Tag: NASA

NASA thinks engine issue on SLS launch caused by misreading sensor

9:16 am

NASA engineers have now concluded that the improper temperatures in one engine in SLS’s core stage that forced the August 29, 2022 launch to be scrubbed were caused by a faulty sensor, and that the actual temperatures in the engine were correct.

During a news conference on Tuesday evening, NASA’s program manager for the SLS rocket, John Honeycutt, said his engineering team believed the engine had actually cooled down from ambient temperature to near the required level but that it was not properly measured by a faulty temperature sensor. “The way the sensor is behaving does not line up with the physics of the situation,” Honeycutt said.

The problem for NASA is that the sensor cannot be easily replaced and would likely necessitate a rollback to the Vehicle Assembly Building at Kennedy Space Center in Florida, a few kilometers from the launch pad. This would delay the launch of the rocket at least into October, and the space agency is starting to get concerned about wear and tear on a rocket that has now been stacked for nearly a full year.

With this SLS rocket, NASA management is now trapped between a rock and a hard place. The rocket’s solid rocket boosters has been stacked for just short of two years, almost a full year beyond their use-by date. Moreover, there are batteries on the rocket that only function for about a month before they must be replaced. Their replacement date is September 6th, which means if NASA cannot get the rocket launched by that date it will have to return it to the assembly building, delaying the launch to at least October. If it has to replace the solid rocket boosters the launch will likely then be delayed until next year, which will seriously impact the second SLS launch, set to send astronauts around the Moon and back.

At the moment the launch is scheduled for a two hour launch window beginning at 2:17 pm (Eastern) on Saturday, September 3, 2022. The countdown will be live streamed here. At the moment the weather for Saturday has improved, with s 60% chance the launch can proceed.

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Axiom gets NASA approval to fly second commercial manned mission to ISS

9:02 am

Capitalism in space: NASA and Axiom have worked out their contract to allow Axiom to fly its second commercial manned mission to ISS, now scheduled for sometime in the spring of 2023.

Through the mission specific order, Axiom is obtaining from NASA services such as crew supplies, cargo delivery to space, storage, and other in-orbit resources for daily use. The order also accommodates up to an additional contingency week aboard the space station. This mission is subject to NASA’s updated pricing policy for private astronaut missions, which reflects the full value of services the agency is providing to Axiom that are above space station baseline capabilities.

The order also identifies capabilities NASA will obtain from Axiom, including the return of scientific samples that must be kept cold in transit back to Earth, the return of a Nitrogen/Oxygen Recharge System (NORS) tank, the capability for last-minute return of two cargo transfer bags, and up to 10 hours of the private astronaut mission commander’s time during the docked mission to complete NASA science or perform tasks for NASA.

The flight, dubbed Ax-2, will carry four Axiom passengers, three of whom will be paying passengers. It will be launched by SpaceX on its Falcon 9 rocket, carrying one of SpaceX’s four reusable manned Dragon capsules.

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NASA awards SpaceX new $1.4 billion contract to launch its astronauts

8:56 am

Capitalism in space: NASA yesterday awarded SpaceX a new $1.4 billion contract to buy five more passenger flights to ISS, using SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon manned capsules.

This follows a similar contract extension in February that awarded SpaceX three more NASA passenger flights.

For Boeing, this contract award must hurt. If its Starliner manned capsule wasn’t years behind schedule, with numerous engineering errors slowing development, some of the cash from these two new SpaceX contracts would have certainly gone to Boeing. Instead, the company has had to spend more than $400 million of its own money trying to get Starliner fixed and operational.

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Cost overruns at Lockheed Martin threaten smallsat Lunar Trailblazer orbiter

8:56 am

NASA is now doing a review to decide if it will kill a smallsat lunar orbiter project, dubbed Lunar Trailblazer, due to cost overruns at Lockheed Martin.

Bethany Ehlmann, principal investigator for Lunar Trailblazer at Caltech, said in a presentation at LEAG Aug. 24 that Lockheed Martin, the spacecraft subcontractor, notified NASA of “recent and projected future overruns” on the project in June. Neither Ehlmann, NASA nor Lockheed Martin quantified those overruns.

“As we brought this mission from paper to life, the engineering and design efforts exceeded our original estimate,” Lockheed Martin said in a statement to SpaceNews Aug. 25. “Our Lockheed Martin team continues to implement cutting edge digital production tools and seek out operational efficiencies to minimize any extra cost incurred over Lunar Trailblazer’s development.”

The wording in this Lockheed Martin statement is meaningless blather, with no specific details. The bottom line however is this: Lunar Trailblazer was meant to demonstrate that it was possible to build a small low-cost science probe, in this case a lunar orbiter, and do it for no more than $55 million. Apparently, Lockheed Martin didn’t take that objective seriously. Instead, it thought it could do what it has done for decades — as have all the old big space contractors — pay no attention to cost, go overbudget, and then have NASA pick up the slack. It appears NASA might not do it this time.

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Starliner manned launch delayed until 2023

8:42 am

NASA and Boeing yesterday announced that the first manned flight of a Starliner capsule has been delayed again, and will not occur before February 2023, at the earliest.

This delay is in order to fix the various thruster problems that occurred in the second unmanned demo flight in May 2021, dubbed OFT-2.

Nappi said some “debris-related conditions” likely caused those thrusters to shut down, but later noted that is their best estimate since the OMAC thrusters are in a service module that burns up on reentry and is not recovered. “We do not know where the debris may have come from,” he said. “The bottom line is that it looks to be the leading root cause, and we’ve eliminated that by looking at the CFT vehicle and making sure that there’s absolutely no debris in the system.”

Several reaction control thrusters also shut down during the mission, which Nappi said was likely due to low inlet pressures and can be addressed with a “tweak in timing and tolerances” in software. High pressures in a thermal control loop noticed in the mission were linked to filters that engineers determined are not needed and can be removed. A guidance system on the spacecraft called VESTA worked well but generated more data than the flight software could handle, requiring changes to the software. [emphasis mine]

The highlighted words indicate once again that there are quality control problems at Boeing. For any “debris” to get into the thrusters without notice means someone at some point wasn’t doing things right.

SpaceX and Boeing got contracts to fly humans on their commercial capsules at the same time, in 2014. SpaceX began those flights in 2020, about three years behind schedule, mostly due to NASA-imposed delays. Boeing has still not flown, with almost all its delays resulting from company failures, almost all of which were uncovered during the two unmanned demo flights in 2019 and 2022.

Hopefully, the company will finally get the last kinks from the system before next year’s flight. In the meantime its inability to get this job done on time has meant it has lost a lot of commercial business, all of which went to SpaceX.

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August 24, 2022 Quick space links

4:15 pm

Links courtesy of BtB’s stringer Jay.

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NASA describes Starship’s first unmanned test lunar landing

9:28 am

In a briefing focused on the science that could be placed on the mission, a NASA official yesterday provided a status update of SpaceX’s first unmanned test flight by Starship to the Moon.

First, the official revealed that NASA is only requiring SpaceX to demonstrate a successful landing. Take-off will not be required. Also,

Starship is not designed to fly directly to the Moon like NASA’s Space Launch System, however. Instead, the first stage puts it only in Earth orbit. To go further, it must fill up with propellant at a yet-to-be-built orbiting fuel depot. Other Starships are needed to deliver propellant to the depot.

Watson-Morgan described the Concept of Operations for Starship’s Artemis III mission, starting with launch of the fuel depot, then a number of “propellant aggregation” launches to fill up the depot, then launch of the Starship that will go to Moon.

Previously SpaceX suggested that the ship would be directly refueled by subsequent Starships, with no middle-man fueling depot. It could be either engineering had made the depot necessary, or NASA politics have insisted upon it.

Finally, the talk outlined the elevator SpaceX is developing to lower the astronauts and equipment to the ground from Starship’s top.

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NASA again approves design concept for Orbital Reef commercial space station

10:53 am

Proposed Orbital Reef space station

Capitalism in space: Sierra Space announced today that NASA has completed, apparently for the second time, the design review for the Orbital Reef space station that the company wants to build in partnership with Blue Origin and others, thus allowing the actual design of the station to begin.

This press release announcement, on August 22, 2022, is a bit puzzling, as Sierra Space made almost the exact same announcement in April 2022. What, did NASA have to do this twice? Did issues come up after the first approval? Was the agency reviewing different things?

Regardless, NASA as usual is slowing things down considerably. Sierra Space and Blue Origin, the primary partners in this private space station project, first announced it in October 2021. It took the government almost a year to simply approve the basic concept so that the design phase could finally begin. At this pace it will be 2090 before the station is launched.

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NASA lists 13 candidate landing sites for Artemis-3 manned mission

11:09 am

Candidate landing sites for Artemis-3
Click for original image.

NASA yesterday revealed its first preliminary list of thirteen candidate landing sites for the Artemis-3 manned mission, the first manned mission the agency wants to send to the Moon in 2026.

The image to the right, reduced, enhanced, and annotated by me to post here, shows these thirteen zones in blue. I have added the red dot to mark what I understand to be the planned landing zone of Viper, an unmanned rover that NASA hopes to launch by ’23 at the latest. From the press release:

The team identified regions that can fulfill the moonwalk objective by ensuring proximity to permanently shadowed regions, and also factored in other lighting conditions. All 13 regions contain sites that provide continuous access to sunlight throughout a 6.5-day period – the planned duration of the Artemis III surface mission. Access to sunlight is critical for a long-term stay at the Moon because it provides a power source and minimizes temperature variations.

Note that this mission will land a Starship with crew at this South Pole region. That spacecraft’s large payload capacity likely means that it could conceivably leave behind supplementary supplies for a follow-up next mission, and thus speed up development of the first lunar base.

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August 18, 2022 Quick space links

10:50 am

As stringer Jay correctly noted to me in an email today, “Slow news day.” None of the stories below merit a full post, even though they are pretty much all of today’s space news.

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