The competition heats up: Tory Bruno, ULA’s CEO, announced yesterday that the company plans to cut 400 jobs next year, in addition to the 375 jobs they are trimming now.
The goal is to cut costs so that the company has a better chance of competing with SpaceX.
There is a commercial space conference going on in Colorado this week, which explains the plethora of breaking stories from the new commercial space companies both yesterday and today.
Two stories today from Aviation Week, however, are more about the old big space industry and the old way of doing things, and both reveal the hollow nature of that entire effort.
Both stories are about work Lockheed Martin is doing in connection with its Orion capsule, and both try to convince us that this capsule is going to be the central vehicle for the first missions to Mars.
Function starts in the bones of the spacecraft,” [Mike Hawes, Lockheed Martin vice president and Orion program manager,] said in an April 12 interview at the 32nd annual Space Symposium here. “To be a deep space spacecraft, you have to build differently than you would if your requirements were to stay in low Earth orbit and be quiescent at the International Space Station for a few months. That’s driven Orion from the beginning. Any architecture you look at needs a crew capability, a long-term design requirement. So, you can debate a lot of different missions, but you need that fundamental capacity we have invested in Orion.”
I say balderdash. Orion is an over-priced and over-engineered ascent/descent capsule for getting humans in and out of Earth orbit. Spending billions so it can also go to Mars makes no sense, because its heat shield and other capsule technologies for getting through the Earth’s atmosphere are completely useless in interplanetary travel. Moreover, such a small capsule is completely insufficient for a long Mars mission, even if you test it for a “1,000 day” missions, as Hawes also says in the first article. To send a crew to Mars, you need a big vessel, similar to Skylab, Mir, ISS, or Bigelow’s B330 modules. A mere capsule like Orion just can’t do it.
Eventually, it is my hope that Congress will recognize this reality, and stop funding big space projects like SLS and Orion, and instead put its money behind the competitive private efforts to make money in space. Rather than trying to build its own capsules, space stations, rockets, and interplanetary vessels (something that NASA has repeatedly tried to do without any success), NASA should merely be a customer, buying the capsules, space stations, and interplanetary vessels that private companies have built, on their own, to make money, on their own.
Consider for example Bigelow’s B330. Each module is about as big as Skylab or Mir, and costs mere pennies to build and launch, compared to those government-designed stations. Moreover, Bigelow can build it fast, and repeatedly. Similarly, Orion has cost billions (about $16 billion when it makes its first manned mission in 2021 at the earliest) and will have taken 15 years to build. SpaceX built Dragon in seven years, Orbital ATK built Cygnus in five years, and Boeing is going to build Starliner in about four years, all for about $10 billion, total.
The contrast is striking, and though ordinary people with the ability to add 2 plus 2 can see it, it takes Congressman a little longer (as they need to use their fingers to count). Sooner or later they will get it, and Orion and SLS will disappear. Bet on it.
The competition heats up: Mandated by Congress to use commercial weather data obtained from privately launched weather satellites, NOAA has announced its first plan for doing so.
The first Commercial Weather Data Pilot, or CWDP, will kick off this summer with a solicitation for GPS radio occultation data of the sort NOAA and Eumetsat have been using for years to improve weather forecasts. GPS radio occultation receivers that have flown on a handful of research satellites and the U.S.-Taiwanese COSMIC constellation obtain highly detailed temperature and humidity soundings by observing tiny distortions of U.S. Air Force GPS signals as they pass through the atmosphere. While the U.S. and Taiwan are preparing to replace the six original COSMIC satellites with the first six of 12 planned satellites slated to launch on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy perhaps late this year, meteorologists would like to see scores of additional GPS radio occultation satellites in orbit.
Several companies, including GeoOptics, PlanetiQ and Spire, have announced plans to address that demand by deploying constellations of dozens to hundreds of small satellites equipped with GPS radio occultation receivers. Spire launched its first four operational satellites last September.
If this goes as I hope, private companies will launch enough satellites to provide the data, at a far lower cost than NOAA spends to build and launch its own satellites, so that eventually it will not pay for the government to do it anymore. Just as private space is replacing NASA in supplying crew and cargo to ISS, private space can do the same for NOAA.
And like NASA initially, NOAA’s managers have been very reluctant to allow this to happen, as it will eventually take the business from them and give it to others. Since they, like NASA, can’t do it very efficiently, however, they can’t really argue their case very well, which is why Congress has been forcing their hand.
In a complicated court battle involving multiple courts, multiple nations, multiple companies, and multiple industries (including Roscosmos), a French court has ruled in favor of Russia and against the shareholders of the liquidated Russian Yukos oil company.
The Ivry First Instance Court ruled in favor of Roscosmos in a dispute with Cyprus-based offshore company Veteran Petroleum, a shareholder in the former Yukos oil company, according to Roscosmos. “They have acknowledged that our arguments are correct and that there is no need to seize the money,” Roscosmos representative Igor Burenkov told the TASS news agency.
France has seized Russian assets worth $1 billion in total following the Kremlin’s refusal to pay damages to former Yukos shareholders. The seized assets included $400 million owed by French-based satellite provider Eutelsat to the Russian Satellite Communications company and $300 million owned by French space launch provider Arianespace to Roscosmos.
More details here. The dispute here is not just between Russia and the shareholders of Yukos. There is also a battle going on between the Hague International Arbitration Court and the French courts. Whether Russia will be able get its money however remains unclear at this moment.
The competition heats up: Orbital ATK has signed Intelsat to the first contract for a private robotic servicing mission to defunct commercial communications satellites.
Orbital ATK is offering the Mission Extension Vehicle (MEV), a spacecraft designed to rendezvous with a commercial satellite and dock to the nozzle of its apogee kick motor and surrounding adapter ring. The MEV would then take over propulsion and attitude control for the satellite, offering up to five years of extended life.
Intelsat has agreed to be the customer for the first MEV mission, named MEV-1 and scheduled for launch in 2018. MEV-1 will first dock with a retired satellite in a graveyard orbit above stationary orbit to test its systems, then dock with an active Intelsat satellite to extend its life for five years.
I like the concept. Unlike other much more complicated proposals, which propose to actually refuel the satellite’s original tank, this is simple, quick, and quite doable for relatively little developmental cost. Orbital ATK already as the technology to do the rendezvous, from its Cygnus freighter. All they need to refine is the specific technology to attach to the specific satellites.
The competition heats up: At a space conference this week Aerojet Rocketdyne pitched its AR1 rocket engine, still under development, as the ideal replacement for the Russian engine in the Atlas 5.
The U.S. Air Force awarded Aerojet Rocketdyne a contract in February worth up to $534 million over five years to certify and start delivering flight-ready AR1 engines in 2019. Aerojet Rocketdyne says it already has kicked in $70 million, with its total investment expected to exceed $250 million over the life of the contract.
Van Kleeck, vice president of Aerojet Rocketdyne’s advanced space and launch business unit, said the Air Force contract — the largest of several propulsion-related awards the service has made in recent months — is a sign of the Air Force’s confidence in the AR1’s ability to provide an expedient replacement for the RD-180 engine the Defense Department is under pressure from Congress to stop using.
United Launch Alliance, however, has anointed Blue Origin’s methane-fueled BE-4 engine as the front runner to replace the RD-180 by serving as the main engine for the Denver company’s next-generation rocket Vulcan.
“The AR1 engine can fly both on an Atlas and Vulcan and it’s the only engine that can do so,” Van Kleeck said.
Aerojet has been losing business to the newer commercial space companies like Blue Origin, and desperately needs to find a customer for the AR1. In the long run the Air Force contract won’t suffice, as it really is no more than government corporate welfare and cannot sustain them as a company. This press conference was part of that effort.
The competition heats up: A Swiss company has purchased an Airbus wide-body jet for use as a commercial zero gravity vomit comet.
What makes this different than previous zero-g companies is that they plan to fly a lot of people for a reasonable amount of money.
Prices range from 2,700 Swiss francs ($2,826) for a seat in the “party zone” with up to 40 passengers to as high as 65,000 francs for the VIP Room, which will hold up to 12 passengers, who will also get a luxury watch and can keep their flight suit.
The competition heats up: A Russian billionaire has announced a $100 million investment in an effort to use lasers to propel cellphone-sized spacecraft on an interstellar voyage to Alpha Centauri.
Called Breakthrough Starshot, the programme is based on an idea that has been around for decades: the solar sail. The theory is that a lightweight space sail could harness the momentum carried by photons in order to travel without fuel.
The Breakthrough Starshot team is betting that a burst of concentrated lasers, fired from the ground, could rapidly accelerate a mobile-phone-sized device equipped with microelectronics and a tiny sail — providing much more energy than could be harnessed from the Sun. Whereas NASA’s plutonium-powered New Horizons spacecraft took nine years to reach Pluto, the “nanocraft” envisioned by Breakthrough Starshot would pass by the dwarf planet and exit the Solar System in three days.
The project’s initial US$100-million budget covers only research and development of such a spacecraft. But Breakthrough Starshot’s ultimate goal is to demonstrate proof of concept for an international programme that would send a fleet of nanocraft into space. Doing so would require the group to surmount enormous scientific and engineering challenges in developing the necessary laser technology, materials and communications systems.
This technology is related though not identical to an earlier story about using lasers to power spacecraft.
Twenty minutes of fun, talking first about the new American space industry, about to burst out to settle the solar system, then followed with a segment on the increasingly sad state of the Russian space program, run by top-down centralized rule from Moscow, with a failing economy that is very strapped for cash. The embed of the podcast is below the fold.
Russia’s refusal to pay damages in a court case has forced France to seize $700 million owed to Russia’s aerospace industry.
In total, France has seized Russian assets worth $1 billion following the Kremlin’s refusal to pay damages to former Yukos shareholders.
In July 2014, The Hague international arbitration court ruled that Russia must pay $50 billion for expropriating the assets of Yukos. The seized assets include $400 million owed by French-based satellite provider Eutelsat to the Russian Satellite Communications company and $300 million owned by French space launch provider Arianespace to Russia’s Roscosmos space agency, the magazine reported, citing the Shearman & Sterling legal firm which represents the Yukos shareholders.
This story is similar to the Sea Launch court suit by Boeing, whom the Russians owe $300 million. In that case Boeing has moved to block Russia from selling Sea Launch.
Both stories suggest that the Russians are in big financial trouble, partly caused by a lack of understanding of capitalism. In both cases, they formed partnerships with western businesses and failed to realize that those partnerships placed financial obligations upon them. From its Soviet days Russia probably thought they could ignore those obligations if it became inconvenient, and they are now discovering that this is not really possible if they wish to sell their goods to the rest of the world.
I expect Russia’s space industry to increasingly become isolated from the rest of the world market, partly because of these events.
In related news, Roscosmos has revealed that after the initial launch at Vostochny in April, the second launch will not occur until 2017. This indicates that the first launch is merely a face-saving effort to hide the fact that construction is really more than a year behind schedule, not three months.
In the heat of competition: ULA has scheduled May 27 has the new launch date of its next Atlas 5 launch, pending the results of its investigation into the engine anomaly from the previous launch.
They have not revealed whether they have pinned down the cause of the first stage engine’s premature shutdown.
The competition heats up: The recovered first stage of last week’s Falcon 9 launch has returned to port, and is being prepared for tests and eventual reflight.
The Falcon 9’s destination is unconfirmed, but SpaceX chief executive Elon Musk said Friday the rocket’s first stage will likely go to launch pad 39A — a former shuttle launch facility now leased by SpaceX — for a series of engine firings to verify its flight readiness.
The objective: Fly the first stage booster again, perhaps as soon as June. “We’re going to do a series of test fires,” Musk told reporters after Friday’s launch. “We’re hoping to do that at the Cape, rather than transport it to Texas (SpaceX’s rocket test facility), and then bring it back. Our plan is to basically fire it 10 times in a row on the ground. If things look good at that point, then it’s qualified for reuse and launch. We’re hoping to re-launch on an orbital mission in … June.”
SpaceX already has one customer, satellite-maker SES, quite eager to pay the discounted price to fly one of its satellites on this booster.
