Tag: engineering

In order to lower costs, Lockheed Martin wants to get more American parts into the European-built service module for the Orion capsule.

9:39 am

In order to lower costs, Lockheed Martin wants to get more American parts into the European-built service module for the Orion capsule.

And why do they want to lower costs? It ain’t for the normal free market reasons you’d expect. Instead, the Frankenstein project that is SLS/Orion has the U.S. building the capsule while Europe builds the service module. However, Europe doesn’t want to spend the money to build two service modules. Instead,

for financial reasons, ESA prime contractor Airbus Defense and Space may provide only “one and a half” service modules, Larry Price, Lockheed’s Orion deputy program manager, said in an interview here.

“They may not complete both of them, depending on funding,” Price said. But “we think we can drive Europe’s cost down so they can deliver two complete service modules” by steering the European company toward American suppliers already working on the Orion crew module. “If we use common parts, they can be lower price,” Price said. He added that ESA is set to deliver a full service module for the 2017 flight.

Read the article. It better than anything I can say will make it clear how much of a dead end project SLS/Orion really is. The rocket costs more than $14 billion per launch, has no clear mission, and the contractor (Europe) for the capsule’s service module only intends to build one and a half. What will NASA do after that? No one has any idea, nor does anyone at NASA have any plans to figure this out.

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Designed and funded on the premise that it would fly past a Kuiper belt asteroid after it flew past Pluto, the New Horizons team has so far failed to find such an asteroid and is running out of time.

9:29 am

Designed and funded on the premise that it would fly past a Kuiper belt object (KBO) after it flew past Pluto, the New Horizons team has so far failed to find such an asteroid and is running out of time.

In theory, project scientists should have identified a suitable KBO long ago. But they postponed their main search until 2011, waiting for all the possible KBO targets to begin converging on a narrow cone of space that New Horizons should be able to reach after its Pluto encounter. Starting to look for them before 2011 would have been impossible, says Grundy, because they would have been spread over too much of the sky.

Now that the hunt for KBOs is on, the New Horizons researchers have mainly been using the 8.2-metre Subaru Telescope in Hawaii and the 6.5-metre Magellan Telescopes in Chile. They have found about 50 new KBOs; none is close enough for New Horizons to reach.

I always thought it unlikely that they would be able to, on the fly, find a suitable candidate that New Horizons could reach in the very empty vastness beyond Pluto. In fact, it seemed absurd and to me seemed instead a transparent public relations ploy to get the funding for the fly-by mission to Pluto. Sadly, my cynical perspective here appears to be turning out to be true.

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The battle between France and Germany on how to replace the Ariane 5 rocket continues.

9:13 am

The battle between France and Germany on how to replace the Ariane 5 rocket continues.

To save money and lower cost, France wants to build a rocket that mostly uses solid rocket motors. Germany however has a problem with this.

German government officials have said they will have difficulty supporting the current Ariane 6 design, which features four identical solid-fueled stages — two as strap-on boosters, and two as the vehicle’s first and second stages — topped by the cryogenic upper stage powered by the same restartable Vinci engine that is the main element of the proposed Ariane 5 upgrade. Germany, through its space agency, the German Aerospace Center, DLR, has said it would prefer a liquid-fueled first stage for Ariane 6 as such a stage could be built in Germany and thus assure a large German industrial role in the program. Without such a role, DLR has said, German support for Ariane 6 might not be forthcoming.

The story above says that France is willing to negotiate with Germany over this, but if they do, they guarantee that Ariane 6 will be a costly rocket to build, making it very unattractive to satellite customers.

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Replacing the Russian-made rocket engines used by the Atlas 5 and Antares rockets would take about four years, according to a industry analysis.

9:03 am

Replacing the Russian-made rocket engines used by the Atlas 5 and Antares rockets would take about four years, according to Aerojet Rocketdyne.

The company presently refurbishes the Russian engines used by Antares, and is building a host of other engines for other rockets.

In related news, ULA has begun considering shifting some of its military launches from the Atlas 5 to the Delta family of rockets. The company has also released previously undisclosed pricing information for its bulk buy military launches.

Michael Gass, chief executive of Denver-based ULA, said the company’s average per-launch price to the U.S. government is $225 million, a figure that includes the block buy contract as well as pre-existing launch backlog. That figure represents the combined value of the contracts divided by the number of missions.

That $225 million figure, though far less than previously believed, is a little more than twice what SpaceX says it would charge for a comparable launch.

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A GAO report says that NASA has been hiding the true and very expensive cost of the SLS/Orion projects by specifically excluding the cost of any actual missions that go anywhere.

9:24 am

It is nothing but pork: A GAO report says that NASA has been hiding the true and very expensive cost of the SLS/Orion projects by specifically excluding the cost of any actual missions that go anywhere.

NASA so far has put only two SLS missions on the manifest: a late-2017 test launch of an unmanned Orion into lunar space followed by a repeat of the mission in 2021 with crew onboard. NASA officials told GAO auditors it expects to have spent at least $22 billion on SLS and Orion through 2021, an estimate that does not include the cost of building the SLS launcher for the second mission. … Moreover, NASA provided no cost estimate for the more powerful SLS rocket NASA would need to mount a crewed Mars expedition the Obama administration envisions happening in the 2030s. According to NASA’s early plans, such a mission would entail multiple SLS-Orion launches.

The cost estimates NASA has offered so far “provide no information about the longer-term, life cycle costs of developing, manufacturing, and operating the launch vehicle, crew capsule, and ground systems” the agency has identified as crucial to the eventual Mars mission, the GAO wrote in its report.

In other words, they are going to spend $22 billion to launch the thing once. Meanwhile, NASA’s commercial manned space effort is producing three different spacecraft for about $3 billion total. If anyone in Congress had any brains, picking between these two programs would be easy, a no-brainer. Sadly, they have no brains, and really aren’t making their budgetary decisions with the needs of the nation in mind.

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Aerojet Rocketdyne has signed a contract to provide rocket engine’s for the upper stage of Stratolaunch’s air-launched rocket.

9:13 am

The competition heats up: Aerojet Rocketdyne has signed a contract to provide rocket engine’s for the upper stage of Stratolaunch’s air-launched rocket.

This company press release is packed full of new information about Stratolaunch’s rocket. For one, the entire package has been named the Eagles Launch System, with the air-launched upper stage called Thunderbolt. For another, they have a scheduled launch date set for 2018.

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Russia signs a preliminary space exploration agreement with China.

9:07 am

The competition heats up: Russia signs a preliminary space exploration agreement with China.

Meeting with his Chinese counterpart, Deputy Prime Minister Wang Yang, in Beijing on Monday, [Russian Deputy Prime Minister Dmitri] Rogozin announced on Twitter that he had signed “a protocol on establishing a control group for the implementation of eight strategic projects.” In a later Facebook post, he said “cooperation in space and in the market for space navigation” were among the projects.

Rogozin and Wang agreed to hold a meeting between the heads of their respective agencies “in the near future,” so that Beijing and Moscow could sow the seeds of a potential space partnership.

Federal Space Agency chief Oleg Ostapanko wants to allow “Chinese colleagues participate in some of the most interesting projects that can replace the ISS,” Rogozin said, adding that they would also discuss “projects such as cooperation in the field of rocket engine development,” and cooperation in the growing market of space applications services — which primarily applies to the development of the Chinese Beidou satellite navigation system and Russia’s Glonass navigation system, both rivals to the U.S.’ GPS.

The article does not give much information about this agreement, but does spend a lot of time discounting it, saying that it really is only a bluff to keep the U.S. from imposing more sanctions against Russia’s profitable commercial space efforts.

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The private effort to reactivate ISEE-3, a 1970s NASA spacecraft in orbit around the sun, has successfully detected the spacecraft.

9:00 am

The private effort to reactivate ISEE-3, a 1970s NASA spacecraft in orbit around the sun, has successfully detected the spacecraft.

Unfortunately the signal is a little weaker than we expected, and it’s also odd that it fades out toward the end of this capture (it returns and fades in subsequent ones too). Again, this is all very preliminary data done tonight on a rush basis. Much more detail to follow.

They don’t have a lot of time to detect, re-establish contact, and get the spacecraft into the necessary orbit for research. Orbital mechanics give them only through July to do this before it will be too late.

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The next Falcon 9 commercial launch, scrubbed from early May, has now been rescheduled to June 11.

8:47 am

The next Falcon 9 commercial launch, scrubbed from early May, has now been rescheduled to June 11.

This new date is a significant slip in the schedule, as they originally announced only a two week delay, and this adds on another two weeks. The original announced reason for the scrub was umbilical connection issues, but a commenter here at Behind The Black says it might have been something more serious, “a helium pressurization bottle burst in the stage.”

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