NASA and the Private Sector - Page 95

NASA is giving us some more insight into its plans to get humans to Mars, under the blanket mission called ‘Journey to Mars,’ and during the press conference, NASA Deputy Associate Administrator for Exploration Systems Development Bill Hill revealed that the current hope is to hand off control of the International Space Station to a commercial owner by sometime around the mid 2020s.

“NASA’s trying to develop economic development in low-earth orbit,” Hill said, speaking on a panel of NASA staff assembled to discuss the upcoming Mars mission. “Ultimately, our desire is to hand the space station over to either a commercial entity or some other commercial capability so that research can continue in low-earth orbit, so that research can continue in low-earth orbit.”

The timing fits with the end of The U.S. Government’s current funding of the ISS program, which was extended by President Obama’s administration from its original deorbiting date of 2016 through 2020. Operations were prolonged through 2024 to help give NASA a platform from which to run its near-Earth preparatory missions leading up to the ultimate manned mission to Mars.

NASA didn’t specify any potential buyer, but two commercial entities are about to add significant real estate to the ISS: a new docking adapter is being put in place to support crew shuttle missions from Boeing and SpaceX, both of which are set to start shuttling personnel to the station in 2017.

Later this year, tech entrepreneur turned space pioneer Elon Musk is planning the blastoff of a new rocket, the Falcon Heavy, that would be twice as powerful as any other in use and one of the biggest since the Apollo era’s mighty Saturn V. The stage for the rocket’s debut: the Kennedy Space Center’s Launch Complex 39A, where Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin took off for the moon in 1969.

SpaceX’s use of 39A is the ultimate symbol that the government’s monopoly on space travel is over. To Musk, it also is proof of an additional triumph — over his fellow billionaire and rival Jeffrey P. Bezos, who had fought to secure the launchpad for himself.

Nearly five decades after the United States beat the Soviet Union to the moon, another space race is emerging, this time among a class of hugely wealthy entrepreneurs who have grown frustrated that space travel is in many ways still as difficult, and as expensive, as ever. Driven by ego, outsize ambition and opportunity, they are investing hundreds of millions of dollars of their own money in an attempt to open up space to the masses and push human space travel far past where governments have gone.

Musk, who made his first fortune on Zip2 and PayPal, and Bezos, who founded Amazon and owns The Washington Post, are the most prominent of a quartet of billionaires aspiring to open the frontier of space the way the public-private partnerships of the 19th century pushed west at the dawn of the railroad age.

The two others are Paul Allen, a Microsoft founder, and Virgin Group founder Richard Branson. All have upended industries, including retail, automobiles and credit cards, and are now embarking on the greatest disruption of all — making space travel routine — in a business long dominated by commercial-space contractors such as Boeing and Lockheed Martin.

While their efforts have reignited interest in space, they also have raised moral complexities and regulatory challenges in pursuing an endeavor that is inherently dangerous. Congress has opted to regulate the industry only loosely, granting it an extended “learning period” that would allow companies to grow and to practice space travel.

Work is progressing on the facility in Florida where Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture plans to build its orbital spaceships.

Bezos called attention to the groundbreaking milestone for the 750,000-square-foot rocket factory in June. Today, Space Florida, the state development agency that’s leasing the property and Cape Canaveral’s Launch Complex 36 to Blue Origin, tweeted that concrete is being poured for the campus’ first building.

The $200 million manufacturing and launch facility at Kennedy Space Center’s Exploration Park is expected to open by early 2018 and employ about 300 people.

That’s in addition to the folks who work at Blue Origin’s headquarters and production facility in Kent, Wash., and at its suborbital launch complex in West Texas. The company says it has about 700 employees today.

Blue Origin is currently focusing on its suborbital space effort. So far it’s conducted four fully successful uncrewed tests of its reusable, hydrogen-fueled New Shepard spaceship, which is built in Kent and flown in Texas.

According to numerous eyewitness reports, a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket just exploded during a test on a launch pad at Cape Canaveral. This rocket was set to launch on Saturday, September 3 on a mission to deliver Facebook’s first satellite to orbit. The status of the payload is unknown at this time.

The Associated Press is now stating that the rocket exploded during a test.

We reached out to SpaceX for confirmation and details of the explosion. They have yet to release a statement or respond.

This rocket was scheduled to launch the Amos-6 communication satellite, which among other functions included the capabilities for Facebook to spot-beam broadband for Facebook’s Internet.org initiative. Facebook and France-based satellite provider Eutelsat spent $95 million for a five year lease on the satellite’s Ka-band communication array.

On September 02 2016 03:06 arbiter_md wrote:
So sad that they lost the payload too. Hopefully it will not block again their flights for a long time.

On September 02 2016 11:10 JimmyJRaynor wrote:
was this one of these "reusable" Falcon9s?

During eight years on Twitter and more than 21,500 tweets, I have used the F-word just one time, on the afternoon of April 8, 2016. Watching a Falcon 9 rocket fall out of the sky and somehow, miraculously, come to fiery stop on a drone ship in the Atlantic Ocean—the moment overcame me. That first sea-based landing may be the coolest thing I've ever seen in my life.

It is unprofessional to simultaneously report on, and be a huge fan of, subjects journalists cover. But there are very few space reporters who don’t marvel at the kinds of things SpaceX has done and is trying to do. I count myself among them. That doesn’t mean the company can do no wrong, nor should it be free from criticism. And having talked to myriad people in the space industry after Thursday’s accident, from new space zealots to big aerospace barons, one thing has become crystal clear. The booster that two NASA astronauts might climb on top of in two years—or less—has just suffered two failures in 15 months.

SpaceX is an amazing company, doing amazing things. But right now there’s really just one thing the company should focus on, and that’s meeting the needs of its biggest customer. That is not a satellite company. It is not Red Dragon. It is not the hordes of adoring fans eager to hear about the Mars Colonial Transporter. It is, rather, NASA, America’s stodgy space agency that has stood by the company for the better part of a decade.

The Falcon 9 rocket lies at the core of everything SpaceX wants to do. It delivers commercial satellites and cargo. It will deliver astronauts into orbit. Three Falcon 9 boosters will power the Falcon Heavy. It is the basis of proving the reusability of orbital launch systems. So if there is no Falcon 9, there is no business. And now there have been two failures in 15 months. While the cause of the second failure is not known to outsiders, and it may have been caused by ground systems rather than the rocket itself, the company has nonetheless lost two of its rockets and associated payloads in 15 months. That is sobering.

Musk has famously contrasted his approach with that of NASA. "There's a silly notion that failure's not an option at NASA,” Musk said in 2005. “Failure is an option here. If things are not failing, you are not innovating enough."

That is a laudable approach that works for risky efforts, such as landing rockets on a boat or trying to send a Dragon to the surface of Mars. But it does not work when it comes to winning the confidence of commercial satellite customers or flying NASA astronauts. And while Musk said Dragon's abort system would have protected the crew from a "fast fire" like Thursday's accident, that is an untested assertion as of right now, albeit one we hope is accurate.

Commercial crew is by far SpaceX’s most lucrative contract ($3.14 billion in awards so far), and its success would cement the company’s legacy. Whoever launches NASA astronauts first from Florida, whether Boeing or SpaceX, will be the first private company to ever send people into orbit. The prestige and branding value of being the company that breaks the grasp of the Russians on our astronauts and restores pride to our space program is almost incalculable.

One person I spoke to recently who is intimately familiar with NASA’s commercial crew dealings with SpaceX and Boeing said both companies face major technical challenges. And while this source wasn’t particularly complimentary of Boeing, noting its interest in maximizing revenue from NASA, that company at least had dedicated a team of engineers to the project. When this person meets with SpaceX engineers, however, the team members are invariably working on several different projects in addition to commercial crew. “If we could only get them to focus,” this source told me.