Will Privately run space stations really succeed?

This week was a big one in the Space Industry, the biggest we've had in years, with the Tuesday announcements. The big two announcements were putting the Lunar Gateway (AKA lunar space station) on hold and shifting the emphasis to creating a permanent presence on the moon with more direct flights. Most of the major shifts this week were well received: a Moon base, a focus on less talk and more action, and working with industry to streamline regulations so increased innovation can propel the United States further into space. 

As far back as 2018, then-NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine was sounding the alarm about the need to find a replacement for the space station if the United States wanted to maintain an ongoing human presence in low-Earth orbit. 

One aspect of this event has begun to run into serious turbulence. It involves NASA’s attempt to navigate a difficult issue with no clear solution: finding a commercial replacement for the aging International Space Station. We've covered the private space station efforts of Axiom Space, Blue Origin, Vast, Nanoracks (later became Voyager), and Northrop Grumman (later withdrew from the program) here before. 

The problem seems to be that none of those three surviving contractors know what NASA really wants. 

In most cases of major space or defense projects, the Agency buying the project issues a document listing everything they want the thing to do. A common document is often called a Hardware Requirements Drawing (HRD) along with requirements drawings for the everything they want it to do. Before that is issued there's generally a Request for Proposal document (RFP) that lists everything they want the system to be able to do. The companies that respond to the RFP go line by line through the RFP responding if they can meet all of the request for proposal and the cost. 

NASA has not released an RFP saying what they really want the independent Space Stations to do.  

“We’re on a path that’s not leading us where we thought it would,” said Dana Weigel, manager of the International Space Station program for NASA.

...

NASA proposed a new solution that would bind the private companies more closely to NASA, requiring them not to build free-flying space stations but rather to work directly with the space agency on modules that would, at least initially, dock with the International Space Station. This change was not well-received.

Part of not telling the private station coordinators what they need is undoubtedly that NASA themselves don't know what they need the new stations to do. 

• Building space station modules is really hard. The HALO and iHAB elements of the now-shelved Lunar Gateway—have both faced significant delays.
• It’s very expensive. Privately, the space station companies have told NASA they generally expect their stations to cost a few billion dollars to construct. NASA believes a truer estimate is probably in the range of $5 to $10 billion. And then it costs hundreds of millions of dollars a year to operate, on top of approximately $2 billion in crew and cargo transportation costs for continuous presence.
• Stations are operationally challenging. The ISS (NASA) has to deal with debris-avoidance maneuvers, equipment failures, medical emergencies, and more. None of the current four companies have any experience with this. 
• Who will come to the space stations? It’s not at all clear that the European Space Agency would pay private stations (or transportation providers such as SpaceX) directly for time on orbit. Typically, they have “bartered” services with NASA for crew time on the International Space Station. NASA is also dubious that the “orbital economy” touted by the private companies will come to pass. “We can’t entertain fiction,” NASA Associate Administrator Amit Kshatriya said this week. “It has to be grounded in reality.”

This graphic outlines NASA’s alternative plan for commercial stations. Credit: NASA

In the four months after Isaacman became administrator, the issue of what to do with commercial space stations has been one of several raging fires his team has had to put out. In some ways, it appears to be the most intractable. 

The architect of the original Commercial LEO destinations (CLD) program, a longtime NASA official named Phil McAlister who retired last year, does not believe NASA’s new option meets those goals.

“I don’t see how this new plan benefits industry at all,” he told Ars. “This new plan destroys the development work the companies have accomplished over the last several years, and it ensures NASA and the nation will see no benefit from the hundreds of millions of dollars that NASA has spent on CLD designs that are now obsolete.”

Of the companies that have been working on their own stations, Axiom, Voyager, Blue Origin, and Vast Space, all but Axiom have all designed “free-flying” stations from the beginning and never intend to dock with the International Space Station, nor go through the ultra-rigorous and expensive certification process to do that. NASA is being too "top down" - decreeing things from the top. They should start from the standpoint of issuing that Request For Proposal. They should try to set it up so that they can use whatever they need to use of the other station's capabilities, and let the new space station sell time on board to colleges or small businesses that will grow into it.

Under 6 days to Artemis II

With all relevant disclaimers about how well preparations go and no big changes, we are under 6 days until the Artemis II mission to loop around the moon, sending an astronaut crew farther from Earth than any group of people since Apollo 17 - the last Apollo mission. Thanks to a website apparently created for just such questions, this was the time to the "T zero" of 6:24PM EDT on Wednesday, April 1st.Counting from the time at the bottom of this screen capture.

At the risk of being too boring, you know that this is going to be the first crewed mission of the Artemis/Orion capsule, and that there has only been one test flight of the fully stacked Artemis SLS system, in November 2022. 

Each Artemis mission is going to cost in the vicinity of $4 Billion and both the first and second missions were delayed repeatedly with problems fueling the system, leaking fuel and other problems with the system. I prefer to think that when we're launching a rocket that's not only the same basic design as previous vehicles but that's literally using parts that flew on previous programs, that everything should go smoother than a system that's new to everyone who gets near it. Artemis II had a Wet Dress Rehearsal (WDR) in February and failed it, requiring the system be rolled back to the Vehicle Assembly Building to be repaired. It then passed the WDR and another problem surfaced the day after they declared success. That led to a second rollback to the VAB. 

NASA has said it won't perform another WDR, which means there are fewer boxes to check during this second stint at the pad. Still, a launch on April 1 is far from guaranteed. NASA will undoubtedly err on the side of caution, given that this is a crewed mission. The stakes are higher. If it doesn't launch during the period between April 1 and 6, there's another window opening April 30th. They haven't posted any summaries of the windows starting from May and through the summer. 

How NASA plans to get nuclear power to Mars

NASA’s announcement Tuesday that it will “pause” work on the Lunar Gateway (lunar space station) and focus on building a surface base on the Moon was no big surprise to anyone paying attention to the current efforts to get back to the moon, especially in light of Jared Isaacman's and President Trump's approaches to space policy.

Don't forget though that Lunar Gateway and other components of the previous approach have been under construction for years and $4.5 billion has been spent so far, with hardware already well into the assembly process; including being delivered almost exactly a year ago. 

The centerpiece of Gateway, called the Power and Propulsion Element, is closest to being ready for launch. NASA’s rejigged exploration roadmap, revealed Tuesday in an all-day event at NASA headquarters in Washington, calls for repurposing the core module for a nuclear-electric propulsion demonstration in deep space.

This is not the first time NASA has announced a nuclear propulsion demo. More than 20 years ago, NASA was working on a nuclear-electric propulsion initiative called Project Prometheus. It was canceled. In 2021, NASA and DARPA, the Pentagon’s research and development agency, started work on a nuclear rocket engine known as DRACO. NASA and the Pentagon canceled the DRACO program last year. 

The cancellation of the DRACO  program (Demonstration Rocket for Agile Cislunar Operations) is not unusual. Space-based nuclear power programs being cancelled has been the norm, despite there being solid reasons for developing them. Nuclear power seems to be the logical choice for more ambitious robotic missions deeper into the Solar System, where the energy from photovoltaic cells isn't enough to generate the required power. Closer to Earth, nuclear reactors on the Moon can be used to power habitats, robots, and lunar bases during the two-week-long lunar night. 

As an aside I remember reading about this topic in the late 1960s, in particular a program called NERVA, the Nuclear Engine for Rocket Vehicle Application. Looking into things for this post, I see that President Nixon canceled the NERVA project in 1973. Despite nearly two decades of work, NERVA never flew in space. This is one of those cases where everyone sees the engineering trades but getting all the approvals is the big problem. 

Nuclear-powered rocket engines are more efficient than chemical rockets. They come in two forms: nuclear-thermal and nuclear-electric engines. Nuclear-thermal rockets produce higher thrust, using heat from a reactor to heat up a chemical rocket fuel. Nuclear-electric engines have lower thrust but greater efficiency. The now-canceled DRACO mission would have used the former approach. NASA’s new nuclear mission will use the latter.

This is the mission Isaacman talked about in the short video yesterday - sending a nuclear powered rocket called SR-1 Freedom to Mars with robotic helicopters on board. 

NASA will cannibalize the core module of Gateway for the SR-1 mission. The Power and Propulsion Element, or PPE, is under construction at Lanteris Space Systems in Palo Alto, California. The module will have the most powerful electric propulsion system ever flown in space, with three 12-kilowatt engines and four 6-kilowatt thrusters. The PPE would have originally relied entirely on solar power. Under NASA’s new plan, it will have solar arrays and a uranium-fueled fission reactor.
...
The goal for SR-1 Freedom is to “prove the US can build, launch, and operate a nuclear propulsion system,” laying the “foundation” for more capable missions to follow, said Steve Sinacore, NASA’s program executive for space reactors. Launch is just 33 months away.

Launching 33 months from now is December of 2028; and since today happens to be the 25th, that means launch would be Christmas Day of 2028.  I wouldn't bet on that.  That said, Space Reactor 1, or SR-1, will have a roughly 20-kilowatt fission reactor, a fraction of the power levels NASA aimed to achieve with previously planned missions before their cancellations. This is still 20 times more electricity than the nuclear power generators currently operating in deep space, such as on NASA’s Mars rovers and the Voyager probes leaving the Solar System.

Artist's illustration of NASA's Space Reactor-1 mission approaching Mars. Credit: NASA

Although NASA will be the “prime integrator” for SR-1, actually launching radioactive fuel into space requires input from multiple federal agencies, including the Department of Energy. Any rocket selected to launch a nuclear-powered mission must undergo a special certification. SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy, which NASA originally booked to launch the Gateway core module, is undergoing a nuclear certification to launch NASA’s Dragonfly mission to Saturn’s moon Titan.

The three helicopters that Isaacman said SR-1 would carry are currently envisioned to be duplicates of the Ingenuity helicopter on Mars, that survived many times the expected number of flights.  

“After separating from SR-1 Freedom, the entry capsule enters the Martian atmosphere at hypersonic speeds greater than Mach 5, slowing to approximately Mach 2,” Sinacore said. “Next, a supersonic parachute deploys to slow the capsule further, and finally, the heat shield separates and the helicopters are released in a first-ever mid-air deployment.”

NASA isn’t sure what they will do with the SR-1 mothership after reaching Mars. They could try to maneuver it into orbit around the red planet, or slingshot the spacecraft past Mars to head to another planetary destination.

Looking at these details becoming available, this SR-1 mission seems to be the most interesting NASA mission in many years.

NASA kills the Lunar Gateway (lunar space station)

It's not like there hasn't been a lot of evidence that this was coming, but today NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman and his colleagues shared a number of major announcements, including outlining a nuclear-powered mission to Mars that will release three helicopters there and major changes to commercial space stations (short video - < 1 minute). However, most significantly, Isaacman outlined a detailed plan to construct a substantial Moon base over the next decade. He also confirmed that NASA will no longer build the Lunar Gateway in orbit around the Moon, but would rather focus all of its energy and resources on the lunar surface.

Is this affordable? One of Isaacman’s fundamental beliefs is that NASA does not have a revenue problem. Rather, it has an expense problem.

“For too long we tried to satisfy every stakeholder, and the results of that are very well documented in Office of the Inspector General reports,” he said. “Billions of dollars wasted. Years lost. Hardware that never launched. Fewer flagship science missions. And fewer astronauts in space, which means fewer kids dressing up as astronauts for Halloween. I don’t like it. The president doesn’t like it. The American people have waited long enough.”

This meeting was at NASA Headquarters in Washington DC, and Isaacman was speaking to an audience of about 160 officials from industry, politicians, and leaders of foreign space agencies. The meetings will continue tomorrow, so it seems entirely possible there will be some news stories during the day. 

But publicly, Isaacman sought to be clear with NASA’s contractors. NASA, he said, needed to do better. And they needed to do better. The space agency is prepared to do everything it can to help its contractors succeed, from embedding subject matter experts to relaxing requirements. But the time for excuses is coming to an end, he said.

“We are not going to sit idly by while schedules slip or budgets are exceeded,” he said. “Expect uncomfortable action if that is what it takes. Because the public has invested $100 billion and has been very patient with America’s return to the Moon. Expectations are rightfully very high. Taxpayers and their representatives in Congress should demand accountability from every leader and every CEO if those expectations are not met.”

It's encouraging to see Administrator Isaacman speaking truthfully about how the agency is barely a shadow of that it used to be. I think it's not going to be accepted as well by major industry players as it is by those of us who think SLS is a hole that's sucked down billions of dollars more than originally bid. 

One of the highlights on Tuesday was an hour-long presentation by Carlos Garcia-Galan, who formerly was a deputy program manager for the Gateway but now has been installed as leader of the Moon Base initiative. Garcia-Galan, however, did not seem downcast by the end of the Gateway. Rather, he seemed fired up about building sprawling infrastructure on the Moon. (A 10 minute video of his presentation)

“The Gateway team, both NASA and industry and the international partners, were an awesome team,” he said in an interview afterward. “While I do believe an orbiting outpost has value in our overall exploration goals, this doesn’t mean that we can’t do it later. We need to be focused on the surface, and everyone wants to be on the surface. So I’m super excited, and I’m sure the rest of the Gateway team will be once they start to shift their focus.” 

NASA released this rendering of a Moon base that will be built over the next decade. Image Credit: NASA

The Moon base will be NASA’s main exploration focus going forward. Garcia-Galan said part of his job will be bringing together the various efforts at NASA previously focused on or near the Moon and make it clear to all that the work they’re doing must be bent toward supporting a Moon base.

This is why the Commercial Lunar Payload Services program will be scaled up, to accommodate the increased need for frequent access to the Moon with larger cargoes. It’s why Gateway had to go. It’s why NASA will develop not one, but two networks of communications satellites.

NASA's SWIFT Sat is falling out of its orbit

They call it one of NASA's oldest astronomy missions, but it has only been in orbit 21 years - since 2005 - so compare that to the Hubble Space Telescope that was launched in 1990. 

The 21-year-old spacecraft is falling out of orbit, and NASA officials believe it’s worth saving—for the right price. SWIFT is not a flagship astronomy mission like Hubble or Webb, so there’s no talk of sending astronauts or spending hundreds of millions of dollars on a rescue expedition. 

Hubble was upgraded by five space shuttle missions, and billionaire and commercial astronaut Jared Isaacman—now NASA’s administrator—proposed a privately funded mission to service Hubble in 2022, but the agency rejected the idea.

As always, there are tradeoffs involved. NASA doesn't want to spend a lot of money on a rescue mission, so it comes down to "how much is acceptable to spend?" Last September, NASA awarded a company called Katalyst Space Technologies a $30 million contract to rapidly build and launch a commercial satellite to stabilize Swift’s orbit and extend its mission. 

The SWIFT observatory launched in November 2004 on a mission to detect gamma-ray bursts, the most powerful explosions in the known Universe. It has been a mission that has probably done more than what was expected, and astrophysicists still rely on SWIFT’s multi-wavelength instruments to identify and locate gamma-ray bursts for follow-up observations by other observatories. The low orbit means its not going to be in a stable orbit for a long time, and it's projected to reenter on its own before the end of the year if this Katalyst satellite rescue doesn't quite work out. 

There are a few things you should know about this venture. First, SWIFT was never designed to be captured or reboosted in orbit. Second, this mission is the first time Katalyst will attempt to dock with another satellite in space. And third, NASA gave Katalyst a daunting timetable of just nine months to build, test, and launch the rescue mission before Swift’s altitude falls too low for a safe rendezvous.

“This is really technically ambitious,” said Ghonhee Lee, founder and CEO of Katalyst.

Launch is scheduled for June 1, and there’s little margin for error. By late summer or early fall, Swift will slip below 200 miles (320 kilometers), too low for Katalyst to have confidence in controlling its spacecraft. “It’s a lot of drag with two big spacecraft docking together, ” Lee said. “Originally, we thought we had more time.”

Concept of operations for the SWIFT rescue mission. Credit: Katalyst Space Technologies

Next time you're outside in the daytime, think about the big, dangerously bright yellow orb in the sky. The sun gets a vote on whether this flies or works, too. Solar Cycle 25 is fading away but it still has been throwing solar flares and Coronal Mass Ejections our way this year.  The last few days have been particularly (solar) stormy, with Geomagnetic storm conditions of G1 or G2 levels. When those happen, the atmosphere expands higher, which increases drag on satellites and that increases the chances of SWIFT reentering sooner than expected. 

Over the years, we've talked about Space 1.0 vs 2.0 or old vs new Space industry and this is absolutely the new side. It makes this more interesting to keep up with than a "plain old Space 1.0" job. The Ars Technica article talks about lots of aspects of the mission that make interesting reading.  

 

Edit 3/24 0840 EDT: the spelling destroyer leprechaun snuck in after posting and changed a word on me, turning one word into a homonym - specifically a homophone. 

 

Little Paul Ehrlich's Dead

The news broke last week that the famous 1960s biologist and apocalypse fearmonger Paul Ehrlich had shuffled off this mortal coil. I've written about Ehrlich many times over the years, but didn't feel particularly moved to write something about him. Frankly, people who make predictions about the future and are wrong far more often than right don't interest me much.  

Just for fun, I looked up every post I've done that mentioned Ehrlich, and this 2018 post about his most famous book, "The Population Bomb," came out on top.  

First published in May of 1968, I was 14, I recall it being talked about widely and seriously.  It was by a scientist after all.  The Stanford University biology professor famously claimed that population growth would result in resource depletion and the starvation of hundreds of millions of people.  I recall conversations about "hamburger wars" as people fought to the death for dwindling supplies of food.

Ehrlich prophesied that hundreds of millions would starve to death in the 1970s (and that 65 million of them would be Americans), that already-overpopulated India was doomed, and that most probably “England will not exist in the year 2000.”

In conclusion, Ehrlich warned that “sometime in the next 15 years, the end will come,” meaning “an utter breakdown of the capacity of the planet to support humanity.”

Doomsday prophesy sells, and doomsday from someone with a handful of letters after their name (MS, PhD etc.) sells even better.  The future didn't turn out quite as dismally as Ehrlich suggested; he famously lost a bet where he picked a "basket of commodities" and bet that these five metals would go up in price in 10 years (1980 to 1990) - they declined in price an average of 57.6% while the population increased. Nevertheless, he influenced a generation or two of policy makers. 

And that's the basic problem with fearmongers like Ehrlich. It doesn't matter how many times people create demonstrations that argue against their predictions and the fearmonger's predictions don't materialize, they keep getting published. You can look up virtually every prediction he advanced and they don't come true. The first article I ever wrote about him was five years before that one, June 2013, about how many people could fit on Earth. 

It starts with a simple idea. First off, I recall hearing around 25 or 30 years ago that the entire population of the world would fit in Jacksonville, Florida, without resorting to high rise apartments: just the square feet of Jacksonville divided by the number of people. It would be highly impractical, each person only gets about a 2' by 2' square, but did you ever think the entire population of the world would fit in a single American city? 

That 2013 post has a graphic of how many states of the USA would be required to house the entire population of the world and goes one better by showing the number of states required for different population densities. It shows, for example, if we housed every single person on earth with the population density of Paris, they would fit into the area of three states: Louisiana, Mississippi and Arkansas.  If we used the population density of New York City, the entire population of Earth could fit into the area of Texas.  Likewise if we used the more generous suburban spread of Houston, the whole population of the planet would fit in the middle states of America. 

But none of that is the point of tonight's post. 

By the time 1970 rolled around and I was in high school, one of my favorite bands was the Moody Blues, a progressive rock group that had been creating some big hits over the last few years of the '60s and on through the '70s. In 1968, a couple of members of the band wrote a song called Legend of a Mind about another popular figure of the late '60s/early '70s, Timothy Leary. That song is probably remembered by most people who heard it at the time using the song's refrain, "Timothy Leary's dead". 

Legend of a Mind

The Moody Blues

Timothy Leary's dead
No, no, no, no, he's outside, looking in

Timothy Leary's dead
No, no, no, no, he's outside, looking in

He'll fly his astral plane
Takes you trips around the bay
Brings you back the same day
Timothy Leary
Timothy Leary

Timothy Leary's dead
No, no, no, no, he's outside, looking in

Timothy Leary's dead
No, no, no, no, he's outside, looking in

He'll fly his astral plane
Takes you trips around the bay
Brings you back the same day
Timothy Leary
Timothy Leary

Along the coast you'll hear them boast
About a light they say that shines so clear
So raise your glass, we'll drink a toast
To the little man who sells you thrills along the pier

He'll take you up, he'll bring you down
He'll plant your feet back firmly on the ground
He flies so high, he swoops so low
He knows exactly which way he's gonna go

Timothy Leary
Timothy Leary

He'll take you up, he'll bring you down
He'll plant your feet back on the ground
He flies so high, he swoops so low
Timothy Leary

He'll fly his astral plane
He'll take you trips around the bay
He'll bring you back the same day
Timothy Leary
Timothy Leary

Timothy Leary
Timothy Leary
Timothy Leary

Yesterday morning as I was waking up and getting up to start the day, this music was playing in my mind. And then my brain did something I never expected. It turned "Timothy Leary's dead" into "Little Paul Ehrlich's dead" which keeps the meter of the song and the number of syllables the same.

Now I just need to come up with a couple of lines for the other places:

Little Paul Ehrlich's dead
No, no, no, no, he's outside, looking in

Little Paul Ehrlich's dead
No, no, no, no, he's outside, looking in

He'll fly his astral plane
Takes you trips around the bay
Brings you back the same day
Little Paul Ehrlich
Little Paul Ehrlich

Cover art for the Moody Blues "In Search of the Lost Chord" album, 1968. The source of the song Legend of a Mind. 

Now that Spring has sprung

As we went through the spring equinox, I couldn't help but notice that there were some questions about the day and night not being the same exact length, which is the actual meaning of the word equinox, after all. It was a spring "not completely equal night".  Space.com offers some explanations of that. 

The reason is "the usual", if you'll allow that short summary. The world isn't exactly perfect, orbits can be not exactly symmetrical, and imperfections are everywhere. I should note that when you look up the date and time of the equinox, you get a specific time of day - to the minute. 

Saturday (March 20) at 10:46 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time (7:46 a.m. Pacific Daylight Time) the vernal or spring equinox was expected to occur. At that moment, the sun comes to one of two places where its rays shine directly down on the equator. It will then shine equally on both halves of the Earth. More precisely, at that moment, the sun will be shining directly down on the equator at a point over the Atlantic Ocean, roughly 790 miles (1,280 kilometers) east of Macapá, Brazil.

When I was learning these things, I filed away that seasons tended to change on the 21st of month. Spring started on March 21, Summer was June 21, Fall was in September and Winter was December. In all cases, that was the first day of "new season." 

Space.com says that's not right. They say that during the 20th century, March 21 was the exception rather than the rule, with the equinox landing on that day only 36 times out of the 100 years in the 20th century. 

From the years 1980 through 2102, it comes no later than March 20. In 2028, in fact, for the Western Hemisphere, spring will officially begin on March 19. This shift in dates happens because the Earth's elliptical orbit doesn't match our calendar perfectly. The vagaries of our Gregorian calendar, such as the inclusion of a leap day in century years divisible by 400, also help contribute to the seasonal date shift. Had the year 2000 not been a leap year, the equinox would be occurring this year on Saturday (March 21), not Friday. 

The Space.com author goes on to note:

One factor to consider is that when we refer to sunrise and sunset, it refers to when the very top edge of the sun appears on the horizon. Not its center, nor its bottom edge.

This fact alone would make the time of sunrise and sunset a little more than 12 hours apart on the equinox days. The sun's apparent diameter is roughly equal to half a degree.

The main reason for this difference is that our atmosphere refracts (or bends) light above the edge of the horizon. Because of that refraction, we end up seeing the sun for a few minutes before its disk actually rises and for a few minutes after it has actually set.

So . . . when you watch the sun either coming up above the horizon at sunrise or going down below the horizon at sunset, you are looking at an illusion — the sun is not really there but is actually below the horizon!

Earth's seasons diagram. (Image credit: NASA/Space Place)

Yet another "who you gonna call?" moment

As has happened before, the US Space Force needs to launch an important payload that had originally been assigned to United Launch Alliance and ULA isn't able to launch it, not having any rockets available to be assigned to this mission. This is partly due to the Vulcan being grounded and partly due to the few remaining Atlas Vs already being assigned to other missions. ULA has nothing that can do the job for Space Force.

So who are they gonna call? SpaceX, who else?

Next month's GPS III-8 mission had been slated to fly atop United Launch Alliance (ULA)'s new Vulcan Centaur rocket. But Vulcan has experienced issues with its solid rocket boosters (SRBs), so the Space Force is moving the GPS spacecraft onto a SpaceX Falcon 9. 

"With this change, we are answering the call for rapid delivery of advanced GPS capability while the Vulcan anomaly investigation continues," Space Force Col. Ryan Hiserote, Space Systems Command System Delta 80 commander and National Security Space Launch system program director, said in a statement today (March 20).

To refresh the big picture for newer readers, ULA developed the Vulcan rocket to replace their Atlas V, and the Vulcan had its first flight in January of '24, flying a total of four missions on a Vulcan Centaur. Half of those four missions - flights three and four - had problems with the solid rocket boosters used to increase the liftoff weight the Vulcan put into orbit. The Vulcan's flight control software overcame the problem both times, successfully reaching orbit and notching its mission goals, but Space Force was concerned enough that the failure rate of the SRBs was too high - and grounded the vehicle until the failure analysis investigation completes. 

To be a bit blunt, today's news about the GPS III-8 mission isn't even remotely surprising. After all, we all remember that Vulcan is currently grounded. If all goes to plan, the satellite — the 10th and final one in the GPS III line — will lift off no earlier than late April from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. 

Since the way US Space Force does these changes to the launch vehicles is to swap missions between their two contractors. SpaceX is going to give up USSF-70, a national security mission that had been manifested on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy. USSF-70 will fly no earlier than summer 2028, according to Space Force officials.
 

An earlier GPS III satellite, SV-08, being readied to ship to Cape Canaveral Space Force Station after being assigned to SpaceX from ULA, Florida. Credit: Lockheed Martin

Failure analysis for December ('25) South Korean launch

Back near the end of 2025, December 22, South Korean rocket company Innospace sent its Hanbit-Nano rocket skyward for the first time ever, from the Alcantara Space Center in Brazil. But the landmark flight — the first-ever orbital launch attempt by a South Korean company — didn't last long, as the Hanbit-Nano exploded less than a minute after leaving the pad. 

Now Innospace has released new details about that launch failure and the results from a joint investigation, which shed light on what went wrong and how the company plans to move forward. 

A gas leak in the forward section of Hanbit-Nano's first-stage hybrid rocket combustion chamber triggered a rupture, ultimately leading to mission failure, according to a March 17 Innospace update.

The leak "was caused by insufficient compression and uneven sealing performance resulting from plastic deformation of sealing components during the reassembly process following the replacement of the forward chamber plug during launch preparation activities in Brazil," the update reads.

Talking about "plastic deformation of sealing components" sounds a lot like the kind of improper sealing that gets seen pretty regularly on SLS and other launch vehicles.  

The Hanbit-Nano first stage uses a fuel combination I don't recall hearing about before, Liquid Oxygen is the oxidizer and the common part, while the fuel itself is paraffin. There are two versions of the second stage, which will run on either the same paraffin/LOX combination as the booster or with a liquid methane/LOX. Hanbit-Nano is a small, 57-foot-tall, light-lift system designed to put 90 kg (about 198 lb.s) into a sun-synchronous orbit from its Brazilian launch pad. For comparison, the Rocket Lab Electron is a small payload launcher as well but it's rated for 660 pounds to LEO, over 3x the Hanbit-Nano's payload.

Innospace conducted its investigation into the mission's failure alongside CENIPA, the Brazilian Air Force authority responsible for aerospace accident investigations. Innospace says it is already implementing design improvements to affected components and introducing additional verification steps to prevent similar failures in future launches.
...
The company plans to move ahead with a follow-up launch, pending authorization from the Korea Aerospace Administration (KASA). That next attempt is currently targeted for the third quarter of 2026, with Brazil expected to remain the launch site.

The South Korean rocket company Innospace has closed its investigation into the failure of its Hanbit-Nano rocket in December and is targeting the third quarter of 2026 for its next launch. (Image credit: Innospace)

So then, the space company said, "let's grab a small asteroid..."

... and bring it back to a "safe" spot near Earth. 

Really. 

It may sound fanciful, but a Los Angeles-based company says it has conceived of a plan to fly out to a smallish, near-Earth asteroid, throw a large bag around it, and bring the body back to a “safe” gathering point near our planet.

The company, TransAstra, said Wednesday that an unnamed customer has agreed to fund a study of its proposed “New Moon” mission to capture and relocate an asteroid approximately the size of a house, with a mass of about 100 metric tons.

“We envision it becoming a base for robotic research and development on materials processing and manufacturing,” said Joel Sercel, chief executive officer of TransAstra. “Long term, instead of building space hardware on the ground and launching propellant up from the Earth, we could harvest it from raw materials in space.”

When they say, "approximately the size of a house," that isn't a very well-defined number. Do they mean 500 square feet, which at 22 ft 3in on a side might be better described as the size of an apartment in a small city, or 1500 sq. ft.? That's a moderately-sized suburban house.  That dramatically affects what they plan to do with that small asteroid. Like the first small paragraph quoted says, TransAstra envisions a system that flies out to the desired asteroid, capturing it in a large bag, and slowly bringing it to some place like the L2 (Lagrange 2) point of the Moon/Earth system - about 900,000 miles from Earth, and also the home of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST).

Such asteroids could provide water for use as propellant and minerals for everything from solar panels to radiation shielding. Various asteroids could be targeted for their content, such as C-type asteroids as a source of water or M-types for metals. 

All of this is the domain of a study underway now which will be completed by May, and should further refine a mission plan with its trajectory and the spacecraft needed to fly it. 

If fully funded, the mission could rendezvous with an asteroid by as early as 2028 or 2029. TransAstra is working with the University of Central Florida, Purdue, and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory/Caltech to complete its analysis. 

This transfer bag has been tested in the International Space Station, flown up to the station on the Northrop Grumman Cygnus cargo drone last fall, then taken into an airlock where the bag was opened and closed while in the vacuum. 

Also last fall, TransAstra won a $2.5 million contract from NASA to scale up the size of its inflatable capture bag system to 10 meters in diameter, the size it says it needs to corral small asteroids. Matched by private funding, the combined funds have allowed TransAstra to be able to accelerate development and testing of its larger capture bag.

The next major step for TransAstra is they need to find a spacecraft maker to contract for a spacecraft capable of traveling into deep space and making a rendezvous with an asteroid. 

An artist's concept of the New Moon facility with aggregated small asteroids. Credit: TransAstra

With the exception of noting the Earth and moon in the upper left hand corner of the artwork, those are about the only things that look familiar to me. I'll SWAG the big things in what appears to be a bag on the left edge of the image are captured asteroids or other raw materials and just say I have no idea what anything else is supposed to be or what they're supposed to do. 

Let me remind everyone of NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission to asteroid Bennu that returned samples of the asteroid in September of 2023. That mission returned 121.3 grams from the asteroid Bennu and cost more than $1 billion but it's quite different than this concept and I don't think it's fair to divide the billion dollar cost by 121.3 grams, to get $8.2 million per gram. That would include costs that didn't contribute to getting those grams of Bennu down to Earth.

TransAstra is proposing to bring back vastly more material for significantly less. The initial mission, Sercel said, would cost a “few hundred million” dollars. That may sound borderline impossible, but it’s the kind of breakthrough needed if humanity is going to start building a future for itself in the Solar System, with materials from the Solar System beyond Earth.

Small Space News Story Roundup 79

A slow news day again, so a couple of interesting smaller stories. 

SpaceX launches 10,000th Starlink Satellite on Tuesday

Today was a dual launch day split between Vandenberg and Cape Canaveral, with the Cape Canaveral launch being the second of the day. 

The first Starlink group (17-24) launched Tuesday from Vandenberg's Space Launch Complex 4 East (SLC-4E) at 1:19 a.m. EDT (0519 GMT or 10:19 p.m. PDT on March 16 local time). That mission's Falcon 9 booster (B1088) completed its 14th flight with a touchdown on the Pacific Ocean-positioned droneship "Of Course I Still Love You." 

The second Starlink group (10-46) departed from Space Launch Complex 40 (SLC-40) in Florida at 9:27 a.m. EDT (1327 GMT). Booster B1090 returned to Earth for the 11th time, landing on the "A Shortfall of Gravitas" (ASOG) droneship stationed in the Atlantic Ocean. This second launch marked SpaceX's 34th Falcon 9 mission of the year and 378th Starlink launch in its history. 

The milestone 10,000th Starlink was on board the first launch of the day from Vandenberg.  The megaconstellation now numbers 10,049 satellites, of which all but 10 are in working order, according to satellite tracker Jonathan McDowell. An additional 1,509 Starlink satellites were launched since May 2019, but have since reentered Earth's atmosphere and been destroyed. That's the price of flying in a low orbit to minimize delays.  

Is Artemis II Delayed Again? 

Maybe yes, maybe no. It's hard to know. 

After the roll back to the VAB to fix the helium leak problem that surfaced after the successful Wet Dress Rehearsal, there was an extensive Flight Readiness Review and it was widely reported they would roll the vehicle out to the pad on Thursday (March 19). After the discovery of another minor problem, an electrical harness for the flight termination system was in need of a repair, the announced rollback to pad 39 slipped one day to March 20th. Then it began to look like that extra day delay won't be needed. The latest updates to that are saying they might actually roll back to the pad on the 19th. 

Update for 5:50 p.m. ET on March 17: NASA is now saying that it may be able to hit its original target rollout date of March 19, thanks to faster-than-expected work on the Artemis 2 stack in the Vehicle Assembly Building. A final decision is expected on Wednesday (March 18).

The full Moon is seen behind the Artemis II SLS rocket at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida in this photo taken before the mid-February WDR. Credit: NASA/Ben Smegelsky

EDIT March 19 at 5:08 PM EDT to add: Rollout of the Artemis II stack to launch complex 39B is scheduled to begin at 8:00 PM EDT on March 19, which is 0100 UTC on March 20. This was announced earlier in the day of March 19.

One hundred year anniversary

Hundred year anniversaries of new technologies don't come up very often, especially in the subject area of space exploration but today is one. 

100 years ago, a liquid-fueled rocket flew into the sky for the very first time. The unlikely contraption was designed by Clark University physics professor Robbert Goddard, and launched from a cabbage field in Auburn, Massachusetts on March 16, 1926. 

Today, Robert H. Goddard (1882-1945), who directed the flight, is widely considered to be one of the founders of modern rocketry, along with Hermann Oberth in Germany and Konstantin Tsiolkovsky in Russia. A tiny rocket by any standards, with a very short flight, his rocket named Nell was fueled by a mixture of gasoline and liquid oxygen. 

A picture you've probably seen before, Robert H. Goddard with his first rocket, Nell. Image from Wikipedia, with a long description including current NASA ownership and its history.

Nell flew for a blistering 2-1/2 seconds and achieved a height of 41 feet. Still, it showed the concepts would work and it even used one of Goddard's design concepts that is still widely used today allowing the super cold liquid oxygen to cool the rocket combustion chamber while the oxygen was leaving the fuel tank.

For his first liquid-fueled rocket flight, Goddard tried putting the engine on top of the fuel and oxidizer tanks in a belief it would create more stability, according to NASA. Following flight tests, Goddard moved the engines underneath the propellant tanks, which "simplified the overall design", and instead for stability added moveable vanes to the engine exhaust and gyroscopes. "He was one of the very first people to take the theoretical ideas around rocketry, and actually turn them into an experiment and really apply the scientific methods and experimentation,"

I'm sure I've read about Goddard and his contributions to developing modern rocketry, but putting this little post together demonstrated that it was mostly lost to memory decay. "If you don't use it, you lose it." The sources I used put together good, readable and short biographies. These were

• Space.com: "2 seconds that changed the world: Robert Goddard launched the 1st liquid-fueled rocket 100 years ago today" 
• NASA: "95 Years Ago: Goddard’s First Liquid-Fueled Rocket" - obviously a celebration article from five years ago, but very readable and good.  
• Ars Technica: "A century after the first rocket launch, Ars staffers pick their favorites" much less page space on R. H. Goddard   

It's worth noting, and the Space.com article has the details that I looked at, that Goddard died young in 1945, of throat cancer, and his wife Esther was instrumental in conveying his history and advocating for him. She was essential in filing his patents. Often, she was the only person who could read his notes to put the patent applications together. Esther got approval for 131 patents of his 214 overall.

EDIT 3/17 @ 0755 EST: In the last paragraph I inadvertently changed that first sentence from "died young in 1945" to  "died young, 45,"

Changes to ham radio that have upended the old hobby

This post is going to be ham radio heavy, especially old ham radio. If you don't care about that, go check out the blogs on the right side of the page, and check back tomorrow to see if I could find any space-related news. 

Back in early January (the 4th), I did a post mentioning that this February was going to be my 50th anniversary of getting my first amateur radio license, my Novice class license. I figured the date based on having a QSL card in an old file box. 

The only thing I could find that I think is useful was in a QSL card box that was full of cards from my early days in radio. I think that card was from my first QSO. It says the date and time of the contact was February 9, 1976 at 4:15 PM, on 3.720 MHz - allocated to Novice licensees in those days. February 9th was a Monday, and the typical way that contests are timed is to start at midnight (UTC) on Saturday morning. Saturday was February 7th and 0000 UTC would have been 7:00 PM in the evening of Friday, February 6th, EST.  For me to be operating Monday, the license would have been received in the mail, before that Monday at 4:15 PM, although it might have come a day or more before that first contact.  

If you've been working toward getting a ham license, you've probably heard of QSL cards. There are a couple of handfuls of Q signals in common use, and QSL has got to be one of the most commonly used Q signals. The precise definition is a little wordy, but a common reference says.  

I am acknowledging receipt. - ("QSL" as a statement) 
Can you acknowledge receipt (of a message or transmission)? ("QSL?" as a question)

It was an old saying 50 years ago that a QSL card is "the final courtesy of making a contact" and you'll still see that saying today. It's not unusual to find that you don't get a card back in reply to every one you send because it's not unusual for one side of the contact to want a card more than the other side. Especially if you work a rare or hard to contact country.

In all the ways that Ham radio hobby has changed over my 50 years, one of the biggest changes has been exchanging QSL cards. As the name implies, for the vast majority of QSLs exchanged in my first couple of years, a QSL card was made out of a postcard-style card with space to write the other guy's address and the details of the contact. I'd write the other guy's address on it, stick a postage stamp on it and drop it in mail. The other end of the contact either did the same thing such that we both got each other's card within a day or two of mailing ours. We can still do that today, but it has been years since I've gotten plain, postcard-style QSL in the mail. 

The next level after the postcard dropped in a mailbox was to go to cards in an envelope and using first class mail. That's still a perfectly reasonable way to send cards to guys in our country, and the next level of caring is to enclose an SASE - a Self Addressed, Stamped Envelope - to pay the postage for the guy on the other end. This goes for virtually all of the "first and second" world countries. 

The first problem with sending a QSL to some countries is how to pay for their postage. There used to be something we could buy at a US Post Office called an International Reply Coupon or IRC that was redeemable for postage in other countries. I'm not sure if they still exist in some places but these days I regularly see other hams saying where they live the postal services won't accept the IRCs. There have been times when the safe way was to buy fresh postage for the country you're mailing to and either put that on your SASE or the other guy could put that postage on the reply envelope.  You could include a couple of bucks in the envelope with your card and the SAE, but that predictably led to mail being stolen from the guy it was intended for so someone could pocket the couple of bucks. The post office employees would learn who the guys were that had the radio towers and regularly got the large, thick envelopes that contained cash.

With the advent of computers and phones everywhere for everything, that has also affected QSLing. There are services that keep a little memory file for every licensee, like QRZ, and licensees can edit their "Biography" page to include info on how to QSL. In the last decade, hams started turning to various online payment services like PayPal, with the end result being you can send an email to them, listing all the contact details (time, signal reports, frequency, mode and all), send them something like $5 and get a bunch of contacts confirmed. 

In a parallel move to using online services for looking up addresses and paying for QSLs, a group of electronic QSL services got started. You upload the details for one or a bunch of QSOs you've had and depending on the service, you can either make your own QSL or use standard cards they have. 

If you're chasing a particular award, check their rules for what an acceptable electronic QSL is. One of the best services is the American Radio Relay League's Logbook Of The World or LOTW. A competitor is just called eQSL.cc and I've used both of those for as long as they're been around. A startup that's sending me a lot of cards these days is QSL World. I haven't yet joined or supported them, but I've replied to the cards I've gotten. While I'm not 100% sure of this, my guess is that LOTW works a lot like the ARRL's DXCC works. You can submit log entries that get security checks when you upload them, or you can send them physical cards, but I don't know how they handle the electronic cards from eQSL, QSL World or others. 

How safe is the Artemis II mission going to be?

It's a good question because no one in a position to know feels comfortable enough to say. Immediately after the Thursday story broke about rolling the SLS back to pad 39B, videos started showing up on YouTube essentially saying that because flight managers said they weren't going to do another full Wet Dress Rehearsal that they were endangering the crew. 

From my viewpoint, the crew is never going to be out of danger, and re-running every test that they've run so far isn't going to make the SLS safer, it's going to help wear it out. My perspective is that every time they fill and drain those cryogenic tanks, the tanks go through a series of thermal contraction and expansion changes due to the temperature changes, and those reduce the life of the tanks. They could wear the tanks out without ever launching. Testing more times doesn't make the probability of success better, it makes the probability worse. 

I think Space.com has a good summary with an article entitled, "How risky is the Artemis 2 astronaut launch to the moon? NASA would rather not say". There's simply too many unknowns. Remember the quote from Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of Defense under George W. Bush in 2002? 

Reports that say that something hasn't happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don't know we don't know. And if one looks throughout the history of our country and other free countries, it is the latter category that tends to be the difficult ones. 

I think I'd change those last few words to the "the latter category tends to be the ones that cause the trouble." 

The fundamental problem is that there has been one flight of the SLS so far. It was unmanned so there are systems that are being used for the first time in flight and it's arguable whether it's really reasonable to use SLS I as an example SLS flight. There's simply not enough data to properly quantify the risks involved.

"I wouldn't actually put a number on it," Lori Glaze, acting associate administrator for NASA's Exploration Systems Development Mission Directorate, said during a briefing on Thursday (March 12) following completion of the Artemis 2 flight readiness review.

Reporters repeatedly pressed Glaze and John Honeycutt, chair of the Artemis 2 mission management team, for numbers during that briefing. And a few did come up.

For example, Honeycutt noted that new rockets have historically launched successfully on their debut flights about 50% of the time.  ...

Human spaceflight programs that are launching regularly could probably expect a failure rate of about 2% — 1 in 50 — on their second or third liftoffs, Honeycutt added. But Artemis' cadence isn't exactly regular, given that there will be about a 3.5-year gap between the first and second missions if Artemis 2 does indeed get off the pad in early April.

Honeycutt went on to say, "That basically means we're probably not 1 in 50 on the mission going exactly like we want to, but we're probably not 1 in 2 like we were on the first flight." (1 in 50 is the mission failure rate). 

For context, a 210-day commercial crew mission to the International Space Station is rated at a 1 in 200 (0.5%), and during the Apollo days, the risk of crew loss was 1 in 10 (10%). In the early days of the Space Shuttle program, they believed the chance of crew loss was 1 in 100, but they later realized that for the early shuttle flights it was actually 1 in 10. 

A persistent problem with doing this calculation for manned spaceflight is the small numbers available to work with. 

"We have pursued loss of mission, loss of crew-type number assessments, but I'm not sure we understand what they mean," Honeycutt said. 

To his credit, Honeycutt realized that he was working with a model that said the most dangerous aspect of the mission would be micrometeors and orbital debris (MMOD) as the biggest single risk, saying "Really? Is that the biggest risk to the mission — MMOD?" 

Honeycutt seemed to realize that such admissions, valid and honest as they are, would probably spawn stories like the one you're reading now. "Well, this oughta make for some good reading over the next few days," he said with a smile, drawing laughter from the journalists in the room.

The four crewmembers of NASA's Artemis 2 moon mission. Left to right: The Canadian Space Agency's Jeremy Hansen and NASA's Christina Koch, Victor Glover and Reid Wiseman. (Image credit: NASA/Aubrey Gemignani)

Firefly Aerospace makes it to seven

Almost exactly one month ago, February 15th, I posted a notice to "Keep an Eye out for this launch this week" about a scheduled launch by Firefly Aerospace, with the funny/cute mission name "Stairway to Seven." Little did I know it would take them as long as it did to complete the mission, but complete it they did on Wednesday, March 11.  

"Mission success! Alpha Flight 7 achieved nominal performance and validated key systems ahead of our Block II configuration upgrade."  

The mission was the first successful launch for Firefly Aerospace after two successive launch failures in the last year. The first was at the end of April of '25, on a mission called "Message in a Booster," (second story in a short news story roundup) that was due to an anomaly just after the first stage shut down and dropped away from the upper stage.  This left the upper stage unable to complete the mission of putting an experimental satellite into orbit for Lockheed Martin.  The payload never made orbit. 

Alpha suffered an anomaly shortly after its two stages separated, which led to the loss of the nozzle extension for the upper stage's single Lightning engine. This significantly reduced the engine's thrust, dooming the mission, Firefly said in an update several hours after launch. 

Then, as they began preparations for "Stairway to Seven," in September of '25, the Alpha first stage exploded on the stand during a pre-launch test. This mishap added months to the mission development timeline as the company investigated a cause and got another booster ready for flight. The test-stand explosion was eventually traced to "a process error during stage one integration that resulted in a minute hydrocarbon contamination," which ruled out a design flaw and allowed them to return to work on a booster for this launch.

The three weeks of delays since the first announced February date for this attempt to launch "Stairway to Seven" were relatively typical things, mostly weather and an abundance of caution. The launch went off at 8:50 PM EDT on Wednesday, March 11, and from this viewer's standpoint, it appeared flawless with every major milestone ticking off just as called.  

Firefly Aerospace's Alpha rocket launches on the "Stairway to Seven" mission on March 11, 2026. (Image credit: Firefly Aerospace)

Now that they've successfully regained where they were with the Block I of Firefly's Alpha, they're going to throw it out - figuratively. They've been struggling to get through the past two mishaps before they switch over to working toward the first launch of the Block II Alpha. 

Alpha Block II will stand about 7 feet (2.13 meters) taller than its 96.7-foot-tall (29.6-m) predecessor and will feature upgraded avionics and power systems, as well as improved thermal protections.

[Wednesday's] launch was a significant step forward for Firefly, which has excelled in some areas of its space business more than others. Last year, the company's uncrewed Blue Ghost moon lander became the first private spacecraft to successfully complete a mission on the lunar surface, but Alpha has now managed full mission success just three times in its seven orbital launch attempts.
...
“Flight 7 served as a critical opportunity to validate Alpha’s performance ahead of our Block II upgrade, and this team knocked it out of the park,” said Adam Oakes, Firefly’s vice president of launch.

NASA says: Artemis II ready for April 1st. Rollout to pad soon

At the conclusion of a two day flight readiness review today, Dr. Lori Glaze, NASA's Moon to Mars program manager, announced that the Artemis II vehicle has been successfully repaired, and they're planning to roll the vehicle out to the pad as soon as one week from today, April 19th. With the earliest possible launch window in the coming month still as reported before: April 1st at 6:24PM EDT. 

"During the flight readiness review, we had extremely thorough discussions — very open, transparent," Lori Glaze, NASA's Exploration Systems Development acting associate administrator, said during a post-FRR press briefing today. It's a short timeline, but NASA officials say they're putting safety first as they work toward their next launch opportunity.

"We talked a lot about our risk posture and how we're mitigating those risks," Glaze said. "We reviewed the challenges that we've had and how we've addressed them, and we talked about the work that remains, what's left to do, and how we're going to get through all of that."

Dr. Glaze spends a few seconds on the launch window availability and points out that even with their calendar of windows we've seen many times, it's not necessarily possible to try on every day that's green, as well as pointing out that in the previous calculations that gave us the "green days," they've missed some times. She added that a recent re-check showed an acceptable launch window on April 2nd.

Artemis 2's mission remains unchanged: fly a single figure-eight loop around the moon and back to Earth. As talked about last Friday, NASA changed the overall Artemis program recently, changing Artemis III from being the first moon landing, currently in 2027, to a mission to test rendezvous and docking between the Artemis/Orion craft and one or both of the human landing systems, SpaceX's HLS or Blue Origin's Blue Moon MK2. That pushed the first lunar landing on Artemis IV out to 2028. Artemis V is tentatively scheduled for later in that year.

NASA doesn't like SpaceX HLS Manual Controls

This Tuesday, March 10 (yesterday as I write), NASA released a report on their management of the HLS -or Human Landing System - that has been under development contracts to SpaceX and Blue Origin. While NASA originally contracted SpaceX alone, after Blue Origin and Dynetics sued NASA, even though NASA couldn't afford to build more than one model HLS, Blue Origin was contracted to deliver their lander, the Blue Moon MK2.   

With two competitors producing lunar landings, an atmosphere of wanting more competition began emerging, and neither company has said much about their landers other than releasing some good computer renderings of their vehicles. That means yesterday's NASA report has made for some interesting reading.  To begin with, they admit the fixed price contracts have worked well for the agency.

Overall, the report, signed by Office of Inspector General senior official Robert Steinau, finds that the fixed-price contracting approach has been beneficial for NASA as it seeks to broaden its utilization of the US commercial space industry.

“We found that the Agency’s contract approach has been effective at controlling costs and provided the HLS Program with insight into SpaceX’s and Blue Origin’s development of their lunar landers,” the report states. “The providers have also been able to utilize the Agency’s subject matter expertise and unique capabilities and facilitates to advance their lander development.”  

At this point you're probably thinking there's a Big But coming (Nota Bene only one "t" - I'm not Sir Mix-A-Lot). 

NASA doesn't like the pilot's controls in the SpaceX HLS. 

NASA had similar reactions during the design of the crew dragon, and the reaction seemed like a typical old school vs. new school reaction, or what you'd get if you put someone who had never flown anything newer than maybe 50 years old into new design.   

The space agency and SpaceX engaged in a similar back-and-forth during the design process for the Crew Dragon spacecraft a decade ago. SpaceX initially wanted touchscreens only, with limited flight commands available to astronauts. NASA pushed back and wanted what were essentially joysticks for astronauts to fly the vehicles like previous spacecraft. A former NASA astronaut then working at SpaceX, Garret Reisman, helped broker a compromise by which astronauts could manually fly the vehicles using controls on touchscreens. 

This is one of those circumstances where I find that both sides make sense to me. In the event of everything going to hell in a handbasket, it's important for the guy flying to work as seamlessly as if he'd been using those controls and flying that vehicle all his life. He could control it without a moment of thinking about it. Totally automatically. You don't want him spending time grabbing the joystick and taking time to do a mental change. On the other hand, these are NASA astronauts we're talking about, "the best of the best" who should be able to learn to fly anything faster, and then fly it smoother and better than non-astronauts. Plus having the flight controls on touchscreens is fine if the touchscreens are working and the astronauts are that smooth with them. 

While Crew Dragon has flown many times, the controls in HLS are going to be new. 

“Starship will not have the same level of proven flight heritage in the actual operating environment for its crewed lunar missions,” the report states. “Incorporating this system capability is a key element of HLS’s human-rating certification and part of an essential crew survival strategy.”

Now balance that with knowing absolutely nothing about Blue Origin's flight controls. It's not that Blue hasn't released the info on the controls, Blue hasn't designed them. 

There is other interesting information in the report, including details on the uncrewed demonstration flights that SpaceX and Blue Origin are both required to fly before human missions can take place. The inspector general notes that these flights will not require life support systems and airlocks, as human missions will. Nor will the tall Starship vehicle be required to test an elevator to bring crew down to the surface.

Maybe it would be better if they did a more thorough flight test.

Artists' renderings of SpaceX's Starship HLS (left) and Blue Origin's lander. Image credit to the respective company.

A little addendum ...

The talk about the reentering Van Allen Probe A last night reminded me of things I've posted about several times over the years, the big one that the Chinese have dropped boosters onto populated areas for years. 

This example is from a post dated November 27, 2019 and the Tweet here is dated the 23rd. 

I hesitate to start with this example because while I believe they still drop boosters with minimal effort to protect the people on the ground, I know that China is working seriously on reusable boosters now. Several recent articles have focused on test flights of reusable boosters. We did stories about them testing reusable boosters just one month ago, a little over a month before that, and so on (second story in a roundup). Still, while there are still US launch companies that don't reuse boosters they don't knowingly drop them on populated areas. 

A big difference is that boosters weigh considerably more than more typical satellites and can cause much more damage. China launched four heavy-lift Long March 5B rockets between 2020 and 2022, and let their approximately 24 ton core stages fall back to Earth. The NASA requirements for public safety from re-entering spacecraft were published in early 1996, and require better than a 1 in 10,000 probability assessment, obviously a smaller chance than the "approximately 1 in 4,200" chance this Probe A was evaluated at. 

“Due to late-stage design changes, the potential risk of uncontrolled reentry increased,” a NASA spokesperson told Ars. “After taking into account the mission’s scientific benefits and the low risk of harm to anyone on Earth, NASA granted a waiver to address the non-compliance with the US Government Orbital Debris Mitigation Standard Practices. Consistent with national policy, NASA notified the US Department of State about the exception.”

Is there anything that screams "big gubmint" more than exempting your own projects (like this NASA satellite) from requirements everyone else is expected to meet? 

All the sources I've read yesterday and today repeat that no one has been injured by reentering satellites. That said, it seems the same can't be said about things falling from the sky. I ran across this photo around 2017, and vividly recalled seeing this picture in a magazine while in the waiting room at my dentist. That would have been somewhere around 1966 to maybe '68. Note that the picture itself is dated 1954. Also, where it says, "Ann Hodges, after she became the only person in history to have been struck by a meteorite,"  that sentence should end with "that we know of."