NASA and the Private Sector - Page 194

The German startup Rocket Factory Augsburg, or RFA, has concluded another test of their RFA One rocket. In the test, the company performed a destructive cryogenic pressure test of their first stage prototype. The company has shown a video in which the prototype stage broke apart after it was fueled with cryogenic nitrogen to test the quality of the welds and determine the pressure at which the structure fails.

The milestone is the latest for the company which is aiming to develop a reusable launch vehicle for small payloads. The first flight of RFA One is currently slated for late 2022, following more testing and development.

The company has confirmed that this latest test might not be the final one for the core stage and that the next first stage prototype might not be the first flight core for their planned launch in late 2022, as it could be used for more testing.

The recently destroyed tank was shown in a raised configuration after the recent stacking of Starship 20 in Starbase, Texas. In reaction, RFA showed their steel tank first stage and mentioned the similarities between the two in their visual appearance, as both first stages are built with steel.

This test comes after a previous update on July 23, in which RFA showed the test of one of their engines for a static fire of eight seconds, reaching a thermal steady-state of the engine. This refers to the point where the engine is no longer in an unstable thermal state during startup, but in a situation where the temperature remains constant over time. The test occurred at the company’s test site in Sweden.

The company confirmed that the test-fire was successful in a statement by COO Dr. Brieschenk: “All systems worked perfectly. We are thus continuing our successful test series and confirmed in our decision to develop engines with staged combustion technology in Europe as well.”

The company previously switched from the gas generator cycle to a staged combustion design for their engine.

After being founded in 2018 as a spinoff from the OHB from Bremen, the company based in the southern German city of Augsburg recently passed 100 employees. In March, RFA opened its new headquarters in Augsburg. The factory will be used to build the RFA One rocket as well as the engines for the launcher.

The RFA One is a three-stage rocket currently in development. The current design calls for a 30 meters tall and 2-meter diameter rocket.

The first stage will be powered by nine of their currently unnamed engines. The engine itself runs a staged combustion cycle, which makes RFA the first company in Europe to develop such an engine to flight readiness. The goal is to provide about 100 kN of liftoff thrust, with early flights operating with lower thrust levels.

The engine will use rocket-grade kerosene known as Rocket Propellant 1, or RP-1, oxidized by liquid oxygen. The ignition will be started by the hypergolic substances of triethylaluminium and triethylborane, or TEA-TAB. Both these propellants and the ignition substance are common with those used by SpaceX on Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy.

The goal is to reuse the first stage and recover it on orbital flights, but the company has not yet disclosed how they plan to reuse and recover it. In the past, the first stages flown by SpaceX were recovered using propulsion for a landing burn, while other companies, such as Rocket Lab, plan to use parachutes to slow the stage down and catch it with a helicopter.

The same engine design on the first stage will be used as an upper stage engine, with a modified nozzle for vacuum operations. The goal for this upper stage is 350 seconds of specific impulse for the vacuum engine. The engines for the first and second stages will be 3D printed.

On top of the second stage sits the third stage, also called the orbital stage, which will be used to insert the payload into the desired orbit. It will use an unspecified green bi-propellant, not hydrazine, and will produce a low thrust at a specific impulse of more than 325 seconds.

RFA recently shared that a torch igniter will be used to start the combustion of the final stage. The goal of the company is to bring either a dedicated payload or a rideshare payload up to the mass of 1,600 kilograms to the orbit of the International Space Station, or 450 kilograms to geostationary transfer orbit.

Currently, the aim is to launch to orbit in late 2022. The first launch will be conducted at the Andoya Space Center in Norway, which was previously used for the Nice Cajun sounding rocket.

The spaceport was formed in 1962 and is owned and operated by the Norwegian Space Agency. Over 1,200 sounding rocket launches have been conducted at Andoya. There is a plan for orbital pad infrastructure at the launch site, which RFA and other companies from Europe intend to use.

RFA wants to operate in orbits ranging from 87 to 108 degrees of inclination from the location in Norway. Later the company also wants to explore potential launch sites in Portugal and the North Sea.

After losing out on a multibillion dollar NASA contract for a lunar lander to SpaceX in April, Blue Origin has hired a high-profile strategic advisory firm named Pallas Advisors. These high-profile advisors have helped the company as it has gone on to protest the contract loss and eventually sue the space agency.

The founding partners of the Washington, DC-based advisory firm, Sally Donnelly and Tony DeMartino, are well-known to Jeff Bezos, the founder of both Amazon and Blue Origin. Both Donnelly and DeMartino previously worked as consultants to Amazon before taking jobs at the Department of Defense in 2017, during the Trump administration. There, they gained some unwelcome public notoriety.

At the Pentagon, Donnelly served as a senior advisor to Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis, and DeMartino worked as his deputy chief of staff. During their time in government service, both Donnelly and DeMartino became embroiled in the controversy surrounding the US Department of Defense award to Microsoft for the $10 billion Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure, or JEDI contract, for military cloud computing services.

The short version of the story is this: competitors in the JEDI contract fight say the pair left Amazon consultancy jobs to work for the Department of Defense in 2017, where they were in position to influence the development of the contract bidding process in favor of Amazon. Donnelly and DeMartino have denied that they acted improperly, and an Inspector General's report largely cleared them. However, the controversy has recently gained new life as Congress investigates the matter.

On July 11th, nearly a minute into the rocket trip carrying Richard Branson, the British billionaire, to space, a yellow caution light appeared on the ship’s console. The craft was about twenty miles in the air above the White Sands Missile Range, in New Mexico, and climbing, travelling more than twice the speed of sound. But it was veering off course, and the light was a warning to the pilots that their flight path was too shallow and the nose of the ship was insufficiently vertical. If they didn’t fix it, they risked a perilous emergency landing in the desert on their descent.

Riding rockets is dangerous stuff. Around 1.4 per cent of Russian, Soviet, and American crewed spaceflight missions have resulted in fatalities. The foremost commercial space companies—Branson’s Virgin Galactic, Elon Musk’s SpaceX, and Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin—must, over the coming years, bring that number down. Their profits depend on making frequent and safe human spaceflight a reality. “A private program can’t afford to lose anybody,” Branson has said.

And yet, perhaps more than any of its competitors, Branson’s company is already hard at work fashioning its identity as a luxury life-style brand. Virgin Galactic is marketing its space-tourism business but for the time being remains an experimental flight-test program. I’ve been covering this company for almost seven years, reporting on its triumphs and tragedies, and on the disconnect between its lofty rhetoric (“Virgin Galactic’s mission is to democratize space,” Branson has said) and its supersonic risks. This account was informed by discussions with eight people knowledgeable about the program.

Virgin Galactic’s space vehicle is unique among its competitors. Whereas SpaceX and Blue Origin operate traditional, vertical-launch rockets that are automated by engineers, Virgin Galactic uses a piloted, winged rocket ship. Every test flight is crewed, which makes each one a matter of life and death. (SpaceX, on the other hand, completed scores of launches before it flew with a human onboard; Blue Origin completed more than a dozen launches before it did the same.)

The success of Virgin Galactic’s program, therefore, will ultimately depend on its pilots, high-calibre but nonetheless fallible, making the right decisions and adjustments in specific moments—like when a yellow caution light comes on. Alerts on the console can be triggered by any number of issues. On the July 11th flight, with Branson on board, it was a trajectory problem, or what’s known as the “entry glide cone.” The ship uses rocket power to get into space, but glides back to Earth and lands on a runway, like the space shuttle would do. This method, mimicking water circling a drain, enables a controlled descent. But the ship must begin its descent within a specified, imaginary “cone” to have enough glide energy to reach its destination. The pilots basically weren’t flying steeply enough.

Not only was the ship’s trajectory endangering the mission, it was also imperilling the ship’s chances of staying inside its mandated airspace. The Federal Aviation Administration regulates the private space industry and sets aside airspace for each mission, seeking to prevent collisions with general air traffic, including commercial airliners, and to limit civilian casualties in the event of an accident. The regulator uses formulas detailed in a hundred-and-twenty-one-page document—including an equation for calculating expected casualties—to assess the safety of a given spaceflight. According to the F.A.A., an acceptable Ec, as the equation is called, involves no more than one expected casualty per ten thousand missions. The agency designates airspace for flights with that equation in mind.

The rocket motor on Virgin Galactic’s ship is programmed to burn for a minute. On July 11th, it had a few more seconds to go when a red light also appeared on the console: an entry glide-cone warning. This was a big deal. I once sat in on a meeting, in 2015, during which the pilots on the July 11th mission—Dave Mackay, a former Virgin Atlantic pilot and veteran of the U.K.’s Royal Air Force, and Mike Masucci, a retired Air Force pilot—and others discussed procedures for responding to an entry glide-cone warning. C. J. Sturckow, a former marine and nasa astronaut, said that a yellow light should “scare the shit out of you,” because “when it turns red it’s gonna be too late”; Masucci was less concerned about the yellow light but said, “Red should scare the crap out of you.” Based on pilot procedures, Mackay and Masucci had basically two options: implement immediate corrective action, or abort the rocket motor. According to multiple sources in the company, the safest way to respond to the warning would have been to abort. (A Virgin Galactic spokesperson disputed this contention.)

Aborting at that moment, however, would have dashed Branson’s hopes of beating his rival Bezos, whose flight was scheduled for later in the month, into space. Mackay and Masucci did not abort. Whether or not their decision was motivated by programmatic pressures and the hopes of their billionaire bankroller sitting in the back remains unclear. Virgin Galactic officials told me that the firm’s top priority is the safety of its crew and passengers. Branson, however, is known for his flamboyance and showmanship. On the morning of the flight, Branson, an outspoken environmentalist, appeared on the “livestream” arriving at the spaceport on a bicycle. But this turned out to be false: Branson did not pedal to work that day; the bike ride was filmed a week earlier and then made to look like it happened that morning. When Reuters called out the company, an anonymous official said, “We regret the error and any confusion it may have caused.”

Although Mackay and Masucci attempted to address their trajectory problem, it wasn’t enough. And now they were accelerating to Mach 3, with a red light glowing in the cockpit. Fortunately for Branson and the three other crew members in the back, the pilots got the ship into space and landed safely. But data retrieved from Flightradar24 shows the vehicle flying outside its designated airspace. An F.A.A. spokesperson confirmed that Virgin Galactic “deviated from its Air Traffic Control clearance” and that an “investigation is ongoing.” A Virgin Galactic spokesperson acknowledged that the company did not initially notify the F.A.A. and that the craft flew outside its designated airspace for a minute and forty-one seconds—flights generally last about fifteen minutes—but said that the company was working with the F.A.A. to update procedures for alerting the agency.

Virgin Galactic has faced close calls and calamities in the past. In 2011, with the company contracting its flight-test program to Scaled Composites, a boutique aviation firm, a crash was narrowly averted when the spaceship got into an inverted spin. And in 2014 an accident killed one pilot, badly injured another, and left their spaceship in ruins. Two recent episodes are perhaps more revealing.

In July, 2018, Mackay and Masucci were conducting a test flight thirty miles above the Earth when the ship got away from them, spinning and tumbling in the thin air. Virgin Galactic’s lead test pilot and flight-test director, Mark Stucky, was monitoring the flight from mission control, fearful that if Mackay and Masucci didn’t steady the ship soon, their off-kilter descent could seriously damage the vehicle and put the pilots in danger. They landed safely, though a post-flight inspection exposed manufacturing defects that required months of repairs.

Seven months later, in February, 2019, Mackay and Masucci flew again, this time with an engineer in the back. They reached space, as planned, but the ship sustained significant damage when a bond holding the trailing edge of the horizontal stabilizer came unglued. “I don’t know how we didn’t lose the vehicle and kill three people,” Todd Ericson, a retired Air Force Colonel and Virgin Galactic’s then vice-president of safety and test, told me in a 2020 interview. When, in Ericson’s view, management tried to keep the problem quiet, his concerns grew. “This should have been a come-to-Jesus moment, not the kind of thing you brush under the rug,” he said. The maintenance crew had supposedly inspected the ship and verified that it was safe to fly when it demonstrably was not, and Ericson was worried that the company was treating an organizational failure as an isolated incident. (The company disputed this account.) Eventually, Ericson shared his concerns with members of the board, which hired a retired Boeing executive to conduct a safety review of the flight-test program. Ericson resigned from his post in frustration, disillusioned by the company’s safety culture. (In a recent e-mail exchange, Ericson declined to comment on the company’s safety practices, or on his resignation.)

The former Boeing executive spent weeks interviewing pilots and engineers, before filing a forty-page report with observations and recommendations. Virgin Galactic, citing confidentiality agreements, declined numerous requests to share the document with me but said that they concluded it was safe to fly. Stucky, the flight-test director, told me that neither the former Boeing executive’s report, nor his observations, were ever shared with him or his team.

Stucky, a pillar of Virgin Galactic’s program and a legend in the flight-test community, had issued his own warnings about protecting the integrity of the flight-test program. In a 2017 e-mail to his team, he wrote, “We must stop de-scoping timelines because we are overworked and understaffed and instead should be jumping up and down on senior management’s desks saying exactly what contractor support, new hires, redistribution of effort, or whatever else is required.” In another e-mail, in 2019, he urged his fellow test pilots to be more transparent: “Failure to admit mistakes in flight test is a cancer that must be nipped at the bud.” Stucky, whom I wrote about in the magazine in 2018, had been particularly troubled by Mackay and Masucci’s unwillingness to take responsibility for what he perceived to be their mistakes on the July, 2018, flight.

Some of Stucky’s criticisms appeared in the book I wrote about him and Virgin Galactic’s rocket ship-program, “Test Gods: Virgin Galactic and the Making of a Modern Astronaut.” After the publication of my book, in May, Stucky was stripped of his flight duties and excluded from key planning meetings ahead of the July 11th event. He watched Branson’s flight from the runway; it was the first mission for which he had no responsibilities after more than a decade on the program. Eight days after Branson’s flight, an H.R. manager booked time on his calendar, and then fired Stucky over Zoom.

His departure—coupled with Ericson’s, two years earlier—leaves the company without important internal voices for accountability. In a recent meeting, when an attendee suggested that Mackay and Masucci were lucky to have escaped serious problems after the entry glide-cone warning, the pilots grew defensive. A source inside the company said of Mackay, the pilot, “He should man up, own his mistake, and admit that he pooched the profile.” A senior company official told me that the flight path trajectory was acceptable but not optimal, nor what they intended, and that the incident was being reviewed.

In a written statement, Virgin Galactic described the July 11th flight as “a safe and successful test flight that adhered to our flight procedures and training protocols.” The statement added, “When the vehicle encountered high altitude winds which changed the trajectory, the pilots and systems monitored the trajectory to ensure it remained within mission parameters. Our pilots responded appropriately to these changing flight conditions exactly as they have been trained and in strict accordance with our established procedures.”

Last month, Virgin Galactic’s C.E.O. announced that, beginning in October, it would ground its fleet for eight months to work on the mothership that carries its space plane aloft, and then put a new space ship through a rigorous flight-test program—all of this without Stucky, their seasoned director of flight test. In 2018, after Stucky flew Virgin Galactic’s first successful space mission, a mentor of his from nasa wrote to congratulate him on “a job well done: as a Test Pilot and as a Program leader—in the face of significant technical and organizational challenges.” Sturckow, the former marine and current Virgin Galactic test pilot who’s flown to space twice with the company and four times with nasa, once commended Stucky for doing “an excellent fucking job as flight-test director, keeping this team of innocents from wandering in the woods endlessly.”

Stucky has spent the days since his departure mostly at home. He has received job offers, and former colleagues have stopped by bearing gifts and condolences. “What a loss for us, and what a way to treat someone who has been here since the beginning,” one engineer wrote to him. Others have come by asking for advice, which Stucky admits puts him in an awkward position. “I want to help my friends,” he told me. “But by the same token, I don’t think I should be helping a company that didn’t see any value in me.”

In late September, before overhauling its fleet, Virgin Galactic is scheduled to fly its next test flight, carrying several members of the Italian Air Force to space. The company spokesperson said Virgin Galactic “is guided by a fundamental commitment to safety at every level.”

Peter Beck hasn’t been shy about his intention to grow Rocket Lab into more than just a launch provider, but a fully vertically integrated space company that makes spacecraft in addition to sending them to orbit. The company, which he founded in 2006, has taken yet another major stride toward that goal with the news Wednesday that it will open a new production facility to manufacture satellite components at a larger scale than ever before.

The facility will manufacture reaction wheels, critical attitude and stability control systems on satellites. Rocket Lab says the facility, which will be operational in the fourth quarter of this year, will be capable of producing up to 2,000 reaction wheels annually. Given that spacecraft generally have between three and four reaction wheels, it’s safe to assume that Rocket Lab customers likely have around 500 individual satellites ready in the pipeline to accept these components. “These are large volumes of supply across multiple constellations,” Rocket Lab CEO Beck said in a recent interview with TechCrunch.

The news is a marked expansion for Rocket Lab’s space systems business, which is already kept busy by the in-house Photon spacecraft and was boosted last year when the company acquired major satellite hardware manufacturer Sinclair Interplanetary. Rocket Lab also offers bespoke Photons for individual use cases — it will be designing the vehicles for forthcoming launches with space manufacturing startup Varda Space Industries and two Photons that will be sent to Mars on an upcoming science mission.

Historically, spacecraft components have generally been produced on the scale of tens or hundreds, because the barriers to get to orbit were so high. But as the cost of launch has declined (thanks in part to innovations from companies like Rocket Lab) more and more entities are able to send projects to space. That means more satellites, and more reaction wheels. Even today, there are around 200 Rocket Lab-made reaction wheels in orbit, so 2,000 in a single year is a huge jump in scale.

It’s all part of Rocket Lab’s goal of being a fully integrated space services company. A major benefit from the vertical integration for customers, Rocket Lab says, is slashed manufacturing lead times. Beck said that when the company first started producing Photons, they quickly encountered months-long delivery times for reaction wheels, which effectively pushed back their timeline for launching one to orbit.

“If the space economy is to grow in the way that it’s predicted, then this has to be solved,” he said. “This is a fundamental problem that has to be solved. The whole space supply chain is characterized by small-scale operations that really lack the ability to produce volume in any scale.”

Rocket Lab will be hiring more than 16 roles to support the space systems division and the new production facility, which will otherwise be highly automated; the company said in a statement that the production tools and environmental testing workstations will all be automated, and the metal machining is optimized to operate unattended. Beck said these techniques are very much in line with Rocket Lab’s other manufacturing processes — he pointed to Rosie the Robot as a cornerstone of the company’s capacity to use automation to rapidly scale its products.

Beck stayed mum about whether the company is planning on scaling the production of other spacecraft components, like the star trackers navigation tool, which Rocket Lab also manufacturers. However, he did say that the company plans on introducing new products — what those will be, he declined to specify. But Beck’s stated aim when he started the space systems division is that “everything that goes to space should have a Rocket Lab logo on it.”

That aim goes to Rocket Lab’s larger vision, which is becoming an end-to-end space company: combining launch services with spacecraft manufacturing to be able to build in-orbit infrastructure.

“When you combine those things together, you have an immensely powerful platform that you can use to develop infrastructure in orbit and ultimately provide services,” he said.

But when asked what kinds of services he was thinking of, Beck played it close to the chest, instead choosing to give a well-known example from a competitor: SpaceX’s Starlink internet satellite project, which it builds and launches itself. He stayed mum on what kinds of ventures Rocket Lab might pursue, just saying that the vertical integration gives the company the ability to try new business models.

“The marginal cost for us to experiment is very, very low.”