The latest technology quarterly at The Economist is a great overview from Oliver Morton (with appreciation to Yours Truly, among others).
Meanwhile, Alex Witze writes about Obama’s “science” legacy in space. I use scare quotes because human spaceflight doesn’t have much to do with science.
Who pays for it? An interesting article on the space insurance business for those unfamiliar with it.
Here’s a crazy idea: Let’s actually test it in space.
It’s worth noting that the cubesat revolution has made such things affordable.
No mention of Brownsville, though. I wonder what the schedule is for that?
Also, as I just noted at Twitter, despite what Wikipedia says, yesterday’s event doesn’t count against their flight record. They’re still 27 of 28.
Eric Berger thinks the company needs to focus on Falcon 9.
I’m not sure that what happened yesterday can be attributed to lack of focus, but we won’t know until we find out what happened.
It seems to be news, so most of you probably heard that there was an explosion on the pad at LC-40 this morning, leading up to a static test fire for the upcoming launch of the AMOS satellite.
What we know so far: No one was injured, but the bird (a $200M payload) was lost. It’s a setback for Spacecom, which was about to be purchased by China pending a successful deployment. It happened prior to ignition, and SpaceX is calling it a “pad anomaly,” so it doesn’t seem to have anything to do with the rocket itself. But it will be a setback in SpaceX’s aggressive fall schedule until they determine the cause and how to prevent it in the future, and repair the pad.
It’s worth noting that they won’t be launching crew from that pad, but from 39B. But Phil McAlister and Kathy Lueders will want to know if the abort system would have saved crew had they been on top of the rocket. The immediate interesting question to me is whether or not they had any warning. The rocket itself has failure onset detection systems to trigger an abort, but it’s unclear if the pad itself does, and how much warning they would have had to pull the D-ring on the Dracos. Phil and Kathy had also better brace for a very stupid Congressional hearing, and we can all expect to hear a lot of illogical nonsense about how SpaceX should forget about Mars, and how this proves that reusable rockets don’t work.
[Update a couple minutes later]
One point as follow up to that last graf: SpaceX had been requesting to fuel with crew aboard, and NASA had been considering it. That’s probably out the window now.
[Update a couple more minutes later]
There were nine more flights scheduled this year. That was always unlikely, but it’s certainly not going to happen now.
[Update a few minutes later]
Well, this is timely. The OIG has released a status report on commercial crew certification.
[Update a couple minutes later]
How this will affect Spacecom. Shares are down with the news. I’d call it a buying opportunity.
[Update a couple more minutes later]
Also worth noting that it’s been a bad couple days for launch. Long March had a failure yesterday, and the Chinese have been mum about it (as usual).
[Update a few minutes later]
Jeff Foust already has a story about the potential ripple effects for SpaceX, SES, and the rest of the affected industry.
[Update a few minutes later]
And here‘s Loren Grush’s story.
[Update a couple minutes later]
And from Miri Kramer.
[Update a while later]
The only good news to come out of this. https://t.co/mpnoJwuBZm
— Apostle To Morons (@Rand_Simberg) September 1, 2016
[Update a few minutes later]
Joe Pappalardo probably has the best take at this point.
[Update a while later]
Well, this is bad news.
Loss of Falcon vehicle today during propellant fill operation. Originated around upper stage oxygen tank. Cause still unknown. More soon.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) September 1, 2016
[Update a while later]
Aaaaaand here’s the video. I’ve heard that people felt it in Orlando. It may have been the largest explosion at the Cape in history.
[Update a few minutes later]
This is great news, if true.
It sounds like that there was
But I’m surprised they fuel the payload on the pad. I thought that storables were filled during integration.
[Update a couple minutes later]
OK, not such good news. Jon Goff reminded me that they use hydrazine for ACS in the upper stage. Though I’d still think they’d fuel that during horizontal integration, not on the pad.
[Late-morning update]
Here’s the full OIG report on Commercial Crew that just happened to come out today. I’ll probably do a separate blog post on it. I would note that the primary reason that it continues to slip, and that NASA has no apparently problem taking six months to do a two-week review, is that space, and American access to it, isn’t important.
[Update at noon]
[Late-afternoon update]
@jsmuir_ @SafeNotAnOption @PaulDalyROI @spacecom @stevenyoungsfn @wingod pic.twitter.com/TLDHgQN9Ge
— Astro Mouse (@AstroMiceRule) September 1, 2016
I’m heading back to California tomorrow, for the first time in about six weeks (the longest I’ve been away from home since I moved back in 2009), but meanwhile, my long-awaited piece in The New Atlantis is on line.
[Update a few minutes later]
Sorry, that’s just a preview, unless you’re a subscriber. The full piece will be free on line in the future, but I’m not sure when.
NASA is basically admitting that it will be a minimum (if they can ever get to two flights a year) of a billion dollars per flight on an ongoing basis, even ignoring DDT&E. For a 130 tonne payload, that’s over $3500/lb, more than three times the cost of Falcon Heavy.
[Update a while later]
Contrast with this story: The coming space race between Internet billionaires.
At first glance, these suggestions from my long-time friend Linda Billings seem sort of anodyne, but she gives away the game at the end:
Deep in my brain and in my heart I think and feel that colonizing other planets and exploiting extraterrestrial resources would be immoral at this stage of human development. I’m not at all sure that Eilene Galloway would agree with me. I wish I could talk with her about it.
I’m pretty sure that Eilene would disagree. I know for certain that I do.
Things have been kind of quiet on the blog because a) I’m still busy renovating the house in Florida and more importantly, b) my bandwidth is limited here, as there’s no Internet service to the house, and I have to rely on tethering to my phone.
I didn’t post about it at the time, but my Twitter followers know that I drove up to the Cape on Saturday afternoon, with a press pass to the SpaceX launch early Sunday morning. It was the first Falcon launch I’ve seen on the east coast (I did see one pass through the clouds at the January Vandenberg launch).
It was impressive. I don’t know what the quantity distance is for that vehicle, but we were on a causeway in the middle of the Indian River at CCAFS, and I think the pad was only a couple miles away, judging from the time that I saw the ignition and started to hear (and feel) the roar. It was sufficiently bright that it temporarily shut down the center of my retinas, but I could see it all the way downrange past staging. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a rocket naked eye that far downrange. It was very impressive, but I hope it becomes routine, including the landing, if it hasn’t already. The next step is to start reflying those stages that they continue to collect (six now). I told John Taylor that SpaceX now has a bigger fleet of reusable rockets than NASA ever had.
Speaking of which, Stephanie Osborn has a guest post from a fellow former NASA colleague with thoughts on the failure of reusability of the Shuttle.
I think that whether single pour or the selected segmented design, solid rockets on a reusable crewed vehicle were a mistake. And the fact that Jim Fletcher was head of NASA (and “Barfing Jake” Garn) is also part of the explanation for building them in Utah, Florida’s environmental regulations notwithstanding.
But as I’ve noted in the past, it’s a huge fallacy of hasty generalization to attempt to draw lessons about reusability of spacecraft from that program.