NASA and the Private Sector - Page 160

While it may look like a completely different design, much of Crew Dragon has a significant level of heritage with the readily flight-proven Cargo Dragon spacecraft, including avionics, parachutes, heat shield expertise, and Draco maneuvering thrusters. The most obvious difference can be found in the four black bays spaced evenly around the edge of the capsule – these contain two SuperDraco thrusters each (eight total) that together act as an integrated launch abort system, capable of launching the capsule and trunk to safety in fractions of a second in the event of Falcon 9 failure at any point during launch. A test of this hardware was first completed almost exactly three years ago, demonstrating acceleration from stand-still to 100 mph in less than a single second.

The hardware shown in Elon Musk’s photo is not intended to carry humans (not on its first flight, at least), instead aiming to be the first Crew Dragon article to make it into Earth orbit, where SpaceX technicians and engineers will conduct and observe a vast fleet of tests with the intent of proving the craft’s capabilities. If successful, this mission (known as DM-1) will be the final step SpaceX needs to complete before DM-2, the upgraded spacecraft’s first real crewed mission.

As of now, DM-1 and DM-2 are officially scheduled for no earlier than (NET) August 31 and December 31 respectively. However, those dates are very unlikely to hold. Per sources with knowledge of Crew Dragon’s progress, DM-2 is currently scheduled for launch NET 2019, likely sometime in the first or second quarter. DM-1, while certainly not ready for an August 31 launch, does appear to be tracking towards a launch later this year, most likely in Q4 2018. SpaceX technicians are working around the clock to ready this groundbreaking hardware for its trip to Plum Brook and eventually to space, spending long shifts in the belly of the Dragon to ensure everything is working as intended.

Australia’s new space agency has been invited to help Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin rockets get to the moon.

At this week’s Australasian Satellite forum in Sydney, Blue Origin commercial director Ted McFarland told InnovationAus.com there was “a lot of land” and “a lot of talent” in Australia which suited launching a space tourism business.

“So, yeah, this is a formal invitation to discuss,” he said.

Australia’s space agency was announced at the International Aeronautical Congress when it was held in Adelaide last year, and it’s the same event McFarland invited it to attend in Bremen, Germany, in September.

He said he wants Australia “on stage with Jeff” in Bremen.

“We’re going back to the moon and we’re going to stay,” he said. “So, yes, we’re ready and able to have that conversation with the government of Australia.”

That sounds like a big tick of approval for the fledgling agency that opens for business on July 1 with Dr Megan Clark as its first CEO, and with $40 million in seed and investment funding for the first four years.

Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture is among 10 teams that will share about $10 million in NASA funding to look into techniques for using resources from the moon and Mars.

The studies are aimed at advancing technologies for in-situ resource utilization, or ISRU.

Such technologies could, for example, make use of ice in lunar soil to produce drinkable water, breathable oxygen and rocket propellants for refueling spacecraft. To cite another example, carbon dioxide from the Martian atmosphere could contribute to the production of methane fuel.

Relying on ISRU resource processing would reduce the amount of fuel and supplies that’d have to be launched from Earth for missions heading to the moon, Mars or other space destinations.

NASA has set up three research tracks as part of its public-private NextSTEP-D program. “NextSTEP” stands for “Next Space Technologies for Exploration Partnerships.” The D refers to Appendix D of the NextSTEP-2 program description, which focuses on ISRU technologies.

In an unexpected turn of events, Teslarati photographer Pauline Acalin came across a remarkable scene in Port of Los Angeles – four flight-proven Falcon 9 fairing halves temporarily stored on a plot of land soon to become SpaceX’s dedicated BFR factory.

While it’s difficult to guess exactly which fairing half is which, it appears that the halves from PAZ, Iridium-5, and Iridium-6 are present and accounted for. Reminiscent of SpaceX’s late-2016, early-2017 struggles with finding enough space to store their massive flight-proven Falcon 9 boosters, these fairing halves are unable to be reused as a consequence of too much saltwater exposure, making it significantly easier for the company to effectively find any old plot of SpaceX land on which to store them.

Officially in early 2018, SpaceX is leasing Berth 240 with the explicit intent of constructing a dedicated facility for production of their first Mars rocket prototypes, as well as the relocation of Falcon 9 and Dragon recovery ops, which are quite space-constrained at their current berths. By all appearances, contractor Buntich is staging equipment ahead of initial demolition, refurbishment, and construction operations at Berth 240. Known predominately for pipeline and utility construction and refurbishment, it’s likely that the contractor is in the very early stages of modernizing the decades-abandoned shipyard, particularly, utilities like water, gas, electricity, and more.

It may be fairly clear why SpaceX is storing four massive, unwieldy, and unreusable Falcon 9 fairing halves at Berth 240, but it’s much less clear what exactly their fates will be. With yet another added to the pack just this morning after a successful half recovery post-SES-12, SpaceX’s awkward fairing fleet is likely up to six structurally-intact halves now. These halves could be used for drop testing to perfect fairing recovery accuracy and ensure, at long last, that recovery vessel and claw-boat Mr Steven can catch them out of the air, avoiding the vast majority of exposure to seawater. SpaceX CEO Elon Musk recently noted that Mr Steven’s net would apparently be massively expanded, quadrupling its area to relieve some of the burdens of precision currently placed almost entirely on each payload fairing’s navigational capabilities.

SpaceX is rapidly expanding it’s Starlink internet constellation development to prepare for full-scale production and aims to bring nearly every major piece of satellite and network hardware and software in-house, according to details revealed in dozens of job postings.

While not explicit, this appears to indicate a significant convergence of multiple possible paths to an operational constellation. Put simply, SpaceX now intends to build every single major component of its 4400+ satellite network in-house. It’s almost easier to list the things SpaceX does not mean to build themselves, but here’s a stab at the components to be built in-house: satellite structures, laser (optical) data interlinks, on-orbit phased array antennae, digital signal processor (DSPs) software and hardware to aim those antennae, solar arrays, battery systems, power electronics, custom integrated circuitry and systems on a chip (SoCs), user terminals and larger gateways, network operations, production automation, autonomous satellite constellation management, and much, much more.

While entire articles could be spent describing the complexities of every single one of the above subsystems, the point is that SpaceX appears to have gone all-in on building its own satellite constellation, departing from stances in the past that appeared to leave room for subcontracting and outsourcing the production of major parts of the network, particularly with respect to ground terminals and gateways. Postings for ground station and user terminal engineers describe a goal of medium to high volume in-house production of the critical network and customer-facing hardware, and an entry into the production of high volume consumer technology would be a truly eclectic and unprecedented step for a company theoretically focused on launch vehicle development and production and sustainable Mars colonization.

If anything, they speak to the truly vertical nature of SpaceX. Many technology development production companies would simply accede and accept the best subcontractor/outsourcing bid when entering into new territory truly outside of their internal expertise. SpaceX engineers and managers, however, seem to have concluded that the vast majority of hardware and corporate expertise they could co-opt is just not satisfactory for the purpose of building a paradigm-shifting satellite constellation; or as CEO Elon Musk noted in 2015, to “revolutionize the satellite side of things, just as we’ve done with the rocket side of things.”

This new (and, in retrospect, unsurprising) trailblazing attitude also helps to explain the marginal delay to Musk’s original 2015 schedule, which estimated initial constellation operations (i.e. a few hundred satellites launched) would begin around 2020. Approximately a year later, SpaceX had built rough prototypes in the form of the original Microsat 1A and 1B twins. This initial foray into independent, long-term communications smallsats was shuttered fairly quickly, and neither of the demo satellites were launched. Instead, SpaceX dove back into prototype design and development, culminating roughly two years later with the March 2018 launch of two dramatically improved prototypes, known as Tintin A and B (or Microsats 2A and 2B in FCC licenses).

It seems probable that the source of this delay lay in an internal decision to dramatically reconfigure the internet constellation for far more in-house development, whereas the original Microsats were likely pieced together from a range of components derived from SpaceX’s Cargo Dragon program or more simply from commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) offerings. Instead, SpaceX’s Starlink development offices in Redmond, Washington and throughout California are staffed with as many as 400 to 500 employees dedicated in large part to the nascent program, similar (if not larger) in scale to OneWeb, the only noteworthy satellite internet competitor at present.

If SpaceX’s decision to push back Starlink’s operational debut by a few years in order to bring in-house almost every single critical subcomponent of Starlink pays off, the company could begin launching finalized satellites en masse as early as late 2019/early 2020, with a goal of offering limited service by 2021 per comments made by CEO Elon Musk. Starlink is likely being brought almost entirely in-house because Musk or other high-level executives and engineers see major room for improvement, improvements that could lower the cost of and improve the performance of lightweight communications satellites by an order of magnitude.

It will likely take a bit longer than initially expected, but SpaceX may yet still pave their path to Mars colonization with profits derived from a wildly successful and disruptive entrance into the broadband market.

The state is proposing to chip in nearly $18 million to help SpaceX and Blue Origin build new facilities at Kennedy Space Center that are expected to add at least 140 jobs.

Next Wednesday in Tampa, Space Florida's board of directors will consider two proposals worth $14.5 million supporting SpaceX’s proposed spaceport expansion, including a hangar for Falcon rocket refurbishment and a control tower.

Another $3.4 million would support Blue Origin’s rocket manufacturing site in Exploration Park, a state-run complex on NASA property at the south end of KSC.

If the agreements are approved, the Florida Department of Transportation would reimburse the companies for some or all of eligible expenses up to those amounts. The department budgeted about $31 million for improvements to spaceport infrastructure this year, and more than $100 million for the budget year that starts July 1, 2018.

Most of the work is described as “common infrastructure improvements,” such as access roads and utilities that could benefit multiple tenants or guests around a site, not just the two private, billionaire-led companies.

SpaceX and Blue Origin have committed to investing $15 million and $30 million, respectively, of their own money in those improvements, and much more on the overall projects.

SpaceX has not revealed a budget for its “SpaceX Operational Area” on 67 acres at KSC, including a 133,000-square-foot hangar and a launch and landing control tower standing up to 300 feet tall, as well as a rocket garden, utilities yard and security office.

The company’s expansion is expected to add 90 jobs with annual wages of $75,000, according to a Space Florida meeting agenda item titled “FDOT Project Palmer/SpaceX.”

SpaceX is on pace to launch more than 20 missions this year and believes it could eventually launch and land more than 60 rockets in a year. The new facilities aim to make recovering and reusing Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets more efficient.

Blue Origin has previously said it planned to invest more than $200 million in its 750,000-square-foot factory, which is nearing completion, and at Launch Complexes 36 and 11 on Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, where an orbital New Glenn rocket could blast off by 2020. The company has promised 330 jobs with an average wage of $89,000.

An Israeli spacecraft will land on the moon early in 2019, the SpaceIL corporation announced Tuesday, in a mission which would make Israel the fourth country to make a lunar landing.

The SpaceIL spacecraft will be launched from the United States on a Falcon 9 orbital launch vehicle, built by Elon Musk’s Space Exploration Technologies Corporation, or SpaceX.

At a press conference on Tuesday, SpaceIL representatives announced that the unmanned lunar landing craft will be transferred to the US in November, with a launch date in December.

According to SpaceIL, the unmanned space vessel will reach the moon and complete the lunar landing on February 13th next year.

If successful, the mission would make Israel the fourth country to make a soft-landing by an unmanned vehicle on the moon. The USSR, US, and China have landed unmanned vehicles in “soft landings” since 1966. The US remains the only country to have undertaken a manned mission to the moon, with six successful Apollo mission lunar landings from 1969 through 1972.

During its mission, the unmanned SpaceIL vehicle will plant the Israeli flag on the moon, SpaceIL CEO Dr. Ido Anteby said.

“We will plant the Israeli flag on the moon,” said Anteby. “This is a small but smart spacecraft. It is 2 meters (6.6 feet) in diameter and about half a meter (1.65 feet) tall. It weighs 600 kilograms (1,323 pounds). When it lands on the moon, it will weigh 180 kilograms (397 pounds).

After its launch, the SpaceIL spacecraft will be carried into an Earth orbit at some 60,000 kilometers (37,282 miles) from the surface of the Earth.

From there, the spacecraft will gradually make its way to the moon from an elliptical orbit around the Earth. This will make the travel time far longer than on past missions to the moon, while saving on fuel and thus reducing launch weight.

SEATTLE (Reuters) - Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos is racing to pull his private space company out of start-up mode and move into production amid signals that his firm’s heavy rocket set for lift-off in 2020 may slip behind schedule, according to people familiar with the project.

Blue Origin has added hundreds of engineers over the past three years and continues to ramp up in an expansion that one employee described as “hyperbolic.” The Kent, Washington-based company is looking to double its current workforce to around 3,000 employees over the next two to three years, a top customer told Reuters.

The urgency centers on a rocket dubbed New Glenn. The heavy-launch vehicle, which Bezos promises will be able to haul satellites and, eventually, people into orbit, is central to the company’s hopes of winning lucrative military and commercial contracts.

New Glenn’s first-stage booster will be reusable, a key piece of Bezos’ strategy to lower costs and increase the frequency of launches. Blue Origin executives have stated publicly that test flights will begin within two years.

But whether Blue Origin can hit that mark remains to be seen.

With the clock ticking on 2020, company engineers are still finalizing details on New Glenn’s design and just beginning to build model components that must be put through extreme testing, people familiar with the project said. They requested anonymity because they are not authorized to speak publicly.

Blue Origin has privately acknowledged in conversations with French satellite firm Eutelsat SA [ETLXCE.UL] - its first New Glenn customer - that its 2020 time frame is “very aggressive,” a person with direct knowledge of talks between the companies said.

The firms have padded their contract, which covers the launch of a geostationary satellite in the period 2021-2022, so that Blue Origin will incur no penalties if it is late, the person added.

Yohann Leroy, Eutelsat’s Deputy Chief Executive Officer, declined to discuss details of his company’s contract with Blue Origin, but said he was optimistic New Glenn will be ready to carry his firm’s satellite by the end of 2022.

“Of course, I cannot guarantee that they will respect their initial timeline, but we are confident that they will not be very far from it,” Leroy said.

A Blue Origin spokeswoman did not respond to requests for comment about the company’s hiring practices, strategy or competitive challenges. The private firm has been tight-lipped on New Glenn’s production status and plans for bringing it to market.

Mounting a successful test in 2020 would give Blue Origin its best shot at fending off competing rockets and new ones expected to enter the market in the next few years, analysts said.

Rivals include aerospace stalwarts United Launch Alliance, a partnership between Boeing Co and Lockheed Martin; and France’s ArianeGroup, a joint venture between Airbus and Safran. Japan and China are likewise designing reusable rockets.

But 18 years after its founding, Blue Origin has found itself lagging a competitor closer to home: SpaceX.

Founded by Tesla Inc Chief Executive Elon Musk, the Hawthorne, California-based company has upended the space industry with its relatively low-cost reusable Falcon 9 rockets. SpaceX has completed more than 50 successful Falcon launches and snagged billions of dollars’ worth of contracts, including deals with NASA and the U.S. Department of Defense.

SpaceX in February transfixed a global audience with the successful test launch of its newest rocket, the Falcon Heavy, the most powerful operational rocket in the world.

Musk had predicted “game over” for other makers of heavy rockets if his launch succeeded.

The good news for Blue Origin is that demand for satellite launch services is projected to soar.

Around 800 small satellites are expected to launch annually beginning around 2020, more than double the annual average over the past decade, according to Marco Caceres, senior space analyst with Fairfax, Virginia-based Teal Group.

“If New Glenn can be ready in the next two years (Blue Origin) may be able to seize that window of opportunity,” he said.