Ketchup Time

Or to borrow the famous quote from Airplane: "Looks like I picked the wrong week to quit sniffing glue." Considering the amount of times it seems like there are no interesting, newsworthy stories, we get two between yesterday and today. 

The first story, dated yesterday, is that a key committee in congress is pushing NASA to "get moving" on developing private space stations to replace the aging International Space Station. Two months ago, a "key staffer" on Senator Ted Cruz's committee, said in a public meeting that she was “begging” NASA to release a document that would kick off the second round of a competition. 

There has been no movement since then, as NASA has yet to release this “request for proposals.” So this week, Cruz stepped up the pressure on the space agency with a NASA Authorization bill that passed his committee on Wednesday.

Regarding NASA’s support for the development of commercial space stations, the bill mandates the following, within specified periods, of passage of the law:

• Within 60 days, publicly release the requirements for commercial space stations in low-Earth orbit
• Within 90 days, release the final “request for proposals” to solicit industry responses
• Within 180 days, enter into contracts with “two or more” commercial providers for such stations

Cruz is trying to inject some sort of sense of urgency into the agency, which doesn't seem have one. Several private companies - including Axiom Space, Blue Origin, Vast, and Voyager - are finalizing designs for space stations. All have expressed a desire for clarity from NASA on requirements for their space stations; requirements such as how long the space agency would like its astronauts to stay on board, the types of scientific equipment needed, and much more. 

This has got to be rough for the companies trying to put up their own space stations. Unlike just about any business you can think about starting here on the ground, there hasn't been a private industry that got space stations going.  What do they charge? Getting there is going to be expensive, but getting to space has always been expensive. It's just not going to be the only expensive part. I suppose NASA will be the best source for info that there is, but ultimately, the company leasing time on their station is going to have to make a profit and there will need to be enough demand to keep the business running. There's just no existing model to base their rates on. 

Nominally, NASA plans to have one or more of these companies operating a commercial space station in low-Earth orbit by 2030. This is the date at which the US space agency has stated it will retire the aging laboratory, some elements of which are now nearly three decades old. However, some space policy officials have questioned whether any of the companies might be ready by then.

Cruz and other senators on the committee appear to share those concerns, as their legislation extends the International Space Station’s lifespan from 2030 to 2032 (an extension must still be approved by international partners, including Russia). Moreover, the authorization bill states, “The Administrator shall not initiate the de-orbit of the ISS until the date on which a commercial low-Earth orbit destination has reached an initial operational capability.”

With this legislation, the US Senate is making clear that it views a permanent human presence in low-Earth orbit as a high priority. This version of the authorization legislation must still be passed by the full Senate and work its way through the House of Representatives.

Rendering of the first Axiom habitat module attached to the International Space Station. Credit: Axiom Space

There's only a handful of companies looking to provide this service, and the source article only interviewed a couple of them: Max Haot, CEO of Vast Space and Dr. Jonathan Cirtain, CEO of Axiom Space. Neither wanted a hard, fixed date to de-orbit the ISS, but were confident they can be ready to provide hardware in the time frame a 2030 de-orbit would require. 

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The second big story is centered on Artemis and the goal of establishing a sustained human presence on the moon. 

Last week brought some big changes to the whole Artemis program and how to improve the chances of success. The changes focused largely on increasing the launch cadence of NASA’s large SLS rocket and putting a greater emphasis on lunar surface activities. The problem is that there was no mention of how to resolve the problem that created the Lunar Gateway was developed to work around. The enormous SLS is not powerful enough to bring four astronauts to the surface of the moon.  

The concept eventually turned into a space station in lunar orbit - the Gateway - an absurd compromise that would allow Artemis to get to the moon by launching to that Near Rectilinear Halo Orbit (NRHO), docking the astronaut carrying - Orion capsule to the Gateway, and taking another new vehicle, a lunar lander, down to the lunar surface. NASA has contracted with SpaceX and Blue Origin to develop these landers, Starship and Blue Moon MK2, respectively.

As part of his announcement, Isaacman said a revamped Artemis III mission will now be used to test one or both of these landers near Earth before they are called upon to land humans on the Moon later this decade.

NASA will launch Artemis III next year, he said, to be followed by one or possibly even two lunar landings in 2028. A single landing before the end of 2028 seems like a stretch, even for glass-half-full optimists in the space community. And for there to be a chance of happening, SpaceX or Blue Origin, or both, need to get hustling quickly.

Isaacman is becoming more aware of these challenges, and one of his first moves as administrator was meeting with engineers from both SpaceX and Blue Origin to hear their ideas for accelerating NASA’s Artemis timeline. 

After this meeting on January 13, Isaacman said NASA would do what it could to facilitate the faster development of a Human Landing System: “We will challenge every requirement, clear every obstacle, delete every blocker and empower the team to deliver… and we will do it with time to spare.” 

An unstated law of the universe is that the more contractors there are involved (who all tend to be competitors of each other) the more complicated the mess becomes. 

For example, to reach the Moon during the initial Artemis missions, a lander must dock with the Orion spacecraft. That may sound routine, as spacecraft have been rendezvousing and docking in space for six decades.

However, Orion is saddled with thousands of requirements, and virtually every decision point regarding docking must be signed off on by the lander company—SpaceX or Blue Origin—as well as NASA, Orion’s contractor Lockheed Martin, and the European service module contractor Airbus. Additionally, Orion has a lot of sensitive elements to work around, such as the plumes of its thrusters, and engineers have spent a lot of time working on issues such as ensuring consistent cabin pressures between vehicles. In short, it gets complicated fast.

One of the ways NASA is trying to help simplify things is to eliminate the NRHO, an elliptical orbit that comes as close as 3,000 km to the surface of the Moon with its high point as far as 70,000 km from the moon. The intent is to not build the Lunar Gateway, partly because the requirement to dock to the Gateway in that NRHO added requirements that make the mission harder. 

Why not simply have Orion meet the landers in a low-lunar orbit, similar to the Apollo Program? This would allow the landers to consume less propellant on the way down and back up from the Moon. The reason is that, due to a number of poor decisions over the last 15 years, the Orion spacecraft’s service module does not have the performance needed to reach low-lunar orbit and then return safely to Earth. Hence the use of a near-rectilinear halo orbit.

However, a research paper published in July 2022 by NASA engineers at Johnson Space Center analyzes several other circular and elliptical orbits that Orion could reach with its present propulsive capabilities. Out of this analysis came another useful orbit with a name that just rolls off the tongue: Elliptical Polar Orbit with Coplanar Line of Apsides, or EPO/CoLA.

The source article goes into a few paragraphs on whether both lander contractors, SpaceX and Blue Origin can get moving fast enough to meet this improved schedule. Here's where the years of watching these things being developed makes me think that if you need good and fast SpaceX is generally the safest option to go with. 

Image from Casey Handmer's blog. He put this graphic together to put raw numbers in front of all the faces who need to know.

This isn't wrong so much as it isn't the full picture and Handmer points that out. In the upper right, that $31.6 billion cost doesn't include the SLS. Orion and SLS have burned through nearly $100b - so far.