NASA and the Private Sector - Page 131

On August 17 2017 07:55 LegalLord wrote:
Ah. Well that might be a problem because NASA hasn't been doing too great on that front. Their "documentary" videos are not particularly inspiring.

I'd link a few Roscosmos videos that are more along the lines of what you're looking for but that comes with a language barrier. I'll take a look and see if there is anything that comes with subs.

A few gems on the ESA YouTube page if you're up for some digging.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wJ0fP453PnQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=amYK5voqLSk

One longtime Torrance defense contractor is shedding almost 100 jobs, while a SpaceX spin-off that could create up to 300 jobs within three years is in talks to move to the South Bay’s largest city, company and municipal officials have confirmed.

Chemring Energetic Devices, which makes missile components, radar detection systems and other defense-related products, has notified the state Employment Development Department as required by law of its plans to lay off 93 of its workers at its Lomita Boulevard plant as manufacturing winds down there by mid-2018.

The company, which purchased Hi-Shear Technology Corp., in 2009 for $132 million, announced two years ago it was consolidating manufacturing operations at its Downers Grove, Illinois, facility for economic and logistical reasons, said company spokesman Rupert Pittman. Hi-Shear had been in business 55 years, according to Chemring’s website.

“The decision to do so was driven by the need to remain competitive in the marketplace, and the significant savings that could be realized by operating out of one site, rather than two,” Pittman said via email. “At the time the announcement was made in August 2015, there were around 110 employees at Torrance. A number of people were offered relocation packages to move to the Downers Grove site, but only a few were willing to make that move.”

The Illinois location also had the capability to handle and store twice as much explosive material as the Torrance plant did because of federal regulations and its close proximity to residential homes, he said.

A clean-up crew will remain at the site until the lease expires in December 2018.

Fran Fulton, Torrance’s economic development manager, said officials knew about the 2015 plant closure announcement and worked to retain the company, but were unsuccessful.

SPACEX STARTUP

However, in a move demonstrating the cyclical nature of the aerospace industry, Fulton said a SpaceX startup she could not name was in discussions to move to Torrance and hire as many as 200 employees within three years. SpaceX is expanding rapidly at its home base in nearby Hawthorne.

Torrance is benefiting from a tighter commercial office market and higher lease costs in cities like El Segundo

“We’re hearing from companies that are looking at El Segundo and they’re not liking the price,” Fulton said. “We’re still a little bit cheaper down here.”

Indeed, a trio of small aerospace companies— including Microcosm Inc., and Scorpius Space Launch Co. — recently relocated to Torrance from Hawthorne, bringing about 25 jobs, Fulton said. They were displaced from a building soon to be occupied by the headquarters of Urth Caffe, which is relocating from smaller quarters in downtown Los Angeles.

Meanwhile, acres of new commercial space is set to open up in Torrance, as Toyota and its thousands of employees begin heading to its new North American headquarters in Texas from its sprawling local campus.

Negotiations with a real estate developer expected to buy the entire 2 million square feet of office space spread across 110 acres are ongoing, Fulton said.

“They’re going to develop a plan for the entire campus to redevelop it,” she said. “It’s not going to be (bought by) one big company.”

Confirming rumors and suspicions that SpaceX is adjusting its plans to begin dispatching robotic landers to Mars, NASA officials said the commercial space company has informed the agency that it has put its Red Dragon program on the back burner.

Under the terms of a Space Act Agreement between NASA and SpaceX, the government agreed to provide navigation and communications services for the Red Dragon mission, which originally aimed to deliver an unpiloted lander to Mars in 2018. SpaceX confirmed earlier this year the launch of the experimental lander on a Falcon Heavy rocket had slipped to 2020.

But Elon Musk, SpaceX’s founder and chief executive, said last month that the company is redesigning its next-generation Dragon capsule, a craft designed to carry astronauts to the International Space Station, to do away with the capability for propulsive, precision helicopter-like landings as originally envisioned. Returning space crews will instead splash down in the ocean under parachutes.

The Red Dragon is a robotic, unoccupied version of the Crew Dragon capsule. The concept publicized by SpaceX called for it to use side-mounted jet packs to slow down in the Martian atmosphere, then brake for a rocket-assisted touchdown.

But with that capability removed from the Crew Dragon, outsiders raised questions about the Red Dragon initiative. Musk has not specifically addressed the future of Red Dragon, and a SpaceX spokesperson did not respond to questions on the matter.

Jim Green, head of NASA’s planetary science division, told Spaceflight Now in an interview that SpaceX has told the agency that it has “put Red Dragon back on the back burner.”

“We’re available to talk to Elon when he’s ready to talk to us … and we’re not pushing him in any way,” Green said. “It’s really up to him. Through the Space Act Agreement, we’d agreed to navigate to Mars, get him to the top of the atmosphere, and then it was up to him to land. That’s a pretty good deal, I think.”

NASA officials said last year that the agency expected to spend about $32 million to support the Red Dragon program over a four-year period. That was expected to be around 10 percent of the total cost of the first Red Dragon mission, one NASA official familiar with the agreement said last year.

The Red Dragons would have delivered cargo and experiments to the Martian surface and tested supersonic retro-propulsion in the planet’s rarefied atmosphere for the first time. NASA engineers say a rocket-braking mechanism like the Dragon’s SuperDraco thrusters is needed to safely land heavy supply ships and crew vehicles on Mars.

The space agency signed up to support the privately-developed Red Dragon project to gather data on supersonic retro-propulsion officials said NASA would be unable to obtain until at least the late 2020s with a government-managed mission.

Musk wrote in a tweet that SpaceX has not abandoned supersonic retro-propulsion at Mars.

“Plan is to do powered landings on Mars for sure, but with a vastly bigger ship,” he tweeted last month after the announcement that SpaceX is abandoning propulsive landings on the Crew Dragon.

Musk said his team at SpaceX is refining how the company could send people to Mars, eventually to settle there. He revealed a Mars transportation architecture in a speech at the 67th International Astronautical Congress in Guadalajara, Mexico, last year, but the outline has since changed.

A vision for gigantic interplanetary transporters Musk presented last year has been downsized, he said.

Musk said he will unveil the changes during a presentation in September at this year’s International Astronautical Congress in Adelaide, Australia.

Launch opportunities from Earth to Mars come every 26 months or so, when the planets are aligned in their orbits around the sun to allow for a direct interplanetary trip.

“What I’ve said is, I’m ready,” Green said. “When they contact us and say, ‘Green, start a solution for going from here to Mars in 20-whatever,’ then I’ll do that.”