Small Space News Roundup 62

A couple of big guys confirm stories being told about them.  "Big guys" in the space company sense.  

Blue Origin confirms ESCAPADE is the next New Glenn Mission

This afternoon, Blue Origin confirmed on X that the second mission of their New Glenn (NG-2) will be the ESCAPADE mission to Mars, as we talked about on June 30th.  

In addition to the two satellites headed for Mars, the New Glenn will carry  a technology demonstration from @Viasat in support of @NASASpaceOps' Communications Services Project.  I can't tell if that's also going to Mars or staying closer to home.

There was no mention of when that launch might be.  To borrow a comment from email edition of the Rocket Report:

Previously, the company has said this second launch will take place no earlier than August 15. However, that is less than one month away. Late September is probably the earliest realistic launch date, with October or November more likely for the second flight of the company's large rocket.

Boeing and NASA agree the next Starliner flight probably won't be manned 

Most everyone knows about the big story of Starliner's Crewed Flight Test 1 (CFT-1) that was going on a year ago - and the fact that it was still going on in mid-July instead of being over in mid-June is just one overall sign of what a dismal failure that mission was.  One of the posts about how bad it was is currently among my most read posts in the last year - and that was posted four months ago. 

One of the major problems in the mission was failure of thrusters.  It was worse than I knew and I'm guessing worse than anyone not actively involved in the mission knew.  That is, only Butch Wilmore, Suni Williams and a handful of other astronauts and engineers.

The story gets worse from there.  Wilmore adds: "And this is the part I'm sure you haven't heard. We lost the fourth thruster. Now we've lost 6DOF (6 Degrees of Freedom) control. We can't maneuver forward. I still have control, supposedly, on all the other axes."  

Now they simply could not control the Starliner to the degree they needed to.  The two of them realized they were in a very precarious situation, and it literally was just barely good enough to only probably not get them both killed. There was no need to talk about that with each other; they're both experienced enough as astronauts to know what the situation meant.  That's when the mission control in Houston came up with the scariest solution.  

Turn the entire system of thrusters off and back on again.  Really.  And some of them started working again.

As you know, the decision was made after two months of delays to return the Starliner unmanned, they bent several unstated rules (the "we always do it this way" kind of rules) and Butch and Suni's mission stretched until March 18th.  

The problematic thrusters are contained in boxes called doghouses and the efforts so far have concentrated on understanding why the problems happened.  It hasn't been spectacularly good or fast progress.  And it needs to be tested in the real environment. 

NASA crew rotations aboard the ISS typically last six to eight months, lining up two launches per year to ferry astronauts to and from the orbital laboratory. Slating the first crewed, operational Starliner mission for the end of 2026 likely means the spacecraft's next launch won't include any astronauts aboard. "There's a strong chance we'll fly a cargo flight first," Stich said.

"What we're really looking at is, can we test all the changes that we are making, to the doghouses in particular, and would we want to validate those in flight first?" he explained.

The CFT-1 Starliner Capsule on top of its Atlas V ride at the SLC-41 launch pad before the mission, May of '24.  Image Credit: ULA on Flickr