NASA and the Private Sector - Page 172

Blue Origin, the rocket company started and led by Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos, opens a new rocket engine manufacturing plant in Huntsville today giving it a production facility for the future and the city a new claim on its nickname of Rocket City.

Blue Origin built the plant after winning a competition to provide the main engines for a new rocket called Vulcan Centaur that United Launch Alliance (ULA) is building in nearby Decatur, Ala..That rocket will compete for satellite launches by commercial companies and the Air Force.

By the numbers, the Blue Origin plant covers 400,000 square feet in Cummings Research Park, will employ 400 workers at peak production and represents an investment of $200 million. It will do the heavy lifting to get ULA’s Vulcan off the launch pad. The upper stage will be powered by engines made by Aerojet Rocketdyne, which is also building a new Huntsville plant.

Huntsville Mayor Tommy Battle said when the plant was announced that Blue Origin adds a critical piece to the city’s future in space. “We always knew we needed commercial space,” Battle said. “This will add to our portfolio and truly make us the center of rocket propulsion for the world. There will be a lot of Huntsville in that rocket.”

“Commercial space” is a description for the new generation of space companies such as Blue Origin and SpaceX that are competing and partnering with legacy space companies like Aerojet Rocketdyne. Blue Origin is leading a team including Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and Draper Laboratory competing to build a lunar lander for America’s return to the Moon. The team’s lander is called Blue Moon.

Blue Origin said it chose Huntsville for the engine plant because of its high-tech aerospace manufacturing workforce and the presence of NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, nearly 300 private aerospace and defense contractors, and the University of Alabama in Huntsville, a top university for NASA research funding. The body of the rocket will be built near Cape Canaveral, Fla.

The Marshall Space Flight Center is important to Blue Origin’s plans. The center is leading NASA’s program to build the next lunar lander, and the company has an agreement to test its new engine on one of the giant Marshall stands used to test the Saturn V moon rocket’s engines. The symbolism of that link isn’t lost on anyone celebrating the new Blue Origin plant in Huntsville today.

A new SpaceX Starlink job posting hints that the company is very interested in an established multi-billion dollar market for high-quality satellite internet – a use-case its Starlink constellation should be a perfect fit for.

One of the biggest sources for a recent boom in global demand for satellite broadband services, in-flight connectivity (IFC) is a rapidly growing market well on its way to multi-billion dollar annual revenues within the next few years. Almost anyone with any experience traveling by air is likely familiar with the promises and pitfalls offered by in-flight WiFi, which can often feel extremely convenient and futuristic while still bringing up old memories of DSL internet and flip-phones. Arguably, most – if not all – of the downsides of modern in-flight connectivity and the patchwork addition of onboard servers carrying limited offline entertainment options are caused by technical limitations in the existing IFC ‘pipeline’.

Meanwhile, SpaceX is just a few months into the years-long process of manufacturing and launching a vast constellation of thousands of Starlink internet satellites, designed to blanket every inch of the Earth with high-quality internet service. With internal goals stretching as high as ~40,000 satellites, Starlink could one day offer enough bandwidth to singlehandedly satisfy the internet needs of hundreds of millions – if not billions – of customers worldwide. In the interim, however, how and where SpaceX chooses to commercially deploy its nascent constellation will be critical in its first few years of operations, and in-flight connectivity is one such place where Starlink could theoretically crush existing options and come to dominate the growing market.

A few days ago, SpaceX published its first job posting exclusively dedicated to “aeronautical terminals”, referring to a type of Starlink user terminals (an antenna and associated hardware) optimized for installation on aircraft fuselages. Thanks to an almost $29 million Starlink contract awarded by the US Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) contract in 2018, SpaceX has already built and successfully tested aeronautical terminal prototypes on military aircraft, with even more ambitious tests soon to come. As such, it would be reasonable to assume than a new job posting for such terminals would be focused on SpaceX’s military work.

Instead, SpaceX’s February 21st listing explicitly refers to the new position as an opportunity to “[certify] Starlink aeronautical terminals [for] commercial and business jet aircraft…[and] play a critical role in deploying an industry-changing In-Flight Communications (IFC) service”, unequivocally confirming the company’s interest in entering the broader IFC market.

While SpaceX has already launched an incredible 240 Starlink v1.0 satellites in the last two months alone, the company has yet to reveal any specific information about the user terminals customers will use to connect to the orbiting network. Earlier this year, CEO Elon Musk did briefly mention that the terminal would look like a “thin, flat, round UFO on a stick”, while COO and President Gwynne Shotwell stated last year that the terminal would be “beautiful” at Musk’s request. Aside from those comments and a few even older ones, the no-less-critical Starlink component remains a bit of a mystery, although we do know that SpaceX intends to mass produce millions of the devices itself.

Still, SpaceX has made it clear that it’s already testing terminals with some success, noting late last year that it managed to deliver bandwidth of ~610 megabits per second (Mbps) to a US military aircraft through a single flight-optimized terminal. That testing was performed with 60 ‘v0.9’ satellites, meaning that all Starlink satellites launched after May 2019 should be able to offer even more bandwidth thanks to the addition of higher-capacity ‘Ka-band’ antennas.

While much is still unknown, the available details paint a fascinating picture of Starlink’s potential in the IFC market. Driven by unprecedentedly ambitious and strict cost targets, SpaceX already builds, owns, and operates its own Falcon rockets, Starlink satellites, and (soon) Starlink terminals – including variants optimized for consumer, aeronautical, and ground station use. In short, SpaceX is building the most vertically-integrated space-based service in the history of commercial space.

What can effectively be considered a very early pre-alpha of the Starlink satellites, terminals, and network has already demonstrated the ability to deliver bandwidth of more than 600 Mbps to a single in-flight aircraft, at least five times better than the best solutions currently available (~100 Mbps). Thanks to their location in low Earth orbit (LEO), Starlink satellites will also be able to offer latency (the gap between when you click and when something happens) as good as or better than what most people have access to on the ground.

By building and owning every critical aspect of the complex pipeline needed for its Starlink network, SpaceX has full control from start to finish. With Falcon 9 rockets and Starlink satellites, this has meant that SpaceX can reach cost targets that are up to several times cheaper than competing solutions and do so while meeting or beating their technical capabilities. With in-flight connectivity, the rockets, satellites, terminals, and ground infrastructure needed to create a functional network all factor heavily into the prices that can be offered to end-users and as of 2020, there simply isn’t an IFC provider on Earth in a position to compete with the level of vertical integration SpaceX may be able to offer.

If SpaceX can launch several thousand satellites and figure out how to affordably mass-produce unprecedentedly high-performance terminals (still up for debate), it’s safe to say that Starlink is going to run through existing IFC providers like a brick wall. Aside from potentially beating them on cost, Starlink – offering perhaps 600-1000+ Mbps per plane – could theoretically allow 100-200 airline passengers to simultaneously stream videos, browse the web, and even game in flight as if they were on the ground. Existing providers are physically incapable of competing with something like that without extensive infrastructure upgrades.

According to Satellite Markets & Research, the annual revenue of passenger aircraft IFC broke $1 billion for the first time in 2018 and the overall market is expected to be worth at least $36 billion (~$3.5B/year) from 2019 to 2029. Major provider Inmarsat estimates that the IFC market could be worth up to $15 billion annually by 2035. With a bit of luck, SpaceX could easily secure a major portion of that pot within just a handful of years.

Virgin Galactic reported a larger-than-anticipated loss when it reported fourth-quarter results on Tuesday, although the interest from prospective customers in the company’s future spaceflights continued to climb.

CEO George Whitesides told shareholders on the company’s conference call that the company’s main goal this year is to safely fly founder Sir Richard Branson to space. He declared that Virgin Galactic generating significant revenue this year is not what will make the company a long-term success, instead focusing on flying safely.

Shares of Virgin Galactic dropped about 5% in after-hours trading from its close at $34.04. The stock slipped 0.7% on Tuesday, although it earlier climbed as much as 8% while fueled by more speculative trading.

The company also announced that on Wednesday it will begin accepting $1,000 deposits toward space flight tickets. Those who pay the fully-refundable deposit will be the first offered reservations when Virgin Galactic re-opens ticket sales later this year. Whitesides said the company will later share its strategy on premium pricing, saying the $1,000 deposits will help identify the customers most eager for the next batch of sales.

“We do plan on going back into the market with a higher [than $250,000] price point,” Whitesides said.

Virgin Galactic raised about $430 million when it went public through a merger with Chamath Palihapitiya’s Social Capital Hedosophia in October. Asked whether Virgin Galactic plans to raise more capital because the stock has more than tripled since that debut, Whitesides deferred.

“We have in front of us an initial market opportunity that we believe is strong and highly profitable,” Whitesides said. “Right now we’re really focused on the engineering.”

Virgin Galactic continues to burn cash

Virgin Galactic reported an EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization) loss of $55 million, more than the $46.9 million loss expected according to analysts surveyed by FactSet. EBITDA is an accounting measure of the company’s total financial performance, although it typically excludes some costs such as capital investments.

The company reported just $529,000 of revenue for the fourth-quarter, below the $800,000 of revenue in its previous quarter.

Virgin Galactic said it has received 7,957 “registrations of interest” from potential customers since December 2018, more than double the 3,557 registrations of interest it reported three months ago.

Overall, Virgin Galactic reported a net loss of $210.9 million for 2019. The company aims to be profitable by 2021.

Virgin Galactic’s market value has soared to about $7 billion since its October debut on the New York Stock Exchange, multiplying several times over in the past few months.

The company has 603 reservations on its books, for most tickets ranging in price from $200,000 to $250,000.

Last year, during its investor roadshow, Virgin Galactic projected it would fly 66 passengers to space on 16 flights in 2020. Chairman Chamath Palihapitiya told CNBC in November that he expects Virgin Galactic to begin commercial operations in the middle of this year.

Virgin Galactic earlier this month relocated its spacecraft to its operating base in New Mexico from its development facility in California.

The company has received more than $1 billion of investment since its founding in 2004.

On March 03 2020 04:03 ZerOCoolSC2 wrote:
Do you think they're recycling the metal after each failure? Or are they scrapping it? I can't imagine why they would scrap perfectly good metal.