NASA and the Private Sector - Page 169

NASA is itching to launch astronauts back to the moon, with an immediate goal of putting boots on the lunar surface in 2024 with its Artemis program. But to accomplish that, the agency may wind up turning to private rocket developers like SpaceX.

Artemis isn't meant to repeat the Apollo missions of the 1960s and 1970s. Instead, NASA wants to send cargo and supplies to the lunar surface, build up a permanent base there, and start looking for ice. Hundreds of millions of tons of water exist on the moon, and that resource can be mined, melted, turned into air, and split into rocket fuel to power voyages to Mars.

NASA plans to use government-funded Space Launch System rockets to return to the moon. But those vehicles won't start launching until late 2021 (the first one was supposed to fly in 2017) and the program is billions of dollars over budget. Increasingly, Trump administration officials and NASA executives are signaling, contrary to congressional budgets, that the agency may look to SpaceX or Blue Origin for help.

"We're not committed to any one contractor," Vice President Mike Pence said in March. "If our current contractors can't meet this objective, then we'll find ones that will."

More recently, Pence told Major Garrett on the podcast "The Takeout" that "if our traditional partners can't do the job, we're going to look to the private space industry to give us the rockets and the technology to get there."

Meanwhile, SpaceX is sending signals back to the Trump administration and NASA in kind.

This month, Time's Jeffrey Kluger interviewed Elon Musk, SpaceX's founder, for "CBS Sunday Morning." During that conversation, Musk suggested his company might attempt an uncrewed lunar landing before the end of 2021. SpaceX would ostensibly pull off this feat using Starship, a launch system it's developing to transport people to the moon and Mars.

"This is going to 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," Musk said. "So then maybe within a year or two of that we could be sending crew."

Musk added that executing a private mission might be easier than trying to persuade skeptics within NASA to partner with SpaceX in the development of its Starship system — and using taxpayer dollars for it.

"It may literally be easier to just land Starship on the moon than try to convince NASA that we can," he said, adding: "'Hey, look. Here's a picture of landing there right now!' That might be the better way to do it."

We recently asked Jeff DeWit, NASA's chief financial officer, about Musk's statements for an upcoming episode of "Business Insider Today," a top daily news show on Facebook.

DeWit, who's in charge of helping the agency make the most cost-effective decisions, said he thought that the odds of SpaceX pulling off a private lunar landing with Starship before NASA can return there "are slim," but he did not rule out the possibility of a NASA-SpaceX partnership on a moon mission. In fact, he underscored the possibility.

"More power to him. I hope he does it," DeWit said of Musk. "If he can do it, we'll partner with them, and we'll get there faster."

He added: "This isn't about us doing it — it's about America doing it. He's [got] an American company. I'd love to partner with him and get that done."

SpaceX did not immediately respond to a request for comment about DeWit's statements.

DeWit also said NASA would "love to bring along" any commercial companies into the Artemis program that could help the agency achieve its goals. Though he named traditional aerospace companies such as Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and Northrop Grumman, DeWit spoke most frequently about SpaceX and Blue Origin and its founder, Jeff Bezos, who in May debuted a lunar-landing spacecraft concept called Blue Moon.

"The fact that Elon Musk is out working for this goal is great," DeWit said. "The fact that Jeff Bezos is out there working for this goal is great."

To develop Starship, SpaceX has built a prototype rocket ship and test bed, called Starhopper, in South Texas. The company hopes to launch the vehicle on Wednesday, send it about 65 feet (20 meters) in the air, hover it, and land it.

Starhopper is not designed to fly to space. However, Musk said a larger prototype, called Starship Mark 1, could fly from Texas or Florida in two to three months and reach orbit by the end of the year.

In September, Musk said that SpaceX planned to use the system to launch a Japanese billionaire around the moon (but not land on its surface) in 2023.

Recently, near the sleepy south Texas beachside town of Boca Chica, a stubby vehicle that looks like a water tank with legs, shining with its stainless-steel hull, rose 20 meters, wreathed in fire and smoke, before it descended back to the ground. The brief flight test of the Starhopper took a few seconds, though it started a grass fire that took a long time to put out. If Elon Musk, the CEO of SpaceX, is right, the short hop is just the beginning of a journey that will take humankind back to the moon, on to Mars — and then beyond.

SpaceX is developing a massive rocket it calls the Starship. Propelled into space by a first stage dubbed the Super Heavy, it promises to change space travel as profoundly as the ocean-going caravel did sea travel. Starship, Musk has boasted, will carry the first colonists to Mars. He has also suggested that the new rocket could land on the moon in two years. Musk has contracted with a wealthy, Japanese businessman to take a crew of artists and writers in a free return voyage around the moon.

The rocket ship would be totally reusable. The Super Heavy first stage would lift the Starship into orbit and then return to its launch site and land, much like the first stage of the Falcon 9 does on a regular basis. The Starship, with refueling, could land on the moon or Mars, taking with it 100 metric tons of passengers, cargo, or a combination of both. The Starship would refuel using local materials mined from either world and then return to Earth. Musk’s proposed lunar surface mission would likely take cargo useful to future moon explorers and an eventual lunar base.

Musk’s rocket ship has caught the imagination of many space enthusiasts. NASA’s Artemis program is built around a super-heavy rocket called the Space Launch System. The SLS is an expendable launch vehicle that has proven expensive to develop and will be costly to operate. Why, say outside space experts, does NASA insist on using the super-expensive super-heavy launcher when it could just partner with SpaceX for far less money and far more capability?

Thus far, NASA has demurred. The space agency is reaching out to the commercial sector, including SpaceX, to build and operate a lunar lander. But the Space Launch System has too many political supporters to scrap just when it is within a couple of years of flying. The SLS may be costly, but it does provide lots of jobs and fat contracts in key congressional districts. Besides, NASA does not think that Starship will ever fly. It is just too incredible a quantum leap in space technology.

Nevertheless, according to Business Insider, Jeff DeWit, NASA’s chief financial officer, threw down the gauntlet to SpaceX. If SpaceX is able to land a Starship on the lunar surface, the space agency will partner with the company to conduct voyages to the moon on the rocket ship.

Of course, DeWit hastened to add that he thinks that Musk’s chances of pulling off a lunar landing are “slim.”

SpaceX has thus far not responded to the challenge laid down by NASA. However, Elon Musk is nothing if not competitive and is always up for a challenge. If any organization can pull off a private moon landing on the scale that Starship could accomplish, it would be SpaceX, in two years or perhaps a bit longer, considering the nature of space development projects. The company has already pioneered the first commercial partly reusable rocket. The Dragon is taking cargo to and from the International Space Station and will, in due course, do the same service for people. The Falcon Heavy is the first commercial heavy-lift vehicle, also partly reusable.

In other words, it’s game on for Musk. Somehow, one thinks his chances are a little bit better than slim.

SpaceX’s SmallSat Rideshare Program will provide small satellite operators with regularly scheduled, dedicated Falcon 9 rideshare missions to SSO for ESPA class payloads for as low as $2.25M per mission, which includes up to 150 kg of payload mass.

Unlike traditional rideshare opportunities, these missions will not be dependent on a primary. These missions will be pre-scheduled and will not be held up by delays with co-passengers.

For payloads who run into development or production challenges leading up to launch, SpaceX will allow them to apply 100% of monies paid towards the cost of rebooking on a subsequent mission (rebooking fees may apply).

As Kent-based Blue Origin works with NASA and other companies to get astronauts back on the moon in 2024, it also envisions a future where millions of people live and work in space.

“We want humanity to continue to expand,” said Patrick Zeitouni, Blue Origin’s head of advanced development programs, during closing remarks July 18 at the three-day NewSpace 2019 conference in Renton. “We want to take full advantage of the near limitless resources of the solar system and be able to preserve Earth. We want to have a vibrant space ecosystem and these millions of people living and working in space are enabling that to happen. That is the future that we want to enable.”

Blue Origin, owned by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, expects to complete by the end of the year a 236,000-square-foot headquarters, research and development facility on 31 acres along 76th Avenue South between South 212th Street and South 228th Street. The current facility covers about 260,000 square feet on 26 acres at 21218 76th Ave. S.

The Maryland-based Space Frontier Foundation, an organization dedicated to opening the space frontier to human settlement as rapidly as possible, put on the conference at the Hyatt Regency on Lake Washington. The conference drew startups, established companies, government agencies, private investors and tech innovators with the focus to grow the commercial space industry as the key enabler to space settlement.

Zeitouni talked for about 35 minutes about Blue Origin’s efforts to help achieve that goal of people living and working in space. He said radical launch reduction cost and the use of in-space resources will help the company build the infrastructure needed.

It’s going to take “systems that are able to launch, land and launch again with minimal amounts of work and effort in between these launches and vehicles that can do so reliably and quickly and over many many flights,” he said.

“Many of you flew here on an airplane, you were not surprised when you landed that we didn’t just throw the plane out,” Zeitouni said to the attendees in the Hyatt’s grand ballroom. “People came on to clean it, refueled it and other people got on the plane and flew someplace else. That’s the place we want to get to in space.”

Blue Origin began flying its New Shepard vehicle in 2015 out of its facility in West Texas. The vehicle is designed and built in Kent. Named after Mercury astronaut Alan Shepard, the first American to go to space, New Shepard is a reusable suborbital rocket system designed to take astronauts and research payloads past the Kármán line – the internationally recognized boundary of space. The vehicle has had 11 successful unmanned test missions that landed the booster over and over. Eventually, the company will send six astronauts into space on the vehicle.

As far as the goal to rely on in-space resources, Zeitouni shared how now everything goes up and down on the rocket. Instead, Blue Origin wants infrastructure in space.

“You go to Paris on a trip, you don’t take your hotel, water, red wine and croissant with you. … It’s provided and you have a more enjoyable trip and more affordable trip,” he said. “That’s the mindset we have to start going to in space.”

Blue Origin built the New Shepard with eyes toward building a larger vehicle. That has led to the New Glenn, named after John Glenn, who made the first American orbital flight in 1963. The orbital vehicle, currently in development in Florida, will take people and payloads to Earth orbits and beyond out of Blue Origin’s rocket facility at Cape Canaveral, Florida. The first launch is expected to be in 2021.

Similar to New Shepard, the company will use New Glenn in multiple missions.

“We want to fly the same thing over and over, it’s safer and you get more practice with it,” Zeitouni said.

When New Glenn returns to Earth, it will land on a moving ship.

“That’s so we can land in the worst sea states,” he said.

Blue Origin also is working on the Blue Moon lander to deliver large infrastructure payloads with high accuracy to pre-position systems for future missions. The larger variant of Blue Moon has been designed to land an ascent vehicle that will allow the company to return Americans to the moon by 2024. Gene Cernan was the last man to walk on the moon as part of Apollo 17 in 1972 before Congress reduced NASA’s budget.

“We’re very excited that we have the support of the administration and NASA of landing a male and female astronaut on the lunar surface by 2024,” Zeitouni said. “We look back about how Apollo did it and it’s so inspiring to see how that happened. It would be the career highlight for all of us to do it.”

With the moon just three days away, Zeitouni said it can be used to set up infrastructure.

“Once we set up infrastructure, we can refuel with local resources, using what have there rather carry everything down and back up again,” he said.

It’s all part of the larger mission.

“We want millions of people to be living and working in space,” Zeitouni said. “We don’t want billions of people on Earth, sort of in mission control, managing them. We want a new model of flight operations. And you can tell it to land on that part of the moon.”

Reaching the company’s goal of people living and working in space has led to many jobs on Earth. Blue Origin has a long list of jobs posted on its website.

“When I joined two years ago, we were at about 1,000 people,” he said. “Now we are at 2,200 and still growing.”

Most of those employees are in Kent, with about 250 working at the New Glenn facility in Florida. Many more employees will be needed with the Kent expansion opening later this year and a new rocket engine factory scheduled to open next year in Alabama.

“We want to put humans in space, millions of them,” Zeitouni said. “We also want humans to be building not just the rockets but a company that can be building rockets. We know it’s going to take a long time to get there.”

Centennial, Colo., Aug. 12, 2019 – At the United Launch Alliance (ULA) factory in Decatur, Alabama, production of the first Vulcan Centaur rocket continues, with shipment to the launch site at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida scheduled for late next year for processing in preparation for its first launch in 2021.

“Atlas and Delta rockets have been the backbone of national security space launch for decades, building on a progressive history of technology development and advancement -- Vulcan Centaur will advance this rich heritage,” said Tory Bruno, ULA’s president and CEO. “Following the successful launch of our 134th mission just last week on our Atlas rocket, we submitted our purpose-built Vulcan Centaur rocket for the U.S. Air Force’s Phase 2 Launch Services competition. It is so exciting to see the first flight vehicle coming together at our factory.”

The Department of Defense has established a selection strategy to ensure a smooth transition to a U.S. engine, while introducing competition, driving down costs and safeguarding continued assured access to space by preventing any capability gaps. Nearly one year ago, the Air Force held a competition and awarded three Launch Services Agreements for public-private partnerships to develop launch vehicles. Phase 2 is the next procurement in the Air Force’s strategy.

“The nation is facing a contested space environment, and we are unleashing the energy of American ingenuity by developing Vulcan Centaur to meet our nation’s need for expanding space missions,” said Bruno. “Vulcan Centaur’s flight proven design, coupled with innovative technology, is transforming the future of space launch and will advance America’s superiority in space.”

ULA is the nation’s only full-range national security space launch provider and is the most experienced, with more than 130 launches and 100 percent mission success. Additionally, ULA and the heritage companies are the nation’s only firms who have ever flown the exquisite Category C heavy-class national security missions, thus providing the country with extreme confidence of continued low-risk mission performance.

“Vulcan Centaur will provide higher performance and greater affordability while continuing to deliver our unmatched reliability and orbital accuracy precision from our treasured cryogenic Centaur upper stage,” said Bruno. “ULA is the best partner for national security space launch, and we are the only provider to demonstrate experience flying to all orbits including the most challenging heavy-class missions, providing the bedrock foundation for the lowest risk portfolio of two launch service providers for the U.S. Air Force.”

In the factory, the fabrication of the structure for the first Vulcan Centaur rocket continues, and the team recently completed the booster structural test article in Decatur. In Florida, assembly of the new Mobile Launch Platform has begun in preparation for the first launch.

With more than a century of combined heritage, ULA is the world’s most experienced and reliable launch service provider. ULA has successfully delivered more than 130 satellites to orbit that provide Earth observation capabilities, enable global communications, unlock the mysteries of our solar system and support life-saving technology.

Virgin Galactic will soon have two space planes plying the sky, if all goes according to plan.

The company's newest six-passenger SpaceShipTwo vehicle, known as VSS Unity, is nearly ready to fly tourists to suborbital space and back. Unity reached space on its two most recent test missions, and the craft is being prepped for a move to Spaceport America in New Mexico, the hub for Virgin Galactic's commercial operations.

Virgin Galactic's manufacturing subsidiary, The Spaceship Company, is currently building two additional SpaceShipTwos in Mojave, California. And one of them is almost ready to go, Virgin Galactic President Mike Moses told Space.com last week at the unveiling of the company's Gateway to Space building at Spaceport America.

"We expect to see test flights in 2020," Moses said, speaking about the vehicle known as Serial No. 3. (VSS Unity is Serial No. 2. The first SpaceShipTwo, VSS Enterprise, was destroyed during a test-flight accident in October 2014 that killed co-pilot Michael Alsbury and wounded pilot Peter Siebold.)

Serial No. 4 is in production as well. And that's how we'll have to refer to these two future space planes, at least for now.

"They have internal names, but we're not revealing them yet," Moses said.

SpaceShipTwo is designed to be lofted by a carrier plane called WhiteKnightTwo. At an altitude of about 50,000 feet (15,000 meters), the space plane separates from the carrier; then, SpaceShipTwo engages its onboard rocket motor to make its own way to suborbital space.

Passengers aboard the vehicle will experience a few minutes of weightlessness and get to see the curvature of Earth against the blackness of space before coming back down to Earth for a runway landing.

A ticket for this ride currently costs $250,000, and more than 600 people have put down deposits to reserve a seat, Virgin Galactic representatives have said.

Unity's test flights to date have all originated from the Mojave Air and Space Port in Southern California, near The Spaceship Company's headquarters. But the final missions in the test campaign will lift off from Spaceport America. Virgin Galactic's one and only WhiteKnightTwo plane, VMS Eve, will haul Unity to the spaceport in the next few months, after technicians finish outfitting the space plane's cabin, company representatives said. (VSS stands for "Virgin Spaceship" and VMS for "Virgin Mothership," by the way.)

The Gateway to Space will be able to fit the new SpaceShipTwos when they're ready, with plenty of room to spare. The building's hangar can accommodate two WhiteKnightTwos and five SpaceShipTwos simultaneously, Virgin Galactic representatives said.

And that cavernous space provides an insight into the company's long-term plans: Virgin Galactic aims to eventually achieve a rapid cadence of commercial flights, perhaps even launching multiple missions per day out of Spaceport America, company representatives have said.

On Tuesday evening, in South Texas, SpaceX launched its Starhopper test vehicle for the second time. During this test, it flew much higher than last month, nearly straight up to 150 meters. Then, under the power of a single Raptor engine, the vehicle smoothly moved laterally for about 100 meters before a controlled descent and touchdown in the center of a landing pad.

From a technical standpoint, the test was impressive, demonstrating the thrust and vector control of the new Raptor engine. This was the first time a large rocket engine burning liquid-methane propellant made a significant flight, and it appeared to be mostly, if not entirely, successful. SpaceX engineers can take confidence from this test as they move into finishing their builds of Starship orbital prototypes in Texas and Florida later this year.

The test may have had more political significance, however. SpaceX seeks to demonstrate that Starship is a viable vehicle for NASA to consider flying astronauts to and from the Moon and other destinations. Visually, the flight of the stubby Starhopper was arresting: it took off in a cloud of smoke and landed in the reddish—almost Mars-red—dust it kicked up at the landing site.

Some politicians may be beginning to notice. Earlier this month, a spokesperson for Ted Cruz, a Republican senator from Texas, told Ars, "With regard to the SpaceX Starship, the senator and his staff have been following the developments closely and are excited about the vehicle's prospects and the economic activity and innovation that is occurring as a result in Texas."

The timing may have been coincidental—but about one hour after SpaceX tested its Starhopper vehicle, NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center tweeted three photos of a replica of its Space Launch System rocket being loaded into a test stand at Mississippi's Stennis Space Center.

"Technicians are lifting and installing a replica of the @NASA_SLS core stage in preparation for the SLS Green Run test," the Alabama-based NASA center tweeted. Marshall manages development of the SLS rocket.

NASA has spent about $230 million to renovate and modify the B-2 test stand for this Green Run test-firing of the SLS rocket's core stage. The rocket itself has been under development since 2011, at a cost of about $14 billion and counting. The first test-firing of the rocket may occur next year at Stennis.

By contrast, the SpaceX Starship program has been moving rapidly. Construction of the Starhopper test vehicle—affectionately nicknamed the "Flying Water Tower" because of its appearance—only began in mid-December 2018. Engine tests began a few months later, with the first 20m flight test in July, followed by Tuesday evening's 150m hop.

SpaceX has now learned what it could from Starhopper, and it will proceed with full-size, suborbital prototypes for Starship that could make test flights later this year. The actual Starship vehicle, which will launch from Earth as the second stage of the under-development Super Heavy rocket, may take flight some time in 2020 or later, depending on prototype testing.

Space.com: Obviously, we're really excited to see the reusable rocket system you're developing. How much progress has been made with that?

Beck: We'd been working on that for, sort of, nine months until we made the announcement. And flight 10, there's quite some significant changes to the launch vehicle for flight ten.

We have new telemetry systems and new bits and pieces on the launch vehicle. The stage 1, you'll see the exterior will look slightly different.

It's an immensely challenging task, but we think we've done enough research to conclude that it's feasible

We've been saying don't expect us to capture it on the first go. It's going to be a number of attempts before we manage to get one through the atmosphere.

Space.com: When do you hope to start staging recoveries?

Beck: We've been gathering data ... we try and do a lot of that in simulation before we actually go and fly. Flight 10 is really important because it gives us the most fidelity of the instrumentation that we've had to date.

It's pretty difficult to put a timeframe on it because we'll fly flight ten and we'll learn a lot and we'll model that ... and we'll make changes and then we'll fly flight 11 and we'll probably do the same again. So, really, it's really hard to predict when were gonna have the first fully fledged recovery attempt.

I would hope next year that we should be successfully recovering.

Just months after closing out the 15-year-long Opportunity rover mission on Mars, Cornell University astronomer Steve Squyres is taking advantage of a new opportunity: the post of chief scientist at Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture.

Today Blue Origin confirmed that Squyres, 63, will be joining the company, which is headquartered in Kent, Wash.

Squyres has been involved in NASA space missions including Voyager’s trip past the solar system’s giant planets and Magellan’s voyage to Venus. But his main claim to fame is his stint as principal investigator for the Mars Exploration Rovers.

The twin rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, bounced onto different locations on the Red Planet’s surface in 2004, beginning missions that were baselined for 90 days. To the team’s surprise, Spirit ended up lasting six years, and Opportunity continued to send data back until the solar-powered rover went out of contact during a massive Martian dust storm in mid-2018.

After months of trying to re-establish contact, NASA declared an end to the mission in February. “It was an honorable end, and it came a whole lot later than any of us expected,” Squyres said at the time.

The rover missions confirmed that Mars was once wetter, warmer and more hospitable to life than it is today — findings that have been expanded upon during the Curiosity rover mission that began in 2012 and is still in its prime.

Squyres is the author of a 2005 book about the rover missions called “Roving Mars: Spirit, Opportunity and the Exploration of the Red Planet.” He chaired the NASA Advisory Council from 2011 to 2016, and served as an “aquanaut” on NASA’s underwater NEEMO missions in 2011 and 2012.

He was the principal investigator for the proposed CAESAR mission, which would have captured a sample from Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko and brought it back to Earth. CAESAR was a finalist to become NASA’s next New Frontiers project but lost out to the Dragonfly mission to Titan in June.

The main extraterrestrial target on Blue Origin’s agenda is the moon. In May, Bezos unveiled a mockup of Blue Origin’s Blue Moon lunar lander, which is considered a strong contender for NASA’s missions to the moon in the 2020s.

Squyres was listed as a member of the Blue Moon science advisory board at the time of the unveiling.

On September 9th, the first signs of SpaceX planning for Starship Mk1’s South Texas launch debut appeared in the form of FCC applications, requesting permission to communicate with the rocket prototype during its first flight.

Simultaneously, word broke on September 5th – via a Business Insider report – that SpaceX is effectively set to receive FAA permission to upgrade its South Texas launch facilities for Starship. All things considered, it appears that most – if not all – the stars have begun to align for SpaceX’s inaugural Starship launch, said by CEO Elon Musk to be scheduled for no earlier than October 2019.

The application confirms several details about Starship Mk1’s debut, revealing that SpaceX will kick off the test campaign with a running jump from Starhopper’s 150m (500 ft) flight-test hand-off. The company is targeting an altitude of ~20 km (12.5 mi) – more than two magnitudes higher than its predecessor’s peak – and plans to land the spacecraft just a hundred or so feet from its launch site, on the same landing pad used by Starhopper.

SpaceX teams continue to work around the clock to ready Starship Mk1 for its ambitious flight debut. A new ring segment was stacked on top of the vehicle’s tank section several days ago, while locals also spotted the delivery of one or two new legs/fins, built out of riveted steel. SpaceX’s Boca Chica team continues to struggle to attach Starship’s tip to the rest of its curved nose section, having recently separated the segments for the first time in months.

Preliminary welding of Starship Mk1’s upper (and final) tank dome appears to be complete and technicians are working to integrate the spacecraft’s internal hardware before it can be installed. Meanwhile, a range of new concrete pads have been set and are being outfitted with additional production hardware, likely paving the way for simultaneously Starship-Starship or Starship-Super Heavy builds in the near future.

Documents acquired and published on September 5th by Business Insider reporter Dave Mosher touched on the assembly facility’s expansion and provided an excellent overview of SpaceX’s planned upgrades to its Starship launch pad. Retasked from original plans (and approvals) for an additional Falcon 9/Falcon Heavy launch site, the documents confirmed that the FAA has reevaluated its 2014 Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) and is effectively ready to re-permit SpaceX’s Boca Chica facilities in light of its new purpose.

About as classically SpaceX as it gets, the company has already dramatically altered plans and timelines since the FAA even began to reevaluate its launch pad EIS. Discussed as Phases 1-3, SpaceX – barely two months after the FAA’s updated EIS statement – appears to have already completed Phases 1 and 2 (wet dress rehearsals, static fires, and small hops) and doesn’t have public plans for “medium hops” of “30 cm…up to 3 km”. The FAA statement – signed in May 2019 – says that the agency did not have the information necessary to permit Phase 3, involving “engine ignition and thrust to lift the Starship to 100 km, flip the Starship at high altitude, and conduct a reentry and landing.“

This article’s feature photo shows SpaceX’s late-2018/early-2019 imagining of launch site upgrades reportedly needed to support Phase 2 testing. Although extremely similar to what SpaceX has already built in South Texas, some significant changes are definitely present, and it looks like SpaceX has a busy 4-8 weeks of work ahead to complete necessary modifications, including expanded propellant storage, two large walls, and possible underground routing of critical infrastructure.

Ultimately, significant work remains for SpaceX to receive both FAA’s EIS go-ahead and experimental launch permits for Starship Mk1’s first flight. Based on the ~3 weeks it took the FAA to simply extend Starhopper’s existing 25m hop permit to 200m (eventually cut to 150m), it could be quite the uphill battle to jump to a 20 km flight test. For the time being, SpaceX hopes to conduct Starship’s 20-km flight debut as early as October 13th, in line with Musk’s ambitious “October” target.

Hotel mogul Robert Bigelow wants to take his idea to build inflatable space habitats and run with it — apparently, all the way to the moon and Mars.

On Thursday, the billionaire publicly unveiled Bigelow Aerospace's latest model of an expandable space station prototype, called the "Bigelow Mars Transporter Testing Unit." The mock-up has the volume of four 40-foot-long cargo containers and was built in part for NASA astronauts and engineers to try it out.

Bigelow's immediate goal is to convince NASA — which is testing prototypes made by four other companies— to fund a space-worthy unit, called the B330 (so named because it would have 330 cubic meters of volume). The work is in support of the space agency's $20-30 billion moon-landing program, called Artemis.

Artemis currently calls for housing astronauts inside a moon-orbiting space station called the Gateway. That way, there'd be a helpful pit stop between the lunar surface and Earth. In the more distant future, the Gateway may serve as a stepping stone to Mars.

Bigelow is interested in helping NASA with both goals using the B330.

"It is important to listen to what President Trump has been saying about Mars. The way to Mars is to the moon. The way to the moon is through the Gateway," Bigelow said in a statement provided to Business Insider ahead of the unveiling. "The B330 is an exploration destined space station, and we are excited about its future."

Bigelow Aerospace built out its demo unit to house astronauts for three days, and the company provided interior pictures of its setup.

According to documents filed with local city and transportation authorities in recent months and cataloged by a few local news outlets and spaceflight fans, SpaceX is preparing to transport its East Coast Starship prototype – known as “Mk2” – as early as later this month.

Throughout August 2019, local resident, spaceflight fan, photographer, and cookie-baker Julia Bergeron did a significant amount of groundwork to flesh out an estimated route for Starship Mk2. Delivering the massive rocket prototype from Cocoa, Florida to SpaceX’s Kennedy Space Center Launch Complex 39A facilities would involve a 30+ mile trip by road, cost-prohibitive due to the amount of work required. Confirmed by documents unearthed by local ClickOrlando journalists, SpaceX will instead transport the rocket a few miles by road before loading it onto a barge and shipping the vehicle the rest of the way to KSC.

According to ClickOrlando’s report, those documents indicate that SpaceX will work with Roll-Lift – a familiar contractor for the company – to move Starship the few miles from its Cocoa, FL build site to a river access point located off of a nearby bridge. Once there, it will be loaded onto a barge on the Indian River and pass through the Canaveral Barge Canal to reach the Banana River. Once that leg is complete, it’s a fairly straight shot by barge to NASA’s Kennedy Space Center Turn Basin, historically used to deliver extra-large rocket components like Saturn V stages and Space Shuttle External Tanks.

According to documents filed with local city and transportation authorities in recent months and cataloged by a few local news outlets and spaceflight fans, SpaceX is preparing to transport its East Coast Starship prototype – known as “Mk2” – as early as later this month.

Throughout August 2019, local resident, spaceflight fan, photographer, and cookie-baker Julia Bergeron did a significant amount of groundwork to flesh out an estimated route for Starship Mk2. Delivering the massive rocket prototype from Cocoa, Florida to SpaceX’s Kennedy Space Center Launch Complex 39A facilities would involve a 30+ mile trip by road, cost-prohibitive due to the amount of work required. Confirmed by documents unearthed by local ClickOrlando journalists, SpaceX will instead transport the rocket a few miles by road before loading it onto a barge and shipping the vehicle the rest of the way to KSC.

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According to ClickOrlando’s report, those documents indicate that SpaceX will work with Roll-Lift – a familiar contractor for the company – to move Starship the few miles from its Cocoa, FL build site to a river access point located off of a nearby bridge. Once there, it will be loaded onto a barge on the Indian River and pass through the Canaveral Barge Canal to reach the Banana River. Once that leg is complete, it’s a fairly straight shot by barge to NASA’s Kennedy Space Center Turn Basin, historically used to deliver extra-large rocket components like Saturn V stages and Space Shuttle External Tanks.

After arriving at the Turn Basin, a few-mile trek along KSC’s Pad 39 Crawlerway will mark the last leg of the spaceship’s move to Pad 39A, where SpaceX broke ground just days ago on a concrete foundation that will eventually support a launch mount for Starship and Super Heavy.

Currently disassembled into a nose cone, upper nose, and tank section, it remains to be seen if SpaceX will transport Starship Mk2 in pieces or integrate the three segments before moving the giant rocket. Stretching 9m (30 ft) in diameter and 45-55m (150-180 ft) tall depending on the stage of assembly, Starship will likely weigh several dozen metric tons (100,000+ lb) and pose major challenges over such a long journey.

SpaceX and city workers have already spent the last two or so months either raising or burying a number of utility lines along the proposed transport route, a necessity to give a vertical Starship the headroom needed to traverse several miles of public roads.

According to documents filed with local city and transportation authorities in recent months and cataloged by a few local news outlets and spaceflight fans, SpaceX is preparing to transport its East Coast Starship prototype – known as “Mk2” – as early as later this month.

Throughout August 2019, local resident, spaceflight fan, photographer, and cookie-baker Julia Bergeron did a significant amount of groundwork to flesh out an estimated route for Starship Mk2. Delivering the massive rocket prototype from Cocoa, Florida to SpaceX’s Kennedy Space Center Launch Complex 39A facilities would involve a 30+ mile trip by road, cost-prohibitive due to the amount of work required. Confirmed by documents unearthed by local ClickOrlando journalists, SpaceX will instead transport the rocket a few miles by road before loading it onto a barge and shipping the vehicle the rest of the way to KSC.

Experience more than you ever expected when you visit vibrant Cleveland
According to ClickOrlando’s report, those documents indicate that SpaceX will work with Roll-Lift – a familiar contractor for the company – to move Starship the few miles from its Cocoa, FL build site to a river access point located off of a nearby bridge. Once there, it will be loaded onto a barge on the Indian River and pass through the Canaveral Barge Canal to reach the Banana River. Once that leg is complete, it’s a fairly straight shot by barge to NASA’s Kennedy Space Center Turn Basin, historically used to deliver extra-large rocket components like Saturn V stages and Space Shuttle External Tanks.

After arriving at the Turn Basin, a few-mile trek along KSC’s Pad 39 Crawlerway will mark the last leg of the spaceship’s move to Pad 39A, where SpaceX broke ground just days ago on a concrete foundation that will eventually support a launch mount for Starship and Super Heavy.

Currently disassembled into a nose cone, upper nose, and tank section, it remains to be seen if SpaceX will transport Starship Mk2 in pieces or integrate the three segments before moving the giant rocket. Stretching 9m (30 ft) in diameter and 45-55m (150-180 ft) tall depending on the stage of assembly, Starship will likely weigh several dozen metric tons (100,000+ lb) and pose major challenges over such a long journey.

SpaceX and city workers have already spent the last two or so months either raising or burying a number of utility lines along the proposed transport route, a necessity to give a vertical Starship the headroom needed to traverse several miles of public roads.

After this move, it’s likely that SpaceX will move its Florida Starship factory to a new site inside the bounds of Kennedy Space Center. Currently known by the road it sits beside, SpaceX has already begun work on its prospective Roberts Road facilities. Proposed in 2018 as a convenient Falcon 9 refurbishment and launch control center (LCC), Roberts Road could also provide at least as much room for Starship production as is available at SpaceX’s current Cocoa, FL property while sidestepping the logistical headaches of transporting Starships – let alone Super Heavy boosters – dozens of miles.

On September 14th, South Texas SpaceX technicians lifted Starship Mk1’s third and final tank dome and began to attach it atop the prototype’s steel tank section, this time making use of a new method of integration.

This progress comes just two weeks before CEO Elon Musk is expected to present a detailed update on Starship’s newest design iteration. Musk is hopeful that – come his September 28th presentation – Starship Mk1 will be nearly complete and ready for its inaugural flight, a milestone that could come as early as October 13th according to Starship documents filed with the FCC.

This latest installation is likely either the last ring (or nearly so) to be stacked on top of Starship Mk1, paving the way for the eventual attachment of the spacecraft’s conical nose section and the fleshing out of its many internal subsystems and aerodynamic control surfaces. This particular milestone involved the attachment of Starship’s third and final tank bulkhead – in this case, the upper dome of the prototype’s liquid oxygen tank. Excluding hardware that might eventually be installed on the dome itself, this means that Starship Mk1’s tank and engine section has essentially been ‘topped off’.

As previously estimated by the author, this particular tank dome installation – the fifth completed by SpaceX’s Mk1 and Mk2 Starship teams – was done in a manner thus far unique. All previous installations have seen SpaceX technicians lower the domes – completed aside from one vertical weld for flexibility – inside the Starship’s cylindrical tank section. The steel domes are then carefully spot-welded to the side of the tank in their proper place – all while being supported by a large crane – before technicians can complete a seamless ring weld around their entire circumference.

This time around, SpaceX welded the upper tank dome to its companion ring section while both elements were still staged on the ground. Once the dome was completely welded to the steel ring and a dome cap was installed to seal off the top, the ring segment was craned atop Starhip Mk1 on September 14th. It’s possible that this was planned all along for each Starship’s third and final tank dome, but the way CEO Elon Musk has previously described SpaceX’s semi-competitive Mk1 and Mk2 builds suggests that it may instead be a new assembly strategy that evolved in just the last month or two.

On September 17th, a NASA blog post praised the progress SpaceX has made with Crew Dragon’s parachute system, indicating that the company is actually pushing the state of the art forward with improved modeling after dozens of tests.

Both before and after SpaceX completed Crew Dragon’s flawless March 2019 orbital launch debut, both NASA and the agency’s Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel (ASAP) have relentlessly focused on two main concerns: Falcon 9’s COPVs and Crew Dragon’s parachutes. The reasoning behind that focus is logical but may pose some problems.

Assuming that discussion points raised during quarterly ASAP and NASA Advisory Council (NAC) meetings are an accurate external representation of NASA’s internal Commercial Crew Program (CCP) priorities, the space agency has been focused on parachutes and COPVs for years. This is primarily a result of NASA’s notoriously reactive approach to safety: SpaceX suffered two COPV-related Falcon 9 failures in 2015 and 2016 and has experienced an unknown number (likely 1-3) of anomalies during Crew Dragon parachute testing.

As a result, NASA has focused extensively on these two stand-out concerns. To an extent, this is reasonable – if you know things have a tendency to fail, you’re going to want to make sure that they don’t. However, prioritizing reactive safety measures at the cost of proactive safety would be a major risk, akin to getting in a car crash because you didn’t use a turn signal and then prioritizing turn signal use so much that you forget to look both ways before making turns. Sure, you will probably never get in the same crash, but you are raising the risk of new kinds of accidents if you overcorrect your attention distribution.

NASA infamously suffered from this throughout the Space Shuttle program, analyzing known-quantities into oblivion as systematic organizational failures and glaring (but new) design flaws were either ignored or buried until it was far too late. It’s impossible to say if NASA is repeating this apparently deep-seated organizational error with Commercial Crew – only the technical experts at SpaceX and NASA have the data to accurately judge. It can be said with certainty, however, that the space agency (and its advisory panels) completely failed to predict the failure mode(s) that caused an April 20th Crew Dragon explosion that would have almost certainly killed all aboard, all while COPVs and parachutes continue(d) to be the apparent focus.

Qualms aside, NASA’s September 17th blog does serve as a unique look into the benefits that the space agency’s prioritization of the obvious – for better or for worse – is producing. According to NASA, the incredibly extensive testing SpaceX has had to do to satisfy agency requirements has lead the company to develop “a better understanding of how to safely design and operate parachute clusters”. SpaceX has reportedly completed 48 distinct parachute tests, of which one or two apparently failed.

In response to the additional testing and analysis NASA required after a recent April 2019 test failure, SpaceX has essentially been forced to push the state of the art of parachute design and modeling to new levels. NASA says that SpaceX has begun to model certain conditions and newfound failure modes in ways that “provide a better understanding of parachute reliability” and have forced NASA to reevaluate its own standards and certification processes. Shown in the video above, SpaceX recently completed a successful second attempt of its failed April 2019 parachute test, a major step towards confirming that the new parachute analysis and design have mitigated prior faults.

Blue Origin, the space company founded by Jeff Bezos, expects to fly its space tourism rocket at least two more times before it puts the first people on board.

The company is developing the New Shepard rocket system for its space tourism business. Blue Origin is still hoping to fly people on New Shepard this year, although the company noted in a meeting with reporters on Tuesday that 2019 is quickly coming to an end, so those plans may move to 2020.

Blue Origin also filed an application for its next test flight with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) on Tuesday. The filing is "for Flight #12 of the New Shepard space launch booster and capsule" and has an operational window beginning in November. To be clear, that's not necessarily when Blue Origin will next launch New Shepard, but rather the earliest time they could with federal approvals.

New Shepard would launch six passengers on a ride past the edge of space, where they would float in zero gravity for 10 minutes before returning to Earth. The rocket's capsule features massive windows, which will give expansive views of the Earth once in space.

CEO Bob Smith has talked about the first crewed flight of New Shepard happening as early as the end of 2018 – but that goal has steadily been pushed back. Smith, in an interview with CNBC on Tuesday, explained why Blue Origin has delayed the first crewed flight and continued to test.

"It's really the robustness of our entire system. It's not one individual thing that's driving [these delays]," Smith said. "It's us being cautious and thorough with the total systems we need to verify."

He noted that Blue Origin has been pushing the limits of its software and hardware, as well as testing its BE-3 rocket engine for extreme and unexpected situations.

"When we came back for our seventh mission [in December 2017], we actually came back with a new booster as well as a new capsule configuration," Smith said.

"Between the seventh flight and subsequent flights, we've not only introduced another pair of boosters and capsules but we've also introduced a series of improvements to that overall configuration that allow us to have higher confidence that the design is robust," Smith added.