A Israeli military satellite, Ofek-11, has experienced unspecified problems soon after its launch today from a military base in Israel.
This has not been a good two weeks for Israel and space.
Sidenote: Take a look a the launch video at the link. Doesn’t that look almost exactly like the Falcon 1 and Falcon 9 launch system, with strongback and everything?
The competition heats up: The European Space Agency today gave its final approval to the deal that will have Airbus Safran Launchers design, build, and essentially own the new Ariane 6 rocket that ESA hopes to use to compete in the launch market in the 2020s.
This deal essentially closes the book on Arianespace. Though it officially still exists, it will be Airbus Safran that will be running the show in the future.
The competition heats up: The first flight of Orbital ATK’S redesigned Antares rocket since the 2014 launch failure is now expected to occur in October.
Originally planned for August, the launch had been delayed partly because of technical issues uncovered during a May static fire test and partly because of scheduling complications with other launches to ISS.
The competition heats up: An Air Force official today said that, based on its ongoing experience with SpaceX during the investigation of its September 1 Falcon 9 launchpad explosion, they do not expect any change in SpaceX’s certification that allows it to bid on Air Force satellite contracts.
The Air Force official also noted that the damage to the launchpad was “moderate” and was “definitely repairable.”
The competition heats up: ULA today announced a new system for shortening the time from a customer’s initial launch contract to the actual launch of their payload.
The priorities of all of our customers include ensuring their spacecraft launches on schedule, securing the soonest possible manifest date and completing the mission with 100 percent success,” said Tory Bruno, ULA CEO and president. “To address these priorities, we have been working on this offering for more than a year, which allows our customers to launch in as few as three months from placing their order.”
It is very clear that this new system was inspired by the competition with SpaceX. It is also pretty obvious that they are making the announcement now in the hope they can grab some of SpaceX’s customers who are once again faced with delays because of the September 1 Falcon 9 launchpad explosion. It is also likely that SpaceX is pushing to get its next launch off by November in an effort to beat back ULA’s effort here.
Ain’t competition wonderful? It is so good, it will even get us to the stars.
The competition heats up: Despite the admitted difficulty of its investigation into its September 1 Falcon 9 launchpad explosion, SpaceX today said that they are aiming to resume launches as soon as November.
“We’re anticipating getting back to flight — being down for about three months — and getting back to flight in the November time frame,” Chief Operating Officer Gwynne Shotwell said Tuesday at an event in Paris. “We’ll obviously take another look at the rocket, focus on the ground systems.”
They have not said yet what payload they will launch, though it is clear that first launch will not be the Falcon Heavy demo launch, which has now been rescheduled for the 1st quarter fo 2017.
An evening pause: Performed by the Boston Pops orchestra.
Hat tip to Phil Berardelli, author of Phil’s Favorite 500: Loves of a Moviegoing Lifetime. As Phil noted to me, “The audience seems to love it.” I think many of them had seen the film, and when they heard that first note couldn’t help feeling a deep down bit of squeamish nervousness about what it signified.
In the heat of competition: Doug Messier has written an excellent essay today raising some serious questions about SpaceX and its methods of operation.
The issues he raises go the heart of the company’s future. Moreover, he notes the unusual nature of the September 1 launchpad explosion that, unless explained, threatens the company business model.
The rarity of a satellite launch vehicle exploding during fueling had people racking their brains and scouring the Internet to find out the last time something like this happened. At least in the United States, that turned out to be more than 50 years ago when rocketry was in its infancy and accidents were much more frequent.
The lack of any modern precedents and the speed of the accident — Musk tweeted that engineers were reviewing around 3,000 channels of telemetry and video data that cover only 35-55 milliseconds — are making the investigation challenging. Musk has said it is the most difficult of the six failure investigations the company has conducted since it was founded in 2002.
Messier also takes a close look at SpaceX’s overall approach to innovation and development, and notes its unusual and somewhat risky nature.
Read it all. It provides valuable information for anyone who wants to understand honestly the state of the American launch industry.
The competition heats up: Virgin Galactic on Monday announced that it has signed a four-launch contract with Sky and Space Global, using its LauncherOne smallsat air-launched rocket.
They hope to launch by 2018. I’ll make a prediction: LauncherOne will complete its first commercial launch before SpaceShipOne.
The competition heats up: In a shift in policy Russia today announced that rather than abandon their Proton rocket and replace it with Angara, they plan to expand the Proton rocket family by introducing two new smaller versions.
Because these new versions are merely revisions, they hope to have them available by 2019 at the earliest.
ULA will delay its final decision on the engine it will use for its new Vulcan rocket until Blue Origin successfully completes a scheduled static fire engine test, originally schedule for late this year but possibly delayed until 2017.
“It’s really tied not so much to the calendar but to a technical event,” [Tory Bruno, CEO of ULA,] said of the schedule for an engine decision. “We want to have a full-scale static firing of the BE-4, so that we understand that it’s going to hit its performance and it’s going to be stable…. That may occur by the end of the year, but I could see it moving into the spring a little bit, to make sure we have enough test data and we feel confident about where we’re at,” he added.
He emphasized that the BE-4 remained the “primary path” to be used on the first stage of the Vulcan, ahead of the AR1 engine under development by Aerojet Rocketdyne. “They’re out in front,” Bruno said of the BE-4.
This engine test is not only critical for ULA, but its success will help firm up Blue Origin’s developmental schedule for its just announced New Glenn rocket.
Bruno’s comments at the link also suggest that ULA, like Arianespace, is pushing to grab some of the customers of SpaceX and Russia, both of whom are now experiencing launch delays.
The competition heats up? The Russian government is considering building another new rocket that would be based more on Proton than Angara and could function eventually as the foundation for a heavy-lift rocket.
At the heart of the new design was the idea to enlarge the diameter of the Zenit rocket from 3.8 to 4.1 meters, so it could match the “caliber” of the Proton rocket. As a result, the Proton’s production machinery could be re-used with relatively few upgrades to manufacture the new-generation launcher, after its predecessor’s planned retirement in mid-2020s. Unlike Proton, all stages on Sunkar would burn non-toxic kerosene and liquid oxygen, as it had long been insisted upon by the Kazakh government. The Sunkar could utilize the existing launch and processing infrastructure for the Zenit rocket in Baikonur, which could be funded by Kazakhstan.
…Ironically, the proposal to develop yet another type of space launcher essentially reverses the previous strategy at GKNPTs Khrunichev of relying on a modular architecture of the Angara family to cover the entire spectrum of space payloads. However, unlike Angara’s standard booster, URM-1, the first stage of the Sunkar rocket will be large enough to serve as a building block for a future super-heavy rocket, reaching payloads of at least 80 tons, so it could serve as the main vehicle for the deep-space exploration program. Therefore, the Sunkar proposal can be considered as the first step in building a more powerful family of space rockets in Russia.
Run as a single government entity, it appears to me that the Russian aerospace industry is struggling with its decision-making process. Without some internal profit-oriented competition, they have no method for focusing their efforts on any design. Rather than have multiple independent companies competing for profit with their own individual designs, Roscosmos’s management can only make its decisions after much office politics, the logic of which often has nothing to do with the best or most efficient concept. Their one saving grace is that, rather than competing with themselves to thus encourage fast and efficient development, they will be competing with other countries — especially the American private sector — and that will eventually give them the impetus to build something.
