NASA and the Private Sector - Page 187

By as early as the fall of 2016, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos had already started to worry deeply about the progress—or lack thereof—being made by his rocket company, Blue Origin.

Although the business had begun to successfully launch its suborbital vehicle, New Shepard, Bezos watched with increasing envy as SpaceX landed its much larger Falcon 9 rocket on ocean-based drone ships. He saw, too, this surging new-space competitor winning launch contract after contract from NASA and the US Department of Defense.

And so, in response, Bezos invited a succession of executives from Blue Origin to his office in Seattle for one-on-one lunches. During these meetings, the executives complained about poor internal communication, long meetings, and questionable spending decisions. One engineer described the company as a Potemkin village—with a dysfunctional culture concealed beneath an industrious façade.

This anecdote is recounted in Amazon Unbound, a new book about the rise of Bezos and Amazon over the last decade. Authored by Brad Stone, the book is being published today, and much of the narrative deals with Bezos' much more valuable retail business. But there is a chapter devoted to Blue Origin that reveals a business in distress.

After the fall 2016 meetings, Bezos informed company President Rob Meyerson that he would hire a chief executive officer for Blue Origin for the first time. According to Stone's book, this process included an inquiry to SpaceX's president and chief operating officer, Gwynne Shotwell. Shotwell, who had worked for SpaceX almost from the beginning of its founding in 2002, quickly turned down the opportunity. (A source confirmed this to Ars.)

Following a yearlong search, Bezos selected Bob Smith, a senior manager at Honeywell Aerospace. Smith was hired to lead Blue Origin through a transition from its startup phase, with just a few hundred employees, to become a major player in the space business. Most of all, Bezos wanted to start winning government contracts like SpaceX.

ULA dispute

The book also delves into the 2014 decision by United Launch Alliance to purchase BE-4 rocket engines from Blue Origin for its Vulcan rocket. Significant fallout ensued a few years later when Blue Origin announced its plans to build the large New Glenn rocket that would compete with Vulcan.

"Executives from the two companies stopped talking; tensions were so high that they walked past one another in the halls of the annual Space Symposium that year without acknowledging one another," Stone writes. "Blue later disputed the notion that its execs stopped talking to counterparts at ULA. Nevertheless, the story ULA execs eventually heard from employees at Blue... was that Bezos was frustrated that the government was funding Elon Musk’s space dreams and wanted to get in on the action."

At the time, Bezos was telling colleagues that he wanted to "get paid to practice" with launching and landing the New Glenn rocket.

As the book makes clear, in seeking to compete with SpaceX, Bezos made a mistake with the hiring of Smith as CEO. In filling out his leadership team, Smith brought in people from companies not known for disruption but rather traditional space practices. Many of his senior hires came from Raytheon, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, the aerospace division of Rolls-Royce, and other legacy companies. These leaders, alongside Smith, built a culture of caution rather than deliberate risk-taking in order to move more quickly.

Partly because of this slow development pace, Blue Origin has in some ways become even less competitive with SpaceX since Bezos' meetings in fall 2016. At the time, both companies, led by billionaires, seemed on the cusp of a great space race. But whereas SpaceX has launched 100 rockets to orbit since then, more than 1,500 of its own satellites, and several crews of NASA astronauts, Blue Origin has only flown New Shepard about a dozen times, without any people on board. (A first crewed flight is likely to finally occur in July.)

And what about those government contracts? Blue Origin has been largely shut out. When it came to the latest round of national security launch contracts, United Launch Alliance and SpaceX won the business, with Blue left on the sidelines. And last month, a Blue Origin-led bid to land humans on the Moon for NASA lost out to SpaceX for a high-profile and lucrative contract.

Bezos has also had to set aside some of his personal ambitions with New Glenn, because the oft-delayed booster will not launch any time soon. Amazon recently announced that it will turn to United Launch Alliance for the first nine launches of its Project Kuiper satellite Internet project.

It's a shame that Amazon Unbound does not bring the Blue Origin story up to the present day. I would be interested to know which Blue Origin executives are lunching with Bezos now and what they are saying. Even more intriguingly, it would be fun to know what Bezos is saying to them about the rocket company's ongoing troubles.

Long Beach, Calif. May 17th, 2021 - On May 15, 2021, Rocket Lab experienced an anomaly almost three minutes into the company’s 20th Electron launch. Following a successful lift-off from Launch Complex 1, Electron proceeded through a nominal first stage engine burn, stage separation, and stage 2 ignition. Shortly after the second stage ignition the engine shut down, resulting in the loss of the mission.

Rocket Lab continued to receive good telemetry from Electron following the safe engine shutdown on stage two, providing engineers with comprehensive data to review as part of a robust review into the anomaly. The extensive data is being methodically scoured to enable the review team to accurately pinpoint the issue and implement corrective actions for future missions. Rocket Lab is leading the flight review with the support of the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA); a structure that ensures Rocket Lab maintains a high degree of control over its return-to-flight schedule.

Preliminary data reviews suggest an engine computer detected an issue shortly after stage 2 engine ignition, causing the computer to command a safe shutdown as it is designed to do. The behavior had not been observed previously during Rocket Lab’s extensive ground testing operations, which include multiple engine hot fires and full mission duration stage tests prior to flight. The vehicle remained within the pre-determined safety corridor during the flight. The full review is expected to be complete in the coming weeks and Rocket Lab anticipates a swift return to flight.

“We deeply regret the loss of BlackSky’s payload and we are committed to returning to flight safely and reliably for our customers,” said Rocket Lab founder and chief executive, Peter Beck. “We are methodically working through the review process to address the issue. After 17 successful missions and more than 100 satellites deployed to orbit prior to this mission, and with multiple launch vehicles currently in production, we are confident in a swift and reliable return to flight with minimal impact on our launch manifest this year.”

Flight data shows Electron’s first stage performed nominally during the mission and did not contribute to the flight issue. The first stage safely completed a successful splashdown under parachute as planned and Rocket Lab’s recovery team retrieved the stage from the ocean for transport back to Rocket Lab’s production complex as part of the company’s reusability test program. The new heat shield debuted in this flight protected the stage from the intense heat and forces experienced while re-entering Earth’s atmosphere and the program took yet another major advancement towards reusability of the rocket. The engines remain in good condition and Rocket Lab intends to put them through hot fire testing for analysis. Selected components from the recovered stage are also suitable for reflight on future missions. Rocket Lab’s program to make Electron a reusable launch vehicle is advancing quickly and the company intends to conduct its third recovery mission later this year.

In March 2021 Rocket Lab announced plans to become a publicly listed company on the Nasdaq via a merger agreement with Vector Acquisition Corporation (Nasdaq: VACQ), a special purpose acquisition company. On May 7, 2021, Vector and Rocket Lab confidentially submitted a registration statement on Form S-4 to the Securities and Exchange Commission and both parties continue to work towards the completion of the transaction.

WASHINGTON — NASA Administrator Bill Nelson told House appropriators May 19 that the agency is requesting more than $11 billion in an upcoming infrastructure bill that would go for the agency’s Human Landing System program and upgrading center facilities.

Nelson, testifying in a virtual hearing by the House Appropriations Committee’s commerce, justice and science subcommittee about NASA’s fiscal year 2022 budget proposal, said the agency has submitted to Congress requests for funding to be included in legislation to enact what the White House calls the American Jobs Plan, which has a total value of $2.3 trillion over 10 years.

He told members that NASA was seeking $5.4 billion for the Human Landing System to fund competition for future lander missions beyond the “Option A” award the agency made to SpaceX April 16. That award covers development of a lander based on SpaceX’s Starship vehicle and a single crewed landing. NASA plans to conduct a separate solicitation for future missions, which will be open to both SpaceX and other companies.

“You, the appropriators, as a partner, you’ve got the opportunity to put over about $5 billion in the jobs bill,” he told members. “Specifically, we named about $5.4 billion on the Human Landing System.”

Several members of the subcommittee said they were concerned about NASA’s decision to make only a single Option A award after agency officials previously stated they would seek to make up to two awards. Nelson said the shortfall in funding for the HLS program, which received $850 million — a quarter its original request — in fiscal year 2021, led to the decision to select only one company. “They just simply didn’t have enough to keep going forward on more than one lander,” he said.

He declined to go into specifics about the HLS award selection process, referring to a “blackout period” as the Government Accountability Office reviews protests filed by the two losing bidders, Blue Origin and Dynetics. If the GAO sustains the protests, “then everything starts over” with the program, he said. If the GAO denies the protests, he said NASA will go forward with a competition for later landing missions.

Among the critics of the HLS award was the committee’s ranking member, Rep. Robert Aderholt (R-Ala.), who said it was “unacceptable for the fate of the U.S. access to cislunar space to be in the hands of only one company.”

Aderholt later asked if NASA could provide funding to all three companies that received HLS base period contracts in 2020 through this August. Nelson said procurement law prevented him from doing so because of the blackout period caused by the protests. He said the agency has obligated $410 million so far this fiscal year on the HLS program, but has spent no money on the Option A award to SpaceX because of the protest.

After securing yet another contract, SpaceX Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets are now scheduled to launch at least six commercial Moon landers over the next two and a half years.

On May 20th, rocket startup Firefly Aerospace announced that it had selected a SpaceX Falcon 9 to launch its first Blue Ghost Moon lander as part of NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program. While Firefly is preparing to launch its own Alpha rocket for the first time later this year, a rocket that is technically capable of launching Blue Ghost with the help of an electric ‘space tug,’ the company is apparently prioritizing maximum payload delivery and on-time performance.

As a result, Firefly has contracted with a direct competitor to launch its first Moon lander, becoming the sixth company to select SpaceX’s Falcon rockets for that purpose.

Thanks to Firefly’s decision to use Falcon 9 instead of Alpha, the first Blue Ghost spacecraft should be able to deliver up to 150 kg (330 lb) of NASA payloads to the lunar surface – three times more than Alpha would allow. That makes Firefly the sixth Moon-bound company to be won over by the unique combination of affordability and performance offered by SpaceX’s Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets.

The first of those missions – Israel’s Beresheet spacecraft – already flew in early 2020 as part of a unique rideshare with a commercial geostationary communications satellite. Unfortunately, the lander suffered an avionics failure just a few minutes before touchdown, causing Beresheet to impact the Moon far too quickly. While it’s no longer clear if that’s still the case, Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost lander may borrow significantly from Beresheet and the lessons Israeli Aerospace Industries (IAI) learned from the mission’s successes and failures. At the same time, IAI is also working on its own follow-up Moon lander mission.

As part of NASA’s CLPS program, SpaceX has won launch contracts for five of the six landers announced, one of which went to ULA’s Vulcan Centaur rocket. One of those six landers wound up canceling their contract due to corporate issues, leaving SpaceX with four of five CLPS launch contracts. The company is currently on track to launch two Intuitive Machines Nova-C landers on Falcon 9 rockets in Q1 and Q4 2022, Masten Space System’s XL-1 lander in 2022, Firefly’s first Blue Ghost lander on a Falcon 9 rocket in 2023, and Astrobotics first large Griffin lander – carrying NASA’s VIPER Moon rover – on a Falcon Heavy rocket in Q4 2023.

Outside of NASA, Japanese startup ispace has selected SpaceX Falcon 9 rockets to launch its first two commercial Hakuto-R Moon landers, beginning as early as Q4 2022. All told, SpaceX has contracts to launch at least six Moon landers in 2022 and 2023.

Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders inserted himself into the debate about NASA's Artemis Program on Monday.

The independent and two-time presidential candidate did so by submitting an amendment to the Endless Frontier Act, which is now under consideration by the full Senate. Sanders' amendment, No. 1925, has a simple purpose: "To eliminate the multi-billion dollar Bezos Bailout."

The "bailout" in question refers to an earlier amendment filed to the Endless Frontier Act during a committee meeting earlier this month. Overall, the Endless Frontier Act is primarily about advancing US scientific and research efforts, but it has become fettered with modifications by US senators. Sanders is seeking to strip language from an amendment that has already been successfully attached to the scientific act.

This earlier amendment, submitted by Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.), modified NASA's Artemis Program. Cantwell's amendment, in part, called for $10.03 billion in additional funding for NASA to carry out the Human Landing System program. This legislation was filed as Blue Origin and Jeff Bezos were urging Congress to add $10 billion to NASA's budget—enough money to fully fund the development of a second Human Landing System. It was passed 11 days ago without any debate by the US Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation.

Sanders' terse amendment seeks to excise the Cantwell language that provides additional funding for a Human Landing System.

In theory, Cantwell filed her amendment to the bill because she genuinely wanted competition in NASA's efforts to build a landing system to send astronauts to the Moon, beginning as early as 2024. In reality, Cantwell's amendment is probably more accurately interpreted as an effort to support Blue Origin, which is based in the state she represents.

NASA genuinely wanted to have a competition for the lunar lander. But it selected only one company—SpaceX—in mid-April after Congress appropriated just a small amount of money in the fiscal year 2021 budget. SpaceX's total bid was only $2.9 billion, less than half that of its competitors, including the Blue Origin-led national team.

However, the way Cantwell's amendment was written would likely have slowed down NASA and its return to the Moon. Were the Cantwell amendment to be signed into law, NASA would have to reopen the competition, thus delaying work on the agency's return to the Moon and putting an already difficult target of 2024 into further jeopardy. Her amendment also ignored NASA's own plans to both create a lunar-lander competition as well as keep the possibility of a 2024 landing on track. Under NASA's plans, SpaceX would work at full speed toward the 2024 landing while a second company would be brought on to compete for subsequent landings.

Harumph

Sanders did not speak publicly about his amendment, but his intentions seem transparent. He is a frequent critic of billionaires in general and Jeff Bezos—the founder of Amazon and the world's richest person—in particular. He was notably upset by Amazon's efforts to prevent a union from organizing earlier this year in Bessemer, Alabama. Therefore, Sanders' amendment is best seen as a shot at Bezos.

Where this leaves NASA and its Artemis Program is difficult to forecast. Even if Sanders' amendment fails, the amended Endless Frontier Act must go through the US House, where the Cantwell amendment may get stripped out. And even if the bill becomes law this fall or winter, this "authorizing" language about funding still could be superseded by the appropriations process.