SpaceShipTwo is nestled between the twin fuselages of WhiteKnightTwo during a flyby at Spaceport America in New Mexico on October 17.
On September 29th, SpaceShipTwo made its 16th glide flight, and first in three months, in the skies above Mojave Air and Space Port in California. The SpaceShipTwo test flight log at Scaled Composites indicates that the flight did not go exactly as planned:
Test card called for releasing the Spaceship from WhiteKnightTwo and immediately entering a rapid descent. Upon release, the Spaceship experienced a downward pitch rate that caused a stall of the tails. The crew followed procedure, selecting the feather mode to revert to a benign condition. The crew then defeathered and had a nominal return to base. Great flying by the team and good demo of feather system.
Scott Ostrem, chief engineer at The Spaceship Company, the Scaled-Virgin Galactic joint venture that will be manufacturing SpaceShipTwo and WhiteKnightTwo, offered an explanation at the International Symposium for Personal and Commercial Spaceflight (ISPCS) in Las Cruces, New Mexico, on Wednesday. “You come off the WhiteKnight and quickly going into a pitch-down attitude by design,” he said. “We pitched down a little too steeply on that flight and experienced a tail stall.”
There are several options to recover from such a stall, he said, one of them being using the vehicle’s unique feathering mechanism, designed to provide stability during reentry. “Our pilot chose to feather it. It’s an incredible testament to the feather design: instantly the vehicle stabilized at about 20, 30,000 feet,” Ostrem said. “We just then de-feathered and glided back down safely. It was a unique opportunity for us to prove out the feather design ata point where we weren’t necessarily intending to do it.”
That, however, has not stopped a series of rumors, whispered during breaks at the ISPCS and on the Internet, that the incident was more serious than what the companies have reported. Those include rumors that they were testing a maneuver in order to perform a drop test at the Spaceport America terminal dedication event held Monday. No such drop test took place, of course, but whatever happened did not prevent Virgin and Scaled from ferrying SpaceShipTwo from Mojave to the spaceport for the event.
Below is a brief video I shot of WhiteKnightTwo and SpaceShipTwo flying over the “Virgin Galactic Gateway to Space” terminal building at Spaceport America on Monday. You’ll see it coming in from the right in the distance, they going over the terminal building and almost straight overhead.
Sir Richard Branson, dangling from the top of Spaceport America's new terminal building, dedicates the building with a bottle of champagne. (credit: J. Foust)
It was the biggest line of the day—and Sir Richard Branson flubbed it.
Branson was dangling from the balcony Spaceport America’s new terminal building, halfway down the building’s glass wall. He and his son and daughter had joined a dance company, Project Bandaloop, for their performance on the building’s wall. After the dancers and Branson’s children rappelled down to the ground, Branson remained in place, and then had an oversized champagne bottle lowered to him so he could formally dedicate, and name, the building. “And, the name is, whoa!” he said as he uncorked the bottle, “Virgin Galactic Galactic.” And then, after a six-second pause, “Gateway to Space!”
While there was laughter and cheers from the several hundred people in attendance (“more than 800″, according to Virgin), some were left scratching their heads. “What did he say the name was?” one person in the media section asked. “Something about a gateway to space, I think,” said another. The building’s name, in fact, is now officially the “Virgin Galactic Gateway to Space.”
That, though, was a minor glitch in an event designed primarily to show off the spaceport and demonstrate Virgin’s continued commitment to flying SpaceShipTwo from the spaceport in the near future. The new name for the terminal building was one of the few new developments from the event. Virgin did announce some new research customers, including the Challenger Center (whose founder, June Scobee Rodgers, was in attendance). Virgin also announced its first hire for a new group of commercial pilots who will fly WK2 and SS2: Keith Colmer, an Air Force pilot who had previously applied to NASA’s astronaut corps but just missed the cut.
WhiteKnightTwo and SpaceShipTwo take off from Spaceport America's runway on a brief captive carry flight over the spaceport. (credit: J. Foust)
At a “press conference” during the event (which, despite the name, did not allow any questions from the media), Virgin Galactic officials played up the progress they’ve made in the last year and sought to set themselves apart from the competition. “There is no other company that is as close to flying people to space as Galactic,” said Virgin Galactic president and CEO George Whitesides. “There is no one else test flying vehicles that can take you and me into space. And there is no one whose vehicles are based on a design that has already been safely to space to people,” a reference to SS2’s precursor, SpaceShipOne.
WK2 and SS2 soar over Spaceport America's new terminal building. (credit: J. Foust)
New Mexico officials at the event, including Governor Susana Martinez and Congressman Steve Pearce, focused on the economic benefits of the spaceport, including both the jobs created during the spaceport’s construction and those that will be created when the spaceport begins operations. Martinez in particular saw the spaceport as both a way to inspire the state’s youth to study science and engineering, as well as a source of high-tech jobs. “As a young child, what could be more exciting than space travel?” she asked. “We want these new jobs to be created right here so that young New Mexicans don’t have to leave the state to find fulfilling work.”
Martinez, who past comments suggested she was at least somewhat skeptical about the $200-million investment in the spaceport, sounded a little excited herself about the spaceport. “I look forward to strengthening the partnership between the state and Virgin Galactic,” she said. Turning to Branson, she added, “And Richard, today I may have to add it to my bucket list.”
Virgin didn’t offer any new clues yesterday on when it will begin flights from Spaceport America. “Our contractors are working hard now to get the system ready for the first powered flights next year,” Whitesides said, a timeline similar to what he said early this month. He did add that another full-scale ground test of SpaceShipTwo’s rocket motor is planned “very soon”.
Virgin Galactic Gateway to Space, the new terminal building at Spaceport America. (credit: J. Foust)
The fact that Virgin is still some time from beginning flights at Spaceport America is perhaps a relief to New Mexico, since the “Virgin Galactic Gateway to Space”, while formally dedicated yesterday, isn’t quite done. Walk up to that distinctive glass wall—which, in the bright sunlight, acts like a mirror—and peer inside, and you see that the interior rooms that will host Virgin Galactic’s operations, astronaut lounge, and other facilities, are still unfurnished, with the walls and floors completely bare. In one case, a door leading into the building was still lacking a handle. However, the building can already serve one its primary purposes: serving as a hangar for WK2 and SS2, which is where they vehicles were housed Sunday when spaceport executive director Christine Anderson saw them for the first time. “It was so awesome to see that,” she said. “Then I thought, ‘Wow, it fits in the hangar. Super!'”
Virgin appeared very pleased with the building and its unique design, as well as its environmentally-friendly characteristics that won it a LEED Gold rating. “Simply put,” Branson said, “it is a 21st century building for a 21st century business.”
In a press release Thursday about NASA’s purchase of a SpaceShipTwo flight for research activities, Virgin Galactic provided an update on sales for its primary market, space tourism. “Virgin Galactic has already collected more than $58 million in deposits from 455 future tourist astronauts,” the release noted. Those are the largest figures that the company has cited for both customers and deposits to date. But how has its backlog grown in recent years?
To try to answer this, I dug through several years of my own notes as well as media reports and press releases. The result is the chart below, showing the number of customers Virgin Galactic has reported since the beginning of 2008:
It’s worth noting that in many cases the numbers given by the company are approximate: “nearly 300″, “over 350″, etc. For the purposes of the chart I’ve rounded up or down accordingly; in the case of the previous examples, they would be 300 and 350, respectively, in the chart. (Ideally I’d put in some error bars, but Google doesn’t support them in this chart.)
What this shows is that after a relatively flat 2009, Virgin has seen a steady increase in customers. (2009, it should be noted, is not as flat as the chart suggests, because of the rounding described above: the company reported “nearly 300″ in early 2009 and “over 300″ late in the year.) Over the last 17 months, from mid-May 2010 to Thursday, the company had seen an increase of 120 customers, a rate of a new customer every 4.3 days. During the nearly 22 months prior to that, from late July 2008 to mid-May 2010, the company had reported an increase of only 65 new customers, or one every 10.1 days. The sluggish growth then is not surprising given the economic crisis that started in 2008. Meanwhile, as the economy slowly improves Virgin is inching closer to flight, which may increase the interest among prospective customers.
This data set is certainly incomplete, based on a limited amount of research. If you’re aware of new or more accurate data, please let me know and I’ll update this chart accordingly.
Virgin Galactic president and CEO George Whitesides offered Saturday some clarity on the company’s plans to move ahead with the next phase of test flights of its SpaceShipTwo suborbital vehicle. Speaking at the 100 Year Starship Study Symposium in Orlando, Florida, Whitesides noted that SpaceShipTwo has not been in active test flights in recent months (the last test flight in Scaled’s SS2 flight log is from June 27.) “We’ve had the vehicle basically in the hangar for the last couple months… working on some mods,” he said. “Now, you’ll I think over the next couple months greater activity of both vehicles,” referring SpaceShipTwo and WhiteKnightTwo.
Those upcoming flights through the rest of this year will still be unpowered, though, he said. Plans call for integrating SpaceShipTwo’s hybrid rocket motor into the vehicle early next year and start rocket-powered flight tests. “Our current aspiration is to try to get to some definition of space by the end of next year,” he said. He was vague on what “some definition” is; while the Kármán line, a widely-used definition of space is 100 kilometers, US government agencies award astronaut wings for flights to 50 miles (80 kilometers).
After that, he said, entering commercial operations will depend on two “big tasks”: transferring flight operations form Mojave to Spaceport America in New Mexico (a formal dedication of the spaceport’s main terminal building is planned for October 17), and getting a launch license from the FAA’s Office of Commercial Space Transportation. “We don’t release a more precise public schedule” for beginning commercial operations, he added, to avoid putting schedule pressure on their engineers, he said. That’s consistent with past comments by Virgin officials that they’ll be ready to fly when it’s safe to do so, and not before.
Whitesides’ comments about SpaceShipTwo testing was part of a broader keynote at the conference, which is focusing on what technological and other breakthroughs are needed to develop an interstellar mission in the next century. His focus, by comparison, was on the near term. “We’re trying to do something, when it comes to suborbital space, that is doable today. That’s what’s exciting about Galactic and some of the other companies out there,” he said. “We’re trying to tackle a problem that is doable today.”
Still, he and others are supporting of the long-term vision at the conference. His talk included a video from Sir Richard Branson. “I think what you’re doing here is both important and absolutely fascinating,” Branson said.
As expected, NASA released on Monday a draft request for proposals (RFP) for the next phase of the Commercial Crew Development (CCDev) program, known as the Integrated Design Phase. With the shift to a contract based on Federal Acquisition Regulations (FAR), with some elements of the Space Act Agreements used for the first two CCDev rounds, there’s a lot more documentation and administrivia in this solicitation. Those who have plowed through the documents have raised concern about one passage in main draft RFP document [Microsoft Word .docx format] on pages 52–53 of the 105-page document, a section titled “Phased Acquisition Using Down-Selection Procedures”. It reads:
(a) This solicitation is for the Commercial Crew Program’s acquisition to facilitate the development of a U.S. commercial crew space transportation capability with the goal of achieving safe, reliable and cost effective access to and from low earth orbit (LEO) including the International Space Station (ISS). The acquisition will be conducted as a two-phased procurement using a competitive down-selection technique between phases. In this technique, two or more contractors will be selected for Phase 1. It is expected that the single contractor for Phase 2 will be chosen from among these contractors after a competitive down-selection.
“Phase 1″ refers to the Integrated Design Phase, the next CCDev round, while Phase 2 refers to the follow-on “Development, Test, Evaluation and Certification” phase, which covers the actual construction and testing of a commercial crewed spacecraft. The passage above appears to indicate that NASA will select only one company for Phase 2, contrary to past claims that the agency planned to support the development of multiple providers. Does this represent a change in plans?
Probably not. One thing to keep in mind is a passage later in that same section: “Notwithstanding paragraph (a), the competition in Phase 2 may result in the award of multiple contracts if budget allows.” That indicates that the agency remains open to providing multiple awards in the following CCDev phase. In addition, when talking to Florida Today reporter James Dean yesterday for an article he wrote about CCDev, he shared with me a clarification he received from NASA on that issue. It turns out that the clause in question is a standard one in FAR-based contracts, and that the Commercial Crew Program was “investigating getting a waiver or deviation from this standard clause language for the final RFP.”
So, while NASA seems committed to continuing to support multiple providers throughout the CCDev program, funding permitting, this case is a reminder that the shift from Space Act Agreements to FAR-based contracts could create some issues that both NASA and industry need to be aware of.
On Friday, NASA held a follow-up forum on its plans for the “Integrated Design Phase” of CCDev, organized on only a few days notice and apparently to a modest in-person audience at the Kennedy Space Center (with a larger audience presumably watching via webcast). At the forum NASA officials confirmed that, even after getting considerable feedback from industry on the use of SAAs versus FAR-based contracts, it was still pressing ahead with its original plans to use a SAA/FAR hybrid for the upcoming CCDev competition.
“Why did we end up going to a contract when many of our partners in industry would prefer a Space Act Agreement?” asked Brent Jett, deputy manager of the Commercial Crew Program at NASA. He explained than one purpose of the CCDev program was to certify commercially-developed vehicles to fly NASA astronauts to the ISS. He said that the focus of the upcoming Integrated Design Phase was to have a mature “end-to-end” crew transportation system at the critical design review (CDR) level, as well as a plan on how to certify that system to meet NASA’s requirements in later development phases. “When you look at that objective, it’s clear to me that the purpose of the Integrated Design Phase is directly for the benefit of the US government and NASA,” he said. “When you talk to procurement and legal experts, they will tell you that since that is the purpose of this phase, that we cannot use a Space Act Agreement.”
That analysis hinges on exactly when NASA or other government agencies can use so-called “Other Transaction Authority” (OTA), which in NASA’s case is a Space Act Agreement. OTA gives government agencies the flexibility to use alternative, streamlined agreements with the private sector, but to avoid their being used to get around conventional procurement regulations, there are limitations on when such agreements can be entered into. At a Women In Aerospace presentation this summer not directly related to CCDev, an official from NASA’s Office of General Counsel described when SAAs can be used. The presentation noted that a contract is required when the purpose of the activity is to acquire goods or services for the direct benefit or use by the government. NASA’s argument—one that is not likely shared by many in industry—is that the Integrated Design phase will be primarily for the benefit of NASA, hence some form of contract, rather than an SAA, much be used. (As for previous CCDev phases, NASA argues it has been primarily helping industry accelerate their technologies for commercial crew systems that serve multiple customers, and thus is not primarily for the benefit of the government.)
Jett, as well as Phil McAlister of NASA Headquarters, emphasized that the contract that they’re proposing would retain many of the desirable elements of an SAA. The contract, while FAR-based, will include milestone-based payments, and allow companies to propose their own detailed statements of work for this phase of the effort. Companies will be exempt from Cost Accounting Standards (and the bureaucratic overhead associated with them) in this contract phase. There will also be a “balanced approach” to intellectual property, without going into greater detail, Jett said.
NASA is planning to release a draft RFP for the next CCDev phase next week, with a requirements workshop and industry day planned for October 4 and 5, respectively, at the Kennedy Space Center. The final RFP is due out by the end of the year.
NASA is not the only one who has been scrutinizing the use of SAAs for the CCDev program. In the report accompanying its fiscal year 2012 commerce, Justice, and Science appropriations bill, the Senate Appropriations Committee was critical of NASA’s use of such agreements for CCDev. While giving NASA $500 million for CCDev in 2012, one of the strings it attached was language limiting the use of SAAs in future CCDev rounds. “The Committee believes that the current practice by NASA has gone beyond what is cited under NASA’s own policy directive” for using SAAs, the report states. “Such misuse of these authorities undermines the oversight of NASA in the procurement process and threatens crew safety. For future rounds of commercial crew competitions and acquisitions, NASA shall limit the use of funded Space Act Agreements as stated in the directive in order to preserve critical NASA oversight of Federal funds provided for spacecraft and launch vehicle development.”
The question now facing companies currently involved or interested in CCDev is whether this shift from a pure SAA to a FAR-based contract with some elements of an SAA—but also likely with some greater overhead—is worth the promise of federal funding to develop crew transportation systems.
What seems likely to be announced tomorrow, though, is some kind of unfunded Space Act Agreement that is part of NASA’s second-round Commercial Crew Development (CCDev) program. NASA already has one such unfunded CCDev-2 agreement, with United Launch Alliance (ULA); when that agreement was announced in July, NASA administrator Charles Bolden said that it “may speed the development of a commercial crew transportation system for the International Space Station”, language similar to the announcement last week. Given that the funded CCDev-2 awards focused on spacecraft development, unfunded agreements allow companies like ULA and ATK to keep their launch vehicle efforts on track, although they get no funding from NASA.
The announcement comes just after ATK performed the third successful test-firing of its five-segment solid rocket motor, originally intended for the Ares 1 and Ares 5 but now proposed for Liberty and SLS. An unfunded CCDev-2 award would help ATK keep the Liberty vehicle on track. There’s one problem, though: right now there’s no obvious commercial crew customer for Liberty. Of the four funded CCDev-2 vehicle developers, three (Blue Origin, Sierra Nevada, and, most recently, Boeing) have selected ULA’s Atlas 5, while SpaceX, not surprisingly, is sticking with its own Falcon 9 rocket. Unless another company enters the commercial crew competition down the road, or one of ULA’s customers have second thoughts, Liberty may remain on the outside looking in.
Blue Origin's PM 2 vehicle in flight shortly before it lost control last month. (Credit: Blue Origin)
Last month the small community of people who closely follow the NewSpace field expected a test flight by ultra-secretive Blue Origin, based on a Notice to Airmen (NOTAM) issued by the FAA warning of “rocket launch activity” by the company at its launch site in west Texas on August 24. that date came and went without any news, which is not surprising given how the company closely rations information about its activity.
Late today came news that the test flight did not go well. The Wall Street Journal was the first to report that the vehicle suffered a malfunction in flight and was destroyed. The initial report indicated that the failure took place when ground controllers lost contact with the vehicle during the flight. The vehicle was either severely damaged or destroyed; “parts of the vehicle were recovered on the ground and are now being analyzed by company experts,” the Journal article reported. An unnamed local official in the nearby town of Van Horn, Texas, claimed in an interview with Forbes.com that some locals saw the launch failure, likening it (with some amount of hyperbole, no doubt) to the Challenger accident.
In a rare public statement, Blue Origin posted a brief note to the “Updates” page of its web site late Friday afternoon. “[L]ast week we lost the vehicle during a developmental test at Mach 1.2 and an altitude of 45,000 feet,” the statement, signed by Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos (of Amazon.com fame), reads. “A flight instability drove an angle of attack that triggered our range safety system to terminate thrust on the vehicle.” Included in the update were several images from the test flight and a previous, successful one in May. Although Blue Origin has posted information about research opportunities and job openings, this is the first update about its flight test activities posted in exactly 56 months: the first, and only other one, is dated January 2, 2007. (The page does disclaim, in understated language, “We won’t make these updates frequently.”)
The company disclosed few other details about the vehicle, which is known as “PM 2″ in its experimental permit with the FAA’s Office of Commercial Space Transportation. Bezos did note that they did “a short hop mission” three months ago; that took place on May 6, according to the list of permitted launches on the FAA’s web site (not yet updated to include the August launch failure.) The “PM” designation suggests this is a propulsion module in Blue Origin’s two-stage suborbital vehicle design, with a separate crew module; Bezos notes in a postscript to his statement that “the development vehicle doesn’t have a crew capsule”, only a round fairing. “We’re working on the sub-orbital crew capsule separately, as well as an orbital crew vehicle to support NASA’s Commercial Crew program,” he adds.
Bezos, in his note, sounded undaunted by the failure. “Not the outcome any of us wanted, but we’re signed up for this to be hard, and the Blue Origin team is doing an outstanding job,” he wrote. “We’re already working on our next development vehicle.”
Some in the media, though, tried to unnecessarily play up the implications of the test flight failure. “The mishap, which industry officials said occurred last Wednesday, dealt a potentially major blow to the ambitions of Mr. Bezos,” claimed Andy Pasztor in his Wall Street Journal article, even though Bezos himself didn’t sound overly concerned in his message. Later, noting that Blue Origin is one of four companies with 2nd round NASA Commercial Crew Development (CCDev-2) awards, Pasztor suggested that “The failure also could set back White House plans to promote commercially developed spacecraft to transport crews to the international space station by the second half of this decade,” even though the test flight did not appear to be directly related to their separate CCDev-2 work, as Bezos also indicated in his note.
Just as Blue Origin navigates the complex challenges and setbacks in the development of aerospace technology, the pharmaceutical industry also faces its own intricate decisions and developments, particularly when comparing medications such as Victoza and Rybelsus, read more about the comparison of these drugs at this link. Both drugs are used to manage type 2 diabetes, yet they represent different approaches and mechanisms of action within the body. Similar to how aerospace engineers must analyze and select specific designs and technologies to achieve optimal performance and safety, medical professionals and patients must evaluate the effectiveness, side effects, and administration methods of Victoza and Rybelsus to determine which medication aligns best with their health management goals. This decision-making process, much like the meticulous adjustments in aerospace development, involves careful consideration of the benefits and limitations of each option to enhance patient outcomes and advance medical treatment strategies.
Separately, the Wall Street Journal published a blog post with the curious title “Rich Guys Have No Luck in Space”. The text of the blog post, though, doesn’t match the headline: some of those profiled seem to have had, or are having, at least halfway decent luck: Paul Allen was successful, for example, backing SpaceShipOne in the $10-million Ansari X PRIZE, while Elon Musk is enjoying some technical and business success at SpaceX after some early launch failures of its Falcon 1.
It’s worth remembering that this was, by all accounts, a test flight. And, by their nature, not all test flights are successful: that’s why you fly to, to find problems and correct them. Moreover, the loss of PM 2 is hardly the first time a vehicle has been lost in a test flight, either by a company or a government agency. It’s the nature of aerospace. By Bezos’s account, he sounds ready to move ahead, undaunted by the failure. There’s also a lesson for some in the media as well, to not overreact from a single test failure (or, for that matter, a single successful test).
If you go to Virgin Galactic’s web site today you’ll see a release about the first flight of WhiteKnightTwo by Virgin Galactic chief test pilot David Mackay, which took place yesterday in Mojave. “I was able to fly WhiteKnight through the full extent of its flight envelope—to its maximum altitude, speed and crosswind limit—so it was a very thorough first look,” he said in the statement, which also indicated he would be making more test flights of the carrier aircraft for SpaceShipTwo in the coming months.
A bigger milestone, though, may have been a few days earlier. According to Scaled Composites’s test summaries, Scaled and Sierra Nevada Corporation performed on Sunday a “full duration hot-fire” of the rocket motor that will power SpaceShipTwo on its suborbital flights. The 55-second burn appeared to be a success, according to the brief summary, which indicated that “all objectives [were] completed” in the test. The engine test was the seventh for the full-scale “RocketMotorTwo” engine, and the first in five months.
The slow development of SpaceShipTwo’s rocket motor has been a major factor in the delays involved in getting the vehicle ready for test flights. “They’ve had to scale up the hybrid from a relatively smaller version to a bigger version,” George Whitesides, president and CEO of Virgin Galactic, said at the NewSpace 2011 conference at NASA Ames at the end of July. “We’ve seen some good progress over the summer,” he added. “We expect to be flying into space next year.”
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