As a small, entrepreneurial space company, XCOR Aerospace has found innovative ways to test and demonstrate its technology. One of its best-known examples was the EZ-Rocket, a Long-EZ plane fitted with twin rocket engines built by XCOR. The company announced this week that it did something similar, using another mode of transportation to test technology intended for its suborbital spaceplane.
XCOR wanted to test the bearings that are used by the piston pump in its rocket engines, but found that conventional test stands were expensive. “The pump test stand costs about $500 a minute to run,” said XCOR chief engineer Dan DeLong in the video above. Instead, they found the bearings could be used in the engine of the Triumph Street Triple motorcycle, which has a similar horsepower as XCOR’s engines and a similar arrangement of cylinders. And, as it turns out, the motorcycle is a lot cheaper than a test stand. “The motorcycle [cost] is gasoline,” DeLong said.
The Falcon 9 rocket that will launch SpaceX's Dragon spacecraft on its upcoming test flight undergoes a hotfire test on April 30. (Credit: SpaceX)
Updated 7:45 pm: As expected, SpaceX announced late Friday that it’s slipping its next planned launch attempt to May 19, with a backup date of May 22. “SpaceX and NASA are nearing completion of the software assurance process,” SpaceX announced, explaining the new launch dates. “Thus far, no issues have been uncovered during this process, but with a mission of this complexity we want to be extremely diligent.” That May 19th launch would take place at 4:55 am EDT (0855 GMT), which is either very late on a Friday night or very early on a Saturday morning, depending on whether you’re a night owl or early bird.
In a separate statement, NASA endorsed the revised launch date. “After additional reviews and discussions between the SpaceX and NASA teams, we are in a position to proceed toward this important launch,” said NASA associate administrator Bill Gerstenmaier. “There are a few remaining open items but we are ready to support SpaceX for its new launch date of May 19.”
In a Twitter chat with the Associated Press on Thursday afternoon, SpaceX’s Elon Musk indicated a new launch date hasn’t been set yet. “Figuring out new no-earlier-than launch date with NASA. Should know in next few days,” he said in a tweet that, curiously, has since been deleted. (The quote is from one of a number of retweets of his original comment.) In addition, one NASA manifest that previously listed a “NET 5/10/2012″ date for the launch now lists it only as “TBD” (to be determined), but putting it after a May 15 launch of a Soyuz mission to the ISS as well as a May 17 launch of a Japanese rocket on a mission not related to the ISS. All that suggests that a May 10 launch is unlikely, and that they’ll wait until after the Soyuz is at the ISS and its new crew settled in before trying again.
It appears highly unlikely that SpaceX will be ready to launch its Dragon spacecraft to the International Space Station (ISS) on Monday as previously planned. Word first came out Tuesday night that the launch was in danger of slipping to give the company more time to get the Dragon ready for its mission to the ISS. Wednesday afternoon, SpaceX provided the following statement: “At this time, a May 7th launch appears unlikely. SpaceX is continuing to work through the software assurance process with NASA. We will issue a statement as soon as a new launch target is set.” SpaceX hasn’t issued a statement since then, but one NASA manifest already has the launch listed as “NET [no earlier than] 5/10/2012″.
May 10 is the previously-announced backup date for the May 7 launch date. Beyond that, though, SpaceX would have to stand down until after a Soyuz launch scheduled for the night of May 14.
While Planetary Resources and SpaceX have been getting all the attention in the last couple of weeks given the former’s announcement of its asteroid mining plans and the latter’s upcoming test flight to the ISS, Virgin Galactic has been active as well. Those announcements, interestingly, have been concentrated in the United Arab Emirates, the home of one of the venture’s major investors and potential future operating location for the company.
On April 17, Virgin announced it had hired Steve Landeene as its chief advisor for “Spaceport Aub Dhabi”. Landeene will be responsible for “developing a roadmap”, as the company put it, for a future spaceport in the emirate, although with no specific timeframe for its development. Abu Dhabi is home to Aabar Investments, which took an approximately one-third stake in Virgin in 2009 and gained regional rights for Virgin Galactic operations. Landeene had been executive director of Spaceport America from 2007 to 2010, although he resigned in April 2010 under something of a cloud about a land deal he was involved with near the spaceport.
Last Thursday the Wall Street Journal (via Zawya Dow Jones) reported from Doha, Qatar, that SpaceShipTwo engine development was nearly complete. “Within a month or two, we expect we’ll have an engine we can put in the [spacecraft] vehicle,” Virgin Galactic president and CEO George Whitesides said. That would put them on a path towards beginning powered flight tests by late this year and beginning commercial service by the end of next year. (In a brief conversation Saturday in Washington, where he was on a panel at the USA Science and Engineering Festival, Whitesides told me that the motor that will be ready for SpaceShipTwo soon will be a “starter” motor for short-duration powered tests, not the full motor.)
That is an agressive goal: assuming it keeps ticket prices at $200,000 each, $500 million requires selling 2,500 tickets a year which, at six customers per flight, works out to nearly 420 flights a year, more than one a day. Even if they’re able to find additional revenue streams, such as flying experiments, that can increase their per-flight revenue, it will still require a high flight rate.
A SpaceX Falcon 9 sits on the pad at Cape Canaveral in advance of Monday's hot fire test. (Credit: SpaceX)
Update 8:30 pm: It took a couple of tries, but SpaceX did carry out the static fire test successfully on Monday. The countdown to the original T-0 time of 3 pm EDT stopped with 47 seconds to go. The company said an unspecified anomaly caused the flight computer to stop the count. After resolving the issue, the countdown proceeded and the engines ignited for two seconds at 4:15 pm EDT (2015 GMT). “So far things look good. Engines fired for 2 seconds, as scheduled. Engineers will now review data as we continue preparations for the upcoming launch,” the company said in an emailed statement.
Elon Musk, though, put it a little more succinctly:
Woohoo, rocket hold down firing completed and all looks good!!
One other note: while the test was webcast, there was virtually no information provided by the company during the test, especially after the original countdown was aborted. Even the company’s updates on Twitter were remarkably terse:
Hopefully on the upcoming actual launch this Monday the company will have a freer flow of information.
Original Post:SpaceX plans to carry out a “hot fire” test of its Falcon 9 rocket on the launch pad today, one of the final tests leading up to next Monday’s scheduled launch of a Dragon spacecraft on a test flight to the International Space Station. SpaceX has scheduled the test, where the Falcon 9’s nine first-stage engines are briefly ignited, for 3 pm EDT (1900 GMT) today. The test will be webcast on the SpaceX web site starting at 2:30 pm EDT.
The test is one of the last major milestones before the launch of that Falcon 9 carrying a Dragon spacecraft, currently scheduled for 9:38 am EDT (1338 GMT) May 7. The Dragon will fly on what SpaceX and NASA call the “C2+” mission for the Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) program, making a close approach to the station and, if all goes well, berthing with the station. A completely successful flight would allow SpaceX to begin commercial cargo deliveries to the ISS later this year, although both the company and the space agency have emphasized that this is a test flight.
A day after announcing they wouldn’t make their previously scheduled launch date of April 30, SpaceX announced it has set a new launch date of May 7 for its Dragon demonstration mission to the International Space Station. “NASA and the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station have approved SpaceX’s request to set May 7th as the target launch date for the upcoming COTS 2 mission,” a company spokesperson said by email. NASA issued its own brief statement supporting the new launch date for the mission, with this quote from NASA associate administrator Bill Gerstenmaier: “We appreciate that SpaceX is taking the necessary time to help ensure the success of this historic flight. We will continue to work with SpaceX in preparing for the May 7 launch to the International Space Station.”
The May 7 launch is scheduled for 9:38 am EDT (1338 GMT). A backup launch date of May 10 is also available.
Illustration of Planetary Resources Inc.'s initial spacecraft, the Arkyd-101 space telescope in Earth orbit. (credit: Planetary Resources, Inc.)
Science-fiction authors and space commercialization advocate alike have dreamed for decades of mining asteroids. So when Seattle-based Planetary Resources, Inc. announced last week it will unveil on Tuesday “a new space venture with a mission to help ensure humanity’s prosperity†that has the backing of an all-star list of investors—Larry Page, Eric Schmidt, James Cameron, and Ross Perot, Jr., among others—the Internet exploded with visions of 21st century ’49ers heading out to the asteroid belt to make trillions of dollars mining gold and platinum.
That vision, as it turns out, is partially correct. Planetary Resources does plan to mine asteroids, eventually, but is taking an incremental approach with a series of robotic missions in Earth orbit and beyond to get there. And once they’re ready to start mining, the first resources they’re interested in are not precious metals but instead volatile compounds like water that can be used for propellant depots, enabling a wide range of commercial and government missions. In short, they’re initially more oil drillers than ore miners.
“Over the next five to ten years, considerable capability will be added in terms of launch vehicles and spacecraft,” company co-founder and co-chairman Eric Anderson said in a telephone interview last week, citing developments in commercial and government crewed and other vehicles. “The ability to use space resources to help explore space is a missing piece.”
Propellant depots have been an area of interest in recent years as a way to lower launch costs by allowing spacecraft to launch “dry”—that is, with empty tanks—and then gas up in space; or, to refuel their tanks to extend their missions. For propellant depots to work, though, the cost of bringing the propellant up separately and operating the depots would have to be less that simply launching fully-fueled spacecraft on larger rockets. Depot advocates in the past have suggested that supplying depots with relatively inexpensive propellants could be an ideal market for new, untried low-cost launch vehicles, particularly reusable launch vehicles.
In Anderson’s vision, obtaining water from near Earth asteroids and hauling it to propellant depots in Earth orbit or in cislunar space (such as one of the Lagrange points) would provide propellant in the form of liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen for spacecraft at a tenth of the cost of hauling that water from the Earth. “I think there’s a market that, once the capability is there, will be easy to demonstrate,” Anderson said.
“I think we’ll have propellant depots in operation within the decade, before 2020,” Anderson said. He added that the company is open to either operating the depots itself or selling fuel to other depot operators, who would, in turn, sell propellant to spacecraft that needed it.
The company isn’t forgetting about the potential to mine asteroids for precious metals that are becoming harder and more expensive to mine on Earth, Anderson said. “I’m certainly not shying away from emphasizing that, but it’s a less urgent example,” he said. He said that “certainly within 20 years” there will be a strong, positive case for extracting such metals from asteroids. “I think the near-term driver for the space resources market is volatiles from near Earth objects” for refueling spacecraft and supporting robotic and human exploration beyond low Earth orbit, he said.
Getting to the point of extracting those volatiles and other resources will be a multi-step process. The company plans to launch its first spacecraft within 18 to 24 months that will go into low Earth orbit and carry telescopes and instruments to observe near Earth objects, characterizing them to determine which ones would be most promising to visit by future missions.
The “Arkyd-101″ spacecraft will be small and simple, said company president Chris Lewicki in a separate interview. Each spacecraft will fit into a box 40 centimeters on a side and weigh about 20 kilograms. Planetary Resources will look for secondary launch opportunities—hitching a ride on a larger spacecraft’s launch—to launch these spacecraft, of which several will be flown.
Within a few years of launching those Earth orbiting missions, the company then plans to launch “swarms” of small spacecraft on missions to candidate asteroids to study them in situ. Lewicki said that phase would include missions to rendezvous with near Earth objects as well as “intercept” missions to asteroids passing close to the Earth “in the spirit of the Ranger missions done to the Moon in the 1960s,” although not necessarily impacting the asteroid.
Lewicki said there were several keys to the company’s technical approach, including technology, small teams, simplicity of design, and overall mindset. For example, on the technology side, the company has been doing work on optical, or laser, communications that would enable high-bandwidth communications among the spacecraft and with Earth while requiring only limited power. Arkyd Astronautics, also run by Lewicki, received a $125,000 Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) award from NASA in 2011 for work on “Multi-functional Optical Subsystem Enabling Laser Communication on Small Satellites”.
The company has attracted a number of experienced people from JPL to help develop its spacecraft. Lewicki himself worked on the Mars Exploration Rovers and the Phoenix Mars Lander. “We have many people on my team that I brought from JPL who were as excited about the opportunity as I was that they jumped ship from Mars Science Laboratory and other exciting projects to really redefine the way robotic space exploration can be done,” he said.
Lewicki likened the company’s efforts to perform low-cost planetary exploration—and eventually exploitation—to how Scaled Composites was able to develop a crewed suborbital vehicle, SpaceShipOne, in the early 2000s, an effort that four decades earlier required the resources of a nation. “In a lot of ways, what we’re focused on at Planetary Resources is doing the same for robotic exploration,” he said. “We’re putting forth missions like the Mariners and Rangers and Surveyors of the ’60s.” Now, though, he added, the technologies make such missions possible for a commercial company.
What financial resources that Planetary Resources can bring to bear is uncertain. Anderson did not respond to questions about the level of funding that the company has raised from its billionaire investors. He did indicate that, in the nearer term, the company could generate revenue by selling versions of its Arkyd-101 and other spacecraft to various customers, including for Earth observing applications. Anderson also would only say that they have “a number of thoughts” on how to accomplish the resource extraction missions to near Earth asteroids.
Lewicki was clearly eager to work on this, while understanding it will be a long term effort to extract asteroid resources. “For me, it’s just really exciting,” he said. “It’s just the promise and the hope that we’re actually gotten to a time and place where private resources and technology, and the foundation that NASA has laid,” can enable such an effort. “We are taking what is that first, necessary step.”
Late Monday, SpaceX announced that, in fact, they would need more time to test the vehicle’s software. A tweet from SpaceX founder Elon Musk broke the news:
Am pushing launch back approx a week to do more testing on Dragon docking code. New date pending coordination with @NASA.
The company provided a little more information about the delay in an email shortly after Musk’s announcement. “After reviewing our recent progress, it was clear that we needed more time to finish hardware-in-the-loop testing and properly review and follow up on all data,” the company announced. “While it is still possible that we could launch on May 3rd, it would be wise to add a few more days of margin in case things take longer than expected. As a result, our launch is likely to be pushed back by one week, pending coordination with NASA.”
SpaceX hasn’t announced a new launch date yet. A one-week delay would push the
April 30 launch to May 7. However, SpaceX previously indicated that they had preferred launch windows every three days in order to minimize the propellant needed to achieve orbit, preserving as much as possible for maneuvers around the ISS. That would suggest launch dates on May 6 or 9, if that three-day span between launch attempts holds.
On Monday, NASA and SpaceX officials met for a Flight Readiness Review (FRR) for SpaceX’s upcoming Dragon mission to the International Space Station (ISS). After the FRR, NASA announced at a press conference that they had given tentative approval for that April 30 launch, pending some final tests and simulations.
“Everything looks good as we head towards the April 30th launch date, but I would caution us all that there’s quite a bit of work that needs to be done,” said Bill Gerstenmaier, NASA’s associate administrator for human exploration and operations, at the post-FRR briefing. “There’s a good chance to make the 30th.” That additional work an additional long simulation and som additional software testing, Gerstenmaier said. NASA and SpaceX will assess their progress on April 23, although not in a formal FRR-like meeting, and proceed from there.
This mission, designated “C2+”, will combine the separate C2 and C3 missions in SpaceX’s original Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) awards. Dragon will first work to achieve the C2 mission requirements of approaching and maneuvering around the station. If successful, SpaceX and NASA will proceed with the C3 milestones, capped off by berthing the Dragon spacecraft to the station, which would take place as early as May 3, assuming an on-time launch at 12:22 pm EDT (1622 GMT) on April 30. Dragon will remain berthed to the station for about two and a half weeks before undocking and returning to Earth, splashing down in the Pacific off the California coast.
Both the space agency and the company emphasized that this mission is a test mission, and any problems don’t indicate a lack of capability or other systemic problems with the vehicle or commercial cargo in general. “This is a test flight,” said SpaceX CEO Elon Musk. “If we don’t succeed in berthing on this mission, we’ve got a couple of more missions later this year and I think we’ll succeed on one of those.”
If this mission does succeed in berthing, it will supply the station with some cargo. ISS program manager Michael Suffredini said the Dragon will carry 521 kilograms of cargo, primarily consumables and other crew provisions. It also will carry a NanoRacks payload with some student experiments. Dragon will also return 660 kilograms from the station back to Earth, although Suffredini said the exact manifest of “downmass” cargo remains to be determined.
If SpaceX misses the April 30 launch (which is an instantaneous window, so no margin for error in the event of weather or technical issues), a second launch window is on May 3. The gap between launch windows is for a variety of reasons, including seeking to minimize the propellant needed to put Dragon into orbit so it has more available for ISS maneuvers. If Dragon doesn’t launch either day, it will slip until at least mid May, deferring to an Atlas launch from the Cape and a Soyuz mission to the ISS planned for early May.
At the post-FRR briefing, both NASA and SpaceX praised each other and the spirit of cooperation between the two for this flight, which departs from the tradition of NASA-managed missions. ISS mission controllers in Houston and Dragon flight controllers at SpaceX’s Hawthorne, California, headquarters are learning to work together to understand each others’ capabilities and requirements to allow for a smooth mission, in much the same way NASA already does for cargo missions by ESA’s ATV and JAXA’s HTV spacecraft. “It’s been a learning experience, I think, for NASA and SpaceX,” said Suffredini. “We’ve really grown together as two organizations.”
Ben Brockert of Armadillo Aerospace said that work is continuing on their next suborbital rocket, called STIG-B. (Unlike past years, when a sizable Armadillo contingent attended Space Access, the rest of the company is back at Texas, hard at work on the rocket.) STIG-B will be a larger version of the STIG-A rocket that Armadillo launched from Spaceport America in New Mexico in December and January, on the latter flight reaching an altitude of about 95 kilometers, although its recovery system failed.
At NSRC Armadillo’s Neil Milburn said they wanted to launch STIG-B as soon as May, but at Space Access Brockert only said that they “want to fly this in the next few months.” One sticking point may not be technical but, instead, regulatory. The STIG-A launches took place under the so-called “amateur exemption” to FAA’s licensing rules for launches. STIG-B will be too big to fit under that rule. In addition, Brockert said that NASA’s Flight Opportunities program, which is providing payloads for those upcoming launches, doesn’t want those launches to take place under the exemption in any case. One option would be to get a experimental launch permit from the FAA, but launches performed under a permit cannot be done for hire, including for NASA. Instead, Armadillo is applying for a full-fledged launch license from the FAA. “That’s what Neil has been spending all of his time on recently,” Brockert said, with the hope that FAA doesn’t take the full 180-day waiting period allowed under law to review the application and award the license.
Dave Masten of Masten Space updated attendees on his company’s progress with its Xaero suborbital vehicle and other projects. Xaero, a vertical takeoff and landing vehicle, has performed a couple of free flights and a large number of tethered tests, the latter to (successfully) work out issues with the vehicle during landing. A second Xaero, called Xaero B, will fly high altitude missions, up to about 30 kilometers, in the near future. “I’m not going to promise any dates, but our internal targets are probably within a few months,” he said of those flights. Masten is also working on a follow-on vehicle, Xogdor, for suborbital flights; he said they have all the parts for it under development with plans to fly it by the end of this year, but are holding off on assembling it until the upcoming Xaero flights.
Masten has also been working on a project called Xeus that would convert a Centaur upper stage into a lander that could put up to 14 tons on the lunar surface. United Launch Alliance has provided Masten with a Centaur stage for terrestrial testing. Masten said that “ideally” he’d like the Office of the Chief Technologist (OCT) at NASA to fund some development of Xeus so it could fly on the first Space Launch System (SLS) demonstration launch in 2017, perhaps carrying a Discovery-class science payload for NASA. That, he admitted, would require cooperation among OCT and NASA’s Science Mission Directorate and Human Exploration and Operations Mission Directorate, “so it’s not going to happen, but it wold be great if it did.”
Mark Street of XCOR Aerospace gave an update on work on the first, or Mark 1, Lynx prototype. Pieces of that first Lynx are coming together in the company’s Mojave, California, facility, including a large fuselage section. The vehicle’s design, in particular the nose, fuselage, and tails, has been tweaked somewhat since the design was unveiled, thanks to an extensive series of wind tunnel tests to refine the spaceplane’s flight characteristics. “The aerodynamic design of Lynx has been a reflection of the need to balance the subsonic flying qualities of the airplane and the supersonic flying qualities of the airplane,” he said.
That work appears to be about done: he said a wind tunnel test in late March led to a couple of minor tweaks in the Lynx design that should “completely resolve” the remaining yaw and roll issues with the vehicle. “We think with those tweaks we have a configuration that’s ready to go,” Street said, with a final wind tunnel test in the next couple months to verify that those changes are sufficient. XCOR is still aiming to have a first, low-level test flight—“air under the gear‗by the end of this year, he said, as part of a gradual, incremental flight test program.
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