Some Small Space News Items

Slow news days lately...

NASA's SLS Wet Dress Rehearsal is proceeding although the weekend has had some nasty weather move through the area.  Earlier this evening, one of the three 600 foot tall towers surrounding the launch pad and vehicle was struck by lightning (which is their designed purpose in life), and as of this evening, there has been no word on whether or not anything was damaged.  Until the storms came, the hope was to have the test completed by Sunday afternoon at 5PM.  Eric Berger at Ars Technica has this reminder. 

NASA officials have said they will update the media on Monday about the results of the test. Of course, this assumes that the wet dress rehearsal test is completed in two days. There are no guarantees of that, as NASA will be working with a complicated rocket and intricate ground equipment and handling 700,000 gallons of extremely cold liquids. It will be a major test for all of these systems. When NASA conducted a similar "countdown demonstration test" of its Saturn V rocket for the first time in 1967, with the Apollo 4 mission, there were all sorts of issues, and the test stretched out to 17 days.

1967 was clearly a long time ago, both in calendar years and in the advancement of engineering of vehicles like the SLS, which is a descendant of the Saturn V and the much more recent Space Shuttle systems.  I would hope we don't see this extending 17 days, but stretching out another one or two days seems very realistic.  FWIW, there's a massive line of storms over the area now, but once this clears the area (after midnight, perhaps even till dawn), the next few days look much better.  

---

April is looking to be SpaceX's busiest April yet with six Falcon 9 launches scheduled for the month.  Friday afternoon's Transporter 4 launch was under the same cloud deck we've been under since last Thursday, so we didn't see it from the yard, but could hear it when the rumble reached us.  They're planning to launch all but one of the month's six missions in the first 19 days of the month.  

SpaceX has two Crew Dragon missions – Axiom-1 with four private astronauts and Crew-4 with four government astronauts – scheduled to launch from Kennedy Space Center Pad 39A on April 6th and April 19th. In the middle, SpaceX intends to launch Starlink 4-14 – the month’s only planned Starlink mission – on April 14th. On April 15th, SpaceX is scheduled to launch the National Reconnaissance Office’s (NRO) NROL-85 spy satellite out of California’s Vandenberg Space Force Base. Finally, SpaceX could launch Egypt’s Nilesat 301 geostationary communications satellite on April 30th.

The CSG-2 mission, back on Jan. 31.  Richard Angle photo.  Just a beautiful shot. 

---

I rarely talk much about the business side of the space industry but we all have to know it's very important.  I just don't have much of an "inner CPA" or "inner financial analyst."  This week's Rocket Report had a couple of interesting little items on the business side of a couple of names we all know that are kind of stuck in my head, so I'll share a little. 

Virgin Orbit loses $157 million in 2021. In its first financial results since going public in December after a merger with a special purpose acquisition corporation, Virgin Orbit announced Tuesday a net loss of $157.3 million for 2021 on $7.4 million in revenue. That is compared to a net loss of $121.6 million on $3.8 million in revenue in 2020, SpaceNews reports. Despite the significant loss, the launch company emphasized in an earnings call the increase in revenue, primarily from two LauncherOne missions conducted in 2021.

They lost $157 million, $35 million more than the year before, and that's a good thing?  They had some more revenue, sure, but they still lost $157m after counting that.  All I can say is, "Yikes!" 

The second item is a story I only briefly touched on once, Aerojet Rocketdyne is in the midst of some sort of internal power struggle between the board of directors and a second, self-declared "independent" board of directors that seems to want to take over the company.  The company's future seems to be on the line.  Aerojet is the company behind the RS-25 Space Shuttle Main Engines that are currently on the SLS out at pad 39B and one of the only dedicated engine producers in America.  My reference to them was when the FTC said they were going to sue to block their acquisition by Lockheed-Martin, after which Lock-Mart withdrew their offer to buy.  

If I were to try to update this story, it would sound like a Kamala Harris-style word salad, so I'll just refer readers who are interested to Breaking Defense, a news site dedicated to the defense industry.  That article is dated mid-February, so consider it a backgrounder.  The update is the very last piece in this week's Rocket Report from Ars Technica.  I don't think much has changed since February.