Today was rumored to be one of the days that NASA would announce the winner or winners of contracts for the next phase of the agency’s commercial crew program, called Commercial Crew Transportation Capability (CCtCap). Barring an unlikely last-second [...]]]>

Boeing’s CST-100 commercial crew spacecraft approaches the International Space Station in this illustration. (credit: Boeing)

Today was rumored to be one of the days that NASA would announce the winner or winners of contracts for the next phase of the agency’s commercial crew program, called Commercial Crew Transportation Capability (CCtCap). Barring an unlikely last-second announcement, that won’t happen, but NASA did have some things to say yesterday about commercial crew.

In a press release Thursday, NASA highlighted a “summer of advancements” with the three companies that have Commercial Crew Integrated Capability (CCiCap) awards from NASA, as well as Blue Orion, which is working on an unfunded extension of its earlier Commercial Crew Development 2 (CCDev-2) award. “We have a set of detailed criteria drawn up so we can adequately evaluate what they are doing and they can tell us where adjustments fit in with their system’s overall success,” NASA commercial crew program manager Kathy Lueders said in the statement. “It’s exactly what we had in mind when we kicked off this effort four years ago.”

Perhaps the biggest development was word that Boeing had completed its final two CCiCap milestones, including an integrated critical design review (CDR) of its CST-100 spacecraft, which Boeing heralded with its own release. “The challenge of a CDR is to ensure all the pieces and sub-systems are working together,” John Mulholland, manager of commercial crew efforts at Boeing, said in the release. “Now we look forward to bringing the CST-100 to life.”

The other two CCiCap awardees, Sierra Nevada Corporation (SNC) and SpaceX, still have some milestones on their agreements that may not be completed until early next year. SNC recently completed a review of its Dream Chaser engineering test article with NASA officials in advance of its second free flight, planned for later this year. SpaceX, meanwhile, is working through some reviews before it performs two abort tests of its Dragon V2 spacecraft. Earlier this month, SpaceX’s Garrett Reisman said those tests, one from ground level and the other in flight on a Falcon 9, are planned for November and January, respectively.

All three companies, meanwhile, are anxiously awaiting when NASA will award CCtCap contracts. Thursday’s NASA release offered no new guidance: “In August or September, NASA plans to award one or more contracts that will provide the agency with commercial services to transport astronauts to and from the International Space Station by the end of 2017.”

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) announced Tuesday it has awarded study contracts to three teams, representing a mix of established and entrepreneurial space companies, to study concepts for a reusable suborbital spaceplane.

DARPA said [...]]]>

Boeing’s concept for the XS-1 spaceplane, one of three selected by DARPA for Phase 1 studies. (credit: Boeing)

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) announced Tuesday it has awarded study contracts to three teams, representing a mix of established and entrepreneurial space companies, to study concepts for a reusable suborbital spaceplane.

DARPA said it awarded contracts to three teams: Boeing, working with Blue Origin; Masten Space Systems, working with XCOR Aerospace; and Northrop Grumman, working with Virgin Galactic. The contracts, for phase one of the Experimental Spaceplane 1 (XS-1) program, cover initial design work on concepts for the vehicle, designed to serve as a reusable lower stage of a low-cost launch system for medium-sized satellites.

“We chose performers who could prudently integrate existing and up-and-coming technologies and operations, while making XS-1 as reliable, easy-to-use and cost-effective as possible,” said DARPA XS-1 program manager Jess Sponable in a DARPA statement announcing the contracts. “We’re eager to see how their initial designs envision making spaceflight commonplace—with all the potential military, civilian and commercial benefits that capability would provide.”

The DARPA statement did not reveal the size of the contracts. However, DARPA has earlier announced, though a Federal Business Opportunities posting, a contract award to Masten valued at just under $3 million. Boeing, in its own press release about the contract, said its contract was valued at $4 million, although it wasn’t clear if that included any award to Blue Origin.

Boeing also released an illustration of its XS-1 concept, a winged vehicle. “Boeing brings a combination of proven experience in developing launch systems and reusable space vehicles, along with unparalleled expertise in the development and fielding of highly operable and cost-effective transportation systems,” said Steve Johnston, director of Boeing’s Phantom Works Advanced Space Exploration division, in the Boeing release.

The goal of the XS-1 program is to develop a vehicle capable of flying ten times in ten days, including at one least one flight to Mach 10. The XS-1, coupled with an expendable upper stage, would be able to launch satellites weighing up to about 2,270 kilograms into low Earth orbit for no more than $5 million a flight. The vehicle could also serve as hypersonics technology testbed. DARPA will select a company in a Phase 2 some time next year to build the XS-1.

One decade ago, hopes were high for suborbital space tourism. Scaled Composites had performed the first powered test flight of SpaceShipOne in December of 2003, and other than a minor landing mishap, the company seemed to be on track for [...]]]>

SpaceShipTwo during its first powered test flight on April 29, 2013. (credit: Virgin Galactic/MarsScientific.com)

One decade ago, hopes were high for suborbital space tourism. Scaled Composites had performed the first powered test flight of SpaceShipOne in December of 2003, and other than a minor landing mishap, the company seemed to be on track for flying into space in the new year, putting it on the inside track to win the $10-million Ansari X PRIZE before it expired at the end of 2004. That, many believed, would usher in an era of suborbital space tourism by Scaled and other companies, including other X PRIZE competitors, in the following years.

The future, though, turned out a little differently. Scaled did win the X PRIZE with SpaceShipOne, performing suborbital flights in late September and early October of 2004 (as well as a test flight in June.) Scaled also announced a deal with Sir Richard Branson’s Virgin Group, establishing a venture called Virgin Galactic that planned to perform flights using a new vehicle, called SpaceShipTwo, as soon as late 2007.

But six years after that initial start date, SpaceShipTwo is still not yet in commercial service. Building a new, and bigger, vehicle, with a larger version of the hybrid rocket motor that powered SpaceShipOne has turned out to be a far greater challenge than expected in the heady days of 2004. And the other teams who were competing for the X PRIZE in the early 2000s have largely faded away—the da Vinci Project, anyone?

Still, there are signs of optimism for 2014. While development of SpaceShipTwo has been slow, Virgin Galactic did achieve some milestone in 2013, most notably the first powered flight of the vehicle in April. However, more than four months passed before SS2 made a second powered flight, in early September. A third powered flight was reportedly planned for mid-December but scrubbed by poor weather; it’s likely to be rescheduled for early January, after the holiday break ends for Scaled and Virgin.

Virgin did put the year’s developments in a positive perspective in a blog post by Branson on Monday, which included a 90-second video recap of highlights of the past year. It also included undated footage of a full-duration (approximately 55 seconds) burn of a hybrid rocket engine on a test stand; that engine has long been perceived as the limiting factor in SpaceShipTwo’s development.

“We are truly in the final phase of preparations for commercial service,” George Whitesides, CEO of Virgin Galactic, said in the video. When that commercial service will begin isn’t stated, but the company expects that to be some time in 2014; coverage of Virgin’s deal with NBC Universal to broadcast the first commercial SpaceShipTwo flight mentioned a date of August 2014. That, though, is contingent on Virgin making sufficient progress on the test program, which appears to be going slowly so far.

Virgin isn’t the only company in the suborbital spaceflight market. Just down the flightline at Mojave Air and Space Port from Scaled and The Spaceship Company (the Virgin-owned entity that will manufacture SpaceShipTwo and WhiteKnightTwo vehicles), XCOR Aerospace has been working on its Lynx vehicle. Its development has also been slow going, although the company has in recent months been actively blogging work on the Lynx and associated activities, like engine tests. In the company’s most recent release, about a payload integrator agreement with the Czech Space Office, XCOR said flights of the Lynx Mark I prototype will begin in 2014.

XCOR is selling seats on the Lynx through another company, Space Expedition Corporation, or SXC. It’s best known for the contest it held in 2013 with Unilever, whose products include Axe deodorants and related products. That worldwide contest culminated earlier this month with Axe Apollo Space Academy, which awarded 23 trips on Lynx flights earlier this month to contestants after a week of testing and training in Florida.

Blue Origin is also working, slowly, on a suborbital vehicle. In early December, it issued a press release and held a media teleconference—both rare events for the publicity-averse company—to discuss a test of its BE-3 rocket engine, which flew a simulated suborbital flight profile. Company president Rob Meyerson said suborbital flights of its New Shepard vehicle should begin “in the next several years,” without being more specific.

While Blue Origin, Virgin Galactic, and XCOR Aerospace all plan to continue development of their suborbital vehicles for space tourism and research activities in 2014, a fourth company is unlikely to follow. In August, Armadillo Aerospace founder John Carmack said in a speech that his company was out of funds and in “hibernation mode” because of a lack progress after a suborbital test flight in January that suffered a parachute failure. Carmack said the company would remain in hibernation until he found an outside investor or “there’s another liquidity event where I’m comfortable throwing another million dollars a year into things,” as he had previously supported the company with his “crazy money” that he has since exhausted.

Masten Space Systems is not in the suborbital space tourism business—its focus is on flying experiments and technology demonstrations—but it has been quietly working on some vehicles. At the Next-Generation Suborbital Researchers Conference (NSRC) in Colorado in June, Masten chief operating officer Sean Mahoney called 2013 “a critical year” for the company as it decides whether to continue work on low-level technology demonstrators or pursue a suborbital vehicle that can fly to 100 kilometers. If the company has made a decision on its direction for 2014, it’s kept that quiet so far.

The article linked to in the preceding paragraph also shows how the schedule slips for other companies continue: at NSRC less than seven months ago, Virgin Galactic was predicting test flights of SpaceShipTwo to space by the end of the year, while XCOR said Lynx text flights would begin by late in the year. Neither, though, happened. As 2014 begins, companies continue to promise major developments, but the slow progress and delayed schedules of the past suggest that people should continue to be patient.

When NASA announced plans earlier this year to lease Kennedy Space Center’s [...]]]>

A NASA illustration of a notional commercial rocket on the pad at Launch Complex 39A at the Kennedy Space Center. NASA selected SpaceX to begin discussions on a lease to allow the company to launch Falcon rockets from the pad. (credit: NASA/KSC)

When NASA announced plans earlier this year to lease Kennedy Space Center’s Launch Complex 39A (LC-39A), a pad used for Space Shuttle launches but no longer needed by NASA, it probably didn’t anticipate the legal battle that resulted. Only two companies, Blue Origin and SpaceX, submitted proposals to lease the pad, but a dispute over whether the pad should be a multi-vehicle facility or exclusively used by one company delayed a decision on who should get access to the pad.

The logjam broke Thursday afternoon when the Government Accountability Office (GAO) released its decision on a bid protest filed in September by Blue Origin. The company claimed that NASA would not equally treat proposals submitted that would make LC-39A a multi-vehicle facility, versus one exclusively used by one company. (Blue Origin had submitted such a proposal, while SpaceX had originally submitted plans to make exclusive use of the pad.) Included in Blue Origin’s complaint was a comment by NASA administrator Charles Bolden earlier in the year, who said neighboring LC-39B was the preferred site of a multi-user launch pad (including for NASA’s own Space Launch System).

The GAO, in its decision, concluded that it did have jurisdiction to consider the dispute, something NASA had not agreed was the case. However, the GAO found no evidence that NASA favored one type of lease proposal over the other. “In the final analysis, we agree with the agency that the AFP contemplates two possible approaches, but includes no preference for one approach versus another,” the GAO concluded, denying Blue Origin’s protest.

When the GAO released its decision, NASA didn’t indicate when it would make a decision about the lease of LC-39A. It did not, though, end up wasting any time: on Friday afternoon, NASA announced it was entering into negotiations with SpaceX for leasing the pad. “NASA made the selection decision Thursday after the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) denied a protest filed against the Agency by Blue Origin LLC on Sept. 13,” NASA stated in the release. The agency explained that it continued to evaluate the proposals while awaiting the GAO decision, and thus was ready to move as soon as the protest was formally denied.

And, as it turns out, the debate over whether LC-39A should be an exclusive-use or multi-use pad turns out to be a moot one. When the controversy over the pad erupted in September, with dueling letters from members of Congress supporting both Blue Origin’s and SpaceX’s bids, SpaceX announced it was open to allowing other companies to use the pad if they wanted. “At the time we submitted the bid, SpaceX was unaware any other parties had interest in using the pad,” the company said then. “However, if awarded this limited duration lease on 39A, SpaceX would be more than happy to support other commercial space pioneers at the pad, and allow NASA to make use of the pad if need be.” Blue Origin has indicated recently they would not be ready to begin test flights of their orbital vehicle until 2018, so SpaceX might not have much company at LC-39A for a while.

Unlike some of its fellow NewSpace companies, Blue Origin keeps a very low, even secretive profile about its activities. The company, founded and funded by Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos, has gained a reputation for saying very little [...]]]>

Blue Origin tests its BE-3 liquid oxygen/liquid hydrogen engine at its West Texas site. (credit: Blue Origin)

Unlike some of its fellow NewSpace companies, Blue Origin keeps a very low, even secretive profile about its activities. The company, founded and funded by Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos, has gained a reputation for saying very little about what it’s up to. ““We like to talk about things after we’ve done them, and not before that, and hopefully you’ll be hearing a lot from us in the future,” Brett Alexander, director of business development and strategy at the company, said at a human spaceflight symposium in October at the US Naval Academy.

And, earlier this week, we did hear a little more from Blue Origin. The company held a rare teleconference with reporters tied to a press release—itself a rare event—about the latest tests of the company’s BE-3 engine. The engine, which uses liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen propellants, will power the company’s New Shepard suborbital vehicle and, eventually, the upper stage of a planned orbital launch vehicle.

Blue Origin said it has fired the engine more than 160 times to date, with a cumulative burn time of 9,100 seconds. In the test highlighted by the company in its Tuesday announcement, the engine performed a “full mission duty cycle” of the type it would perform if being used a New Shepard flight. The engine fired at full thrust (490,000 newtons, or 110,000 pounds-force) for 145 seconds to simulate the boost phase of the flight, then shut down for four and a half minutes before firing again at less than a quarter of its boost phase thrust to simulate a powered landing. Blue Origin conducted the tests at its facility north of Van Horn in west Texas.

The test, Blue Origin president Rob Meyerson told reporters Tuesday, was part of the company’s unfunded extension of its Commercial Crew Development phase 2 (CCDev-2) Space Act Agreement with NASA. “This was one of the three milestones in our unfunded CCDev-2 agreement,” he said. The other two, he added, are reviews of cryogenic propellant tanks for New Shepard and an interim design review of the company’s orbital space vehicle.

The upper-stage version of the BE-3, dubbed the BE-3U, would be at least slightly different from the BE-3 that powers Blue Origin’s suborbital vehicle. The BE-3U will feature a different nozzle to account for the different expansion ratio at higher altitudes. Meyerson said there could also be other manufacturing changes to the BE-3U since it is designed to be an expendable engine, while the BE-3 used for New Shepard is reusable.

While the company was happy to talk about the recent engine test, Meyerson, keeping to company tradition, was less specific about the company’s future plans. “We’re in the development phases now, so we’re not going to talk about flight schedules, pricing, or any other details like that,” he said at the beginning of the press conference. Asked later for some general timeline of activity, Meyerson said we could expect the company to start flying New Shepard “in the next several years” while the company develops an orbital vehicle in parallel. For the latter, Meyerson offered a more specific date for its first orbital flights: the “2018 timeframe.”

That’s the claim of the obituary of William Wright Kuhn, a mathematician and [...]]]> Blue Origin is best known for its work developing suborbital and orbital reusable spacecraft (well, that, and its infamous secrecy about that work.) But the company at least once had interest in a different topic, according to an unusual source: planetary defense.

That’s the claim of the obituary of William Wright Kuhn, a mathematician and consultant who passed away last month. The obituary, published Tuesday in the Philadelphia Daily News, states that Kuhn worked as a consultant for Blue Origin from 1999 to 2006. (The start date is one year before the company was formally incorporated.) “His primary work was to help develop a sunlight-powered spacecraft whose purpose was to prevent asteroids or comets from hitting Earth,” the obituary claims, adding that, besides its space transportation work, Blue Origin “is also working on the problem of Earth being bombarded by astronomical drifters bent on destruction.”

“His expertise in math-physics was invaluable,” adds a separate obituary of Kuhn published by his funeral home in South Carolina. “In addition, using his technical and management skills, he was key in helping to identify and manage lines of promising research and the scientists performing the work.”

This appears to be the first time that Blue Origin has been publicly linked to any kind of planetary defense work. However, at least in the early years of the company, Blue Origin did cast a wide net in studying advanced technologies. In The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon, the new book about the founder of Amazon.com and Blue Origin, author Brad Stone noted that, when he first wrote about the company for Newsweeek a decade ago (the first public account of Blue Origin), the company “was also funding forward-looking research into new propulsion systems, like wave rotors and rockets powered by ground-based lasers.” Spacecraft for planetary defense might also fit into that “forward-looking research” category.

Blue Origin has developed a reputation over the years as a notoriously secretive company, only grudgingly releasing information about the company and its plans. While other companies hold high-profile events [...]]]>

Blue Origin’s PM2 suborbital experimental vehicle, shown here on a flight before being lost during a test flight in August 2011. (Credit: Blue Origin)

Blue Origin has developed a reputation over the years as a notoriously secretive company, only grudgingly releasing information about the company and its plans. While other companies hold high-profile events for media and customers (hi, Virgin Galactic!) or issue press releases about their ongoing efforts, Blue Origin only rarely issues releases or discloses information, which means those interested in the company hang on, and often try to parse, any words said by company leadership, including founder Jeff Bezos.

On Friday, Bezos did discuss Blue Origin in an on-stage interview Friday that was part of the grand opening of the Bezos Center of Innovation at Seattle’s Museum of History and Industry. As reported by Seattle technology publication GeekWire, Bezos said that the company was now up to 300 employees, the first time in recent memory the company has disclosed a headcount. That makes it small compared to SpaceX, which now has over 3,000 employees, but likely on a par with the Virgin Galactic/The Spaceship Company team developing SpaceShipTwo, and much larger than other suborbital companies like XCOR Aerospace and Masten Space Systems.

“The project is going extremely well,” Bezos said of the company’s efforts to develop suborbital and orbital reusable spacecraft, according to the GeekWire report. He said the company is working on its third iteration of its New Shepard suborbital vehicle, adding that he hopes this is the final iteration before beginning commercial service, although he didn’t offer a timetable for that.

Bezos regularly devotes time to Blue Origin, according to an excerpt of a new book about Bezos and his more famous company, Amazon.com, published in the latest issue of Bloomberg Businessweek. Author Brad Stone writes that Bezos “moonlights” a day a week at the company. (According to the book itself, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon, just published today, Bezos spends each Wednesday at Blue Origin.)

Blue Origin has also been working on an orbital vehicle concept that would launch initially on top of an existing rocket like an Atlas V, but eventually on the company’s own reusable boosters. The company got some funding and technical support from NASA under the Commercial Crew Development (CCDev) program, and although Blue Origin elected not to continue under the next funded phase of the program, Commercial Crew Integrated Capability, it has extended the Space Act Agreement it had under its CCDev-2 award to permit additional, unfunded cooperation with NASA. Bezos said that the company’s orbital vehicle would be ready for flights in 2018, according to the GeekWire report, but didn’t mention how it would be paid for given the lack of NASA funding.

Those orbital flights, though, would likely come well after the suborbital vehicle begins service. “We will be able to have tens, if not low hundreds of flights [suborbitally] to prove out that flight heritage before putting people in orbit,” Brett Alexander, director of business development and strategy, said at a conference on human spaceflight organized by the US Naval Institute and held at the Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, earlier this month.

Blue Origin, of course, has also been locked in a controversy with SpaceX over their competing bids to lease Kennedy Space Center’s Launch Complex 39A; Blue Origin has proposed a multi-user commercial facility on the former shuttle launch pad while SpaceX originally sought an exclusive use agreement. SpaceX’s Elon Musk was openly skeptical of Blue Origin’s ability to use the launch pad any time in the next five years, telling Space News that “we are more likely to discover unicorns dancing in the flame duct” of the pad than Blue Origin showing up with an orbital spacecraft to launch in the next five years.

However, Blue Origin has famously also taken the long view, not surprising for a company with the motto “Gradatim Ferociter” (roughly translated as “step by step, with ferocity”). Other than the $25.7 million it received from NASA, Alexander said the rest of the company’s funding has come from Bezos, accounting for “well more than 90 percent” of the company’s total investment so far (suggesting a total investment of well more than $250 million), and that this would continue for the foreseeable future.

“Fundamentally, we are on a journey that is about changing spaceflight from being dangerous and expensive into something that’s accessible to a broader sector of humanity,” Alexander said. “We view it as a long-term endeavor, something that’s 20, 30, 40 years in the making.”

And for the secrecy? “I think the reality is that we’re just very quiet,” Alexander said. “We like to talk about things after we’ve done them, and not before that, and hopefully you’ll be hearing a lot from us in the future.”