NASA and the Private Sector - Page 168

Just days after NASA laid out its ground rules for commercial travel to the International Space Station, Nevada-based Bigelow Space Operations says it’s targeting a fare of roughly $52 million a seat for rides that will make use of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket and Crew Dragon capsule.

Bigelow Space Operations is the service subsidiary of Bigelow Aerospace, the space venture founded by Nevada real-estate development magnate Robert Bigelow. Three years ago, Bigelow Aerospace had one of its expandable modules attached to the space station for testing, and it’s still being used.

Following up on Friday’s NASA announcement, Bigelow said his company has put down substantial deposits and reservation fees for up to four SpaceX launches to the space station. Each launch would be capable of sending up to four people into orbit for a stay of up to one or two months, in accordance with the space agency’s ground rules.

Bigelow, who holds the title of president at Bigelow Aerospace as well as Bigelow Space Operations, said NASA’s requirements would be thoroughly digested “so that all opportunities and obligations to properly conduct the flights and activities of new astronauts to the ISS can be responsibly performed.”

“In these early times, the seat cost will be targeted at approximately $52,000,000 per person,” he wrote in a statement released today.

That cost presumably doesn’t include the roughly $35,000-a-night fee that NASA plans to charge as reimbursement for station-related expenses such as life support and food.

“The next big question is, when is this all going to happen?” Bigelow wrote. “Once the SpaceX rocket and capsule are certified by NASA to fly people to the ISS, then this program can begin. As you might imagine, as they say, ‘the devil is in the details,’ and there are many. But we are excited and optimistic that all of this can come together successfully, and BSO has skin in the game.”

Bigelow isn’t the only one with skin in the game: Virginia-based Space Adventures says it will be selling seats on Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner capsule, which will be launched on a United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket. Neither Space Adventures nor Boeing has named a precise price, but Boeing spokesman Josh Barrett told GeekWire last week that NASA’s estimate of $58 million per seat was in the right ballpark.

In contrast to the full-flight reservations that Bigelow has with SpaceX, Space Adventures plans to sell the “fifth seat” on Starliner trips that will take four NASA-funded astronauts to the space station. Private-sector astronauts would fly alongside public-sector astronauts.

The first crewed Starliner mission to the space station will set the model for this arrangement: Boeing test pilot Chris Ferguson, a former space shuttle commander, will be flying as a private astronaut alongside NASA’s Nicole Mann and Mike Fincke.

That mission, and SpaceX’s first crewed Dragon trip to the station, are currently expected to take place by the end of this year – with the caveat that the flight schedule has repeatedly slipped and may well do so again. Only after those demonstration flights will NASA assess the space taxis’ performance and issue certification for regular service.

SpaceX is raising yet another round of funding, a month after completing its second fundraising of the year.

The latest round, filed on Monday, seeks to raise $314.2 million at a price of $214 a share, according to a document seen by CNBC. The new equity would bring SpaceX’s total 2019 fundraising to $1.33 billion once completed.

The company declined to immediately comment on the filing.

Part, if not all, of the investment in SpaceX is from the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan, which has $191.1 billion in assets under management. The investment is the first by a new technology fund that Ontario Teachers’ launched in April.

“SpaceX is the world’s leading private space launch provider, and we are excited to work with the company in the next phase of its growth as it rolls out its Starlink satellite network,” Teachers’ Innovation Platform fund senior managing director Olivia Steedman said in a statement.

Ontario Teachers’ said that SpaceX was seen as a “a compelling investment opportunity” for the fund because of “its proven track record of technology disruption in the launch space and significant future growth potential in the satellite broadband market.”

SpaceX raised equity rounds of $486 million and $536 million earlier this year. Before this latest round, SpaceX’s valuation had risen to $33.3 billion, people familiar told CNBC in May.

Elon Musk’s company is bankrolling two capital intensive projects: Starlink, a network of thousands of small internet satellites, and Starship, a massive rocket to send people and cargo to Mars.

Starlink would consist of 11,943 satellites flying close to the planet in what is called low Earth orbit and is intended to be an interconnected network, called a “constellation.” The satellites would create a web that beams high-speed internet to any place on Earth. The company’s first full mission of 60 Starlink satellites launched in May, making the funds SpaceX has raised this year key to scaling up development and production to meet its ambitious goals. Musk said last month, before this latest round, that SpaceX has “sufficient capital to get to an operational level ” for Starlink.

Starship, on the other hand, is the company’s plan for a next generation rocket. Designed to transport up to 100 people at a time to the moon or Mars, Starship is designed to be a fully reusable launch system. Two prototypes are currently in development, one in Texas and the other in Florida, and SpaceX is deep in finalizing the design and production of the Raptor engines that will power Starship.

Musk sees Starlink as the way for SpaceX to fund the development of Starship. He estimated recently that SpaceX revenue from launches likely peaks at about $3 billion a year but said he believes internet service revenue is potentially “more like $30 billion a year.”

After two successful Falcon Heavy missions in less than 11 weeks, launch fans will likely have to wait until late 2020 for SpaceX’s next Falcon Heavy flight, barring a surprise mission for an unannounced customer.

SpaceX has successfully launched Falcon Heavy missions to date — all successfully — and has firm launch contracts or contract options for four more Falcon Heavy missions with the U.S. Air Force, Viasat and Inmarsat. All of the missions are expected to lift off from launch pad 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, the only facility outfitted to accommodate the triple-core Falcon Heavy rocket.

One of the Air Force missions, designated AFSPC-44, is next in line to fly on a Falcon Heavy rocket. The AFSPC-44 mission is scheduled for launch in the fall of 2020, according to Col. Robert Bongiovi, director of the launch enterprise systems directorate at the Air Force’s Space and Missile Systems Center.

The Air Force has not identified the payloads on the AFSPC-44 mission, which the military awarded to SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy in February. Documents released with the military’s request for proposals suggest the AFSPC-44 launch will loft two payloads into a circular geosynchronous orbit more than 22,000 miles above the equator.

In the request for proposals, the Air Force told prospective launch providers to assume the combined mass of the two payloads is less than 8,200 pounds, or about 3.7 metric tons.

A direct injection of the AFSPC-44 satellites into geosynchronous orbit by the Falcon Heavy rocket will require a lengthy coast phase of more than five hours between upper stage engine burns. On the most recent Falcon Heavy mission, which lifted off Tuesday, the rocket’s upper stage completed four burns over three-and-a-half hours on a demonstration flight sponsored by the Air Force.

The complex orbital maneuvers were required to place the mission’s 24 satellite payloads into three distinct orbits. They also exercised the capabilities of the Falcon Heavy and its Merlin upper stage engine before the Air Force entrusts the launcher with more critical, and more expensive, operational national security payloads on future flights.

The Air Force formally certified the Falcon Heavy to be eligible to win national security launch contracts after the rocket’s inaugural flight last year. A series of in-depth technical and process reviews are now underway before the military puts a critical national security satellite on a Falcon Heavy.

“What we’re doing now is what we call the spaceflight worthiness process,” Bongiovi said in a pre-launch conference call with reporters.

The successful STP-2 mission “will move us one step closer to spaceflight worthiness for the AFSPC-44 launch in fall of 2020,” Bongiovi said before the launch.

The Falcon Heavy used on the STP-2 mission flew with reused side boosters recovered after the previous Falcon Heavy launch April 11, which delivered the commercial Arabsat 6A communications to orbit.

Officials said they will use the experience from the STP-2 mission familiarizing Air Force engineers with SpaceX’s booster recovery and reuse procedures to help certify previously-flown rocket hardware for national security missions. Before the STP-2 launch, all of the Air Force’s launches with SpaceX, to date, have used newly-built Falcon 9 boosters.

After the AFSPC-44 launch, the Air Force plans another Falcon Heavy mission with SpaceX in the spring 0f 2021, Bongiovi said. That launch, designated AFSPC-52, was previously planned to lift off by September 2020, but in a briefing with reporters earlier this month, Bongiovi twice said the AFSPC-44 mission is the Air Force’s next Falcon Heavy mission.

Like the AFSPC-44 launch, the Air Force has not identified the name or purpose of the payload to be launched on the AFSPC-52 mission.

In a draft solicitation released for the AFSPC-52 mission, the Air Force said the payload required a lift capacity of around 14,000 pounds, or 6,350 kilograms, into a geostationary transfer orbit ranging in altitude between 115 miles (185 kilometers) and 21,865 miles (35,188 kilometers), with an inclination of 27 degrees.

Viasat and Inmarsat are the two major telecommunications satellite operators with contracts or options to fly their payloads on a Falcon Heavy rocket.

SpaceX won a contract with Viasat last year to launch one of the broadband provider’s three next-generation communications satellites on a Falcon Heavy. Viasat is developing three new Boeing-built satellites, known as the ViaSat 3 fleet, to expand the company’s broadband Internet coverage around the world, with spacecraft stationed over the Americas, Europe, Africa and the Middle East, and over the Asia-Pacific region.

Viasat has booked firm launch contracts with SpaceX, United Launch Alliance and Arianespace to carry one ViaSat 3 satellite at a time toward their operating positions in geostationary orbit beginning in 2021. But the California-based broadband company has not announced the order of the ViaSat 3 launches, or which rocket will launch each satellite.

Viasat said the Falcon Heavy will place its satellite “extremely close” to its final perch in geostationary orbit, utilizing a multi-hour launch profile similar to the one planned for the AFSPC-44 mission.

London-based Inmarsat also has a contract option with SpaceX for a Falcon Heavy launch. Following delays in the Falcon Heavy’s first flight, Inmarsat decided to switch the launch of one of its satellites in 2017 to a Falcon 9 rocket, but retained a contract option to fly a satellite a future Falcon Heavy mission.

Inmarsat, which owns a network of satellites for maritime and aeronautical communications, has not executed the Falcon Heavy contract option. Inmarsat’s CEO said in March that one of the company’s future satellites — the Airbus-made Inmarsat 6B spacecraft scheduled for launch in late 2021 — might be a candidate to fill the company’s Falcon Heavy contract option, according to Space News.

SpaceX has also signed up one additional customer to launch a satellite on a Falcon Heavy mission.

The Swedish company Ovzon announced last year its selection of a Falcon Heavy rocket to haul its first geostationary communications satellite into orbit. Ovzon’s announcement specified the satellite would ride the Falcon Heavy directly into geostationary orbit.

Contingent on final financing, the Ovzon 3 satellite will be built by Maxar’s SSL division and is expected to weigh less than a ton at launch. The relatively light weight of the Ovzon 3 spacecraft suggests it may not be dedicated launch, and could fly with another payload on the Falcon Heavy.

Several SpaceX missions have been announced only months in advance, such as the Falcon 9 launch of the U.S. Air Force’s X-37B space plane in September 2017, and the liftoff of the U.S. government’s mysterious Zuma payload in January 2018.

A Falcon 9 launch of a South Korean military communications satellite, scheduled for November from Cape Canaveral, also went unannounced until earlier this month.

Gwynne Shotwell, SpaceX’s president and chief operating officer, said in May that the company plans between 18 and 21 missions this year, excluding flights carrying SpaceX’s own Starlink broadband satellites.

Starlink launches this year are expected to fly on Falcon 9 rockets, which can deliver 60 of the small satellites to space per mission. The Falcon Heavy uses the same-size payload fairing as the Falcon 9, and the 60 Starlink satellites loaded for the network’s first dedicated launch in May were a “tight fit” inside the nose shroud, according to Elon Musk, SpaceX’s founder and CEO.

That leaves little opportunity to carry a higher number Starlink satellites, at least in their current design, on a Falcon Heavy mission.

SpaceX has completed eight missions in the first half of the year, including the one launch dedicated to the Starlink network.

Virgin Galactic, the space tourism company founded by billionaire Richard Branson, is preparing to enter the stock market by the end of 2019, through a merger with an existing company.

It would be the first spaceflight company to be publicly owned; Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin and Elon Musk's SpaceX are both privately held.

Virgin Galactic was founded in 2004 and experienced a significant setback in 2014 when a test flight fatally crashed. But within the past year, the company has successfully taken two crewed spaceflights.

More than 6o0 people have paid to reserve spots on future commercial flights — putting down a collective $80 million in deposits, according to Virgin Galactic, and on the hook for another $120 million by the time they actually visit space.

But to make those flights a reality, the company needs more funds. Branson was discussing a substantial investment from Saudi Arabia, but he canceled those plans after the killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

Now, a group of investors is working with Branson to take Virgin Galactic public, as an alternative way of raising money.

Those investors have organized into a company called Social Capital Hedosophia, which will merge with Virgin Galactic in order to convert it into a publicly traded company. Chamath Palihapitiya, the CEO of Social Capital Hedosophia, will be the chairman of the combined company; the partnering investors will own up to 49% of the shares.

Palihapitiya was an early executive at Facebook. Adam Bain, the former chief operating officer of Twitter, is another major investor in the plan.

By merging with Social Capital Hedosophia, Virgin Galactic will be able to go public without needing to organize an initial public offering.

"We know that millions of people are deeply inspired by human spaceflight, would love to become more involved and, ultimately experience space for themselves," Branson said in a statement on Monday, before the details of the plan were announced. "By taking Virgin Galactic public, at this advanced point in its development, we can open space to more investors and in doing so, open space to thousands of new astronauts."

Amazon is looking to expand its empire and Morgan Stanley believes Jeff Bezos’ ambitious satellite internet plan may become one of its most lucrative businesses.

Called Project Kuiper, Amazon aims to launch a network of 3,236 small satellites to create an interconnected network that beams high-speed internet to anywhere on Earth. While Amazon has yet to outline a timeline or cost for Project Kuiper, in a note on Monday to investors, Morgan Stanley analyst Adam Jonas highlighted the network’s potential.

Jonas said Project Kuiper represents as much as a ”$100 billion opportunity,” marking it as a play in the consumer broadband sector of the space economy. Morgan Stanley’s estimate is based on its expectation that the space economy will grow to more than $1 trillion over the next 20 years. The firm’s comments came in a feature on Bezos’ space business Blue Origin, the latest in Morgan Stanley’s series on “space disruptor” companies.



Amazon last year hired the former leader of SpaceX’s satellite program, CNBC reported in April, and Project Kuiper pits Bezos against Elon Musk’s company, as well as several others, in the race to build next-generation internet satellite networks.

“We believe investors may want to pay attention to Jeff Bezos for the advancement of efforts in Space, as he has demonstrated both the will and, increasingly, the financial muscle to put to work,” Jonas said.

Morgan Stanley’s note focused on Blue Origin. The space company is finishing development of a rocket for space tourism, a massive rocket for launching spacecraft to orbit and a lunar lander to carry humans and cargo to the Moon. Bezos sells more than $1 billion in Amazon stock each year and invests it in Blue Origin.

TIME: History is usually most viscerally felt by people who lived it. If you lived through World War II, you understand World War II. You came along two years after Apollo 11. And yet space seems to be in your marrow.

Elon Musk: I think Apollo 11 was one of the most inspiring things in all of human history. Arguably the most inspiring thing. And one of the most universally good things in history. The level of inspiration that provided to the people of Earth was incredible. And it certainly inspired me. I’m not sure SpaceX would exist if not for Apollo 11.

I kept expecting that we would continue beyond Apollo 11, that we would have a base on the moon, that we would be sending people to Mars. And that by 2019 probably would be sending people to the moons of Jupiter. And I think actually if you ask[ed] most people in 1969 they would have expected that. And here we are in 2019. The U.S. actually does not have the ability to send people even to low-Earth orbit.

Lots of other people who love space felt that same despair and disappointment. I certainly did and yet I didn’t build a space and company and you did. So what was it that made you think, “Yeah this has to be done, and I’m the guy who can do it, or at least one of the guys who can do it”?

Well I didn’t think I was one of the guys who could do it. I thought SpaceX would be 90% likely to fail. And the way I actually started out was I was gonna do a philanthropic mission called “Mars Oasis” to land a small greenhouse on the surface of Mars with seeds in dehydrated nutrient gel that would hydrate upon landing. And you’ve have this incredible shot of green plants against a red background. My goal was simply to get the public excited, which would then get Congress excited so that they would appropriate more money and increase NASA’s budget. I was gonna take half the money that I made from PayPal and essentially it would be gone—in order to increase NASA’s budget, and then we’d go to Mars.

It could not have been easy getting a home-brew space mission and rocket company off the ground. How did you begin?

I went to Russia a couple of times because I couldn’t afford the American rockets. They were too expensive. Russia was decommissioning a whole bunch of ICBMs [intercontinental ballistic missiles]. So in 2001 and early 2002 I went to Russia to try to buy some decommissioned ICBMs, which sounds crazy, but you know, they’re gonna throw them away anyway. But they kept raising the price on me.

I also came to realize that even if we doubled NASA’s budget, unless NASA had good options for rocket contractors, they would still not make progress ’cause it would just be more expendable rockets and we’d be at risk of a flags-and-footprints outcome for Mars, which is still better than not going there at all, but not as good as having a base on Mars, a base on the Moon, and ultimately a self sustaining city on Mars. And so I was like ‘okay I gotta try building a rocket company here.’

I thought this was almost certain to fail. In fact, I would not let anyone invest in the company in the beginning. Not because I thought it would turn out well, but because I thought it would fail.

If the Elon Musk of 2019 could talk to Wernher Von Braun, Chris Craft, Gene Kranz and all of the heroes of the 1960s—if you had one piece of advice to give them whether it was technological, spiritual, salesmanship, long-term vision, what would it be?

Well, Wernher Von Braun really knew what he was doing. His plans were for reusability. But those plans were stymied. It doesn’t matter how you skin the cat, you just have to get reusability done. It’s so insane the way rockets work today. It would be like if you got a plane and the way you get to your destination is you bail out with a parachute over the city in question and your plane crash lands somewhere. That’s how rockets work today—with the exception of Falcon 9. This is completely bonkers.

In order for us to be a multi-planet species we must solve full reusability of rockets. In the absence of that…. It would as though if in the old days if ships were not reusable. The cost of an ocean voyage would be tremendous. And you’d need to have a second ship towed behind you for the return journey. Or you can imagine if airplanes were not reusable, nobody would fly, you know, because airliner costs a couple hundred million dollars.

So this is why full and rapid reusability is the holy grail of access to space and is a fundamental step towards it—without which we cannot become a multi planet species. We cannot have a base on the moon or a city on Mars without full and rapid reusability. This is why we’ve been working so hard towards reusability at SpaceX.

There are people who argue for taking the same monomaniacal—and I mean that in a good way—focus and creativity that SpaceX brings to the work it does and applying to developing a truly renewable, truly clean power grid. The knock-on effects in terms of saving the species would be easier to see what in the relatively short term. Do you ever think about that in those 3 AM hours?

Well, I think Tesla’s actually made great progress towards a sustainable energy economy. I think for electrification of transport Tesla’s arguably advanced the cores of sustainable transport by 10 years, maybe 20. These are small numbers in the grand scheme of things. But they do matter.

If I were to fully allocate myself to Tesla, how much faster could we grow versus if I split my time between SpaceX and Tesla? I think the marginal value is relatively limited. I’d rather have Tesla take a couple years longer and still have SpaceX ’cause I think this is the right balance for the greater good.

I wish there was some way to do rockets without burning things. But there isn’t. I mean, Newton’s third law, no way around it. So, you know, balancing what is best for humanity—well, there’s just no other way to do it except rockets.

Obviously a question a lot of folks wanna know right now is, when will we start seeing regular crewed runs to the International Space Station on a crewed Dragon?

Well, this is both a NASA and a SpaceX readiness thing. So from a SpaceX readiness standpoint, my guess is we’re about six months. But whatever the schedule currently looks like, it’s a bit like Zeno’s paradox. You’re sort of halfway there at any given point in time. And then somehow you get there. So if our schedule currently says about four months, then probably about eight months is correct.

If you had to bet your house on it, when would you say the next boot prints show up on the moon?

Well, this is gonna sound pretty crazy, but I think we could land on the moon in less than two years. Certainly with an uncrewed vehicle I believe we could land on the moon in two years. So then maybe within a year or two of that we could be sending crew. I would say four years at the outside.

And when you say, “We,” do you mean the U.S. or you mean SpaceX?

I’m not sure. If it were to take longer to convince NASA and the authorities that we can do it versus just doing it, then we might just do it. It may literally be easier to just land Starship on the moon than try to convince NASA that we can.

Obviously this is a decision that’s out of my hands. But the sheer amount of effort required to convince a large number of skeptical engineers at NASA that we can do it is very high. And not unreasonably so, ’cause they’re like, “Uh, come on. How could this possibly work?” The skepticism…you know, they’d have good reasons for it. But the for sure way to end the skepticism is just do it.

Instead of going with the Falcon rockets and Dragon spacecraft you’ve got and saying, “Let’s get ourselves to the moon in three years,” you’re going an even more ambitious step further with, the Super Heavy and Starship. Why do that? Why not say, “We can go now”?

Well, I think we could do a repeat of Apollo 11 and a few small missions—you know, send people back to the moon. But the remake’s never as good as the original.

We really wanna have a vehicle capable of sending enough payload to the moon or Mars, such that we could have a full lunar base. A permanently occupied lunar base would be incredible. Like we’ve got a permanently occupied base in Antarctica. And it’d be absolutely way cooler to have a science base on the moon.

So that’s why we’re trying to build it as fast as possible. You know, I think it’s generally a good idea for a company that is building technology to try to make its own products redundant as quickly as possible. It’s slightly discomforting because we’ve put so much work into Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy and Dragon. But actually the thing we should aspire to do is to render them redundant as quickly as possible. And we’ll put them in the museum.

Lastly, there are gonna be feet on the moon. There are gonna be feet on Mars. Could they be yours one day?

I would like to go to the moon and Mars. I think that’d be quite fun. But I need to make sure…the overarching goal here is to help make life multi-planetary. This is not some sort of personal quest to go to the moon or to Mars. My sort of philosophical foundation is in line with Douglas Adams, the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. What he was essentially saying was, “The universe is the answer, what are the questions?” And if we expand the scope and scale of consciousness, then we are better able to understand what questions to ask. We’ll learn more, we’ll become more enlightened. And so we should try to do the things that expand the scope and scale of consciousness. And becoming a multi-planet species and ensuring that we have a sustainable climate on earth, these are very important to that overarching philosophy. And that’s the philosophy I buy into.

According to tweets published by CEO Elon Musk on July 21st, SpaceX’s combined Starship and Super Heavy launch vehicle (BFR) could have as many as 41 Raptor engines at liftoff.

As with all other aspects of SpaceX’s next-generation rocket, this is a sign that things remain in flux as the company nears the point at which a specific design will need to be settled on for the first flight-ready prototype(s). With 6 Raptors on the upper stage (Starship) and 35 Raptors on the first stage/booster (Super Heavy), the rocket will – without a doubt – be the most powerful launch vehicle ever developed when it attempts its inaugural launch.

Now expected to feature 35 Raptors in its final iteration, SpaceX’s Super Heavy booster can now be expected to produce a minimum of ~70,000 kN (15.7M lbf) of thrust at full throttle, assuming that all 35 Raptors are the throttleable ~2000 kN variant. According to Musk, SpaceX may also develop a simplified Raptor with minimal throttling that would produce upwards of ~2500 kN (550,000 lbf) of thrust.

If, say, 5 throttleable Raptors were kept as the center cluster of engines used for landing and critical recovery-related burns, a Super Heavy booster with 30 uprated Raptors could produce upwards of 85,000 kN (19.1M lbf) of thrust at launch. In no uncertain terms, a Super Heavy booster anywhere inside those rough bounds (70 MN to 85 MN) would be packing double the thrust of NASA’s Saturn V rocket and double the thrust of NASA’s in-development SLS rocket in its higher-thrust variants.

Put simply, this is a spectacular amount of thrust and energy, so much so that launching a c. 2019 BFR might very well destroy any launch pad in existence today, including SpaceX’s own Pad 39A. Rated and built – in some sense – for Nova, a 10 to 20 million pound-thrust rocket meant to follow Saturn V, it’s likely that Pad 39A would/will need some significant modifications to support a full-stack Starship/Super Heavy launch, especially with a full complement of Raptor engines installed. According to Musk, work has already begun on a Starship launch structure, while the vehicle’s ‘pad’ will be situated on the opposite side of Pad 39A as its Fixed Service Structure (FSS), the tower holding SpaceX’s Crew Access Arm (CAA).

If all goes well, Musk – likely telegraphing his old, wildly optimistic, “Musk-time” self – believes that the first Starship prototypes (one in Texas, one in Florida) will be ready for inaugural flight tests as early as September/October 2019.