced to shut down last year when red tape at the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) delayed the licensing of Saxavord. It could be this grant has been issued partly to repay the losses the spaceport company experienced due to those bureaucratic delays. The timing kind of reinforces this speculation, as only yesterday Saxavord got its spaceport license approved, though other approvals remain pending.

All this news suggests strongly that the first test flight at Saxavord by the German rocket startup Rocket Factory Augsburg will occur later this year, as promised.

Meanwhile, the other spaceport in Sutherland must be wondering if it can get similar government aid, or if the government is now playing favorites.

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Irish company wants to establish spaceport in Ireland

9:32 am

An Irish company, SUAS Aerospace, has announced a investment capital round to raise €5 million in order to establish a spaceport in Ireland by 2027.

The company has been lobbying for this spaceport since at least May 2023. It is based on the southern coast of Ireland at a facility dubbed the National Space Centre. This would likely be close to where the spaceport would be located, though this is unconfirmed.

SUAS Aerospace was founded in 2019 and is supported by the Enterprise Ireland. With initial investment of €1.1 million to date, SUAS has secured significant partnerships with major European Companies including Skyrora, T Minus Engineering, Pangea Aerospace and is part of a successful consortium awarded a €5m grant from Horizon Europe to develop interoperable (plug and play) rocket engine testing infrastructure for Europe.

I wonder if Ireland’s bureaucracy will be easier to work with than Great Britain’s.

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SpaceX: We want to fly next Starship/Superheavy test launch on March 14, 2024

9:07 am

In a tweet yesterday SpaceX announced an update on its Starship webpage, outlining its plans for the third orbital test launch of its heavy-lift Starship/Superheavy rocket, with March 14, 2024 listed as the hoped-for launch date.

The update began with these cautionary words, “pending regulatory approval,” and then went on to describe details of the test flight:

The third flight test aims to build on what we’ve learned from previous flights while attempting a number of ambitious objectives, including the successful ascent burn of both stages, opening and closing Starship’s payload door, a propellant transfer demonstration during the upper stage’s coast phase, the first ever re-light of a Raptor engine while in space, and a controlled reentry of Starship. It will also fly a new trajectory, with Starship targeted to splashdown in the Indian Ocean. This new flight path enables us to attempt new techniques like in-space engine burns while maximizing public safety.

I suspect the change in the splashdown location, from northeast of the main island of Hawaii, was instigated by the FAA for those “public safety reasons”. From SpaceX’s perspective, this is an easy give, as a slightly shorter flight makes little difference for this test, and it allows the company to test that Raptor engine by firing that de-orbit burn.

Will the flight occur on March 14th? The odds are high, partly because this SpaceX announcement is designed to put pressure on the bureaucrats at the FAA to finish their paperwork already. At the same time, bureaucrats sometimes love to stick it to private citizens, just for fun. We shall see.

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More orbital tugs reach orbit

9:44 am

When SpaceX launches a large number of smallsats and payloads on a Falcon 9 launch, as it did on March 5 from Vandenberg in California, it routinely takes several days or even months for the results from each payload or smallsat to trickle in. Two reports today illustrate the growing cottage industry of orbital tugs.

First, a company named Apex has successfuly demonstrated its first service module for satellites, designed to provide the basic services needed for satellites so that companies can focus on designing their primary mission rather than reinventing a basic satellite each time. The module was launched on March 5th, and has been operating as expected. The company hopes to begin mass producing this service module in a new factory later this year.

Second, a new orbital tug company from France, Exotrail, has successfully deployed a cubesat from its first tug. That tug was launched on a Falcon 9 smallsat launch in November, and has been testing operations since. After releasing that cubesat for Airbus’s defense division, the tug is continuing operations, acting as the service module for a second payload from Belgium that is testing its own gyros and reaction wheels for controling smallsat orientation.

These companies are small, and are focused on very specific technologies needed by smallsats to operate efficiently in space. As such, their achievements are generally more mundane and less exciting that a SpaceX Starship/Superheavy test launch, by many magnitudes. Nonetheless, their success, not only technically but financially, suggests a growing maturity to the in-orbit space industry, which will also lay the groundwork for much more sophisticated operations in the future beyond Earth orbit. The people that build these tugs will move on to build vessels that can go to the planets and do things that are presently impossible or too difficult, and do it at low cost and very quickly.

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