NASA and the Private Sector - Page 162

Elon Musk’s vision for an electric-powered elevator that would transport vehicles to and from a network of cost-effective, high-speed underground tunnels is quickly taking shape near SpaceX’s Hawthorne, CA headquarters.

The Boring Company released new images revealing a freshly painted tunnel in white and a shaft that’s being constructed on a private lot at 120th Street and Prairie Avenue, roughly at the halfway point of the tunneling startup’s underground 2-mile test tunnel. Dubbed O’Leary Station after Patrick O’Leary, a 13-year SpaceX veteran who transitioned in 2017 to become Structures Engineering Designer for The Boring Company, the location is part of a proof-of-concept that aims to demonstrate the efficiency of lowering vehicles into transportation systems, perhaps directly from a vehicle owner’s home garage.

It’s all part of Musk’s grander vision to counter “soul-destroying traffic”, where people either drive their vehicles or are lowered into underground tunnels in Urban Loop pods and then transported at high speed on electric skates. Prior to gaining permission from Hawthorne’s city council for the construction of a “Loop Lift” garage-elevator system at the SpaceX-adjacent testing grounds, The Boring Company highlighted the progress of development for its subterranean, electric transport system by sharing a video of a Tesla Model X being whisked away underground.

The tunneling startup began construction of a tunnel entrance located directly across the street from SpaceX headquarters – Crenshaw Boulevard – in 2017. Not long after, a video showing a Tesla being lowered into the ground and images showing continued development of the tunnel walls pointed towards rapid progress at the test site. More importantly, ongoing research and development in the project would pave the way for future initiatives across the U.S., as the company looked to secure regulatory approval for city-scale projects in major metros like Chicago, New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore.

The Boring Company’s recently shared photos are a good indicator that the various components in its proof-of-concept project are starting to come together. The photo of the 20-plus-ft-in-diameter hole in the ground, or tunnel shaft, is in the same residential location where Teslarati photographers Pauline Acalin and Tom Cross recently spotted excavation taking place. The location, now understood to be O’Leary Station, will be the site for The Boring Company’s “garage-elevator” concept, as well as a more convenient point access for maintenance and eventually the permanent removal of tunnel boring machine (TBM) segments.

The concept elevator when complete will not be open to the public but instead used as an internal testbed for moving vehicles in and out of the private residence, which the company acquired. Cars would enter the tunnel from the SpaceX campus near Crenshaw Boulevard, move through the tunnel and on to the garage at O’Leary Station and then back to headquarters.

“It’s an important part of the longer-term vision the company is trying to build,” said The Boring Company spokesperson Jane Labanowski.

Elon Musk’s rocket company SpaceX is seeking to borrow $500 million in the leveraged loan market, according to three people familiar with the matter.

Goldman Sachs Group Inc. is leading the talks with potential investors this week, said the people, who asked not to be identified because plan is private. Spokesmen for Space Exploration Technologies Corp. and Goldman Sachs declined to comment.

Musk is the chief executive officer and largest shareholder of both SpaceX and Tesla Inc. Closely held SpaceX’s valuation has climbed to about $28 billion as it has routinely launched and landed rockets for reuse, significantly reducing the cost of space travel. It’s the third-most valuable venture-backed startup in the U.S. after Uber Technologies Inc. and Airbnb Inc.

SpaceX’s timing lets it take advantage of a borrower’s market in leveraged finance, even for companies like Uber and Tesla that are burning through cash. While investors have piled into loans this year in search of floating rate assets amid the Federal Reserve’s tightening, issuance has dropped by about 20 percent.

On October 24 2018 06:15 Belisarius wrote:
I've never really been on board with this thing about dropping whole cars into long range mass transport. Isn't it an incredibly expensive solution to a problem that will go away of its own accord?

Once everything goes driverless, surely people traveling long distances could be driven locally to whatever human-sized regional transit system is in place, then get into a different, waiting car on the other end.

On October 27 2018 21:03 arbiter_md wrote:


I've never understood why people assume that driverless cars will solve all the problems? As long as we stay in two dimensional space for traveling and make higher buildings in the cities, the congestion will only become worse. So, the tunnels make a lot of sense.

On October 27 2018 21:03 arbiter_md wrote:


I've never understood why people assume that driverless cars will solve all the problems? As long as we stay in two dimensional space for traveling and make higher buildings in the cities, the congestion will only become worse. So, the tunnels make a lot of sense.

SEATTLE/ORLANDO, Fla. (Reuters) - SpaceX Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk flew to the Seattle area in June for meetings with engineers leading a satellite launch project crucial to his space company’s growth.

Within hours of landing, Musk had fired at least seven members of the program’s senior management team at the Redmond, Washington, office, the culmination of disagreements over the pace at which the team was developing and testing its Starlink satellites, according to the two SpaceX employees with direct knowledge of the situation.

Known for pushing aggressive deadlines, Musk quickly brought in new managers from SpaceX headquarters in California to replace a number of the managers he fired. Their mandate: Launch SpaceX’s first batch of U.S.-made satellites by the middle of next year, the sources said.

The management shakeup and the launch timeline, previously unreported, illustrate how quickly Musk wants to bring online SpaceX’s Starlink program, which is competing with OneWeb and Canada’s Telesat to be first to market with a new satellite-based Internet service.

Those services - essentially a constellation of satellites that will bring high-speed Internet to rural and suburban locations globally - are key to generating the cash that privately-held SpaceX needs to fund Musk’s real dream of developing a new rocket capable of flying paying customers to the moon and eventually trying to colonize Mars.

“It would be like rebuilding the Internet in space,” Musk told an audience in 2015 when he unveiled Starlink. “The goal would be to have a majority of long-distance Internet traffic go over this network.”

But the program is struggling to hire and retain staff, the employees said. Currently, about 300 SpaceX employees work on Starlink in Redmond, the sources said. According to GeekWire, Musk said in 2015 the Redmond operation would have “probably several hundred people, maybe a thousand people” after 3-4 years in operation.

So far this year, about 50 employees left the company “on their own accord,” one of the SpaceX employees said, though the reason for those departures was unclear. Overall, SpaceX employs more than 6,000 staff.

As of Tuesday, there were 22 job openings - including a job making espresso drinks - for the Redmond office, according to SpaceX’s website.

SpaceX spokeswoman Eva Behrend told Reuters the Redmond office remains an essential part of the company’s efforts to build a next-generation satellite network.

“Given the success of our recent Starlink demonstration satellites, we have incorporated lessons learned and re-organized to allow for the next design iteration to be flown in short order,” Behrend said.

She had no further comment on the reorganization or the launch window, but noted the strategy was similar to the rapid iteration in design and testing which led to the success of its rockets.

Among the managers fired from the Redmond office was SpaceX Vice President of Satellites Rajeev Badyal, an engineering and hardware veteran of Microsoft Corp and Hewlett-Packard, and top designer Mark Krebs, who worked in Google’s satellite and aircraft division, the employees said. Krebs declined to comment, and Badyal did not respond to requests for comment.

The management shakeup followed in-fighting over pressure from Musk to speed up satellite testing schedules, one of the sources said. SpaceX’s Behrend offered no comment on the matter.

Culture was also a challenge for recent hires, a second source said. A number of the managers had been hired from nearby technology giant Microsoft, where workers were more accustomed to longer development schedules than Musk’s famously short deadlines.

“Rajeev wanted three more iterations of test satellites,” one of the sources said. “Elon thinks we can do the job with cheaper and simpler satellites, sooner.”

A billionaire and Chief Executive Officer of Tesla Inc, Musk is known for ambitious projects ranging from auto electrification and rocket-building to high-speed transit tunnels.

A Musk trust owns 54 percent of the outstanding stock of SpaceX, according to a 2016 U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filing, SpaceX’s most recent.

The first 9-meter (29.5-foot) diameter composite propellant tank dome for SpaceX’s full-scale BFR spaceship prototype has been spotted more or less complete at the company’s temporary Port of Los Angeles facility, unambiguous evidence that SpaceX is continuing to rapidly fabricate major components of its next-generation rocket.

Speaking at a dedicated BFR update event in mid-September, CEO Elon Musk foreshadowed as much, and recent updates have reiterated just how committed SpaceX is to BFR and just how keen the company is to waste no time at all.

During that September 17th presentation, Musk did not parse his words despite a self-admitted tendency to look at SpaceX’s development program timelines (Falcon 9, Falcon Heavy, Dragon, BFR) through rose-tinted glasses. Just two months after he uttered the quote above, SpaceX has visibly either finished or nearly finished a 9-meter diameter BFR spaceship (BFS) tank dome.

Due to SpaceX’s opaque treatment of development programs (both literally for the tent and figuratively for official updates), it’s possible that this may even the second dome completed so far. Either way, it can be extrapolated – assuming that the layout of BFR 2017 is generally representative of BFR 2018 – that the first spaceship prototype will require two or three roughly identical tank domes. If the common-dome tank layout is basically the same (disclaimer: it might be quite different), then SpaceX may end up mounting BFS’ 7 Raptor engines almost directly to the rear of the bottom tank dome, requiring either significant structural reinforcement or a second uniquely-engineer and optimized dome.

Judging from SpaceX’s and Musk’s desire to make reusable rockets as reliable as (if not even more reliable than) commercial airliners, the safest form of mass-transit humans have created, it seems more likely than not that Raptor and BFR will continue SpaceX’s practice of quite literally surrounding each engine with thrust-transmitting structures that simultaneously act as armored shields. In the event that a Merlin engine fails on Falcon 9 or Heavy, each booster’s octaweb contains nine separate armored chambers that exist to isolate each engine in the event of a catastrophic failure. In fact, a Merlin failure – the only such in-flight failure known – during SpaceX’s CRS-1 Dragon launch in 2012 demonstrated the efficacy of this design, preventing the failure of just one of nine engines from causing total mission failure.

Federal regulators are allowing entrepreneur Elon Musk to use an expanded range of wireless airwaves for his plan to deliver cheap, high-speed Internet access — from space.

The decision Thursday by the Federal Communications Commission paves the way for SpaceX to build its full network of about 12,000 satellites intended to blanket the earth in wireless Internet access. Proponents say next-generation satellite Internet technology could help developing countries and rural areas connect to economic opportunities currently out of reach for them because they lack competitive Internet access.

“I’m excited to see what these services might promise and what these proposed constellations have to offer,” said FCC Chairman Ajit Pai. “Our approach to these applications reflects this commission’s fundamental approach to encourage the private sector to invest and to innovate and allow market forces to deliver value to American consumers.”

SpaceX’s Starlink program launched its first test satellites in February. The FCC gave SpaceX approval the next month for its first 4,400 satellites. The company has an initial goal to deploy 1,600 satellites in the next few years, but it has said that it could take more than six years to complete the full network.

Satellite communications have been in use for decades. But Internet access through the technology is slow and expensive, largely because the satellites responsible for ferrying data to and from the ground orbit at great distances from the earth, increasing lag. SpaceX and its rivals are racing to field a new type of communications network. Instead of sending Internet traffic to just a handful of satellites in geosynchronous orbit, the companies hope to boost satellite Internet speeds by using many cheaper satellites that orbit closer to earth.

On Thursday, the FCC also approved hundreds of satellites from three other companies: Kepler, Telesat and Leosat. The pressure to be the first and strongest network is fierce: Last month, Musk reportedly fired a number of Starlink managers over the pace of their work.

The race by so many companies to build new satellite constellations has many policymakers concerned about proliferating space objects. NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine has repeatedly warned of the “growing threat” posed by orbital debris, and the U.S. military now tracks more than 500,000 individual pieces of flying space junk.

The FCC on Thursday sought to weigh in on the issue itself by unveiling a proposal — its first such effort in a decade — that could introduce more rules to the satellite industry designed to limit orbital debris. The proposal considers whether changes to satellite designs are needed, as well as improvements in the way companies dispose of outdated satellites.

“My favorite example is an innocuous little screwdriver that slipped through an astronaut’s grasp and has been circling low Earth orbit at up to 21,600 miles per hour for the last 35 years,” said FCC Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel. “At these speeds, even a common household item can wreak havoc.”

In addition to spurring problems for the car company Tesla, Elon Musk's puff of marijuana in September will also have consequences for SpaceX. On Tuesday, The Washington Post reported that NASA will conduct a "safety review" of both of its commercial crew companies, SpaceX and Boeing. The review was prompted, sources told the paper, because of recent behavior by Musk, including smoking marijuana on a podcast.

According to William Gerstenmaier, NASA's chief human spaceflight official, the review will be "pretty invasive" and involve interviews with hundreds of employees at various levels of the companies, across multiple worksites. The review will begin next year, and interviews will examine "everything and anything that could impact safety," Gerstenmaier told the Post.

The reviews will come as both SpaceX and Boeing are racing to conduct human test flights of their rockets and spacecraft in mid-2019. Both companies have yet to meet critical milestones, including abort tests and uncrewed test flights, before the first crews fly on SpaceX's Dragon and Boeing's Starliner vehicles.

The "safety culture" reviews are also coming after NASA has worked with SpaceX for 10 years and Boeing for decades. NASA engineers and managers likely already have a deep familiarity with how both companies operate.

"For years, our engineers have worked side by side with NASA, creating a strong partnership and guiding the development of Crew Dragon—one of the safest, most-advanced human spaceflight systems ever built," SpaceX said in a statement. "In addition, SpaceX actively promotes workplace safety, and we are confident that our comprehensive drug-free workforce and workplace programs exceed all applicable contractual requirements. We couldn't be more proud of all that we have already accomplished together with NASA, and we look forward to returning human spaceflight capabilities to the United States."

A few days after a brief appearance in Arizona, SpaceX’s next Falcon Heavy side booster has been spotted vertical at the company’s McGregor, Texas first stage test stand, likely just days away from the rocket’s first static-fire ignition test.

By all appearances a newly manufactured booster, this hardware is the first public evidence of serious preparations for the second flight of SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy.

Taking as little as a week to go from SpaceX’s Hawthorne factory to its McGregor first stage test stand, this Falcon Heavy side booster appears to be a new rocket, barring the possibility that it’s an older flight-proven booster that has since been modified extensively with Block 5 hardware and had all visible soot cleaned off.

Most notably, if this booster is not effectively identical to any given Falcon 9 Block 5 first stage, widespread changes to avionics, software, and firmware would be required to ensure compatibility between an older variant of Falcon 9 and its Block 5 predecessors. Among countless other changes, Falcon 9 Block 5 features a ~10% thrust increase, an almost clean-slate avionics refresh, and major structural upgrades throughout the booster.

With almost a full year now expected between Falcon Heavy’s first and second flights, the chances that the second vehicle wont be entirely composed of Block 5 hardware are slim to none. Anything less than a sort of fixed Falcon Heavy design would undoubtedly make it harder for SpaceX to certify the heavy-lift rocket for both NASA and USAF launches in the eyes of each agency, much like both have struggled to bend their highly inflexible certification requirements to SpaceX’s strategy of continuous hardware and software improvement.