Small Space News Story Roundup 69

A quieter day than the last time I posted one of these little posts.

Former VP who practically founded SpaceX to fly Blue Origin 

If you've read much about the history of SpaceX you've undoubtedly read about Hans Koenigsmann.  Koenigsmann was there from the first days of SpaceX until four years ago in late 2021.  A search of the blog shows his name (first and last) appears in nine posts.

When Elon Musk started the company in 2002, he was joined by two other “founding” employees, Tom Mueller in propulsion and Chris Thompson in structures. Koenigsmann was the next hire, brought on to develop avionics for the Falcon 1 rocket.

Koenigsmann remained at the company for two decades before leaving SpaceX in late 2021. During that time, he transitioned from avionics to lead mission assurance and safety while also spearheading every major failure investigation of the Falcon 9 rocket. He was a beloved leader and mentor for his employees within the company’s demanding culture. 

This week we learned that he has signed up to fly a New Shepard suborbital flight; a program from Blue Origin. 

Because of this experience and his prominence during SpaceX’s first crewed flights, Koenigsmann has become one of the most well-known German rocket scientists active today. And now he has announced he is going to space on a future New Shepard suborbital flight alongside his friend Michaela “Michi” Benthaus as early as next month. She’s notable in her own right—a mountain biking accident in 2018 left her with a spinal cord injury, but she did not let this derail her from her dream. She will become the first wheelchair user to fly in space.

It's a short article and Koenigsmann comes across well.  It's important to add that he comes across as what he is; an engineer who dealt with the requirements of space flight, and keeping bad things from happening but has always wondered what it was like to experience.  I think this quote sums up his desire for the mission about as well as can be:

I’ve always been interested in experiencing Max Q from the inside. Does it shake you side to side? Or is it just something you fly through so fast you don’t even notice it? None of the astronauts I’ve talked to really had a good report on that. So I want to find this out for myself. I also want to be able to say that I saw that Earth is a sphere. I just want to see the whole thing from above and get an idea of how big it really is in terms of curvature, right? Because you can extrapolate the curvature all the way around, and it gives you a great idea of how small we are and how big the planet is. 

“Michi” Benthaus and Koenigsmann pose in front of a New Shepard capsule. Credit: Hans Koenigsmann/LinkedIn

Making Vandenberg a space center again

While SpaceX hasn't finished modifying that launch complex at Vandenberg, they've already turned the Space Force Base "upside down and inside out" and they're just getting started. (Obligatory warning that's really Diana Ross)

The Department of the Air Force has approved SpaceX’s plans to launch up to 100 missions per year from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California, Ars reports. This would continue the tectonic turnaround at the spaceport on California’s Central Coast. Five years ago, Vandenberg hosted just a single orbital launch. This year’s number stands at 51 orbital flights, or 53 launches if you count a pair of Minuteman missile tests, the most in a single calendar year at Vandenberg since the early 1970s. Military officials have now authorized SpaceX to double its annual launch rate at Vandenberg from 50 to 100, with up to 95 missions using the Falcon 9 rocket and up to five launches of the larger Falcon Heavy.

No big rush … There’s more to the changes at Vandenberg than launching additional rockets. The authorization gives SpaceX the green light to redevelop Space Launch Complex 6 (SLC-6) to support Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy missions. SpaceX plans to demolish unneeded structures at SLC-6 (pronounced “Slick 6”) and construct two new landing pads for Falcon boosters on a bluff overlooking the Pacific just south of the pad. SLC-6 would become the West Coast home for Falcon Heavy, but SpaceX currently has no confirmed contracts to fly the heavy-lifter from Vandenberg.

From one launch in the year five years ago to 53 - so far this year - at a rate obviously more than one per week.   

And here's a bonus story

The current schedule shows a Falcon 9 launch from SLC-40 on Cape Canaveral SFS on Sunday morning (October 19).  Video here is set to start at 9:52 AM EDT while launch is 10:52 AM.  This is the fleet leader, B1067 launch 31, which will be a new record.