NASA and the Private Sector - Page 161

On August 18 2018 10:57 cLutZ wrote:
Probably Tesla needs its own CEO

On August 18 2018 13:11 Lmui wrote:


Tesla needs a COO first, so Elon gets his head out of micromanaging the factory.

SpaceX has Gwynne Shotwell so they're pretty solid, even if Elon has to take a temporary leave of absence. The Falcon Heavy, routine falcon 9 launches etc. will continue without him for a few years without any issue. Tesla isn't in the same situation - the Tesla stock routinely jumps up/down based on tweets from Elon. He's singlehandedly responsible for the success or failure of Tesla and it's taking too much of a toll on him.

On Thursday evening, without any advance notice, SpaceX tweeted that is had signed the world’s "first private passenger to fly around the Moon aboard our BFR launch vehicle." Moreover, the company promised to reveal "who's flying and why" on Monday, September 17. The announcement will take place at the company's headquarters in Hawthorne, Calif.

There were only two other clues—tweets from Elon Musk himself. Was the rendering of the Big Falcon Spaceship in SpaceX's tweet new? Yes, Musk said. And was he the passenger? In response to this, the founder of SpaceX simply tweeted a Japanese flag emoji. This would seem to be a strong clue that the passenger is from Japan. Or maybe Musk was enjoying the epic Seven Samurai movie at that moment.

By announcing this on Thursday, and waiting four days to provide more details, the company has set off a big guessing game as to who will fly. Of course that is an interesting question, but we have many other questions that we'd like to see answered before that. We've included some of those questions below, along with some wild and (slightly) informed guesses. Musk even answered one of them for us.

Blue Origin has entered into an agreement to build a new testing and refurbishment center on the Space Coast.

According to Space Florida, the state’s spaceport authority, the company is moving ahead with a $60 million facility in Exploration Park, the state-run complex near Kennedy Space Center where Blue Origin has already built a more than $200 million rocket factory, set to open early next year.

The new testing and refurbishment complex will create about 50 jobs with estimated annual wages of $70,000, plus benefits, according to Space Florida’s board of director meeting agenda. The board approved Space Florida to enter into an agreement with Blue Origin regarding the facility last month.

As part of the pact, the state will use tax dollars to reimburse Blue Origin up to $4 million in common infrastructure costs, such as roads and utilities.

Blue Origin’s investment in a second Space Coast facility is separate from its original commitment to the Cape, when it announced it would build a 750,000-square-foot factory and invest in Launch Complexes 36 and 11 at the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. The company, led by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, is building its New Glenn rocket on the Space Coast, with plans for a 2020 launch.

Spotted on an official SpaceX T-shirt commemorating Starlink’s first two prototype satellites and corroborated through analysis of limited public photos of the spacecraft, SpaceX appears to be testing a relatively unique style of solar arrays on the first two satellites launched into orbit, known as Tintin A (Alice) and B (Bob).

It’s difficult to judge anything concrete from the nature of what may be immature prototypes, but SpaceX’s decision to take a major step away from its own style of solar expertise – Cargo Dragon’s traditional rigid panel arrays – is almost certainly motivated by a need to push beyond the current state of the art of satellite design and production.

Unlike any discernible solar panel deployment mechanism with a flight history, SpaceX’s Starlink engineers seem to have taken a style of deployment used successfully on the International Space Station and mixed it with a modern style of solar arrays, relying on several flexible panels that can be efficiently packed together and designed to be extremely lightweight. While a major departure from SpaceX’s successful Cargo Dragon solar arrays, the mechanisms visible on the Tintins seem to have the potential to improve upon the packing efficiency, ease of manufacturing, and number of failure modes present on Dragon’s panels.

It’s difficult to judge anything concrete from the nature of what may be immature prototypes, but SpaceX’s decision to take a major step away from its own style of solar expertise – Cargo Dragon’s traditional rigid panel arrays – is almost certainly motivated by a need to push beyond the current state of the art of satellite design and production.

Unlike any discernible solar panel deployment mechanism with a flight history, SpaceX’s Starlink engineers seem to have taken a style of deployment used successfully on the International Space Station and mixed it with a modern style of solar arrays, relying on several flexible panels that can be efficiently packed together and designed to be extremely lightweight. While a major departure from SpaceX’s successful Cargo Dragon solar arrays, the mechanisms visible on the Tintins seem to have the potential to improve upon the packing efficiency, ease of manufacturing, and number of failure modes present on Dragon’s panels.

In essence, those three motivations are indicative of the challenges SpaceX’s Starlink program must solve in a more general sense. In order to even approach SpaceX’s operational aspirations for Starlink (i.e. high-speed internet delivered from space almost anywhere on Earth), the company will need to find ways to mass-produce hundreds or thousands of high-performance satellites annually at a price-per-unit unprecedented in the history of commercial satellites, all while keeping the weight and volume of each satellite as low as possible (no more than a few hundred kilograms).