NASA and the Private Sector - Page 184

NASASpaceflight reports that SpaceX wants to begin orbital Starship launch attempts as early as July 1st, 2021, less than four months from now.

In no uncertain terms, this is an internal target, meaning that it’s far likelier than not that SpaceX’s first orbital Starship launch attempt wont happen in July. Nevertheless, the target’s existence implies that SpaceX sees a real, viable path – however narrow – to launching Starship into orbit for the first time just four months from now.

Put a different way, SpaceX believes it has six months of margin to get through preliminary Super Heavy booster testing (possibly including one or several hops), qualify an upgraded Starship design (SN15 onwards), roughly complete an orbital launch complex, and deliver around two-dozen orbit-capable Raptor engines before the end of the year. While unclear, it’s also possible that the milestone would require SpaceX to qualify and ship the first flightworthy Raptor Vacuum engines – another major challenge.

On its own, completing any one of those major feats of engineering would be impressive. Completing all of them simultaneously – even if the effort suffers more than five months of delays – would be nothing short of extraordinary. As such, it’s fair to assume that SpaceX will fall well short of its incredibly ambitious development schedule, even if the company almost invariably does what it sets out to do.

In this case, that means that there is a very real chance that Starship reaches orbit before the end of 2021, achieving a target that both SpaceX CEO Elon Musk and COO/President Gwynne Shotwell have reiterated within the last several months.

Even after reaching orbit for the first time, SpaceX will likely continue Starship development largely unchanged, treating the orbital regime as just another sandbox to test and refine Starship prototypes with. Given all the extraordinary problems SpaceX will need to solve to reach orbit, there’s also a decent chance that Starship or Super Heavy’s first orbital launch attempt will fail. If the launch is initially successfully, it’s just as likely that Super Heavy will fail its first hypersonic launch and landing attempt.

If Starship itself reaches orbit in one piece, any number of issues could kill the vehicle in space. If it survives long enough complete a 90-minute orbit and line up for reentry, descent, and landing, Starship’s first orbital-velocity atmospheric reentry – one of the biggest challenges in aerospace engineering – could easily destroy the spacecraft. If Starship somehow makes it through reentry on its first try, the stresses of orbital spaceflight and that reentry could prevent its Raptor engines from performing nominally during its powered flip maneuver and landing burn.

This is all to say that even as SpaceX sets its sights on orbital flight, the trajectory is still a continuation of an ongoing test program and iterative development process. While orbit-capable Starships will likely be much more expensive than their suborbital brethren, the differences are small enough that SpaceX will undoubtedly continue to push the envelope and risk losing prototypes to uncover and fix bugs and design flaws as early as possible.

Along the way, there will undoubtedly be more SN8/SN9/SN10-style hiccups. Given Starship’s developmental history, however, it’s starting to look like nothing less than catastrophe will prevent SpaceX from launching Starship into orbit before the year is out.

A little more than a week ago, the European Space Agency announced an initiative to study "future space transportation solutions." Basically, the agency provided about $600,000, each, to three companies—ArianeGroup, Avio, and Rocket Factory Augsburg—to study competitive launch systems from 2030 onward.

This initiative would allow Europe to understand and prepare for the future of space launch, said Daniel Neuenschwander, director of space transportation for the space agency. It "lays the foundations that enable us to prepare the future beyond Ariane 6 and Vega-C," he said. "These system concept studies will include services that prioritize the future needs of Europe’s space programs but also allow us to address global market needs."

The implication is that Europe's next generation of rockets, the larger Ariane 6 booster and smaller Vega-C, will meet the continent's launch needs for the next decade. Both of these new rockets, which are evolved from an earlier generation of boosters, are due to make their debut within the next 12 to 18 months.

However, there now appears to be increasing concern in Europe that the Ariane 6 and Vega-C rockets will not be competitive in the launch market of the near future. This is important, because while member states of the European Union pay for development of the rockets, after reaching operational status, these launch programs are expected to become self-sufficient by attracting commercial satellite launches to help pay the bills.

Economic ministers in France and Italy have now concluded that the launch market has changed dramatically since 2014, when the Ariane 6 and Vega-C rockets were first designed. According to a report in Le Figaro newspaper, the ministers believe the ability of these new European rockets to compete for commercial launch contracts has significantly deteriorated since then.

The primary cause? SpaceX. Thanks to its reusable, low-cost Falcon 9 rocket, SpaceX has been able to slash prices for large commercial satellites that could be lofted by the Ariane 6. Whereas Europe's Ariane vehicles once played a dominant role in launching geostationary satellites, they've lost considerable market share since 2014. Moreover, through its rideshare program for the Falcon 9, SpaceX also threatens to take missions away from Vega-C, which has a lift capacity of about 1.5 tons to polar orbit.

As the newspaper reports, Europe now lags behind SpaceX in other key ways. Because of its partnership with NASA, SpaceX can now launch astronauts. French astronaut Thomas Pesquet, in fact, is a mission specialist on the Crew-2 mission due to launch next month. He will likely be the first of many European astronauts to reach space on a SpaceX vehicle. Europe also presently has no answer to the Starlink megaconstellation that SpaceX is in the midst of launching—either in the capacity to build hundreds of satellites a year or affordably get them into orbit.

Because of this, the French and Italian ministers are calling for Europe to offer a significant "technological and industrial" response to the rise of SpaceX. It is not clear what form this would take, nor how quickly the European nations could move in response.

Moreover, any initiative will be complicated by politics. The Ariane program has roots in France, while Vega originated in Italy. Germany, with no history of its own rockets during the European Union era, nonetheless has several promising small launch companies, including Rocket Factory Augsburg, and it may seek to foster private competition rather than financially support an institutional approach.

A North Las Vegas space technology company has filed a lawsuit in federal court against NASA this week, claiming the space agency owes $1 million for work done.

Bigelow Aerospace filed the lawsuit Thursday in federal court, alleging it completed work set out in the agreement with NASA, though the space agency is withholding payment unless it receives extensive test data.

The issue began in mid-December when Robert Bigelow, the president of the company, sent a payment demand letter to NASA in the amount of $1 million for the company’s “full performance of certain obligations” under the contract with NASA.

Bigelow said in an interview Friday with the Review-Journal that he wrestled with the idea of filing a lawsuit.

“It was something that we thought about whether to do it at all because you don’t want to bite the hand that potentially can feed you,” he said. “So, a lot of consideration was put into whether to walk away from the million dollars and forget about it, or is there a principle here that ought to be looked at.”

Bigelow said he believes the decision to litigate was justified. The company wanted to defend the principle of getting paid for work performed under a contract. It’s also to prevent a precedent for future work.

“We don’t make money suing people,” Bigelow said. “It wasn’t an easy decision to make, but we had to do it. And now, at least they know that we’re not a doormat. We’re a small company and we do matter.”

B330 space module

Bigelow Aerospace, for years, has been designing and developing its Expandable Bigelow Advanced Station Enhancement. Known as the B330, the full-size ground prototype expandable module is intended for deep space habitation.

As previously reported by the Review-Journal, in the fall of 2019, the company hosted eight NASA astronauts and 60 engineers to understand its B330 autonomous, expandable space station. The company wanted to work alongside NASA on its Mars missions.

“The B330 is the heart of the best kind of spacecraft this country can send to Mars and to any location — whether it’s low earth orbit or as a lunar depot or any of the Lagrange points between Earth and the Moon — and into our deep space to Mars,” said Bigelow on Friday. “It was the heart of NASA’s architecture for what senior management assumed was going to be the enclosures to protect people from … big space radiation.”

The company’s space module is also different in many ways. The International Space Station is made up of a lot of aluminum tubular modules, Bigelow said. The largest of those are about 100 cubic meters, and it takes several of those to keep astronauts onboard alive.

“No one module on the ISS can keep you alive, so you need three or four, along with the solar arrays to give you power,” he said. “In our case, the B330 is a standalone, autonomous space station that only takes one launch: That’s a very big distinction.”

The B330 can sustain four people indefinitely or six people for several months, given enough supplies. The module has two toilets, two double CO2 systems and sleeping compartments for six to eight people with significant warehouse capabilities for supplies.

Payment withheld

Bigelow Aerospace said it entered into an agreement with NASA on the B330 project in August 2016 to perform and complete a certain long-term pressure leak test on its prototype. The purpose of the test was to demonstrate that the B330 meets NASA’s standards of construction and reliability.

According to the lawsuit, Bigelow Aerospace was required to perform a leak test on its module and “provide certain periodic test reports” to NASA. The reports were scheduled and were required to summarize the results of the test, specifically whether the B330 had met certain standards set by NASA.

“Importantly, the Contract contains no requirement that Bigelow Aerospace had to provide NASA with continuous and/or raw” data, the lawsuit alleges.

Bigelow Aerospace said NASA breached its contract with the agency by refusing to pay the full amount to the company.

The company said that its damages are in excess of $1 million because it had to hire attorneys to bring the lawsuit forward.

According to the suit, multiple attempts were made between January and February to demand payment. The lawsuit said that NASA’s attorney requested raw test data from Bigelow’s testing carried out under the contract as a prerequisite of being paid the amount owed.

“However, this requirement was not a term of the Contract, and was an attempt by NASA to place additional requirements on Bigelow Aerospace that had not been part of the parties’ agreement,” according to the lawsuit.

The company said NASA is not entitled to that data until it makes payment first. “NASA is also demanding that Bigelow Aerospace participate in a time consuming and expensive technical coordination meeting at NASA headquarters, that is not required by the Contract,” the lawsuit said.

CEO Elon Musk says that SpaceX’s latest Starship test flight ended with a midair explosion because a “small” leak started on one of the rocket’s three Raptor engines.

As promised, the new information offers some insight into the cause of Starship SN11’s premature demise and the challenges of iteratively developing systems as complex as a fully-reusable Saturn V-class launch vehicle. On March 30th, after about a week of delays, Starship SN11 lifted off on SpaceX’s fourth high-altitude launch and landing test while all but completely obscured by a thick bank of fog.

Despite the unfortunate weather conditions, which prevented almost any kind of view of the launch outside of Starship’s own cameras, the rocket performed about as well as its three predecessors, reaching a planned apogee of 10 km (6.2 mi) before free-falling belly-first back to earth. At T+5:49, however, things went wrong.



At that point, Starship tried to ignite its three Raptor engines to flip into a tail-down landing configuration, at which point two of those engines would be shut down, leaving the healthiest of the three to attempt a soft landing. Something immediately went wrong and both telemetry, live video, and the countdown clock froze with a view of one partially ignited Raptor engine.

Notably, as pictured in the image at the top of this article, it’s possible that the “small [methane] leak” Musk has blamed for SN11’s failure was visible on Raptor engine SN52 less than 30 seconds after Starship lifted off, leaving plenty of time for a high-pressure fire to severely damage the faulty engine and its adjacent partners. The SpaceX CEO says that the resultant fire “fried part of [the] avionics” controlling one or all three Raptors, “causing [a] hard start” that damaged or destroyed one or all of the engines when they attempted to begin their landing burns.

Based on analysis of unofficial videos taken by cameras near the Starship launch site, it’s been deemed likely that SN11 exploded not because its flight termination system (FTS) triggered – but because of Raptor’s violent, explosive “hard start.” Ultimately, it’s not clear if ever SpaceX itself will ever be able to paint a truly clear picture of what exactly happened to SN11, but Musk says that the suspect Raptor leak “is getting fixed [six] ways to Sunday.” It’s possible that an upgraded Raptor engine Musk has hinted will debut on Starship SN15 has already fully or partially dealt with whatever is at the root of SN11’s engine leak and hard start(s).

Either way, SN15 is already expected to roll to the launch pad as early as this week – mere days after SN11’s explosion – and SpaceX wont have to wait long to test whatever fixes it implements as the upgraded vehicle works towards static fire tests and its own launch debut.