August 2009 Archives

Well perhaps long awaited by the two guys at the centre of Project Enterprise who have probably wondered whatever happened to the April 2009 interview Hyperbola did with them at the Space Access Society conference in Phoenix, Arizona - you can hear the wildlife in the background. But here it is anyway, I knew I hadn't lost it...

Warning: This video was taken with a Flip video camera and while attempts to improve the audio through Windows Movie Maker have been made this blog takes no responsibility for the quality at your end

Flightglobal's spaceflight analysis this week looks at the 10 August announced Commercial Crew Development (CCdev) programme and it and its participants' prospects when US president Barack Obama could kill all hopes for an instant market by not choosing commercial space transportation

Looking at the list of 50 or so companies that have expressed an interest in CCDev some names are more credible than others. All the aerospace primes. Lockheed Martin, the joint venture United Launch Alliance, ATK et al are there and their previous teaming partner PlanetSpace.

The problem for the primes is that to date they have not succeeded in bidding for commercial contracts. Beaten by Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) and Orbital Sciences in the Commercial Orbital Transportation Services and Commercial Resupply Services competitions these "old space" aerospace prime contractors are not obviously a good bet

Looking further down the list's aerospace industry food chain (or is that up?) and selecting on the basis of cashflow and technology and not just collective brain power SpaceX and Orbital spring out at the reader as does Bigelow Aerospace and Blue Origin

Orbital Sciences has been very radio silent with past Flightglobal interview requests not responded too and no reply to an email about its CCDev intentions, so its situation is difficult to judge as is Blue Origin's

The secrecy of Blue Origin and the resources of its alleged billionaire owner Jeff Bezos (alleged billionaire status not his ownership of the company) means that its position is also difficult to judge and could mean it is a wild card. However Blue Origin has only been aiming for a sub-orbital system and over the years its design has changed from a single-stage-to-suborbit vertical take-off vertical landing rocket towards a more conventional rocket and capsule

The team that Hyperbola thinks could be quite interesting is a Bigelow Aerospace, SpaceX partnership but is Bigelow, a company that has told Hyperbola it is to make a CCDev proposal, about to take a different turn?

The blogosphere is all abuzz with the outcome of yesterday's final public meeting of the Review of US human space flight plans committee

Hyperbola, despite being in Washington DC this week and the US for the past two and a bit weeks, has been somewhat hampered in its efforts to monitor proceedings because of the EAA Airventure airshow in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, the AIAA 45th Joint Propulsion Conference in Denver and the AUVSI Unmanned Systems North America 2009 conference, right here in the USA's capitol city (and some tourism around Utah and DC's national mall)

Despite that I found the time to write an analysis piece for our print title Flight International which you can find here. I was interested in how NASA was re-examining Constellation and what the committee's comments were about the "program of record", to use the technical term, when the Ares rocket work was presented at the Hunstville, Alabama meeting on 29 July

Looking at the media coverage now the final public meeting has taken place, Hyperbola's reacton is, but is that news, we knew that already? We knew that Constellation, in its current form, was unaffordable, we knew back in June that opting for Delta IV was not a cheap option, but I would have to say that the best headline prize goes to the RocketsAndSuch blog

Examining the realistic options we know that Atlas V is ruled out because of its Russian engines, and Augustine panel member and former Boeing Space Shuttle programme director Bo Bejmuk thinks its margins are to close to call

Delta IV could do the job apparently but you have to man rate it especially the RS-68 engines, and so why not use the Falcon 9 Heavy, it and its Merlin engines have been designed with NASA man rating standards from the get go?

Some panel members do indeed think that "commercial" has some sort of magic wand to do it cheaper and faster but in the Aerospace Corporation's view, people who have actually looked at the numbers, that is not so - and Hyperbola agrees

If you choose a Delta or Falcon then you have to redesign Orion for those launchers, unless you want to start again? Why not use SpaceX's Dragon you might ask, well that has not been designed to be lunar capable and until now the intention is to go back to the Moon

This all might sound like an argument for Ares I but it is in fact an argument about why the alternatives are not as great as their proponents claim. And as Bejmuk said at the 29 July meeting, and I qouted in the analysis article referred to above, if the US is going to change from Ares to something else it is got to be something "overwhelmingly better"

credit: Lockheed Martin / caption: leveraging the investment

Go here to find Lockheed Martin's Orion promotional material and three new videos about the alternate missions it is proposing for the crew exploration vehicle and its service module, which have the title "Leveraging the investment in Constellation". The videos are here, here and here.

credit Lockheed Martin / caption: when one Orion crew exploration vehicle is simply not enough

Lockheed Martin is proposing alternate uses for the Orion crew exploration vehicle (CEV) it is developing for NASA's Constellation programme

The image above shows two Orion's docked together for a near Earth object mission. Other alternate uses were given in a presentation by Lockheed's Brian Duffy at the AIAA 45th Joint Propulsion Conference in Denver, Colorado last week

Just as soon as Hyperbola gets the presentation it will post more

click on the image above to see a larger version in the same window browser

Scroll down the menu above to find Flightglobal's videos, all 13 of them, of Virgin Galactic activity at the Experimental Aircraft Association Airventure Oshkosh 2009 air show

credit Flight / caption: This is how WK2's rudder looked earlier this year

In its 23 April statement Scaled Composites said of WK2's development "We concluded the rudder aerodynamic modification tasks following flight 3", which maybe true, and while talking to reporters at Airventure Oshkosh air show on Monday 27 July Scaled's founder and chief engineer Burt Rutan discussed this but there have been further changes to the mothership's tail fin assembly, as can be seen in the pictures in this blog post

The above picture is how Virgin Galactic's WhiteKnight Two's rudder was earlier this year (and this rudder configuration was the same immediately after the June Mojave-Phoenix Mesa Gateway-Las Cruces, New Mexico flights) and below is a cropped picture taken by Hyperbola of the mothership while she sat in Aeroshell square at the Airventure Oshkosh air show on 29 July 2009


credit Flight / caption: the whole bottom of the rudder has been modified with mystery cables to boot 

Hyperbola has heard that following the rocket motor tests that Virgin Galactic publicised with videos earlier this year (and its prime contractor Scaled Composites reported on its online test logs) work is focusing on the flight weight engine

In all rocket engine projects intending to fly something there are engineering development units that are used so the design can be tested while components may be at an earlier level of maturity, earlier than they have to be come the final flying version

But eventually the development work has to approach the mass and performance engine targets required of the propelled vehicle

Hyperbola understands that testing and firings are ongoing and that while the Scaled test logs web page has not been updated since 20 May more videos and test logs can be expected later this year, in a few months time

Around the time the prototype SpaceShip Two will be rolled out for its unveiling and first captive carry flight on its mothership WhiteKnight Two Eve perhaps?

A concern expressed by this blog was that the Norman Augustine led review, all 90-odd days of it, would simply be too short to achieve anything and that the options this US Review of human spaceflight plans committee would come up with would just lead to another study 

Fortunately it would seem, according to sources brave enough to talk to Hyperbola, that Bolden will have a "forward plan" very soon after Augustine has briefed the US Senate and House of Representatives, dates for which are being organised now

This will follow the committee chairman's 14 August debrief to NASA administrator Charles Bolden and John Holdren, Office of Science and Technology Policy director - whose office kicked off the review on behalf of president Barack Obama's administration

The rapid timing for all this is apparently because political wheels are to be set in motion as regards the Congressional budgetary process. So it is nice to know everything but the engineering is driving the schedule

But fear not Hyperbola readers because this NASA announcement yesterday indicated that all would be revealed sooner than you think

The Aug. 12 meeting will be held from 1 to 5 p.m. EDT at the Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center Amphitheater, located at 1300 Pennsylvania Ave. NW in Washington. The agenda is:

1:00 to 5:00 p.m. Committee public deliberations:

Discussion of final options

Discussion of final report

Discussion of close-out activities

Hyperbola understands that all the Augustine materials will be made public on 12 August, and perhaps there won't even be set of secret appendices...

Coming back to this forward plan of Bolden's, some people have been getting quite excited about what Xcor founder and chief executive Jeff Greason's (pronounced Grey-son) propellant depot presentation means for the options that Augustine's committee could choose

At 2min 41s in the video above, care of Experimental Aircraft Association, Burt Rutan asks Sir Richard Branson about the prospects for developing an orbital system and Branson gives a cryptic answer

Rutan first spoke of an orbital version of this WhiteKnight, SpaceShipX launch system way back in 2004 when he visited the Royal Aeronautical Society

Thanks to Flightglobal freelancer Jeff Decker for pointing Hyperbola to this video

Hyperbola understands that the following will be options in the US Review of human spaceflight plans committee report that is to be about 100-pages long;

• A Space Shuttle extension with more flights beyond any "stretching out" of the current manifest
• The Heavy Lift Vehicle that is a variant of the famous "Shuttle-C" design
• Ares I crew launch vehicle and Orion crew exploration vehicle block one

The key aspect of the first two options is that they fit into the existing budget line. An advantage of HLV is that its cargo carrier could be operated along side the crewed orbiter

Other options Augustine's committee will put forward will require outlying years' budgets to be in excess of what Obama's fiscal year 2010 budget requested. Hyperbola is not aware of any Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicle options being included at this time

Various media reports have referred to subcommittees' of the Norman Augustine led review committee being pro-Shuttle extension but Hyperbola understands that the report itself, expected in a month's time, will have an option for continuation of Shuttle

Other media reports have referred to Augustine committee members identifying a likely 2017 start for Orion and Ares I. A fourth quarter 2008 report by the Congressional Budget Office made the same determination

Hyperbola has learnt that in the course of the reviews for NASA's return to the Moon Constellation programme, and its many avenues for meeting the new budget reality, the deletion of test flight Ares I-Y, an Ares I crew launch vehicle (CLV) with a dummy upper stage, is not without its problems

While there have been references to an Ares I-X Prime test flight in the blogosphere the planning reality that is emerging is that no Ares I-Y means that Orion 1, the test flight for the complete CLV, Orion crew exploration vehicle (CEV) stack, will be the first launch of any and all of the vehicle's operational hardware

While this is not without precedent, the Space Shuttle flew manned on its very first launch that brought together all its component parts, today NASA planners are concerned that without an earlier test run, including for the processing of the CEV and CLV and launch operations, there will be inevitable delays as obstacles are overcome

Such a learning curve is thought to not only threaten Orion 1's timing but also Orion 2's

credit FAA / caption: Babbitt gets a tour of WK2

New US Federal Aviation Administration administrator J. Randolph "Randy" Babbitt got a tour of Virgin Galactic's WhiteKnight Two at EAA Airventure Oshkosh last week. His agency's office of commercial space transportation will have to certify the mothership as a launch platform for SpaceShip Two and award Virgin Galactic its permits for flying its customers to above 100km (62miles) 

credit Flightglobal / caption: Sir Richard Branson is greeted after his demo flight

Go through to the extended portion of this blog post to watch all of Flightglobal's videos of Virgin Galactic activity at the Experimental Aircraft Association Airventure Oshkosh 2009 air show