NASA and the Private Sector - Page 166

SEATTLE (Reuters) - Boeing Co has delayed by at least three months its first uncrewed flight to the International Space Station under NASA’s human spaceflight program, and pushed its crewed flight until November, industry sources said on Wednesday.

Reuters reported last month that NASA has warned Boeing and rival contractor SpaceX of design and safety concerns the companies need to address before flying humans to space.

Boeing’s first test flight was slated for April but it has been pushed to August, according to two people with direct knowledge of the matter. The new schedule means that Boeing’s crewed mission, initially scheduled for August, will be delayed until November.

A Boeing spokesman declined to comment.

A NASA spokesman declined to comment but said a new update to the launch schedule would be posted next week.

NASA is paying Boeing and SpaceX about $6.8 billion to build rocket and capsule launch systems to return astronauts to the International Space Station from U.S. soil for the first time since America’s Space Shuttle program went dark in 2011.

Earlier this month an unmanned capsule from Elon Musk’s SpaceX completed a six-day round-trip mission to the International Space Station. Its astronaut flight is planned for July.

For years, the United States has relied on Russia for rides to the space station. The clock is ticking because there are no seats available for U.S. crew on the Russia spacecraft after 2019 given production schedules and other factors.

NASA said it was considering paying for two more seats to the space station for autumn of 2019 and spring of 2020 to ensure U.S. access.

The initial April launch was ahead of a United Launch Alliance mission for the Department of Defense in June from the Cape Canaveral launch pad in Florida, so Boeing would have needed to clear the launch pad by the first week in May, one of the sources said, describing the pressure not just on technical issues but also launch schedules at Cape Canaveral.

In a wholly unforeseen turn of events, SpaceX has taken the extraordinary step of permanently scrapping both its Port of Los Angeles-based BFR development tent and what seem to be the majority of what it contained, irreparably destroying custom-built tooling meant to support the fabrication of carbon composite BFR spaceships and boosters.

Likely worth anywhere from several to tens of millions of dollars (USD), SpaceX’s advanced BFR production tools were procured from industry-expert Ascent Aerospace sometime in 2017 before being officially delivered to the rocket company’s newly-erected Port of LA tent around April 2018. Situated at the port specifically due to logistical concerns about the high cost of transporting 9m/30ft-diameter objects from SpaceX’s main Hawthorne facilities to a barge for transport east, the company has decided to unequivocally destroy its aerospace-grade composite tooling less than 12 months after accepting delivery. Put simply, this is the best evidence yet that SpaceX – willing or not – has gone all-in on build Starship and Super Heavy out of stainless steel less than six months after CEO Elon Musk began to hint at the program’s utterly radical pivot.

The centrality of carbon fiber composites remained with SpaceX’s Sept. 2017 iteration of BFR, downsized by 25% to a diameter of 9m (~30 ft). Around six months later, that commitment to composites was further solidified by the delivery of the first 9m-diameter carbon fiber tooling in March or April 2018. The tooling used to mold and lay up aerospace-grade advanced carbon fiber structures is inherently expensive, demanding extremely low tolerances across massive surface areas and volumes in order to ensure the quality of the equally massive and low-tolerance composite structures they are used to build. Actual prices are often closely guarded and difficult to determine or extrapolate off of, but it’s safe to say that SpaceX likely spent months of effort and at least several million dollars to acquire its large BFR mandrel.

In the subsequent months of 2018, SpaceX’s BFR and composite R&D team spent tens of thousands of hours building out an ad-hoc advanced composites workshop inside a temporary tent in an industrial area, and ultimately managed to build a number of full-scale carbon fiber segments, including at least one large tank barrel section and the beginnings of a tank dome. In September 2018, that progress was partially revealed alongside the announcement that Japanese billionaire Yasuka Maezawa had purchased the first crewed lunar launch of BFR for several hundred million dollars, set to occur no earlier than 2023.

Two months after indicating that the first BFR “airframe/tank barrel section” would be built out of a “new carbon fiber material”, Musk provided the very first teaser for a “counterintuitive” development that would later be identified as the CEO’s decision to wholly replace BFR’s proposed used of composites with stainless steel and an advanced metallic heat shield. Still more than a little controversial and hard to follow almost half a year later, the feeling at the time was that SpaceX’s eccentric leader had decided to throw away more than 24 months of composite BFR design and development work for an almost entirely unproven alternative approach.

For better or for worse, it appears that SpaceX (or maybe just Musk) has quite literally trashed the most concrete demonstration of a prior commitment to advanced carbon fiber composites, scrapping the vast majority of its composite tooling and perhaps even the prototype BFR segments built in 2018.

Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture has filed plans for expanding its Florida rocket manufacturing facility onto a vacant 90-acre plot of land next door, Florida Today reports.

The newspaper reported today that the plans for a “South Campus” on Space Commerce Way, near NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, are laid out in documents filed with the St. Johns River Water Management District. The land would be used to establish “programs complimentary to those constructed on the adjacent North Campus,” the documents say.

Construction on the new site is due to begin in July, with the final building phase to be wrapped up a year from now. The buildings would provide space for manufacturing and provisioning of commercial launch vehicles, Florida Today reported. The site would include a warehouse that could be expanded later.

In response to GeekWire’s inquiry, Blue Origin said it had nothing to add to the Florida Today report.

Blue Origin has erected a 750,000-square-foot factory on the 126-acre North Campus site for building orbital-class New Glenn rockets. “We’re making parts for the first booster already down there,” Brett Alexander, Blue Origin’s vice president of sales and strategy, said this week at the American Astronautical Society’s Goddard Memorial Symposium in Maryland.

The first New Glenn launch from Cape Canaveral’s Launch Complex 36 is currently scheduled for 2021.

The company builds its suborbital New Shepard rockets, as well as its BE-3 and BE-4 engines, at its headquarters facility in Kent, Wash. BE-4 engine production is expected to shift to a new 200,000-square-foot factory in Huntsville, Ala., in preparation for New Glenn’s maiden launch.

Florida has been attracting an increasing level of interest as a base for commercial rocket production as well as for launches. Relativity Space and Firefly Aerospace recently struck deals for facilities in Florida, and this week SpaceX founder Elon Musk said his company’s next-generation Starship and Super Heavy booster would be built in Florida as well as in Texas.

NASA and Boeing are nearing the final stages of development and evaluation for crew systems that will return human spaceflight launches from American soil on missions to the International Space Station as part of the agency’s Commercial Crew Program. To meet NASA’s requirements, the commercial providers must demonstrate that their systems are ready to begin regular flights to the space station.

Boeing now is targeting the company’s uncrewed mission, called Orbital Flight Test, in August 2019, although this is a working target date and to be confirmed. The CST-100 Starliner will launch atop a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket from Space Launch Complex 41 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. The decision to adjust the launch date was guided by limited launch opportunities in April and May, as well as a critical U.S. Air Force national security launch – AEHF-5 – atop a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket from Space Launch Complex 41 in June.

Following the uncrewed flight, Boeing is planning to fly a test mission with crew on board to the space station in late 2019, with the specific date to be confirmed closer to that timeframe. NASA and Boeing have agreed to extend the duration of that flight test to the International Space Station after completing an in-depth technical assessment of the Starliner systems. Boeing also will fly a Pad Abort Test before those two orbital flights to demonstrate the company’s ability to safely carry astronauts away from a launch vehicle emergency, if necessary. Find a full mission and Boeing progress feature here: https://go.nasa.gov/2FM8zcQ.

Following the test flights, NASA will review performance data and resolve any necessary issues to certify the systems for operational missions. NASA and Boeing are actively working to be ready for the operational missions. As with all human spaceflight vehicle development, learning from each test and adjusting as necessary to reduce risk to the crew may override planning dates.

The following planning dates reflect updated schedule inputs for Boeing’s test flights as of March 26, 2019.

Test Flight Planning Dates:
Boeing Pad Abort Test: Summer 2019
Boeing Orbital Flight Test (uncrewed): current target working date August 2019
Boeing Crew Flight Test (crewed): current target working date late 2019

SpaceX Demo-2 Update

NASA also is working with SpaceX to return human spaceflight launches to American soil. The company completed an uncrewed flight test, known as Demo-1, to the space station in March. SpaceX now is processing the same Crew Dragon spacecraft for an in-flight abort test. The company then will fly a flight test with a crew, known as Demo-2, to the station.

NASA’s Commercial Crew Program and SpaceX are expected to reevaluate its target test dates in the next couple weeks.

SpaceX has announced a launch target of May 2019 for the first batch of operational Starlink satellites in a sign that the proposed internet satellite constellation has reached a major milestone, effectively transitioning from pure research and development to serious manufacturing.

R&D will continue as SpaceX Starlink engineers work to implement the true final design of the first several hundred or thousand spacecraft, but a significant amount of the team’s work will now be centered on producing as many Starlink satellites as possible, as quickly as possible. With anywhere from 4400 to nearly 12,000 satellites needed to complete the three major proposed phases of Starlink, SpaceX will have to build and launch more than 2200 satellites in the next five years, averaging 44 high-performance, low-cost spacecraft built and launched every month for the next 60 months.

Despite the major challenges ahead of SpaceX, things seem to be going quite smoothly with the current mix of manufacturing and development. As previously reported on Teslarati, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk forced the Starlink group through a painful reorganization in the summer of 2018, challenging the remaining leaders and their team to launch the first batch of operational Starlink satellites no later than June 2019. As a consequence, a sort of compromise had to be reached where one additional group of quasi-prototype satellites would be launched before settling on a truly final design for serious mass-production.

According to SpaceX filings with the FCC, the first group of operational satellites – potentially anywhere from 75 to 1000 or more – will rely on just one band (“Ku”) for communications instead of the nominal two (“Ku” and “Ka”), a change that SpaceX says will significantly simplify the first spacecraft. By simplifying them, SpaceX believes it can expedite Starlink’s initial deployment without losing a great deal of performance or interfering with constellations from competitors like OneWeb.

Somewhere along the line, SpaceX would iteratively improve each subsequent ‘generation’ of Starlink satellites until they reached the nominal performance characteristics outlined in the company’s original constellation application. Knowing SpaceX, improvements would continue for as long as lessons continued to be learned from operating hundreds and eventually thousands of orbital spacecraft.

As one concrete example, recent SpaceX FCC documents stated that the first 75 Starlink spacecraft would feature a less-optimized reentry design, meaning that a select few components will not entirely burn up during reentry, creating debris that poses a slight added risk in the eyes of regulatory bodies like the FCC. After those first 75 spacecraft are built and launched, SpaceX will introduce upgrades – already planned and designed – that will reduce the surviving reentry debris (and thus their risk to humans below) to zero.

While the FCC has yet to grant SpaceX’s requested modifications, the other major goal is to reduce the operating orbit of the first phase of 1584 satellites to 550 km (340 mi), a change that SpaceX says will drastically reduce the potential lifespan of any orbital debris in the unlikely event of their creation. A lower altitude also places a major cushion between SpaceX’s first ~1500 satellites and the orbits of several other planned constellations, including OneWeb and Telesat.

As the global leader in small satellite launch, Rocket Lab has now introduced the next evolution of its mission services, the in-house designed and built Photon satellite platform.

Rocket Lab now delivers an all-inclusive spacecraft build and launch service that enables small satellite customers to focus on delivering their service from orbit and generating revenue, rather than building their own satellite hardware. Our customers simply bring their payload or idea and we do the rest, taking care of the complete satellite design, build and launch as a bundled and streamlined experience.

Photon is an advanced and planned evolution of the Rocket Lab Kick Stage. Operating a high-powered iteration of the flight-proven 3D printed Curie propulsion system, Photon can support missions with up to a five year on-orbit life span. Equipped with an S-band communication system, a high-fidelity attitude control system, and a robust avionics suite, Photon is the complete spacecraft solution for a range of LEO missions, from constellation development, through to technology demonstrations and hosted payloads.

NASA has selected SpaceX in Hawthorne, California, to provide launch services for the agency’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission, the first-ever mission to demonstrate the capability to deflect an asteroid by colliding a spacecraft with it at high speed – a technique known as a kinetic impactor.

The total cost for NASA to launch DART is approximately $69 million, which includes the launch service and other mission related costs.

The DART mission currently is targeted to launch in June 2021 on a Falcon 9 rocket from Space Launch Complex 4E at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. By using solar electric propulsion, DART will intercept the asteroid Didymos’ small moon in October 2022, when the asteroid will be within 11 million kilometers of Earth.

NASA’s Launch Services Program at Kennedy Space Center in Florida will manage the SpaceX launch service. The DART Project office is located at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, and is managed by the Planetary Missions Program Office at Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, for NASA’s Planetary Defense Coordination Office in Washington.

SpaceX plans to check off another reusable-rocket milestone soon.

The company, which routinely lands and re-flies first-stage boosters, recovered the payload fairing during yesterday's Falcon Heavy megarocket launch and plans to employ it on another mission in 2019, SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk said.

"Both fairing halves recovered. Will be flown on Starlink mission later this year," Musk said via Twitter yesterday (April 11), where he posted photos of the space hardware.

Payload fairings are the nose cones that surround and protect satellites during launch. SpaceX has yet to re-fly any fairings, but doing so has always been part of the plan. The company outfits each fairing half with an avionics system and thrusters, which it uses to steer itself to a soft, parachute-aided ocean splashdown.

SpaceX has gone to such trouble because fairings are expensive and therefore worth reusing. Each one costs $6 million, Musk has said — about 10% of the cost of a launch of one of SpaceX's workhorse Falcon 9 rockets. (The two-stage Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy use the same payload fairing. The Heavy is basically three modified Falcon 9 first stages strapped together; the central booster is topped with a single-engine second stage and the payload.)

Yesterday's recovered payload fairing will be reassigned to a launch for Starlink, Musk added. That program is SpaceX's huge internet-satellite constellation, which will ultimately consist of thousands of spacecraft. The first operational Starlink launch is planned for next month; it will lift off atop a Falcon 9 from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California.

It's unclear if the recovered fairing will top that Falcon 9; Musk didn't specify which Starlink mission the hardware will fly on.

SpaceX has tried multiple times to catch falling fairing halves using a net-equipped boat named Mr. Steven. Musk has said that approach was motivated by the desire to keep the fairings out of seawater's corrosive clutches, but none of these attempts to date have been successful.

SpaceX did not employ Mr. Steven during yesterday's launch; recovery boats simply fished the fairing halves out of the water. So, it would seem that Musk does not view corrosion and contamination as a serious issue anymore.