NASA and the Private Sector - Page 241
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BradTheBaneling
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https://www.stokespace.com/update-on-hopper2-the-hopper-has-landed/ | ||
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Now the question is how long it will take the FAA. | ||
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WASHINGTON — The head of the Federal Aviation Administration’s commercial space transportation office says he believes that the FAA can wrap up safety reviews needed to update the SpaceX Starship launch license by the end of October, but than a concurrent environmental review is a “wild card” to that schedule. In a Sept. 18 interview, Kelvin Coleman, FAA associate administrator for commercial space transportation, said his office was working well with SpaceX to confirm that the company had implemented the corrective actions from a mishap investigation the FAA formally closed on Sept. 8 related to public safety. Coleman said that, of the 63 corrective actions listed in the mishap report, 27 are linked to public safety. “So one thing that we’ll need to see before the next operation is evidence that shows that the company has closed out the corrective actions that are specifically tied to public safety,” he said. That is tied to a modification to the launch license FAA issued to SpaceX for the Starship/Super Heavy launch in April. That license was effective for just the single launch that took place April 20, requiring the company to request the FAA modify it to enable additional launches, something that would have been required regardless of the outcome of the launch. “We’re on a pretty good schedule,” he said, affirming comments made by the FAA’s acting administrator, Polly Trottenberg, at a conference Sept. 13, where she projected that a modified license could be ready in October. “It’ll probably set us somewhere in mid to late October for conclusion of the safety review.” He added, though, that completing the safety review alone will not be sufficient for the license modification. A separate environmental review is needed to examine changes to launch site infrastructure, including a water deluge system intended to minimize pad damage suffered in the April launch. That review is being carried out in conjunction with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to comply with the Endangered Species Act. A spokesperson for that agency said Sept. 19 that the Fish and Wildlife Service is “discussing the project details with FAA staff to understand the extent of new effects” of the water deluge system. “Once the Service reviews FAA’s final biological assessment and deems it complete, consultation will be reinitiated. We have 135 days to issue a final biological opinion,” the agency stated. “That piece is a little bit of a wild card,” Coleman said of that environmental review. “We’re hoping that piece will wrap up somewhere in proximity to the safety review.” While the FAA has been the subject of criticism for appearing to slow down SpaceX, Coleman said his office has a good working relationship with the company, talking regularly with SpaceX executives. “I think we’re all striving to solve immediate challenges that are in front of us, but also think more strategically, down the line, in terms of how can we better our relationship and how can we better engage as different applications come our way in the future.” Those discussions included a visit last week by Elon Musk, SpaceX founder and chief executive, who met with Trottenberg, Deputy Administrator Katie Thomson and Coleman about the licensing process. “We had a good conversation with him,” he said. “I think the relationship is working pretty well,” he concluded, while noting that SpaceX is “pushing hard” to fly again as soon as possible so it can make progress on missions that will use Starship, like the Artemis lunar lander variant. “There’s some challenges we have to work through from time to time.” Source | ||
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edit: it's David Limp a former Amazon exec who was in charge of Alexa etc. Link | ||
ZerOCoolSC2
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I'm hoping BO gets it together (they kinda need to if they want to keep their NASA contracts from being given to SpaceX once starship is operating). Here's to seeing how they move forward. | ||
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The Federal Aviation Administration closed its investigation into last year’s failed flight of a cargo mission by Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin, the regulator announced on Wednesday. Blue Origin is required by the FAA to “implement 21 corrective actions,” the regulator said in a statement. The FAA noted that Blue Origin will not be clear to launch New Shepard until after Blue Origin implements “all corrective actions that impact public safety” and receives an updated launch license. “We’ve received the FAA’s letter and plan to fly soon,” a Blue Origin spokesperson said in a statement. The 21 required actions include the “redesign of engine and nozzle components to improve structural performance during operation as well as organizational changes.” The FAA did not comment further on specifics of the corrections. In September 2021, the company’s New Shepard rocket was flying a cargo mission when it suffered a failure. Earlier this year, Blue Origin said the source of the issue was an overheated part in the rocket engine’s nozzle. No people were onboard, as the NS-23 mission was carrying science and research payloads. Blue Origin said its investigation found that NS-23 flight’s engine failure was due to “operational temperatures that exceeded the expected and analyzed values of the nozzle material.” The company recovered fragments of the BE-3PM engine’s nozzle, finding “clear evidence of thermal damage and hot streaks resulting from increased operating temperatures.” The New Shepard rocket launches from Blue Origin’s private facility in West Texas, carrying people and payloads above 100 kilometers — or more than 340,000 feet — for a couple minutes of weightlessness. The capsule is flown autonomously, with no human pilot, and floats down with the assistance of a set of parachutes to land in the Texas desert. The New Shepard rocket booster is reusable, returning to land on a concrete pad near the launch site. To date, Blue Origin has flown 31 people past the edge of space with New Shepard. Blue Origin has said since March that it expects to return New Shepard to flight “soon.” The crucial re-flight of the rocket is planned to carry the same research payloads that didn’t make it to space on the NS-23 mission, without crew. Source | ||
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The Orbital Reef space station partnership between Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin and Sierra Space is on rocky footing, CNBC has learned. The companies announced Orbital Reef as a co-led project in 2021, but updates about the project dried up in the past year. The pair of private space companies are now navigating a potential end to the Orbital Reef partnership, according to three people who spoke to CNBC about the situation. Those people, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss nonpublic matters, emphasized that discussions are ongoing and described the situation as fluid. But other development projects with more significant current contracts – such as Blue Origin’s Blue Moon lunar lander and Sierra Space’s Dream Chaser spaceplane – have taken higher priority for both companies, those people said. It’s becoming increasingly likely that Blue Origin and Sierra Space will go their separate ways, leaving behind joint efforts to develop Orbital Reef, according to those sources. Shortly after unveiling the Orbital Reef project, Blue Origin won a $130 million contract from NASA for design work on the private space station. That contract was one of three funded Space Act Agreements (SAA) that NASA issued for the first phase of its Commercial LEO Destinations (CLD) program. Blue is the prime contractor under that NASA award, with Sierra as a subcontractor. NASA spokesperson Rebecca Wickes told CNBC in a statement that the agency has so far paid Blue Origin $24 million of the total contract amount for completing specified milestones. As of yet “there are no current plans to transfer the agreement,” Wickes said. Sierra did not respond to CNBC’s request for comment on Orbital Reef. Neither did Blue Origin, but the company, shortly after being reached by CNBC, posted on social media that it is making “progress on our Commercial Destinations Space Act Agreement with NASA.” “Our team is currently testing window frames and materials in a relevant space environment,” Blue Origin said, without mentioning Orbital Reef by name. Orbital Reef erosion Blue originally unveiled Orbital Reef alongside Sierra, envisioning a “mixed use business park” in space. The first major pieces of Orbital Reef were scheduled to launch in 2027, with the companies aiming to begin service around the time the International Space Station retires near the end of the decade. Habitable space stations have long been an interest for Blue Origin, with Bezos’ vision for the company to create a future where “millions of people are living and working in space to benefit Earth.” Similarly, Sierra has been developing an habitat concept for years, known as LIFE (“Large Integrated Flexible Environment”). Several companies are also working to build private space stations, with competing projects being led by Axiom, Voyager Space, Northrop Grumman and Vast. The Orbital Reef team also includes Boeing , Redwire , Amazon , Genesis Engineering Solutions, and Arizona State University underneath Blue and Sierra. Orbital Reef is not seen as a top priority for either company, according to three people familiar with the companies. Two of those sources pointed CNBC to a shift in Blue Origin’s interests after the company won a $3.4 billion NASA contract to build a crew lunar lander – noting its space station and lunar lander programs compete for resources in the same business unit. Blue Origin CEO Bob Smith is leaving at the end of the year and new leader Dave Limp will need to execute on other major projects – including its New Shepard and New Glenn rockets, as well as its BE-4 engine production. Similarly, much of Sierra’s resources are devoted to getting the initial cargo variation of its reusable Dream Chaser spaceplane flying. It has been developing Dream Chaser for more than a decade, under contract to fly cargo for NASA to the International Space Station. The company earlier this week raised $290 million in new funding and hopes to fly Dream Chaser to the ISS for the first time next year. There have been signs the Orbital Reef project was unraveling: The website for the project, created jointly by Blue and Sierra, hasn’t published an update on the station’s development in more than a year. As of Thursday, neither company’s careers websites have job openings that mention “Orbital Reef,” despite having dozens of listings mention the project in the past. And Sierra Space dropped references to Orbital Reef in its most recent press releases, focusing solely on its own habitat work. From NASA’s viewpoint, changes to the structure or involvement of different companies in the first phase of a project like this one are not surprising. For example, Northrop Grumman didn’t rejoin Blue Origin’s team when the company bid a second time for a crew lunar lander. And, more relevant to the CLD program, another space station project called Starlab saw Airbus take the place of Lockheed Martin as the core habitat’s builder. For its part, Sierra has continued to test and develop LIFE – an inflatable module that made up a major part of the Orbital Reef architecture. Sierra has regularly posted updates about milestones in testing habitats, such as a recent “burst” testing of a sub-scale prototype. Last month, Sierra announced plans to launch a “pathfinder” demonstration mission of its LIFE (Large Integrated Flexible Environment) habitat in 2026. Source edit: Sierra Space LIFE modules: + Show Spoiler + | ||
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WASHINGTON, Oct 2 (Reuters) - Blue Origin, the aerospace company founded by billionaire Jeff Bezos, expects to break up a corporate partnership formed years ago to build a commercial space station, reassigning staff and changing leadership as it adapts to more urgent priorities, according to several people familiar with the changes. Earlier this year, the company reassigned a majority of its employees working on Orbital Reef, a commercial space station it had planned to build with Sierra Space, according to three sources familiar with the moves. The staff went to other programs such as Blue Origin's new moon lander contract with NASA and a closely held in-space mobility project, the sources said. The shakeup of the Orbital Reef team shows the rocky state of industry plans to build a private replacement to the two decade-old International Space Station (ISS), the work of multiple government space agencies that has cost more than $100 billion. In addition, the head of Blue Origin's Advanced Development Programs that oversees Orbtial Reef, Brent Sherwood, plans to leave the company by the end of the year, two sources said. The sources spoke on the condition they not be identified as the changes have not been disclosed publicly. CNBC had reported that the partnership was in question, but had no details on the staff reassignments or Sherwood's departure. A Blue Origin spokesperson said Sierra will remain a partner on Orbital Reef but declined to say in what capacity. Amazon.com (AMZN.O) founder Bezos, who started Blue Origin in 2000, has been looking to inject a sense of urgency into the company as some important programs face steep hurdles. Last week, Bezos told Blue Origin employees that longtime Amazon executive Dave Limp would replace Blue Origin's current CEO by year's end. The company's suborbital tourist rocket, New Shepard, has been grounded for more than a year after a 2022 accident. Delays are also mounting in the development of its bigger rocket, New Glenn, an expected commercial workhorse that will mark Blue Origin's first, long-awaited step into Earth's orbit. In 2021, Blue Origin announced its partnership to build what it envisions as a "business park in space" with Sierra Space, a spinoff from defense contractor Sierra Nevada Corp. In low Earth orbit, Orbital Reef would function as a microgravity science laboratory for companies and government agencies, and a destination for tourists, among other uses. A month after the announcement, Sierra announced a series A fundraise worth $1.4 billion. It said a third of that total would fund its contributions to Orbital Reef: an inflatable habitat that formed the livable core of the space station's design. Recently the partnership has soured, with feuding and disagreement between the companies' managements, three sources said. A Sierra Space spokesperson declined to comment. Some Blue Origin employees who had worked on Orbital Reef were assigned to a secretive "space mobility" program to develop maneuverable satellites, two sources said. A job opening posted 25 days ago describes the effort as a "cutting-edge satellite management system, capable of operating a large constellation of vehicles with a small team." Other employees went to Blue Moon, the company's proposed astronaut moon lander, the sources said. Blue Origin secured $3.4 billion from NASA this year for that lander as part of the agency's Artemis program. Blue Origin said at the time it planned to privately invest "well north" of that amount. With the aging ISS slated to retire around 2030, NASA is helping fund Orbital Reef and three other early proposals. The agency plans to add more funding for one or two space station proposals in 2026. Industry executives have acknowledged that the 2030 deadline is tight. U.S. officials also fear that retiring ISS with no private station in place could hand China's national space station much of the market for low-Earth orbit research and tourism. Skeptics worry the orbital market is too small to support four separate privately built space stations. Blue Origin, which leads the partnership, is expected to keep working on its own version of a space station without Sierra, two sources said, but it was unclear what those plans look like. The company has not notified NASA of any changes in the partnership, as its contract would require, a NASA spokesperson said. Reuters could not determine when Blue Origin's commercial contract with Sierra is due to expire. Source | ||
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Boeing had big plans for its new space capsule, even before it won a $4.2 billion contract in 2014 to develop a spacecraft for NASA to fly astronauts to the International Space Station. If space were indeed going to open to the masses, as many at the time were predicting, Boeing wanted to position itself as the premier spacecraft provider, the way it had with commercial airliners. Nearly a decade later, those dreams have crumbled. Not a single person has flown Boeing’s spacecraft to space. No one has booked a private flight. The company has had to absorb about $1.4 billion in cost overruns, and NASA’s safety advisers have called for an independent review of the program. Meanwhile, SpaceX, which received a contract at the same time Boeing did, but for nearly 40 percent less money, has flown eight missions to the ISS for NASA, as well as additional private astronaut crews. What went wrong? How could one of the world’s most legendary aerospace companies fail so miserably in its race with Elon Musk’s SpaceX and still be on the ground when its competitor has been launching astronauts to the space station since 2020? One top NASA official called Boeing’s inability to get its CST-100 Starliner capsule into regular use an “existential” challenge. Some NASA officials think one cause may be the way the commercial crew program was set up — a fixed-price contract after years of cost-plus ones that allowed contractors to pass to NASA any excess expenses they encountered in developing the project. “That commercial model is not exactly the way Boeing was structured,” NASA Deputy Administrator Pam Melroy said in an interview. “So, they’ve had to work through that and make sure that they’re resourcing it, and, you know, it’s tough. You’ve got to put a lot of skin in the game. That’s not the way they’ve been structured from the beginning.” But NASA, which desperately wants Boeing to start flying so that it doesn’t have to rely solely on SpaceX, is hesitant to criticize Boeing. “They’ve been great partners,” Melroy said. “They’re committed. They recognize it’s existential.” John Shannon, who in December was appointed vice president of Boeing Exploration Systems, which has oversight of Starliner and the company’s space programs, said in an interview that despite the enormous costs, the company will not abandon the program — though he acknowledged that the $1.4 billion Boeing has had to eat on the program has been a major hurdle. “For a government contract like that you just never see that kind of investment,” he said. “And trying to take the very top level view of it, it’s important, I think, to the country to have an American capability to fly crew. SpaceX is doing that now. We’ll be the second one.” But asked whether Boeing plans to continue with the program long-term, he suggested that was in doubt. “It’s a great question. And I wish I had the answer to it right now,” he said. The concern, he said, is that the private market for space travel is uncertain and plans for commercial space stations that would provide a need for regular launches have yet to materialize, even though NASA has started to invest in those and Boeing is a partner with Blue Origin and Sierra Space on one. “They’re just not at a level of maturity where I can write them into any kind of a business case and say that yeah, this is something that’s going to kind of get us over the hump,” he said. He added: “Probably the biggest challenge I have is defining how do I make this into a positive business case, given the market conditions as we see them right now.” SpaceX, however, appears to have made a case that flying successfully can be good business. Since the original NASA contract, it’s won another, for five more missions to the space station, valued at more than $1.4 billion. It also has flown an all-private citizen trip to orbit that was financed by billionaire entrepreneur Jared Isaacman, who has chartered three more flights. SpaceX has also flown civilians to the ISS on missions chartered by Axiom, a Houston-based company. Whatever the market conditions, though, many of Boeing’s problems are self-inflicted. Over the years, the program has faced repeated delays, and technical challenges that have ranged from severe software errors to corroded valves. Earlier this year, Boeing delayed yet again what had been a hoped-for launch in July when it discovered problems with the design of the capsule’s parachute system and found that tape inside the craft was flammable. Now, the flight isn’t scheduled until sometime next year — at the earliest. For Boeing, getting Starliner off the ground is now about more than flying — it is about whether the company can be relied upon to deliver on programs that are vital to the national interest. The Starliner program had problems from the start. In an effort to consolidate some of its major aerospace programs, Boeing in 2015 created a new division to oversee their development from concept to reality. Under the leadership of a senior executive, it brought together engineers from across the company, from commercial aviation, defense and space, to “more effectively apply engineering expertise, development program best practices, and program management and integration from across Boeing to our most important development activities,” the company said in a statement at the time. Suddenly, the KC-46 aerial refueling tanker it was building for the Pentagon was lumped alongside the 777X commercial airplane, as well as the Space Launch System rocket and Starliner spacecraft it was developing for NASA. But instead of driving efficiencies, it created problems, according to industry officials familiar with the matter who were not authorized to speak publicly. The commercial airplanes designed to roll off the production line with some frequency had little in common with military aircraft designed for combat and even less with rockets and spacecraft, which would be built at a far slower cadence. In a briefing in June, Mark Nappi, the third Boeing executive to lead the Starliner program, said some of the spacecraft’s problems stemmed from its early development days. “It can be questionable — should we be catching these types of things this late?” he said. “And that might be because there was a certain sense of optimism when some of the designs were done. Some of the processes were created many years ago. And they led to some of these things kind of creeping their way through the system.” Shannon pushed back on the idea that putting together different programs under one division was a mistake. Under the division, the programs could “work out all our engineering schedules to make sure that we weren’t stepping all over each other,” he said. “And if we were off in our individual divisions, trying to do it separately, we wouldn’t have had that communication. We’re also able to take engineering talent and flow it between the programs as it was needed.” Even so, the problems with Starliner quickly mounted. During a test of the Starliner’s abort engines in 2018, it suffered a propellant leak. The following year, only two of its three main parachutes deployed during a test because workers simply failed to attach one of the smaller, lead chutes to the main parachute. The problems only continued — a list of severe errors and mishaps that compounded just as the company was also dealing with the fallout of the 737 Max disasters, two plane crashes in the space of five months in 2018 and 2019 that killed a total of 346 people. In December 2019, Starliner was successfully launched to orbit during a test flight without any astronauts on board. But as soon as it was on its own, Starliner started behaving erratically, forcing ground controllers to scramble. The problem: The spacecraft’s onboard computers were 11 hours off, so the spacecraft was executing commands for a far different part of the mission. While dealing with that problem, ground controllers discovered another one that they feared could cause the service and crew modules of the spacecraft to collide upon separation. Afterward, NASA officials were unusually blunt about the severity of the problems. “We could have lost the spacecraft twice during this mission,” said Douglas Loverro, who was then NASA’s associate administrator for human exploration and mission operations. “So this was a close call.” Over the next year, Boeing set out to fix its software, poring over all 1 million lines of code. A year and a half later, by the summer of 2021, it said it was ready to redo the test flight to the space station without astronauts on board. By then, SpaceX already had flown three astronaut missions to the station. Boeing was eager to catch up, but Starliner couldn’t get off the launchpad. This time the culprit was not software but several stuck valves in the capsule’s service module. Another problem, another months long delay. In May 2022, Boeing finally did successfully fly Starliner to the space station. It was able to dock, then return home a few days later, landing under parachutes in the New Mexico desert, though still without astronauts. Earlier this year, Boeing said it was finally ready to attempt to launch the Crewed Test Flight (CTF) with two NASA astronauts on board, Sunita Williams and Barry “Butch” Wilmore, the same mission SpaceX had flown in 2020. Then, in June, the company announced it had discovered more problems, this time with the parachutes and the flammable tape. It would have to stand down again. When Shannon was given oversight of Boeing’s space programs, including Starliner, he did a top-down review of the program. “I could come in with a fresh pair of eyes,” he said. “We came in to make sure that we really understood systemically from the foundation up, was the program grounded well? We did a really detailed engineering review with the entire team.” The result: “We didn’t find really anything. I think the issues we’ve had, while frustrating, come with the territory of trying to develop a system that is as complicated as a crewed space vehicle.” He said the company was not going to rush or do anything to compromise safety. “There is no more sacred responsibility you have than keeping a spaceflight crew safe,” he said. “And that really drives a level of conservatism that I am very careful to make sure that I am constantly maintaining.” NASA purposefully awarded two contracts in case one provider faltered, and the value of that strategy is now evident. If SpaceX had not been successful, NASA would still be relying on Russia to get its astronauts to the space station, as it did during the years after the space shuttle was retired and SpaceX started flying. The space agency “desperately needs a second provider for crew transportation,” Steve Stich, NASA’s commercial crew program manager, told reporters in June. “Our ultimate goal is to have one SpaceX and one Boeing flight per year to rotate our crews to station. And so we support Boeing, and we’re doing everything we can during the investigation of each of these issues and trying to get to the flight as soon as we can.” Initially, Boeing was considered the favorite to dominate even though Elon Musk’s upstart company was already delivering cargo and supplies to the space station on its Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon spacecraft. But flying astronauts was an altogether more difficult task, one more suited, many thought, for a company like Boeing with a long heritage in space that dated to the Apollo era. And SpaceX had struggled as well. In 2015, one of SpaceX’s rockets exploded while flying supplies to the ISS. Then another blew up on the launchpad during an engine test in 2016. But in 2020, SpaceX successfully flew a test mission to the station with astronauts. And the company has been flying crews ever since, both NASA astronauts and private citizens. “There is pride to it, and Boeing has a long history in human spaceflight programs,” said Todd Harrison, a nonresident senior associate at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank. “If they were to throw in the towel on Starliner, they would be walking away from that history and basically ceding it to the new space companies.” Source | ||
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MILAN, Oct 4 (Reuters) - Italian luxury group Prada and Texas-based startup Axiom Space will collaborate to design NASA's lunar spacesuits for the Artemis III mission planned for 2025, the two companies said on Wednesday. Prada's engineers will work alongside the Axiom Space systems team throughout the design process, developing solutions for materials and design features to protect astronauts against the challenge of space and the lunar environment, they said in a joint statement. Axiom has a contract with U.S. space agency NASA to develop spacesuits for use on the moon and other space programmes. Source | ||
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