During the last decade, NASA has invested billions of dollars into programs with private companies to carry cargo and, eventually, astronauts to the International Space Station. These commercial services were powered by new kinds of contracts for the agency, because they offered a "fixed price" for services and required companies to put in their own funding to develop new spacecraft and rockets.
But the space agency has established a Maginot line of sorts around the planet when it comes to deep space exploration. For example, less than a year ago, NASA's then-administrator, Charles Bolden, said he's "not a big fan" of commercial companies building large, heavy lift rockets that will enable private companies to venture beyond low-Earth orbit. For Bolden, the lines were clear: we'll support you near Earth, but leave deep space to the professionals. "We believe our responsibility to the nation is to take care of things that normal people cannot do, or don’t want to do, like large launch vehicles," Bolden said of NASA.
Nevertheless, SpaceX, Blue Origin, and other companies have pressed forward with their plans to develop large rockets capable of deep space exploration. And they're making progress. SpaceX's Falcon Heavy booster, which has 90 percent of the lift capability to low Earth orbit as the initial version of NASA's Space Launch System, is likely to fly in 2017—up to two years before NASA's own big rocket.
On Thursday during a hearing before the US Senate's Subcommittee on Space, Science, and Competitiveness, SpaceX formally called upon the US government to support public-private partnerships in deep space. Tim Hughes, SpaceX's senior vice president for global business and government affairs, testified. "The principles applied in past programs for low Earth orbit capability can and should be applied to deep space exploration," Hughes said. He referred to NASA's Commercial Orbital Transportation Services, or COTS program.
NASA, Hughes said, should now consider funding a COTS-like program to run "in parallel" to NASA's Space Launch System and Orion spacecraft for deep space exploration. "There's a program of record right now that is NASA's central focus for deep space exploration," Hughes said in response to a Senator's question. "But I think it can be readily supplemented with public-private partnerships to allow us to sustain a permanent presence in space."
As examples, Hughes said NASA could set "high level requirements" for companies, such as demonstrating the vertical takeoff and landing of rockets from the lunar surface, delivering large amounts of cargo to the surface of Mars, or building a more reliable communications network between Earth and Mars. All of these projects, he said, would enable the United States to establish a permanent presence in space, rather than fly one-off missions.
Hughes also offered evidence that the COTS program has benefited both NASA and SpaceX to a large degree. For example, in 2011, NASA estimated that it would have cost the agency about $4 billion to develop a rocket like the Falcon 9 booster based upon NASA's traditional contracting processes. A more "commercial development" approach might have allowed the agency to pay only $1.7 billion.
However, by setting a high-level requirement for cargo transport to the space station—and leaving the details to industry—SpaceX was allowed to design and develop the Falcon 9 rocket on its own, Hughes said. The cost? According to NASA's own independently verified numbers, SpaceX’s development costs of both the Falcon 1 and Falcon 9 rockets were estimated at approximately $390 million in total. NASA got a better deal, and SpaceX got a rocket it could use to fly commercial payloads as well as NASA ones.
It is not clear how warm the senators were to SpaceX's plan, which shares support in the commercial space community from others interested in deep space activities (such as Blue Origin, with its Blue Moon concept). "I think the COTS program has been a great success story for NASA and the commercial marketplace, and believe that the government should look at all options for public private partnership in advancing our nation's exploration goals," said Eric Stallmer, president of the Commercial Spaceflight Federation.
However, some at NASA will likely resist the notion, as it would mean relinquishing some of the control they have over design and development of rockets and spacecraft under the agency's traditional, cost-plus contracting methods. The beneficiaries of those contracts—including Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Aerojet Rocketydyne, and other established aerospace companies—are also likely to be less than welcoming toward NASA opening the door to competition in deep space exploration to new space firms.
On July 14 2017 17:29 {CC}StealthBlue wrote: NASA just announced they dont have the funds to get to Mars and instead are going to build a moon base instead.
This is no surprise. Every other space agency around doesn't want to go to Mars, they want to go to the Moon. NASA is on their own here and without enough government support to make it happen.
On July 14 2017 09:07 LegalLord wrote: "Common sense" strawmen don't make things economical. Show me the money.
Unless you're a potential customer or an investor SpaceX has little interest in convincing you. Sure, Elon might throw out the occasional tweet for PR purposes, but the real test is launching payloads. Even the whole reusability program is secondary to reliability, launch cadance and finishing Crewed Dragon.
It's important for the long term future of spaceflight, if there's a path to reusing the second stage, but it won't determine whether SpaceX is a successful company either way.
Great, we're back to the old game of everything being "on the horizon" - with little to nothing to show in the now to indicate that their great project wasn't just a colossal waste of effort.
Musk has been going particularly ham on the whole "our competitors get free money" hoopla as well in the past three or four months in particular - I don't doubt that there is a particular goal in mind. Let's just hope our government isn't stupid enough to toss more money their way for them to have further reason to dick around for another few years until they blow all that money as well.
Jim Cantrell is the CEO and one the founders of Vector Space Systems. I spoke with Jim at length about Vector and their plans. You can listen to the full podcast below.
Some of the highlights of the interview include a company which has just closed its Series A round of funding from Sequoia Capital with participation from Shasta Ventures and Lightspeed for $21 million and having raised just over $31 million in its first year.
The company had a head start though, having purchased Garvey Spacecrafts with its heritage of 15 years of rocket development. John Garvey became one of the founders and Chief Technology Officer.
The company has already completed a block 0 test of a full scale version of the Vector-R rocket, the smaller of the two currently planned launch vehicles. That test went well except for the recovery shute having failed. The company plans another sub-orbital test in August from Camden, Georgia, which is in the process of being certified by the State as a spaceport.
Vector will start doing orbital test flights next year and said it was on track to launch its first customer payloads in 2019.
The smaller of the launch vehicles, Vector-R, will cost $1.5 million while the Vector-H will cost $3 million. An optional third stage is available for both at a cost of $500k to $1 million depending on needs.
To be successful Cantrell said the company will need to develop a rapid assembly line factory to churn out the rockets to meet their goals of launching at least 100 times a year. Some of those satellites being launched will include their own Galactic Sky satellites which will be used to build an “Amazon Web Services” type of constellation in low earth orbit for companies to runt their “space apps”. Satellites as a Service is coming soon it seems.
The company plans on launching from the Pacific Spaceport Complex in Alaska for polar and Sun Synchronous orbits and Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida for low inclination orbits. They will also need another spaceport and are looking at the future Camden Spaceport and even Canada, where a new spaceport may start construction as early as next spring. At some point the company also plans on going public.
WASHINGTON — Moon Express, a company developing commercial lunar landers, said July 12 its first mission is still on schedule to launch by the end of this year in a bid to win the Google Lunar X Prize.
The Florida-based company used an event on Capitol Hill to unveil the design of that lander, known as MX-1E, as well as plans for future missions that include larger landers and sample return spacecraft.
That spacecraft, capable of placing up to 30 kilograms of payload onto the lunar surface, is the building block of a “flexible, scalable and innovative exploration architecture that can help us open the moon as a frontier for humanity,” said Moon Express Chief Executive Bob Richards.
Richards, standing next to a full-scale mockup of the MX-1E, said work on that initial spacecraft is going well. “We have flight hardware already,” he said, citing development of the lander’s engine, called PECO, that uses rocket-grade kerosene and high-test hydrogen peroxide propellants. Two of those engines have been built and will soon be undergoing tests.
Other components of the spacecraft are either undergoing testing — its laser altimeter, Richards said, is being tested at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center — or are being manufactured. That includes the main spacecraft bus, a carbon composite “unibody” design that includes both the spacecraft structure and propellant tanks. The company did not release photos or videos of that hardware.
Current plans call for integrating the spacecraft components by September at the company’s facility at the former Launch Complex 17/18 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, then shipping the spacecraft to the New Zealand launch site of Rocket Lab, which will launch the spacecraft on its Electron rocket.
Richards admitted that the schedule was tight, both for spacecraft assembly and launch, in order to meet the deadline in the $20 million Google Lunar X Prize competition of launching by the end of the year. “We have a lot to do in a very short timeframe, and Rocket Lab has a lot to do in a very short timeframe,” he said.
That schedule is complicated by the fact that the Electron vehicle is still in development, having made its first, partially-successful launch May 25. The first stage of the rocket performed as planned, but the second stage failed to place a test payload into orbit. Rocket Lab has not released details about the flight, or announced when it will carry out its second of three planned test launches of the rocket.
There are several launches ahead of Moon Express on Rocket Lab’s manifest, Richards said, including a NASA mission under a Venture Class Launch Services contract awarded in 2015. “I would imagine there’s opportunity for shuffling” the order of those launches, he said. “The main thing is to get the vehicle operational now, then we can talk about when we can be on top of it.”
Richards said it would be disappointing if Moon Express did not launch before the prize deadline, but that the company wasn’t relying on the prize purse. “I really hope that we can be in a position to win it,” he said. “But from our business perspective, it’s not a dependency, and it never was. So we will be launching this mission as soon as we can.”
The initial MX-1E mission is the first in a series of missions in the planning stages by Moon Express, Richards said. A second mission, planned for launch in 2019, will attempt to land in the south polar regions of the moon, an area of considerable interest for both science and future human exploration given the presence of deposits of water ice in permanently-shadowed craters there.
The MX-1E is intended to be a building block for future larger landers. One design, the MX-2, would feature two MX-1E buses stacked on top of each other, with the capability for missions not just to the moon but also elsewhere in the inner solar system.
A larger lander, the MX-5, would use five MX-1E buses as engine pods to support a large lander platform capable of carrying 150 kilograms of payload to the lunar surface. An even larger spacecraft, the MX-9, would have nine engine pods and could carry out lunar sample return missions, using an MX-1E as the ascent vehicle.
Richards said that Moon Express could fly an MX-9 as soon as 2020 as a sample return mission, returning “tens of kilograms” of lunar samples. “We look forward opening up the opportunity for everyone to have lunar rocks,” he said, including for both scientific and commercial applications. “Only governments own moon rocks, and we want to change that.”
Richards said he hopes to have both commercial and government customers for the company’s missions, including tapping into what he sees as a renewed interest in lunar exploration by the Trump administration. “We want to time this with our customers in mind,” he said of the schedule of future missions, “particularly with NASA and what we see as the emerging American enthusiasm for returning to the surface of the moon. We believe we can play a big role in that.”
What that mix of customers will be, and when they will be ready to fly, is still uncertain, he acknowledged. “We’re predicting a market that doesn’t really yet exist,” he said. “We’re kind of skating towards where we believe the puck is going to be.”
Jim Cantrell was on the TMRO podcast as well, talking about the history of commercial space and relatively little about Vector Space Systems. I thought it was pretty interesting and worth listening to.
It’s been 44 years since the mighty Saturn V last thundered skyward from a launch pad at Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The towering rocket, generating enough power to lift 269,000 pounds into orbit, had been the workhorse of the Apollo moon missions.
Later this year, SpaceX plans to launch its most powerful rocket yet from the same pad. The long-awaited Falcon Heavy is key to the Hawthorne company’s plans to ramp up its defense business, send tourists around the moon and launch its first uncrewed mission to Mars.
But unlike the Saturn V, the Falcon Heavy will have plenty of competition.
Years in the works and the product of hundreds of millions of dollars of investments, a new generation of huge rockets will soon take to the skies. Their manufacturers range from space start-ups to aerospace giants to the space agencies of the United States, Russia and China.
Thanks to advances in fuel, materials and electronics, the new rockets, while physically smaller than some of the Space Age beasts, may be more efficient and cost-effective. They will be able to hoist massive spy satellites to a high orbit or ferry crews into deep space.
The rush of new rockets has prompted some to question whether NASA even needs to build its own massive new space vehicle — and whether there will be enough launch business to go around.
After years of a monopoly, the lucrative business of launching sensitive national security satellites is now competitive, which may be an incentive for the big rockets. But at the same time, the launch demand for large satellites is not expected to change.
And in the case of SpaceX, the workhorse Falcon 9 rocket — which recently completed its 10th mission of the year — has been upgraded to the point where it can handle heavier loads than originally anticipated.
Whereas SpaceX first thought that it would fly the same numbers of Falcon 9s as Falcon Heavys, that ratio is turning out to be about two to three times more Falcon 9 commercial missions. The company’s May launch of the Inmarsat-5 F4 satellite on a Falcon 9 was originally slated for a Falcon Heavy.
“There is a part of the commercial market that requires Falcon Heavy,” said Gwynne Shotwell, president of SpaceX. “It’s there, and it’s going to be consistent, but it’s much smaller than we thought.”
That hasn’t deterred rocket makers.
One analyst estimated that companies together are pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into the large rockets. SpaceX says the price of a Falcon Heavy launch will be at least $90 million, versus $62 million for its Falcon 9.
Last year, Amazon.com Inc. Chief Executive Jeff Bezos unveiled plans for a heavy-lift rocket called New Glenn to be built by his space firm, Blue Origin. The rocket, which will have two-stage and three-stage versions, was designed to launch commercial satellites and to take humans into space. Analysts have speculated that Blue Origin may also eventually want to compete in the national security launch market.
United Launch Alliance (ULA), a joint venture of Lockheed Martin Corp. and Boeing Co., has proposed a new rocket called the Vulcan, which would eventually replace its current intermediate- and heavy-lift vehicles.
Orbital ATK Inc., a commercial aerospace firm in Dulles, Va., intends to expand its lineup with its first intermediate and heavy-lift rockets, known for now as the Next Generation Launcher (NGL).
Europe’s Arianespace already can use its Ariane 5 heavy launcher to take two large satellites into space.
While rockets may look similar on liftoff, their makers can be selective in the contracts they target.
SpaceX, for instance, has tried to compete for nearly all types of launches, but Orbital ATK seems to be focusing on the extreme ends of the market — small and large payloads, said Carissa Christensen, chief executive of consulting firm Bryce Space and Technology.
“The launch market is complicated and so specialized that all of those players could find a niche,” she said.
An atmospheric test model of Sierra Nevada’s Dream Chaser spacecraft, a cargo carrier for the International Space Station that will take off on top of an Atlas 5 rocket and land on a runway, is undergoing braking and steering checks in California ahead of a flight test later this year, the company said Monday.
The full-scale Dream Chaser is pulled behind a tow vehicle for the ground tests now underway, reaching speeds fast enough to gauge the craft’s braking performance and guidance, navigation and control systems.
Rolling on two main landing gear wheels and a nose skid, the Dream Chaser traveled down a runway Monday in Sierra Nevada’s latest tow test at Edwards Air Force Base, which is co-located with NASA’s Armstrong Flight Research Center.
Once cut free from its tow vehicle, the Dream Chaser slowed to a stop, allowing engineers to gather data on the craft’s brakes, steering system, and guidance, navigation and control sensors that will line the spaceplane up for landing, according to Eric Cain, a Sierra Nevada engineer who described Monday’s test on the company’s Twitter account.
More tests are planned in the coming months, including additional tow tests and a “captive carry” flight with the Dream Chaser suspended under a helicopter.
“When that’s done, we’ll move into a series of flight tests, where it will be dropped for approach and landing like the shuttle Enterprise,” said Mark Sirangelo, corporate vice president of Sierra Nevada’s space systems division, in an interview earlier this year.
Sirangelo was referring to the vehicle NASA used for landing demonstrations in the 1970s before the first full-up space shuttle mission.
The unpiloted Dream Chaser will be dropped from heavy-duty carrier helicopter from an altitude of 10,200 feet (about 3,100 meters) above the ground for an autonomous landing at Runway 22L at Edwards Air Force Base.
The approach and landing test later this year will be the second time Sierra Nevada has dropped the Dream Chaser from a helicopter. A similar test using the same test vehicle in October 2013 made a smooth approach to the runway, but the Dream Chaser’s left landing gear failed to deploy.
Sierra Nevada says the 2013 flight was successful until that point, and Dream Chaser’s autopilot landing system steered the craft toward the runway for a touchdown on the centerline.
Engineers blamed the mishap on a landing gear borrowed from a U.S. Air Force F-5E jet. Future Dream Chaser cargo missions to the space station will fly with a different landing gear, and the refurbished spaceship now in California features a gear more advanced then the one at fault in 2013.
“It’s much more close to the (configuration) of the orbital vehicle now, with flight software,” Sirangelo told Spaceflight Now earlier this year. “It’s fully autonomous, so it will use flight software that we’ll go to orbit with. All the control surfaces, and all the data gathering is all electronic.
“The computer systems are now the orbital version of the computer systems that we will manage with, so it’s structurally similar, but virtually the whole inside of the vehicle has been updated and changed.”
Meanwhile, technicians are building the space-rated version of the Dream Chaser that will fly into orbit on a cargo run to the space station as soon as 2019.
The Dream Chaser is about one-quarter the length of NASA’s space shuttle orbiters, and it will blast off from Cape Canaveral inside the payload fairing of United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rockets.
It is capable of delivering more than 12,000 pounds (5,500 kilograms) of equipment to the space station inside its pressurized compartment and on an external aft-mounted payload carrier. At the end of each flight, the two parts will detach, with the Dream Chaser space plane returning to Earth with research specimens and other gear, and the disposable cargo module burning up in the atmosphere to incinerate trash.
Not gonna lie, pretty disappointed about no propulsive landings and scaling down ITS. Sounds like SpaceX is trying to focus on their core business and cutting down on their more ambitious projects.
This is pretty much the end of the Mars project for the forseeable future.
On July 21 2017 02:15 LegalLord wrote: Mars has been dead for a while for lack of funding and logic. It makes a hell of a lot more sense to go Moonward first.
I would say Mars is too expensive and difficult while the Moon might not be interesting at any price. So really, the only point of a tiny Moon base, or the DSG would be to keep the human spaceflight program alive at a reasonable cost.
But then you get the same arguments as you did with the ISS and even the space shuttle. It's far more affordable than a serious Mars program would be, but if you're not really making any progress it's still an expensive luxury.
Not to mention hardware, software, material, and engineering tests. Then even assembly, and refueling and so on.
Developing rockets is difficult – even when those rockets use existing rocket boosters. Such is the case for SpaceX and the development of the Falcon Heavy. Once operational, Falcon Heavy will be the most powerful rocket in the world. While the path to its inaugural mission has been challenging, Elon Musk is urging caution surrounding expectations of the rocket’s first flight, which is expected later this year from LC-39A at the Kennedy Space Center, Florida.
The long wait is nearly over as SpaceX readies for the final series of upgrades/modifications to LC-39A at the Kennedy Space Center for the upcoming debut of the company’s heralded Falcon Heavy rocket.
Designed as a souped up version of the Falcon 9 – which has enjoyed a great deal of fame and attention this year with the first (and now second) reflights of previously-flown core stages as well as lofting the first reused Dragon capsule on the CRS-11 resupply mission to the ISS – Falcon Heavy’s initial design seemed simple.
But as Elon Musk stated at the keynote to the ISSR&D (International Space Station Research and Development) conference on Wednesday, “it ended up being way harder to do Falcon Heavy than we thought.
“At first it sounds really easy to just stick two first stages on as strap-on side boosters. But then everything changes.”
Mr. Musk admitted, “We were pretty naive about that.”
To the specifics of the design challenges surrounding Falcon Heavy, strapping three Falcon 9 core stages together is tougher than it sounds.
Once a rocket has three cores working in tandem, the aerodynamics, structural loads, the Max Q envelope (period of maximum mechanical stress on the vehicle during ascent), and the subsonic to transonic transition region (where the vehicle accelerates through the speed of sound) are all greatly changed by the fact that Falcon Heavy is powered by 27 Merlin 1D orbital class engines.
Moreover, the tripling of the engines from nine to 27 creates a tripling of the vibrations and acoustics at play throughout the vehicle.
All of these elements, according to Mr. Musk, required a complete redesign of the central-core’s airframe.
“The amount of load you’re putting through that center core is crazy because you have two super powerful boosters also shoving that center core,” stated Mr. Musk.
“So [we broke] the qualification levels on so much of the hardware [that] we had to redesign the whole center-core airframe on the Falcon 9 because it’s going to take so much load.
On July 22 2017 00:19 {CC}StealthBlue wrote: Not to mention hardware, software, material, and engineering tests. Then even assembly, and refueling and so on.
Is this in reply to going to the Moon? Because the Moon isn't a good refuelling station. It's still a decently deep gravity well. Something like 2km/s to high Eart orbits. Then you would need to mine and refine propellants and launch them into orbit.
If you want to do in orbit refuelling it's probably best to just do it in LEO and get your fuel from Earth. Something like ULA's ACES concept, ideally supported by reusable launches. But even using expendable launches could lead to a big jump in performance. Then you can evolve that by supplying propellant depots from near Earth asteroids, some of which are energetically closer than the Moon. But it will be a long time until anything produced in space will be cheaper, even in low Earth orbit, than just producing the same thing on Earth and launching it into orbit.
Still, if you want something that has clear relevance for the future, in orbit refuelling and possibly propellant depots are a good bet. A much better use of resources than developing single-use technology for a space station or Moon base.