Space Access Update #137 11/24/14
Copyright 2014 by Space Access Society
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In this Issue:
Maintaining
An Even Strain
Commercial
Crew Followup
Booster &
Engine Developments
Space Access
'15 Conference, April 2015
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Maintaining An Even Strain
Many times over the years,
we've gotten feedback to the effect that "things are going so well for
this new industry, don't you think it's time to declare victory and move
on?"
Oddly enough, none of those
times was during this last month. The
spectacular loss of two different commercial space vehicles in quick succession
now has some questioning the viability of the entire commercial space industry.
To both extremes, we counsel
patience. Maintain an even strain, pace
yourselves for the long haul. Things are
generally neither as good as they seem when we're all giddily celebrating a success,
nor as bad as claimed by the naysayers after a
high-visibility setback or two.
In this case, a few weeks
later, both outfits that lost commercial ships now have a pretty good idea what
went wrong, and both are now outlining their path forward.
According to Space
News and their
own press release, Orbital Sciences says that the problem that destroyed
their Antares booster was a failure in one of the
Soviet-surplus NK-33 engines bought out of long-term storage and refurbished
for their program. They now think the
remainder of that surplus batch is inherently unreliable and they don't plan to
fly with them again. They plan to meet
their contractual obligations to NASA for Station cargo services by flying
their Cygnus robot cargo vehicle on alternate boosters for the next one or two
missions. And by 2016 they plan to be
flying Antares again with new first-stage engines
from one of a number of possible sources.
All this will involve their taking a financial hit, but nobody seems to
think it's one they can't handle.
We suspect that the general
nature of the NK-33/AJ-26 problem may be one we've seen before elsewhere with
batches of long-stored surplus hardware.
There's a strong tendency to pick out the items in best condition and
use them first, with success. After a
while you find yourself getting down to the ones that were stored under the
leak in the roof, or where mice had been nesting in the machinery for years,
and things get iffier. This would fit
with last May's similar (also
the turbopump) failure of one of these engines on
the test stand, with the 2011
test stand failure of one of these engines due to corrosion stress cracking
in a high-pressure fuel duct, and with other reports of corrosion problems in
the decades-stored engines.
Virgin Galactic meanwhile we
expect are feeling their flight loss more, since they lost one test pilot and
saw another seriously injured. Our
heartfelt condolences to the family and friends of Michael Alsbury,
and our best wishes for a quick and complete recovery to Pete Siebold.
We will take this opportunity
to mention that you can donate to a fund that will go directly to Michael Alsbury's wife and two children, at http://www.gofundme.com/mikealsbury.
It seems very likely now from
the preliminary
facts that NTSB has released that the problem had to do with loss of
aerodynamic control leading to breakup of the SS2 vehicle due to a controls
procedure issue, not (as many speculated) an issue with the new-version SS2 rocket
motor being flight tested for the first time.
The issues involved are complicated, and we urge everyone not to leap to
any premature conclusions as to what went wrong. Consider that "pilot error" is far
from the only possible (nor even necessarily the most likely) explanation. The formal controls procedure for this
mission may have been incorrect, or a correct procedure may have been executed based
on an incorrect (or easy-to-misread) instrument reading, or some combination of
cockpit design and test-plan and training factors may have made a procedural
error much harder to avoid than it needed to be. The NTSB has assembled a new Human
Performance Group within the SS2 investigation to look into these factors.
Virgin Galactic meanwhile has
announced that they're proceeding with construction of their 65-percent-complete
second copy of SS2, and hope to begin test-flying it next summer. Our take is that it's very likely they
already have a pretty good idea what went wrong, and with feedback from NTSB
they ought to be able to eliminate the possibility of a repeat without major
additional delay.
Virgin's ability to cover the
obvious additional costs involved is however an interesting question. They've already spent considerably more than
originally planned on SS2 development, due to the protracted engine
development. Their investors have
already been showing signs of impatience over the last year, and at least one
major investor is
said to be taking a wait-and-see approach to any additional funding. Virgin however at this point has a
significant amount of prestige wrapped up in the project, and we would never
underestimate the salesmanship of the group's founder. We would be inclined to bet that the
additional funding will be found, externally or failing that perhaps
internally, and the project will move forward.
Taking a few steps back from
this all, we have two observations. One,
both Orbital and Virgin seem to be reacting to their problems in a businesslike
- we might almost say "commercial" - manner. And two, in both cases, one by plan, one by
the nature of the competitive marketplace, if either commercial player is
delayed or ultimately fails to recover from their setback, there are
alternatives. NASA deliberately chose to
support two Commercial Cargo providers to allow for exactly these
circumstances, so SpaceX is available to make up the cargo-to-Station slack if
Orbital can't deliver. (Advocates of
reducing the Commercial Crew program to a single contractor take note.) And the marketplace has provided Virgin with
near-term competition in the form of XCOR**, likely to begin test-flying their
own approach to profiting from the suborbital spaceplane
tourist and payload markets sometime in the coming year, and Masten Space, working hard on their unmanned solution for
the fast-growing suborbital market for engineering test and science instrument
payloads.
So, that was an interesting
week, yes, in the Chinese curse sense.
But it wasn't the end of the world, or the end of the industry - nowhere
near that. We look forward with
considerable interest to this roller-coaster ride continuing.
** disclaimer - the writer of this piece holds a modest amount of XCOR stock from his three years as Chief of Staff there. He tries not to let it go to his head.
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Commercial Crew Followup
We haven't been in the
breaking news business (with rare exceptions) for a long time, as many fine
news sources have sprung up in recent years to cover this new industry. The last time we wrote on this subject,
Senator Shelby's poison-pill (mandating massively onerous "cost-plus"
accounting for future Commercial Crew contracts despite their being
fixed-price, which typically requires much simpler accounting) was still in
play, and the CCtCap downselect
hadn't yet happened.
Just in case anyone spent the
last few months on a desert island, Boeing and SpaceX were selected and Sierra
Nevada was not. More on that in a bit.
The poison-pill's fate is
somewhat less obvious. Short version,
that specific report language is now dead, for multiple reasons. First, as expected, that Commerce, Justice,
Science (NASA) Appropriations bill got replaced along with many others by an
omnibus Continuing Resolution, technically leaving the accompanying Appropriations
Report behind. Second, the CCtCap contracts have now been awarded, so any new attempt
to impose cost-plus accounting would be ex post facto and thus arguably unconstitutional.
But most important, other
influential Appropriations Committee Senators spoke out against it - that we know of, Senator Nelson on the
Senate Floor, and later Senator Feinstein in a response letter she sent
constituents who'd written her about it.
Money quote: "I share your concerns about the report language, and
I agree that cost-plus accounting is unnecessary for commercial companies and
could slow the commercial crew process as well as reduce competition and innovation. Please know that I will work with my
colleagues in the Senate to seek to ensure that commercial space companies are
not forced to use this type of accounting for the Commercial Crew Program."
This sort of thing generally
slips through because other Senators don't notice or don't care. We think it's now safe to say that this
particular attack on Commercial Crew is not likely to be repeated. (We also think that some good has come of all
this, in that a lot more people are now aware of the inherently much higher
costs of Cost-Plus contracting.) Our
thanks to all of you who took action on this over the summer. It worked!
Which is not to say it's all
smooth sailing for Commercial Crew from now on.
For one thing, Sierra Nevada
has filed a protest over not being selected.
The top-line numbers for the three bids (for a package deal covering
development, one demonstration flight, and up to six operational flights) are
Boeing, $4.2 billion, Sierra Nevada $3.3 billion, and SpaceX $2.6 billion. Sierra Nevada has asserted that the
official CCtCap selection criteria were 50% cost-based
(with the other 50% made up of mission suitability plus past performance), that
their cost was $900 million better than Boeing's, and that overall scores were
close enough that they should have been selected instead.
It does seem clear that NASA
considered Sierra Nevada program risks to be somewhat higher than Boeing's,
and that this was a factor in Boeing's selection despite the significantly
higher price. Beyond that, the available
facts are fragmentary and occasionally contradictory, and anything we said
about the merits of Sierra Nevada's case would be a guess. We do know that there was immense political
and lobbying pressure swirling around the downselect. GAO is supposed to decide the protest by
January 5th, and your guess is as good as ours how it will turn out.
Regardless of how the protest
turns out, the big problem we see for CCtCap now is
development funding. NASA has been
extremely careful not to give even a hint as to how those top-line numbers
break down between development and the (up-to) six operational flights. We think there's a reason for this.
Given a first test flight
goal of late 2017, the bulk of the development funding is needed over the next
three years - federal Fiscal Years 2015 (underway since October 1st), 2016, and
2017. When last we looked, Congress was
aiming to provide NASA with FY'15 CCtCap funding just
short of $800 million. Our ballpark
guess is, NASA is now going to have to go back to Congress and ask for an
increase to well north of a billion a year for the next couple of years.
To arrive at these ballpark
numbers, we assume half of those top-line numbers ($4.2 billion to Boeing, $2.6
billion to SpaceX) is for development, half for the six operational
flights. This gives us a pricetag of $350 million per Boeing operational flight,
$217 million per SpaceX operational flight.
(These per-flight prices seem a bit high, so possibly our development
totals will be a bit low.)
This leaves us with a
ballpark overall CCtCap development total of $3.4 billion.
Split evenly over three years, that's $1.13 billion a year. More realistically assuming this year's total
will remain near $800 million due to Congressional distraction and inertia,
that's $1.3 billion a year for FY'16 and FY'17.
Possibly more, if in fact those six operational flights are less than
half of the respective top-line totals.
We expect this to be a
problem. Congress will need a great deal
of persuading to give the program an additional billion (or more) over the next
three years. In particular, we guarantee
the Congressional NASA-pork-business-as-usual coalition will push for reduction
to one contractor, Boeing, "to save money". (It's a sucker bet - this has already
started.)
We note that substituting
Sierra Nevada's top-line number for Boeing's would reduce the (ballpark) total
three-year increase needed from $1 billion to $550 million, an average increase
of $183 million a year rather than $333 million. We note that the modest increase in technical/schedule
risk Sierra Nevada may present over Boeing is exactly the sort of risk that
keeping two competitors in the program is supposed to mitigate. Above all though, we note that in light of
the recent loss of a Commercial Cargo launch with no major impact on the
overall goal of getting vital cargo to Station, downselecting
to a single contractor "to save money" on Commercial Crew would be a
massive false economy, leaving NASA at the mercy of single-vendor failures in a
vital NASA capability for years (if not decades) to come.
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Booster & Engine Developments
On a much more cheerful
subject, we never cease to be amazed at this industry's ability to pleasantly
surprise us. As of our last Update, we
saw ULA as having a major problem with corporate parental non-support of
lower-cost launch (SAU#136, US Launch Development Policy). We also saw no immediate policy alternative
to substantial government funding of a guaranteed-expensive Aerojet
RD-180 booster engine replacement (SAU #136, Defense Launch & Propulsion
Politics). We did advocate some
provision for support of Blue Origin or SpaceX also, but didn't see either as
being a high-probability near-term RD-180 replacement solution.
But Blue Origin notoriously plays
their cards close to their vest, and apparently so does ULA. The announcement that Blue Origin has in fact
been developing their BE-4 550,000 pound thrust booster engine for the past
several years, and that ULA has cut a deal with them to support development and
production of the BE-4 and to use a pair in a new-design ULA lower-cost booster
to replace their two current high-cost boosters, changes everything.
The DOD requirement for two
independent means of launching national security payloads will now very likely
be met by SpaceX Falcon and by the new lower-cost ULA booster, allowing
graceful retirement of ULA's two current high-cost
legacy launch systems. The recently
recognized need to move away from (now politically risky) Russian engines will
be satisfied. And none of this will depend
on shoveling money into Aerojet, which as the last
contractor standing after consolidation of the traditional US rocket engine
industry has an unenviable reputation for producing results only slowly and at
great expense.
Some observations on all
this, in no particular order:
- The push to allocate two hundred million a year
of DOD funds for new booster engine development, practically speaking earmarked
for Aerojet, is now deader than a Monty Python
parrot. We were amused to see a trial
balloon floated in the press recently for the money to go to a development competition,
as we'd advocated before Blue Origin showed their hand. Sorry, guys, too little too late. Given the extreme pressure on Defense budgets
and given that DOD dual-redundant launch requirements are likely now going to
be met by purely commercial investments, we think Aerojet's
lobbyists will do well to get a few tens of millions.
- ULA's new booster
may well be called Atlas 6 for marketing reasons, but its heritage will likely
be more Delta 4.
Facts: The new Blue Origin
booster engine runs on liquid natural gas fuel rather than Atlas 5's
rocket-grade kerosene or Delta 4's liquid hydrogen. LNG's density is about half that of kerosene,
but about six times higher than liquid hydrogen. Delta 4's very low fuel density means it has
larger diameter 5.1 meter tanks versus Atlas 5's 3.8 meter tanks. And a pair of BE-4 engines at 1.1 million lbs
takeoff thrust implies a somewhat heavier booster than either A5 with its
850,000 lb thrust RD-180 or D4 with its 705,000 lb thrust RS-68a.
Our guess then is the new ULA
booster stage will end up being built on Delta 4's 5.1 meter-diameter tank
tooling, that it may actually be somewhat shorter than the D4 core but its
liftoff mass will be significantly higher, and that (assuming similar second
stages) it will lift a significantly larger payload with no (expensive) solid strapons than either D4 or A5.
- ULA's new booster
cost-reduction effort will certainly focus on getting away from the current
legacy USAF-qualified rocket component vendors.
The combination of high fixed overhead for the inflexible legacy-vendor
testing and documentation requirements, plus the ever-shrinking market for
their products - in some cases ULA is the only customer left - means costs from
these vendors have been rising rapidly.
This is a major part of ULA's ongoing
problems with rising D4 and A5 costs.
As for how ULA will go about
this, SpaceX famously addressed the high-cost legacy components problem by
bringing most of its rocket component production in-house. ULA looks likely to take a different
approach, working with non-traditional outside vendors to obtain suitable
lower-cost components. We say this
because that's what ULA already has been doing.
From various public sources, they're known to be working with XCOR, with
the Detroit high-performance specialty automotive company Roush, and now with
Blue Origin. We would not be at all
surprised to see this pattern continued and expanded as the new ULA booster
development advances.
- An intriguing question is, will ULA pursue
reusability for their new booster core? It
would increase development costs, and it is not obvious whether ULA's corporate parents might be ready to support the
additional investment. Arguments can be
made either way as to whether reusability will be required to remain
competitive with SpaceX, given the early stage of SpaceX's
reusability testing, and given the likelihood US government customers with
critical payloads may insist on new-built stages anyway for their missions for
some time to come. (We'd be inclined to
advise keeping reusability as an option in the design process at least long
enough to see how it's working out for SpaceX.)
- The BE-4 meanwhile also has some interesting
implications for Blue Origin. Their
previously-known booster engine, the BE-3 110,000 lb thrust liquid-hydrogen
engine, if used for a ground-launch booster stage implies an at-most
medium-sized overall vehicle, even with multiple engines. With some number of BE-4 engines for a lower
stage, and the BE-3 powering a reusable upper stage, the implication is a
considerably larger vehicle. If Blue
Origin goes for enough engines on each stage to allow for engine-out capability
- and their goal of reusability somewhat implies this - the resulting vehicle
could be very large indeed.
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Space Access '15 Conference, April 2015
We'd like to thank everyone
who responded to our appeal for funds last issue. Between that and some attention to mundane
business again after our summer spent biting Senatorial ankles, we're now
caught up on bills, we're shopping for a replacement for our (slow,
increasingly flaky) 2004-vintage office computer, and we have two thousand put
away toward the ten thousand it'll take to do the next Space Access conference
without starving.
So, we've been talking to
multiple hotels since summer about hosting a Space Access conference in Phoenix
next April. We've recently narrowed it
down to a handful of good candidates - and two possible dates.
We had decided last summer to
aim for Thursday-Saturday April 23-25 for Space Access '15, but then one of the
hotels we were talking to made us an interesting offer: Go with Wednesday-Friday
April 1-3, and get a fancier place, at a slightly better price, three weeks earlier
in the spring when Arizona's more reliably just pleasantly warm and when the
rest of the country's more likely still unpleasantly cold.
One downside of those alternate
dates, of course, is that Easter Sunday is April 5th next year - hence the
Wednesday-Friday schedule, so people can still get home to their families in
time (and so this hotel can clear the decks for their annual 800-person Easter
Sunday brunch.) Another possible
downside is that our first day would overlap with the end of Major League
Baseball "Cactus League" Spring Training in Phoenix. We've been wary about that ever since SA'95,
when NASA HQ didn't believe they needed to confirm rooms with a credit card and
the hotel gave Dan Goldin's reservation away to
Chicago Cubs fans. (Then again, for any
combined space and baseball fans among us, that could be an upside - we would
as usual have our hotel rate available up to three days before and after the
conference.)
So, we'd like your input over
the next week: April 23-25, or April 1-3? Any info you have on relevant schedule
conflicts is also very welcome. (Also, a
sub-question: Thursday-Saturday, or Wednesday-Friday? Twenty years ago we were almost entirely
amateur enthusiasts and weekends were best.
As our pro percentage has increased, we've moved partly into weekdays -
our current guess is that Thursday-Saturday is still the best compromise, but
what do you think?)
In the meantime, if you
believe Space Access conferences are useful to this community, and that keeping
conference prices as low as possible for all of us who are still students, hungry
amateurs, or tight-budget startup pros is still the way to go, help,
please. Send a donation of whatever size
- ten, a hundred, a thousand, it all helps - via check still for now (credit cards
online are nearing the top of the to-do list, but aren't quite there yet) to: Space
Access Society, PO Box 16034, Phoenix AZ 85011.
Note that this is NOT
tax-deductible, as we are not a 501c-anything.
It is however entirely confidential, as we have never and will never
share or disclose in any way our supporters' names. (Unless you really want to be listed as a
conference sponsor - we'll be glad to give credit where desired. Keep in mind though that having your name
listed publicly as a donor could lead to lots of other people pestering you for
donations to their favorite causes too.)
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Space Access Society
space.access@mindspring.com
"Reach low orbit and you're halfway to anywhere in the Solar System"
- Robert A. Heinlein