Because Slow News Day
The Launch Industry's biggest problem is exactly what you think
It's one word: cadence.
At the World Space Business Week this week, executives speaking at the Sept. 15 panel highlighted their problems scaling up flights of new vehicles that have entered service in the last two years.
“The key for us is cadence,” said Laura Maginnis, vice president of New Glenn mission management at Blue Origin, citing investments in tooling and automation “so that we can scale up with a really dramatic increase in the coming year to meet the needs of all of our customers.”
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At the same conference a year ago, another Blue Origin executive projected the company would conduct 8 to 10 New Glenn launches in 2025. To date, New Glenn has launched once this year, the vehicle’s inaugural mission in January.
A quick check of Blue's page at NextSpaceflight shows they have a target of three more launches this year, with the next launch being the Escapade mission to Mars for NASA and targeted as "No Earlier Than October," which is uncomfortably (to me) nonspecific. SpaceNews adds:
Rocket Lab, which built the twin spacecraft, noted in a Sept. 12 social media post that it had yet to ship them to the launch site, suggesting liftoff may still be a couple of months away.
It's not news that ULA is in a similar boat. CEO Tory Bruno was quoted saying that between Atlas V and Vulcan they would aim for 25 launches this year. In August CEO Tory Bruno said the company now expects nine. And it's not just US companies.
As recently as June, Arianespace projected five Ariane 6 launches this year, including the debut of the more powerful Ariane 64, with four solid-rocket boosters, but has completed only two Ariane 62 flights, including one in August.
One of the two ESCAPADE spacecraft undergoes final test in Rocket Lab's clean room. Image credit: Rocket Lab
NASA reports passing a major milestone for the number of exoplanets discovered
I remember fairly clearly where I was when the first planet outside our solar system was discovered and verified, Oct. 6, 1995. In my real job, I was still working at the second to last company I'd ever work for, and the project I was working on was communications systems working around 60 GHz, well into what are called "millimeter waves" or the spectrum above microwaves.
NASA reports we have crossed the 6,000 line of discovered and verified planets. We're just short of 30 years since that discovery in October of 1995, which seems to indicate a rapid pace of discovery, but it's more than that.
In fact, only three years ago, that figure was at 5,000. At least at face value, the rate of discovery appears to be exponential — which is good, because, theoretically, there should be billions more worlds out there for us to locate.
I'm going to rush to add that while the whole concept (and the source article) are full of the stuff of dreams - not just new planets and imagining what they may be like, but the thought of visiting them to see and experience what they're really like. That's where reality diverges dramatically from those dreams. Without those staples of science fiction, like "warp drives" or traveling at multiples of the speed of light, we'll never see those places. I've gone through some of the numbers before.
Voyager 1 is currently 22 hours, 37 minutes and change away at light speed. I'll call it 22-1/2 light hours away. The nearest stars are just over four light years away. Assuming it's even going in the right direction, it'll take Voyager 1 almost 77,000 years to get to the Alpha/Proxima Centauri star system.
It's safe to say that there's no way we could mount a mission to the nearest star with any technology we know of. What moving machines do you know of that could work for 77,000 years? If we could go 10x faster than Voyager, it's still 7700 years. We'd have to go a significant portion of the speed of light to even get there in an adult's lifetime. The problems are mind boggling - and this is for the nearest star. Our galaxy is thousands of times bigger than the distance to Proxima centauri; around 88,000 light years in diameter. It's practically impossible to go those distances. Even going 100 times the speed of light it takes far too long to get there.
Regarding all those companies that suffer from Failure to Launch syndrome, funny that some of them were making fun of Elon Time and SpaceX not meeting its huge goals by a little bit.
ReplyDeleteSiG, now that you mention distances, I wonder if this is what indirectly contributed to what I perceive to be the lessening of good science fiction. When there are no limits and an easily explainable (if entirely fictional) technology, you can write grand tales. When the reality is known and the suspension of disbelief is much more difficult, one is thrown back on writing what one knows, which is sort of the real world pushed forward hundreds or thousands of years.
ReplyDeleteI do not want the real world. I want planetary exploration of exotic words and finned rockets.
That's something I hadn't thought of. I haven't really enjoyed much science fiction really since the original Dune trilogy, and I read that in the late '70s. To me nothing seems as good as the classic Heinlein, Asimov, Clarke stuff.
DeleteI don't think many would call it sci-fi instead of fantasy (of some sort) but the only series I've really enjoyed has been Larry Correia's Monster Hunter stuff - and I'm so out of touch with that I'm not sure how much I've read.
Hey SiG, I only follow along casually, and mostly here (thank you) but isn't the fundamental problem these other launch companies have their mindset? The quote above says that NOW they have to scale up... where SpaceX was built from the ground up to scale, and with the need for mass manufacturing as a design constraint.
Delete'Get one successfully built, and THEN we'll figure out how to do 20' is old school, while SpaceX's approach is new school, treating space access like an industrial process.
The approach to astronauts is similar. Musk needs 10,000 mechanics and oilfield guys, NASA wants 10 polymath olympic athletes.
I'm pretty sure I know which approach I'd bet on for getting humanity off this rock.
nick
I think the root is deeper, but it really is reflected by the mindset.
DeleteIt's about Space 1.0 vs. 2.0. Space 1.0 seems to be founded on attaching itself to the government money teat. They have to give some record of successful launches to be allowed to suck that money, but that's their only reason for even trying to launch successfully. Once they're on that money, they don't have to be good. Look at SLS. OK, it's big. So what? You can put up the same amount of payload with two Falcon Heavy launches that cost 8% of one SLS launch. There's not one characteristic of SLS that's better.
Space 2.0 is founded on expanding into space, unmanned or manned, and making their money from the private sector is secondary to improving life in general.
My impression, FWIW, is that both Jeff Bezos and Tory Bruno see the potential in Space 2.0's model, but the companies are fossilized and resist change. And a new company, like Blue Origin, is only fossilized because they hired "experienced" (fossilized) staff.
Sadly, in regards to 'good' science fiction, the fault is on both the publishing houses and on legacy-sci-fi-con. Both have been taken over by the hive mind and have made it ridiculously difficult for actual science-science fiction to be both published and to get any recognition at many conventions.
DeleteIt goes back to THE HUGO AWARDSSSS!!! and the whole mess when someones pointed out, in public, for all to see, that only a small segment of sci-fi-fandom gets to determine who gets put on the list and a small segment who gets to count the votes (sound familiar) and that the parameters for what's considered to be votable for are rather leftists in nature. And that was back in 2013. It's only gotten worse, according to some authors like Larry Correia and Sarah Hoyt, both who have some presence on the internet.
Almost everything I read these days is on Kindle Unlimited from small publishing houses or self published.
DeleteI don't remember the last time I read a book from a "major" publisher - I've read the cover blurbs of some recently and could immediately tell I wouldn't be interested in them.
Jonathan
Beans, from what I have read I completely agree with you. To be fair, all of my sci-fi interests are now in the late 1960's to the early 1990's because of the Hive Mind.
DeleteSiG - I think you are spot on with identification of the problem of 1.0 versus 2.0. One mindset encourages innovation and risk, the other encourages "we need more money to do it".
Deletere: SpaceX, yep, they're going to get mocked because they didn't hit 200 launches in 2025.. While the average for everyone else is...less than 2.
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