An evening pause: Hat tip George Petricko, who noted, “Just when you think the whole world has gone rotten, you see someone like this.” I say, this is just one more testament to what is possible if you are humble and do the best you can, with what you have.
The competition heats up: Orbital ATK today revealed plans to build what it calls the Next Generation Launcher designed to compete with SpaceX’s Falcon 9.
The first stage would use a variation of the solid rocket boosters that ATK built for the space shuttle. The second stage would be bought from Blue Origin.
The competition heats up: Iridium has announced the availability of its own location technology comparable to GPS and using the company’s constellation of satellites.
Iridium Communications Inc. has introduced its Satellite Time and Location (STL) service, an alternative or complement to traditional indoor and outdoor location-based technologies, and declared it ready for use. STL’s position, navigation and timing (PNT) technology is deployed through Iridium’s 66 cross-linked, low-earth orbit satellite constellation. Through Iridium satellites and in GNSS receivers, STL technology can work to verify GPS, GLONASS, Galileo and other navigation services, and also can serve as an alternative for those services when GPS signals are degraded or unavailable. STL also can provide an alternative source of time when testing GPS signals.
Essentially, for practically nothing, using satellites and technology already in orbit, they have created their own system that can both compete and complement the expensive government-built GPS systems.
The competition heats up: The United Kingdom has cancelled its spaceport competition to chose one spaceport and instead has announced it will allow any one of the competing locations to operate if they can want and can meet some licensing requirements.
In other words, instead of the government dictating one location as the nation’s spaceport, it will allow different locations to compete for the space launch business.
The link has few details, though a closer look at subject of the British space effort can be found here.
The competition heats up: India’s space agency ISRO has scheduled the test flight of its half scale space plane prototype for May 23.
Two stories this week illustrate the difference between lobbying the government to get anything accomplished, and doing it yourself with the goal of making money from it from private customers.
In the first case SpaceX is planning to fly a Dragon capsule to Mars, using its Falcon Heavy rocket, and do it by 2018. It would not be manned, but would do the initial engineering testing for later manned missions, using larger interplanetary spacecraft. SpaceX is not asking the government to help pay for it. They are only making sure they have dotted all the legal “I”s required. The goal is to build spacecraft that can take anyone to Mars who is willing to pay for the flight.
In the second case Lockheed Martin is proposing a big government program to put six astronauts in orbit around Mars, in 2028. They haven’t really built anything yet to do this, they merely are lobbying the federal government to pay for it.
Which do you think is more likely to happen? Anyone who reads Behind the Black knows that I choose SpaceX. For 40 years I have seen many different variations of Lockheed Martin’s proposal, all of which came to nothing. They are powerpoint proposals, not real engineering, designed to wow Congress and NASA and get funding for the company. Nothing will ever be built, since the actual construction is so far into the future and so untested that it is impossible to predict what will really happen.
SpaceX however is planning a real mission, which is being designed to lay the groundwork for later more complex attempts. Rather than propose something big for far in the future, they are building something reasonable and doable now. Moreover, they aren’t lobbying the government, they are advertising their skills to the entire world, with the goal of convincing everyone to buy their very real product.
UPDATE: I should add a link here to Orbital ATK’s proposal in Congressional hearings on Monday to use their Cygnus capsule to build a cislunar space station by 2020. Like Lockheed Martin, they are lobbying Congress to build a mostly powerpoint concept. Why don’t they instead make an investment of their own money, like SpaceX, to send some Cygnus capsules to lunar space and demonstrate the concept, while also learning what needs to be done? I would have greater faith in the reality of their concept if they did that.
The competition heats up: Orbital ATK’s upgraded Antares rocket, with new Russian engines for its first stage, has been rolled to the launchpad in preparation for its launch in July.
They plan to do a 30 second long hot fire engine test on the launchpad of the first stage engine to see if all works properly. If successful, they will then confirm the launch date in July.
The recovered first stage from SpaceX’s last Falcon 9 launch experienced significant wear and tear during its high speed descent and landing.
They do not think they will be able to use the stage again, but will instead test it to determine the engineering tolerances that need to be met to make recovery and reuse in these situations more likely. The data will also help them increae the likelihood of reusability on launches that are less stressful.
Posted from Belize.
The competition heats up: Airbus has begun a project to develop a smallsat commercial launch rocket, competitive with Rocket Lab’s Electron and Virgin Galactic’s LaunchOne, aimed at the cubesat and nanosat satellite market.
The source for the story was unnamed, and also gave few details, so it is hard to know how real this is. What I gather however is that we might be seeing the beginnings of a long term split in the launch market, with one set of big rockets designed to launch human-related payloads, including humans, and a second set of small rockets focused on launching unmanned satellites.
Tory Bruno, the CEO of ULA, explained in an op-ed today why his company is discontinuing its use of Boeing’s Delta family of rockets and focusing exclusively on Lockheed Martin’s Atlas 5 and its eventual replacement, the Vulcan Centaur.
Delta is an amazing rocket, but it’s costly to produce. Its burnt-orange foam insulation has to be applied by hand. Its production line is bigger and more complex than Atlas’s. And its components are pricier.
Bruno’s purpose with this op-ed is to convince Congress to leave his company alone while they develop the new Vulcan rocket. Congress keeps proposing outlawing use of the Atlas 5 with its Russian engines, and Bruno does not want that, at least not until the Vulcan is flying. He is also trying to reduce his costs by discontinuing Delta, which in turn would allow him to lower prices for his Atlas 5 and compete more effectively with SpaceX.
Though I understand Congress’s concerns, I do find it sad that in modern America a private businessman has to lobby Congress for the right to run his company as he sees fit.
Boeing has revealed that the first manned flight of Starliner will be delayed until 2018.
This delay for Boeing is not really a surprise. Unlike SpaceX, the company had done very little actual development work on the capsule before winning its contract from NASA. They therefore have a lot more to do to become flight worthy. My one worry is their contract. If the contract is fixed price, as with the original cargo contracts awarded SpaceX and Orbital ATK, Boeing will have no incentive to delay, as they won’t be paid anything until they achieve specific milestones and will get no additional monies to cover the added costs of the delay. If the contract is cost-plus, however, NASA’s traditional contract system used for SLS, Orion, and almost every other boondoggle since the 1960s, then Boeing will be paid regardless of the delay, and NASA will also be on the hook for paying the additional delay costs, thus giving Boeing an incentive to slow walk the construction.
I think the contract was fixed-price, but am not sure. Anyone out there have an answer?
After a month docked to ISS, SpaceX’s Dragon capsule has successfully splashed down in the Pacific.
The competition heats up: Blue Origin has released footage taken from the New Shepard propulsion module as it returned to Earth and landed.
I have embedded the footage below the fold. Quite cool.
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The competition heats up: The third first stage recovered by SpaceX, and the second in a row, has returned to port.
The link has several nice pictures of the booster, one at sea as it approaches port, and the second on the drone, showing the scorching on the stage’s upper body.
Linux can be a pain sometimes, and it requires a bit more hands-on work by the user to make it function, but overall in the ten years since I abandoned Windows and switched to Linux (first with the Debian operating system and now with Kubuntu) I have found my work on my computer to be far more satisfying and successful. I can mostly get things done the way I like to do them, not as dictated by some software geek working at Microsoft’s headquarters.
Which is why this story interested me: “I thought my daughter clicked on ransomware – it was the damn Windows 10 installer.” It describes a number of stories where Windows 10 took control of a person’s computer and imposed an upgrade, against their will.
This story, among many others, only confirmed for me that my decision in 2006 was a wise one. I will never return to Windows, and if I was certain that computer projectors could read Linux laptops I’d switch the laptop to Linux as well.
It is just a shame however that so many people still stick with Windows, as it often makes doing their work difficult, if not impossible. When a product doesn’t work for you, you find another product. That’s how freedom and competition work.
Below is video of the Falcon 9 first stage landing last night. There isn’t really much to see, because this happened at night. However, I must repeat that this happened at night. In other words, SpaceX was able to bring its first stage down accurately in the middle of the ocean onto a tiny barge in the dark.
Who says the impossible is not possible?
During the live telecast, the audience broke out into a chant of “USA! USA!”, as they did after the previous first stage landings. Can you guess why?
This opinion column looks at the three remaining politicians campaigning for president, and finds that Donald Trump probably has the most favorable position toward commercial space.
While all three candidates mouth favorable platitudes towards NASA and space exploration, all three also express reluctance to fund a giant government space program. Trump however was the only one to note the positive aspects of commercial space and express
…support for the government partnering with private space companies like Elon Musk’s SpaceX. “I think there needs to be a growing partnership between the government and the private sector as we continue to explore space,” Trump told AIAA. “There seems to be tremendous overlap of interests so it seems logical to go forward together.”
Obviously, one can’t and shouldn’t put much faith in what any politician says during the campaign. Nonetheless, this might be a hopeful sign that if elected, Trump would push to dump NASA’s SLS/Orion and have NASA instead focus on buying space exploration services designed and operated by private companies.
The competition heats up: In tonight’s launch, SpaceX not only put a commercial satellite into geosynchronous orbit, it successfully landed the first stage on a barge, a landing they did not expect to succeed.
Go here to watch a launch replay. The landing is at about 38 minutes.
With this success, I think they have demonstrated that they can recover that first stage in almost every circumstance. The next big challenge: Launch Falcon Heavy and recovering all three of its first stages.
The competition heats up: As part of its outer space development program, the government of Luxembourg has signed a deal with asteroid mining company Deep Space, Inc. to build an orbital demonstration test satellite.
The inaugural project of this exciting new partnership is Prospector-X™, an experimental, low Earth orbit technology demonstration mission, designed to test the company’s innovative deep space technology. These key enabling technologies will be instrumental to the success of the company’s first deep space resource exploration missions in the near future. The Prospector-X spacecraft will be built at Deep Space Industries’ new European headquarters, in Luxembourg, in conjunction with the company’s international and American partners, including the Interdisciplinary Centre for Security, Reliability, and Trust (SnT) at the University of Luxembourg.
It essentially appears that Luxembourg is creating its own space program, focused entirely on profit by acting as the venture capitalist for private commercial companies. Most interesting.
They will try to launch 24 hours later, at 1:21 am Eastern early Friday morning.
Note that though they will try to land the first stage on the barge, they don’t expect to succeed this time because of the mission’s launch requirements.
Doug Messier has posted a detailed analysis of Congressman Jim Bridenstine’s (R-Oklahoma) proposed American Space Renaissance Act (ASRA) that is definitely worth reading.
Most of the changes appear aimed at organizing the regulation process of commercial space more completely under FAA control, rather than the hodge-podge of agencies that presently have responsibility. The bill also encourages NOAA and NASA to increase their use of commercial data for weather and Earth remote sensing.
At first glance, the bill looks good, but it also is not likely to be passed as written. Moreover, not surprisingly it calls for a hefty increase in funding for the FAA agencies being given more responsibilities, but I wonder if Congress will comparably reduce the funding of those agencies it takes responsibility from. My instinct tells me no, which means of course that the government and bureaucracy grows again.
The competition heats up: SpaceX has already begun construction of one of the booster cores for its first test flight of Falcon Heavy, and expects to have all built by summer.
They have not yet decided on the payload or goal of that first test flight, though they appear to still be aiming for an November launch.
Meanwhile, they have a 1:21 am (eastern) Falcon 9 commercial launch tonight, in which they will also attempt another first stage barge landing.
Embedded below the fold. The focus tonight was about the uptick in investment capital going to space, fueled by the drop in launch prices.
Note that I was also on Coast to Coast tonight discussing the same thing during the opening news.
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The competition heats up: NASA has signed an agreement to provide testing facilities to Generation Orbit so it can do test flights of its air-launched rocket.
Generation Orbit Launch Services, Inc. (GO) is pleased to announce the signing of a Space Act Agreement with NASA Armstrong Flight Research Center (AFRC) to collaboratively pursue the flight test and envelope clearance for the GOLauncher 1 air launched rocket vehicle. Utilizing AFRC’s experience and capabilities in flight test engineering for air launch rocket systems, the two year program will demonstrate integration of the GOLauncher 1 Inert Test Article (GO1-ITA) with NASA’s Gulfstream III research aircraft, captive carry flight testing, and release testing. Further, NASA AFRC will continue the development of its store separation analysis capability, eventually validating the toolset through release flight testing of the GO1-ITA.
Like many similar past SAA agreements, NASA will provide no money, but will make its facilities available for testing at no charge. For a new company like this, this availability will help them enormously, and is more in line with what NASA was originally designed to do.
The fallout from the scrub and one day delay of the first launch at Vostochny, while Vladimir Putin was there and watching, has generated an investigation and the suspension of one designer.
The official goal of the commission was to find causes of the failed launch attempt and to check the completeness of tests leading to the incident.
However given a minor technical impact of the delay, the investigation likely had the primarily political nature, namely it was aimed to demonstrate to the Kremlin that the industry problems were being dealt with. Moreover, Rogozin also made a decision during the work of the commission to suspend the responsibilities of Leonid Shalimov, the designer general at NPO Avtomatika, which supplied the hardware allegedly responsible for the incident. Rogozin summoned Shalimov to Moscow on May 6, apparently to present the results of the investigation. [emphasis mine]
When you develop any new system or cutting edge technology, things are certain to go wrong. This is the one certainty that I will admit to and gladly embrace, and to which good designers, scientists, and engineers all agree. Vostochny is brand new. It stands barely finished. No launch had ever been attempted there before. For there to be a one day delay because of a minor engineering issue is hardly a sign of poor workmanship. Instead, it suggests the people who built it did a reasonably good job, even as many of their managers ripped them and the project off.
What we see here is an industry that is being run not by people who understand the business, but by distant politicians whose only interest is power and control. Can you imagine any manager in Roscosmos anywhere being willing to approve the start of a radical new engineering project, faced with pressure from Putin and these power-hungry politicians in Moscow? It won’t happen. Until there is a change and the politicians let go of their control of this industry, Roscosmos is going to take the safe route every single time.
Nothing new is going to come from Russia’s aerospace industry for a very long time.
The competition heats up: SpaceX this weekend updated the prices and listed capabilities for buying a Falcon 9 launch, while also adding the price and capabilities of its not-yet flown Falcon Heavy. Here’s the link to the SpaceX page.
The damage shakes out to $62 million for a Falcon 9 rocket launch with a payload of 4,020 kilograms (8,860 pounds) and $90 million for a ride on the much-anticipated Falcon Heavy rocket, set to debut in late 2016, which can ferry 13,600 kilograms (29,980 pounds) to Mars. In addition to adding an interplanetary destination to its wares, SpaceX has also upped the payload capacity of the Falcon 9 to low Earth orbit from 29,000 pounds to over 50,000 pounds.
The Falcon Heavy is expected to put slightly more than 50 tons into low Earth orbit, half of what a Saturn 5 could do, and about two thirds what the first version of SLS will be able to do. Yet, their price to buy a launch is actually less than what every other rocket company is charging for rockets approximately comparable to the Falcon 9 and about 500 times less than the cost to build that SLS rocket (what an SLS actually costs to launch is anybody’s guess, but it certainly ain’t anywhere near $100 million). And the upgrades on the Falcon 9 have also made it better than those other rockets because it can now put 25 tons into low Earth orbit, only slightly less than the space shuttle.
That they have added the Falcon Heavy is also more evidence that they are confident that its first test flight will be this year.
The competition heats up: Blue Origin has selected the construction company that will build its Florida rocket manufacturing facility.
This decision indicates that Blue Origin is now very confident in the designs of both its New Shepard capsule/rocket and its BE-4 rocket engine, and knows enough about both to begin committing money and resources to manufacturing both repeatedly.
The competition heats up: Three stories today about investors putting money into different space related business ventures are worth consolidating into one post, as they all indicate the same thing.
The first story involves a takeover by SES of the O3b satellite constellation that provides internet service globally. They already have 12 satellites in orbit, and have plans to launch 8 more by 2019. A partial list of their customers (Digicel Pacific, Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines, American Samoa Telecom, Speedcast, Rignet, Bharti International (Airtel), Timor Telecom, CNT Ecuador, Entel Chile and NOAA) illustrates the solidity of the company’s success, which is also why SES is spending $20 million to own it.
In the second two stories we find investment capital being committed for two different and unusual space-tourism-related companies. World View plans to launch high altitude balloons with passengers, taking them up 20 to 30 miles for a several hour journey on the edge of space. That they have secured an additional $15 million in investment even as their deal with the city of Tucson is being challenged in court indicates the confidence the investors have in their business.
SpaceVR is even more interesting. They plan to launch smallsats with cameras providing a 360 degree view, and link them to virtual reality headsets here on Earth. Consumers will then be able to experience being in space, without actually going. Though the press release does not specific how the product will be sold, it suggests that they are aiming for the education and museum market.
All three stories prove that the modern investment community, normally very adverse to high risk endeavors, is increasingly finding that the financial benefits of space travel and anything related to it are worth the financial risks. This fact can only lead to good things for the eventual development and exploration of space.
Moreover, the third story once again demonstrates the value of reducing the cost to get into orbit. SpaceVR’s idea is a very good one, but it couldn’t have happened before SpaceX forced a reduction in launch prices. Beforehand, no one could have afforded to buy the product because of the high cost to launch the satellites. Now, because the launch price is affordable, it can be marketed at a realistic price.
In other words, lower the price, and you increase the number of customers able to buy your product. I expect the rocket business to boom in the coming years.
Embedded below the fold. Discussed the SpaceX proposal to send Dragon to Mars, as well as the ramifications of SpaceX’s first Air Force launch contract.
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The competition heats up: On April 27 the Air Force made it official and announced that SpaceX has won its first military contract, breaking ULA’s launch monopoly.
This contract award really isn’t a surprise, as SpaceX had been certified by the Air Force as a qualified bidder, and ULA had declined to bid on this particular contract, leaving SpaceX as the Air Force’s only possible contractor.
Update: The Air Force has admitted that SpaceX’s $83 million price is 40% less than what ULA has typically charged for a comparable launch, confirming what Elon Musk and SpaceX (and many others, including myself back in 2005) have claimed all along, that the Air Force’s EELV bulk buy (giving ULA an Air Force launch monopoly) was a bad idea, discouraging innovation, forcing costs up, and guaranteed to force the government to spend a lot of unnecessary extra money.
I must add that it is definitely worthwhile reading my UPI column from 2005 again, now, more than a decade later. I predicted quite accurately what has subsequently happened following the merger of Lockheed Martin and Boeing to form ULA.
