Artemis to Roll Back to VAB

On Friday, we covered that the Artemis Wet Dress Rehearsal never completed and the next step  was uncertain.  On Saturday, the agency held a teleconference to discuss the progress and announced they will roll the vehicle back to the VAB.  

The decision comes after three tries during the last two weeks. Each fueling attempt was scuttled by one or more technical issues with the rocket, its mobile launch tower, or ground systems that supply propellants and gases. During the most recent attempt, on Thursday April 14, NASA succeeded in loading 49 percent of the core-stage liquid oxygen fuel tank and 5 percent of the liquid hydrogen tank.

While this represents progress, it did not include the most dynamic portion of the test, during which the rocket is fully fueled and pressurized; and it, the ground systems, and computer systems are put into a terminal countdown when every variable is closely monitored. NASA had hoped to complete this wet dress rehearsal test to work out the kinks in the complicated launch system so that, when the rocket is rolled out later this year for its actual launch, the countdown will proceed fairly smoothly.

NASA said that they and their contractors will use the next several weeks to address the problems found during the test.  Something I hadn't read before was that some issues were found with nitrogen system contractor Air Liquide's hardware, which will have to upgrade its capabilities.  Technicians will replace the faulty check valve on the upper stage of the rocket, as well as fix a leak on the mobile launch tower's "tail service mast umbilical," a 10-meter-tall structure that provides propellant and electricity lines to the rocket on the pad.  

Under the "nothing happens quickly" rule of thumb, it seems like a reasonable guess to say it will take them a week to prepare and roll the mobile launch tower and Artemis back to the VAB.  Under the same assumption, I expect the work to take the month of May.  

At some point, NASA has to decide if they roll Artemis back out to the pad and complete the WDR successfully, roll it back to the VAB for some tasks typically done between WDR and then roll it to the pad for the third time to launch, or if they take a riskier approach and roll it to the pad essentially ready to fly.  If they do that, once the WDR passes, they could conceivably launch within days.  

There's a gotcha here.  The "tasks typically done" in the VAB between WDR and launch include arming the flight termination system or FTS.  All vehicles are required to carry such a system to destroy the vehicle if it threatens other people or places, and everyone who has listened to launch coverage of Falcon 9s or other launches have heard call-outs about the FTS being armed or being made safe.  

During a teleconference on Friday, Artemis Launch Director Charlie Blackwell-Thompson confirmed that there is a 20-day timeline once the flight safety system is armed. (This is a range safety mechanism used by all orbital rockets that destroys the booster in case it veers off course.) After the system is activated, it will take about a week to make final preparations in the Vehicle Assembly Building and a week to roll to the launch pad and make preparations there. That would leave just a single week for a fueling test, recycling of commodities, and perhaps one or two launch attempts before the 20-day window closes.

With a 20-day window, the system would have to be virtually flawless and it seems like a large bet they could approach flawless.  Which implies the earliest they could possibly launch the unmanned test flight would be around the start of July, but from August into the fall might be more realistic.  

Artemis SLS rollout on March 17th.  You can just mentally move the stack left (back into the VAB) or right (back out to pad 39B) and use the same image for the next few months. 

Happy Easter!

To my reader friends and those who drop by on occasion.  I know the modern thing is to refer to this as Resurrection Sunday - it's the reason for the season after all - but the old fashioned greeting is still OK by this old guy.

Enjoy your day.  Enjoy your families. Instead of the usual pork butt (hey, it's kinda like ham) I'm in the midst of smoking a turkey.  However you celebrate, enjoy your day.

Correction to Wednesday' Post

In talking about the ability for space coverage reporters to overfly the cape, I had said, "I think it's a bit more difficult for independent journalists here than in south Texas; over there they can set up remotely controlled cameras and run them all day, as Lab Padre does.  While the KSC isn't a no-fly zone, small plane flyovers are more expensive and can't provide the continuous coverage that ground-mounted cameras can." 

I have a good friend who's a pilot and he let me in on the real situation, letting me know I was too optimistic and lenient.   While it technically isn't completely a no-fly zone, it essentially is.  There's no such thing as flying over the bulk of the Kennedy Space Center without previous approval to do so. It used to be possible, but those days are long gone.  My friend was thoughtful enough to include a clip of the Sectional chart for the area; in fact, two such clips: one showing a wider look and one showing a more zoomed in area.  Pilots will understand this better than lay people, but I wouldn't be surprised if some of it wasn't clear without good familiarity with the area.  First, the wider area, from around Daytona well north of the area, south to the city of Rockledge, just south of Cocoa. 

The wide circular sector offshore the area is the area that is most likely to get shut down both for aircraft and boats.  Rocket parts are known to fall in the area, sometimes even intentionally.  This is the keep out zone that we hear of launches being delayed because of boats or aircraft were in the area, such as this story not even three full months ago.  Every one of the cryptic alphanumeric messages (R-2932, R-2933, W-137G, etc.) is a reference to a document to read and comply with.  

Air traffic flying to and from South Florida (the big, blue cities) tend to go well off the east coast or a few miles inland in this area, depending on destination so they're unaffected by all this.  While difficult to see, the coast of mainland Florida and most of the air space over the western side of the Indian River lagoon tend to be available to small planes.  It's best not to consider flying over the eastern shore of the Indian River because there are sections of the shore in the blue keep out area over the Merritt Island portion of the KSC.  Here's where the zoomed in clip is more helpful.

Along the coast stretching from just above the bottom right (SE) of the clip toward the NE, and then to the west of north, you'll see little black squares; those mark launch pads.  Never expect to be allowed to fly over launch pads.  The inverted triangles near the black squares seem to indicate the towers used for lightning protection, or other towers on the property.  There are two elongated dark blue rectangles, much longer than wide; those mark the two principal runways on the base: lower right belongs to Cape Canaveral Air Force Station while the longer one at the middle top is the former Shuttle Landing Facility, which is now in general use by NASA. 

One of my questions concerned the Roberts Road SpaceX expansion.  Videos of that area (and Blue Origin's facility) tend to look as if they were shot from a more vertical perspective, if not nearly straight down during a fly over, while views of the pads are clearly shot from farther west at a more acute angle.  My friend says that the area west and south of of the shuttle landing strip, which we think includes the Blue Origin facility and possibly the Roberts Road facility, is more lightly controlled.  Casual pop-up requests to the air traffic controller on duty might be possible there, but you still need permission to enter.  

The farther east you venture, the more prior permission and clearances are needed.  Complicating things further is that the south end of Cape Canaveral borders the property of Port Canaveral, which hosts (among other things) a submarine basin that the Navy wants to keep you from flying over.  There are controlled, Class B air spaces around major airports in the Orlando area, Tampa/St.Petersburg, Daytona and Melbourne.  There are heights above which certain avionics boxes are required to fly legally, and the general appearance of those is that of an upside down layer cake; smaller diameters at the bottom, larger at the top.  It's a difficult place to fly for the smaller, general aviation aircraft's pilot new to the area.  The last time I heard someone talking about this they said it's not possible to fly across the state, say from Melbourne to Tampa for instance, on a straight compass heading for the whole trip without steering around "keep out areas."

Just for comparison, take a look at the sectional air chart around Starbase Boca Chica.  Practically no restrictions at all. 

Artemis Wet Dress Rehearsal Flops Again - SpaceX Booster 7 Pressure Tested

The WDR for Artemis ran into another issue yesterday and the test was halted late in the day.  

Teams concluded today’s wet dress rehearsal test at approximately 5:10 p.m. EDT after observing a liquid hydrogen (LH2) leak on the tail service mast umbilical, which is located at the base of the mobile launcher and connects to the rocket’s core stage. The leak was discovered during liquid hydrogen loading operations and prevented the team from completing the test.

There is no further update on the web site.  A roughly 50 minute long press conference was held, but I haven't listened to it yet.  It's a YouTube link that seems to be audio only.  The first nine minutes is just a blue screen with text and background music.  In the "Heavy Rockets" section of this week's Ars Technica's Rocket Report newsletter, Author Eric Berger relays reports that the Artemis team reported they weren't going to fill more than 5% of the liquid hydrogen tank.   The LOX tank was brought up to 50% full. 

The question is whether they're going to try to do more on the pad or roll back to the Vehicle Assembly Building.  Delays with new ground systems and a new rocket are probably inevitable, but NASA has to be disappointed that we are now on day 14 of a two-day test.  My opinion is that while this test accomplished things, it was a failure.  When it comes time to launch cargo or people, it's a pass/fail test without the slightest tolerance for failure.  "Mostly working" doesn't cut it.  

We're in day 14 of a two day test on a booster that was supposed to fly six years ago.  And the problem they're having is with the most basic requirement there is.  They can't even fuel the stupid thing.

---

Meanwhile out a Boca Chica, stress testing of Booster 7 has begun.   

Known as Super Heavy Booster 7 or B7, the prototype is the first of its kind designed to support up to 33 new Raptor V2 engines – each potentially capable of producing up to 230 tons (~510,000 lbf) of thrust at liftoff. Even with just 20 such engines installed, Super Heavy – measuring around 69 meters (~225 ft) tall and nine meters (~30 ft) wide – will be the largest and most powerful rocket stage ever tested. That potentially unprecedented power is why SpaceX has custom-built a complex structural test stand to explore Super Heavy’s true performance envelope in a slightly less risky manner.

The tests had a few impressive looking moments but viewers mostly wouldn't know what's going on without pressure gauges to watch.  This video brief starts right before some impressive venting during the test.  

Increasing the central engine count from 9 to 13 was already certain to up the amount of stress future Super Heavy thrust pucks would need to survive by almost 45%. But combined with Raptor V2’s thrust increases, Super Heavy Booster 7’s thrust puck could actually be subjected to at least 80% more thrust at liftoff. Altogether, Super Heavy B7’s 33 engines should be able to produce ~7600 tons (~16.8M lbf) of thrust compared to Super Heavy B4’s ~5400 tons (~11.9M lbf). As a result, though it’s odd that SpaceX never did significantly test Booster 4, it’s no surprise that the company chose to give Booster 7 priority as soon it was ready.
...
After a few false starts and at least one ‘pneumatic proof test’ that likely saw Booster 7 pressurized with benign nitrogen gas, SpaceX began stress-testing the upgraded Super Heavy in earnest on April 14th. First, the booster was filled about a third of the way with roughly 1000 tons (~2.2M lb) of liquid nitrogen (LN2) or a combination of liquid oxygen (LOx) and LN2. Once the rocket was fully chilled, there were clear signs of some kind of added stress as large sheets of ice that had formed on the side of B7’s skin broke apart and fell off.

Screen capture from the above-linked video.  NASASpaceflight.com credit.

My Favorite Story in the Last Month

Long time readers will know I have special contempt for junk science.  Maybe even hatred.  I've written many pieces on it (quite possibly the first).  Consider that background when I say my favorite story in the last month is about junk science. 

A quiet little story that got very little coverage broke on Reason.com on March 31.  It was about just how junky the science of gun control is.  The title was, "Do Studies Show Gun Control Works? No." The subtitle is an even better gotcha: "Out of 27,900 research publications on gun laws, only 123 tested their effects rigorously."  

Only 123 out of 27,900 - 0.4% - applied proper statistical testing of their results?  Yup.  Only it's not even really that good.  

First, let me grab their quote describing the study.

There has been a massive research effort going back decades to determine whether gun control measures work. A 2020 analysis by the RAND Corporation, a nonprofit research organization, parsed the results of 27,900 research publications on the effectiveness of gun control laws. From this vast body of work, the RAND authors found only 123 studies, or 0.4 percent, that tested the effects rigorously. Some of the other 27,777 studies may have been useful for non-empirical discussions, but many others were deeply flawed.

and then the conclusion about those 123 studies. 

We took a look at the significance of the 123 rigorous empirical studies and what they actually say about the efficacy of gun control laws. 

The answer: nothing. The 123 studies that met RAND's criteria may have been the best of the 27,900 that were analyzed, but they still had serious statistical defects, such as a lack of controls, too many parameters or hypotheses for the data, undisclosed data, erroneous data, misspecified models, and other problems. 

And these glaring methodological flaws are not specific to gun control research; they are typical of how the academic publishing industry responds to demands from political partisans for scientific evidence that does not exist.

Let me rephrase that a bit: out of 27,900 studies on gun control, not one study conclusively showed that gun control laws change anything for the better.  Oh, and by the way, the same is likely to be true for studies on climate change, dietary recommendations, Covid, or anything else with a pronounced political component. 

It's a worthwhile read, especially as the drumbeat of more gun control gets louder and louder.  Over and over, you'll hear the same arguments about how much the studies prove, when the deep and long review of their studies show none of them prove anything.  Plus, it includes a pretty good 16 minute video if you look at the Reason article and say TL:DR. 

Update on Starbase on Kennedy Space Center

I've been trying to find updates on the progress of SpaceX's effort to duplicate Starbase Boca Chica on the Kennedy Space Center, but have been having trouble.  I think it's a bit more difficult for independent journalists here than in south Texas; over there they can set up remotely controlled cameras and run them all day, as Lab Padre does.  While the KSC isn't a no-fly zone, small plane flyovers are more expensive and can't provide the continuous coverage that ground-mounted cameras can.  

NASASpaceflight.com covers their work at KSC, apparently roughly monthly, and while airborne, they also cover other activities on the Cape, especially Blue Origin's build out.  This video was posted yesterday.  

Teslarati has a brief story today on the work at KSC but while they have this video embedded, the most recent photos they post and Tweets they link to are from mid-March.  

The Orbital Launch Integration Tower (OLIT) appears to be very similar to the one at Boca Chica, with more differences in its build and assembly than the design.  The OLIT has eight segments plus a concrete building those segments mount on top of; you can see in the video that three segments are complete, a fourth has been started, and the base has been started out near Pad 39A.  Twitter user @Furqan263 compiled a chart of the status of all of the major components of the OLIT back during the build in Texas.  This is his chart at the completion of the OLIT in Texas; you can ignore the bottom lines about when the various sections were started, ready to rollout to the pad and when they were stacked.  It gives a good overview of the assemblies and steps involved.

The main difference between the Texas and Florida towers is that on the first one, they would build one or two segments and transport them to the launch complex, while on the second, they're apparently building all of them and transporting to the Pad 39A complex at once, saving on road closures and probably interfering less with launch operations as well. 

This work is going to take a while.  Nobody has seriously suggested anything could launch from the new Starship pad before 2023, I just get impatient with wanting to see progress.

In this screen capture of the Pad 39A area during last Friday's Ax-1 mission, the orbital tower base can be seen left of the existing launch tower, and behind it - toward the ocean in this view.  The angle of the shot makes it impossible to see that the Orbital Launch Mount - the new pad - has begun construction as well.

CAFE Standards Are Back - But Hard to Find in the News

Back on April 1st, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg announced new CAFE (Corporate Average Fuel Economy) standards for all vehicles to be sold in America, starting in 2024-2046.  The US Department of Transportation (DOT) has a propaganda an informational page on the new standards which require a CAFE of 49 mpg by '26.  To borrow a quote from the wonderful Mark Steyn, it reads like a refrigerator manual written by someone who really loves refrigerator manuals. 

The new Corporate Average Fuel Economy standards require an industry-wide fleet average of approximately 49 mpg for passenger cars and light trucks in model year 2026, the strongest cost savings and fuel efficiency standards to date. The new standards will increase fuel efficiency 8% annually for model years 2024-2025 and 10% annually for model year 2026. They will also increase the estimated fleetwide average by nearly 10 miles per gallon for model year 2026, relative to model year 2021.

Clarity?  Not much.  

Stepping back a bit, I've been writing on battles and skirmishes over CAFE standards for a long time, starting with the push to create a 54.5 mpg standard from the first Obama term's DOT back in 2012.  CAFE Standards are best thought of as the "A" in the name - the average over the vehicles they sell.  Regulating the average says that every vehicle in the manufacturer's lines doesn't need to get 49 mpg, just that the average mileage of everything they sell needs to hit this magic number.  The rules specifically apply to "cars and light trucks" while heavier trucks are in a different class.  The fact that cars are treated differently than trucks is one of the reasons for the popularity of SUVs versus station wagons.  You don't see many station wagons being made these days.  There is great legal wrangling and fighting over how to classify any given vehicle because not every vehicle has a prayer of hitting that kind of mileage.  If the requirement can't be approached, the companies have to restrict the number of SUVs or other light trucks they can sell to push the average up.  This has to all be calculated out in advance as they're determining how many of which models to make. 

I never worked in the auto industry (but I did stay in a ... sorry) but I'm pretty sure that they're working on the preparations for the '23 model year now.  My guess would be that it's too late to make any substantial changes to the 2024 models and preparation for the '25 models isn't likely to be much better.  The way I read that line that, "The new standards will increase fuel efficiency 8% annually for model years 2024-2025 and 10% annually for model year 2026." may be something lawyers would make a million bucks on, but if 2025's CAFE can be 10% less mileage than 2026, that's 44.1 mpg.  2024 can be 8% lower, or 40.6 mpg and 2023 can be 8% lower than that or 37.3 mpg.  The DOT says the current standard is, "a combined fleet-wide fuel economy of 40.3-41.0 mpg."   

Car makers need to figure out how many of their SUVs or muscle cars they can sell balanced against anything in their fleet that gets over 50 mpg (and the higher the better) to bring their averages up.  

Regular readers know I'm fond of pointing out that physics is a bitch and you don't get something for nothing.  The only places where the laws of physics get broken is in commercials and Looney Tunes.  The internal combustion engine has been optimized as a system for over a hundred years, and you're not going to suddenly make it much more efficient.  Instead, to reach the new standards the cars will get lighter, with more plastics and thinner metal structures.  The shorter way to say that is they'll be less safe.  The new standards will cost more lives.  

Reporting on the new standards, the Center for Automotive Research (CAR, of course) quotes DOT indirectly.  

The NHTSA press release notes that under the new standards, fuel consumption will decrease fuel use by over 250 billion gallons through the year 2050 compared to sustaining the previous Trump-era standards. Less reliance on foreign oil, consumer savings on gas, and reduced emissions were also emphasized in the announcement as an advantage of stronger standards. Officials highlighted that carbon emissions would be reduced by 2.5 billion metric tons and estimated that consumers could save almost $1,400 in fuel expenses over the lifetime of a 2029 model vehicle under new rules. However, it is also estimated that the new regulations will likely drive up the cost of new vehicles by nearly the same amount.

Two reactions: first, saying "almost $1,400" is recognizing that we're currently in a situation with very high fuel costs, and if we had lower fuel prices the savings would go down.  Saving that amount over the life of a car is a pretty trivial savings.  $140/year or $11.67/month for a car kept 10 years.  Second, I don't believe that the cost will be equal to what's saved on fuel.  The last several times this was studied the car costs went up more than the money saved on fuel.  

I'm going to reuse a graphic from my 2012 article on the CAFE standards, which shows the annual cost of gas at three prices per gallon from $1.50 to $5.00 gallon, versus the car's mileage and assuming driving 15,000 miles per year.  The curves display a similar shape, illustrating the diminishing returns for each incremental increase in mileage.  At the top curve, a 10 mpg increase from 20 to 30 mpg saves $1,250 or 33.3% less for 50% higher mileage; a 10 mpg increase from 40 to 50 mpg saves $375, or 20% less for 25% higher mileage.  All of the bigger gains were taken on the left end of that plot.

The problem, as always, is that government has no business regulating this sort of thing.  It's the most common, fatal conceit of our single-minded bureaucrats that they think they know better than the free market.  I've got news for the administration: a real half ton pickup (the most common size) that got twice the current MPG would be snapped up so fast it would set every truck sales record there is.  Nobody's against that.  We're just against being forced to pay more for a flimsier, less safe vehicle than we save by buying it, and we're against getting stuck with one that doesn't do everything we need it to do. 

 

 

When We Talk About Space Being Hard

...what we're really saying is there's a very small margin of error.  The people trying to design orbital rockets are not perfect - obviously nobody is - so they're going to make mistakes.  Just like you can ruin a crane or trailer winch by not being sure that it's stronger than the load you're going to lift, you can make up for that with design margin.  If you're going to lift a thousand pound load, you can make sure every part involved in lifting that load is going to be stronger by a defined safety factor.  In something common like lifting a known load, you can buy however much safety factor you want.  

Getting rockets into orbit is different.  The thrust vs. weight costs are a critical design trade.  If you make the rocket stronger, it will weigh more, meaning more fuel is required to lift it, and reducing the payload that can be lifted.  If a part on an engine is going to handle some sort of operating temperature extremes, or a valve has to spin at some number of thousands of revolutions/minute, margin might get very difficult to achieve.  There simply isn't much margin available in the percentage of liftoff weight a rocket can carry.  If the designers don't consider some characteristic or don't even know they need to consider it, the rocket could blow up on the pad or at any point of its mission.  

In my years of design, I referred to margin of error as margin of stupid.  When I screwed up, I owned it.  In some fields with a wide margin of stupid, designers can make lots of mistakes or big mistakes and get away with it.  Things with a wide margin of stupid don't explode in huge fireballs killing everyone and everything around. 

Prior knowledge from lots of research or hiring people who have done it before are the two big ways to get that reduction in stupid mistakes.    

Why am I talking about this?  Meet a small California startup in the rocket design business named Pythom (yes, that's an "m" on the end, not like the snake - or programming language).  Their aim is to beat SpaceX to Mars.  From quite literally nothing they aim to launch for Mars by 2024 - the next closest approach.  If not, definitely by 2026.  Pythom was founded by a married couple who are explorers and adventurers: Tina and Tom Sjögren who think of going to Mars as an analogy to sailing to the New World after Columbus.  Tina Sjögren put it like this:

"When Columbus sailed to America, there were both better boats and sailors. But no one else did it. He did. All it took was three weeks. It was not difficult; it was fear that held everyone back. It was believed that one would fall over the edge of the earth. Or be eaten by sea monsters. He showed... that was wrong."

Over at Ars Technica (first link) Space Correspondent Eric Berger notes:

This seems naïve, of course. Even SpaceX, which from the beginning was well-funded and able to hire excellent early employees, is still years away from sending humans to Mars after its founding in 2002. But the Sjögrens are undaunted. "You have to work hard, but you do not have to be very smart," Tina Sjögren added.

Do you see the huge warning flags in that statement.  Yeah, it is a cliche to talk about it being rocket science, but the saying, "it's not rocket science" didn't invent itself.  There is hard stuff there.  With a goal of launching a lander to Mars in 2024, they're working on developing engines and a small payload rocket called Eiger, which will be capable of launching 150 kg (330 lb.s) to LEO.  Somewhere around developing engines and a rocket, they're also working on developing a Mars lander called Olympus.  

Their philosophy is simple.  Since they claim 90 percent of a rocket's cost in the traditional space industry is related to personnel, their website says, "Pythom runs small teams and tight facilities, building in the spirit of early explorers such as Lewis & Clark and Roald Amundsen."  Having been through 40 years of manufacturing companies always striving to do more with less, my reaction isn't to find fault with that, but that it needs to be done intelligently.  My first department to target for cost reduction might not be the safety and mission assurance department.  Just sayin' because based on a video of a recent test they ran, it might be that they assume the design guys will know everything about safety and mission assurance so they never hired anyone for those jobs.

Personally, the colors in that exhaust/desert dust cloud kind of alarm me.  They kind of scream Toxic Nitrogen Compounds.  The part of the video where a couple of staff members find themselves downwind and run at 90 degrees to the cloud is a highlight, and over on Ars Technica, Berger talks about the initial video being on Vimeo, but he saved it and uploaded it to YouTube (where this is linked from).  After some questions to Pythom, they took down the video and uploaded a more sanitized version to Vimeo.  

Jordan Noone, co-founder of Relativity Space, tweeted in response to the video, "We knew better as untrained college students."  For their part, Pythom responded with a long post on their website, explaining a lot of details that aren't evident in that video.

I don't really know what to make of these guys.  They really do seem to need some adults in the room, but the engine does fire and the rocket doesn't explode - nor does it lift off (so at least they got weight greater than thrust).  Apparently nobody was injured here, but it sure looks more like luck than skill.  That said, I've always observed that "all the knowledge and skills in the world have never beaten pure, dumb, luck."  To go back to my original point, they displayed a lot of stupid, but apparently had enough margin of stupid to handle all of it.

The articles on Warp News are rather flattering and admiring in tone.  Warp News also implies that the flight they're aiming for in '24 will carry Tom and Tina, not the Olympus mars lander. 

NASA's Artemis WDR To Resume Tuesday

The folks at the Artemis program left us hanging last week when they aborted their Wet Dress Rehearsal due to a problem with a hydrogen valve on the Mobile Launch Tower (which was quickly repaired).  They didn't offer an update until last Thursday, explaining that a different problem was then found with a Helium check valve on the Centaur upper stage's RL10 engine.  At that point, they said, 

The countdown for the two-day test is currently slated to begin with call to stations beginning at 5 pm EDT on Saturday, April 9 with T-0 planned for 2:40 pm on Monday, April 11.

That never happened.  Instead of the call to stations on Saturday, they issued another update moving the date back another three days.  

NASA is planning to proceed with a modified wet dress rehearsal, primarily focused on tanking the core stage, and minimal propellant operations on the interim cryogenic propulsion stage (ICPS) with the ground systems at Kennedy. Due to the changes in loading procedures required for the modified test, wet dress rehearsal testing is slated to resume with call to stations on Tuesday, April 12 and tanking on Thursday, April 14.

NASA's Exploration Group's Twitter page noted that when this test is completed, the vehicle will be returned to the VAB.   

I would have to say that (IMO, of course) troubles like this are unfortunate but are not unexpected.  

SLS on Pad 39B at the start of preparations for the Wet Dress Rehearsal tests.  NASA photo. 

Weekly Update on the 1 by 1 - Part 23

I really shouldn't call this a Weekly update because my last update was far from a week ago.  Part 22 was January 30th, so over two months ago!  At the time, I was talking about preparing my piston's connecting rod to be cut out via CNC.  Since then, lots of complicating factors got in the way; big and small interruptions to life, ranging from one of our senior cats having a bad annual physical leading to several tests, lots of things to do and angst to go with it, to a one week house repair project resisting completion for a month, to my not being happy with either my CAD or CAM of the design and then finding an interesting new way to do it.  I do have a bunch of other hobbies, too, after all.

I've been back to it, but haven't started machining the part yet.  Let me pull up the drawing as it's provided with the plans, and shown here in January.  

One of the complications with this part is that I can't just import this into my CAD program, create a solid model of the finished part and then make it.  That big hole on the right end of the crankshaft is 3/8" and needs to be 0.375" exactly.  That means a 3/8 drill bit isn't accurate enough, and what you might think to do is to drill it undersized and then ream to final size.  The problem is that if you then cut the right end off it, you now have something that's neither circular or 0.375" diameter.  It's missing the width of the cutter.  

If you read the that big (four line) note at the bottom in that figure, you'll see the designer says to drill and tap the two holes for #5-40 socket head cap screws that you can see in outline above and below the big hole, then cut off the bottom cap.  Once it's cut off, attach it with the screws you just tapped for, and then drill and ream the big hole.  

That changes everything.  A slight complication is that's assuming the saw cut is .030" wide.  My saw cuts .047 wide.  All this led to re-drawing the part to revise the solid model to make it look like what I need to machine, moving that cap on the right enough for my saw blade.  It's tough to see but that raised area on the right isn't circular.  In CAD, once the two pieces were separated by the width of the saw kerf, I filled in the gaps with solid material, so the .047 segment is straight in those areas.

This is a two sided part, completely symmetrical top to bottom (in and out of the screen in this view).  A brilliant modeler on a forum I read regularly came up with an approach I'd never heard of for machining two sided parts like this.  He machines the part halfway in thickness, fills the space around the part with epoxy, turns the blank hunk of metal over and repeats the machining on the second side (after verifying the machine is still zeroed properly). This operation ends with the parts fully machined and suspended in the epoxy.  A short stay in a toaster oven causes the epoxy to break down and the part can be popped out.  There's fewer steps here than a lot of machining operations.  

I've lifted three pictures of his machining four connecting rods at once for a model of a Ford 300 six cylinder engine. 

Once the top side is machined, the missing aluminum is replaced by Devcon epoxy. 

Then the work is flipped over and re-fixtured on the mill to machine off the aluminum on the back of the connecting rods. Once that's done the parts are ready for the heat treatment to break down the epoxy.

He still has some machining steps to do before they're usable, but easy stuff for him.  

My approach to this part is to learn as much as I can and try some techniques I haven't done before.  For one thing, I'm going to do a roughing pass and a finish pass.  Both will use 1/4" diameter cutters and I'll use finer steps between passes on the finish pass.  My mill's spindle (driving the cutter) is slow for most work in aluminum and especially for a 1/4" diameter cutter. 

 

AX-1 On Orbit, Heading for ISS

Right on schedule at 11:17 this morning, the Axiom-1 mission to the International Space Station launched into space atop a Falcon 9 under bright blue spring skies from pad 39A on the Kennedy Space Center.  At 12 minutes into the flight, the Dragon spacecraft Endeavour separated from the Falcon 9 rocket's second stage and began its in-space journey toward the International Space Station. It is expected to dock with the station on Saturday morning.  

About 9-1/2 minutes after launch, Booster 1062 landed on drone ship A Shortfall Of Gravitas.  A video loop caught it in better than usual coverage today and is on SpaceX's feed on Twitter.  Of note for this mission is that this is the fifth flight of B1062 and the third flight of Crew Dragon Endeavour (capsule C206). 

Eric Berger at Ars Technica points out a statistic that I found mind blowing.  It hasn't taken SpaceX two full years to launch more astronauts than China has in 19 years.

Overall, this was SpaceX's sixth human spaceflight with the Crew Dragon vehicle. The company has transported 22 people into low Earth orbit across those missions in just under two years. To illustrate the rapidity of Dragon's rise, consider that China, widely regarded as having the second-most capable civil space program in the world, has launched 20 astronauts since 2003.

This mission is the first of many that Axiom has planned.  It truly is an historic mission; it's the first completely private mission to the ISS; a private citizen crew launched on private corporation's rocket and capsule.  Commander Michael López-Alegría of Spain and the United States, Pilot Larry Connor of the United States, and Mission Specialists Eytan Stibbe of Israel and Mark Pathy of Canada will spend about 10 days in space and a little more than a week on the station. Their time will be their own, and they will conduct a bit of research and also enjoy the experience of living in space.  

By late 2024, Axiom plans to launch its own spacious module to the station, where its customers will be able to come and go more freely. Before the end of the 2020s, this module and others subsequently launched by Axiom would break off and become an independent, private space station.  Assuming the ISS lasts as long as the end of the 2020s and doesn't need to be decommissioned before then.  

Richard Angle photo for Teslarati.

The mission is hard to sum up in one cute observation.  Yes, the Axiom crew is going to do some experiments, but from everything I can see they're not big new things that have never been done before.  As everyone seems to want to point out, these are wealthy old white men, the most despised demographic in Woke Western Civilization.  They are privileged.  But this isn't a Blue Origin New Shepard flight to just above the Karman line so they can say they've been to space.  Instead of the few hours that Space Tourists on a Blue flight get, these four have been in training for a year, working at Johnson Space Flight Center in Houston, at SpaceX in Hawthorne, and other places.  They can fly the Crew Dragon and they know their way around the ISS.   

Final words to Eric Berger at Ars:

The reality is that the crew of Ax-1 is something new: an important part of the transition from spaceflight as primarily a government-led activity to one led by commercial space companies like SpaceX. For example, this will be the fifth flight of this Falcon 9 rocket's first stage, making it a far more experienced booster than has previously been used for human spaceflight. No one really knows where this is all headed, whether it is sustainable, or how weird things might get. But with today's launch, the Ax-1 crew is among the first pioneers to explore this new commercial frontier.

 

 

Rocket Lab Ready to Try For Helicopter Recovery

Back in August of 2019, Rocket Lab - one of the most successful small satellite launch providers - announced that they intend to recover the booster stage of their Electron booster for reuse.  Their intent is to both reduce the costs they charge and increase their launch cadence.  At the time, they were saying they needed to quadruple the number of launches they could do per year to meet demand.    

Unlike SpaceX's Falcon 9, though, Electron wasn't designed for reuse from the blank sheet of paper (or blank screen) stage.  Redesign of the Electron adding the mass of hardware like deployable legs, would undoubtedly lead to either redesign of the rocket or only launching smaller payloads.  The Electron's payloads are already fairly small at 220 kg (485 lb.) so there's basically very little margin there.  

Given that, they opted for a technology the military has used for decades, recovery by putting a parachute on the booster and snatching the stage out of the air with a helicopter.  

As expressed in that August '19 post, they started on a program of capturing data on what the stage went through during descent, and then later recovered some stages that splashed into the Pacific, the first of which was in November of  '20, so 15 months after the announcement they were going to start working toward the goal.  To the best of my knowledge, none of those were actually reused. 

This week's Rocket Report from Ars Technica reports their next mission will be the first attempt to catch a booster.

The company will make this attempt during its next flight, with a launch window that opens on April 19 for the "There and Back Again" mission to deploy 34 small satellites. After the first stage completes its boost phase, at 2 minutes and 30 seconds, it will separate and begin descending at speeds up to 8,300 km per hour.

Falling, spinning, catching? ... Nominally, a drogue parachute should deploy at 13 km altitude, followed by the rocket's main parachute at around 6 km altitude to dramatically slow the stage to 10 meters per second. As the stage enters the capture zone, Rocket Lab’s Sikorsky S-92 helicopter will attempt to rendezvous with the returning stage and capture the parachute line via a hook. If this is successful, Rocket Lab engineers and technicians will conduct a thorough analysis of the stage and assess its suitability for re-flight.

Rocket Lab's website news page has more details.  

Back in August of '19, when asked about how many reuses they wanted for each Electron Booster, CEO Peter Beck replied, "If we could reuse it once we've effectively doubled production. Once would be wonderful. Anything more would be really fantastic."  As we can see from SpaceX now having reused a booster 12 times, that lifetime might well be beyond two.  The disclaimer here is that Falcon 9 was designed for reuse from the get-go while it's an add on feature for Electron.  The first thing that comes to mine is that Falcon 9 is a welded metal booster while the Electron is a carbon fiber composite.  Design details like that might matter.

The launch time hasn't been announced yet, but I'll be trying to watch it that Tuesday.  I can only wish them tons of luck.   Happy hunting, Rocket Lab!

 

SpaceX & Axiom Space Team Up For Friday Launch

If all goes according to plan, SpaceX will launch their second private manned mission Friday, April 8 at 11:17 AM EDT for Axiom Space.  This will be a one week mission to the International Space Station for Axiom, where the crew of four will be conducting a variety of experiments primarily using equipment already on the ISS.  There have been space tourist missions to the ISS before, but this is more corporate R&D for Axiom, a contender in the development of a private space station.  In this case, the term “private manned mission” means Axiom is paying NASA for access and anything they consume in doing their experiments.  In turn, three of the four-man crew will pay Axiom to work for them in space, which will help defray Axiom's costs.   

Axiom put up an hour long video (55 minutes) of Q&A with the four man crew, one of the company founders and another principal officer, talking about their goals for the mission, but with very little depth about any actual experiments they're doing.  As a company, they're dedicated to opening up space for commerce and the unique things that can be done in microgravity.  

SpaceX Image

Teslarati reports:

The focus of Axiom-1’s crew is three ultrawealthy customers:

• Larry Connor: Ax-1’s pilot and an entrepreneur who accrued his wealth through real estate
• Eytan Stibbe: a venture capitalist and former fighter pilot who could become the second Israeli astronaut ever
• Mark Pathy: CEO of Canadian investment and shipping companies
  

Each paying $55 million for the ten-day journey and eight-day stay at the International Space Station (ISS), Connor, Stibbe, and Pathy are bankrolling the mission. Crew Dragon’s fourth Ax-1 passenger, however, is Michael López-Alegría, a retired four-time NASA astronaut turned private (space) pilot who now works for Axiom Space.

Last fall's Inspiration4 mission, while also a private space mission, was different in lots of details.  It orbited for a shorter period, didn't go to the ISS, and was funded almost entirely by one person (Jared Isaacman).  The mission was primarily intended as a fundraiser for St. Jude Children's Research Hospital raising over a quarter of a billion dollars for pediatric cancer research.  The crew of four also conducted other scientific experiments on orbit.    

Crew Dragon is expected to dock with the ISS about 20 hours after liftoff, giving the Ax-1 crew a little over eight full days at the ISS before they’ll need to board Dragon and return to Earth.  If the weather forecast for landing zones looks particularly bad or good leading up to undocking, SpaceX and NASA reserve the right move the departure earlier or later.

 

Amazon to Launch Via ULA, Blue Origin and Ariane

Amazon has become a late player in the world of internet by satellite, having just run a small number of experiments.  This morning, word broke that Amazon had chosen "everybody except SpaceX" to launch "the majority" of their 3,236-satellite Project Kuiper constellation.  Twitter link: to Thomas Burghardt of NASASpaceflight.com.  

This is in addition to nine ULA Atlas V and two RS1 launches from startup ABL that have already been contracted for.  

The thing about that announcement that jumps out at me is that four out of the five launch vehicles named there don't exist yet.  The only one that has actual history is the Atlas V - and is being discontinued.  The Vulcan Centaur won't fly until Blue Origin delivers the BE-4 engines that ULA needs for it, and Blue Origin's New Glenn needs the same engines.  I can find nothing on the status of ABL's RS1 other than being in development.  Strictly by what the companies are saying, Ariane 6 and Vulcan Centaur could fly before the end of '22, although next year is more likely.  New Glenn is unlikely to fly before 2024.  Eric Ralph at Teslarati doesn't see how even the first tiny, ineffective pieces of the Kuiper constellation will launch this year. 

Per Amazon’s Project Kuiper FCC constellation license, the company will need to launch half of its constellation – 1618 satellites – by July 2026. It’s not actually clear if Arianespace, ULA, and Blue Origin will be able to collectively complete the roughly 36 launches that will require over the next four years. In the last four years, Arianespace’s Ariane 5 and ULA’s Atlas and Delta rockets have collectively launched 38 times. The first Kuiper satellite prototype is scheduled to launch no earlier than late 2022, meaning that operational launches are unlikely to begin before Q1 2023.

If there's one thing the Internet age has taught us (IMO, of course), the company that's "firstest with the mostest" wins.  Amazon is looking to be behind OneWeb, so firmly in third place.  It seems hard to imagine that with a constellation of 3,236 satellites that performance could be on a par with the 12,000 satellites that Starlink has authorization for.  The pace of launches required to put up those satellites and the availability of the launch vehicles paints a discouraging picture of how quickly they'll be able to get their service online.  

Image from Teslarati, not credited there.

 

A Testing Day

For the two biggest rockets on Earth.  

After yesterday's setback due to the lightning strike, the Artemis Wet Dress Rehearsal was back on this morning.  They made it until a bit after 4PM EDT, partially filled the Liquid Oxygen (LOX) tank to prechill it, then began pre-chilling the Liquid Hydrogen tank.  That's when they found a valve that wouldn't work properly on the mobile launch tower.  Today's test was called off by 5PM. From the Artemis blog page:

The Artemis I team has ended today’s attempt at the wet dress rehearsal test at 5 p.m. The countdown ended after partially loading liquid oxygen into the Space Launch System core stage tank. This provided the teams a valuable opportunity for training and to make sure modeled loading procedures were accurate. This was the first time using new systems at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center Launch Complex 39B. The team was able to monitor the Artemis I core stage as it was exposed to cryogenic liquids and gather data that will inform updates to propellant loading procedures.
...
During chilldown of the lines in preparation for loading the liquid hydrogen, the teams encountered an issue with a panel on the mobile launcher that controls the core stage vent valve. The purpose of the vent valve is to relieve pressure from the core stage during tanking. Given the time to resolve the issue as teams were nearing the end of their shifts, the launch director made the call to stop the test for the day. A crew will investigate the issue at the pad, and the team will review range availability and the time needed to turn systems around before making a determination on the path forward.

There is a video feed for the test on a channel called KSC Newsroom, but I saw nothing happening on it, just the rocket stack standing there.  It doesn't figure to be a dramatic test to look at, though.  The news updates are on Twitter, and apparently open to all since I'm not a Twitter member.

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Meanwhile, over at Boca Chica, SpaceX wasted no time over the weekend by mounting Booster 7 directly on the Orbital Launch Mount.  They arranged for a road closure today and ran cryogenic tests of the infrastructure all the way to B7 and filling the booster itself. 

This screen capture is after the test had completed but you can see the top section of B7, behind and above the chopsticks, is coated with ice that has been frozen out of the moist Gulf air.  Below the chopsticks, there's a gap in the ice on the left side of the booster, while the rest of it is well coated in ice as well. 

It might be tempting to compare these tests, but SpaceX wasn't doing a WDR.  Both of them were doing necessary tests; NASA's Artemis test is a bit more focused on ground infrastructure like the launcher tower and the pad connections.  Remember, this SLS booster went through a full eight plus minute static firing last March, so barely over a year ago.  Because of that, we know that the SLS booster is capable of doing everything it's supposed to do, making this primarily a test of the ground-based hardware and software.  SpaceX has been testing their equivalent ground-based infrastructure for the last few weeks so problems like Artemis program had today shouldn't be happening at Boca Chica. 

Russian Space Agency Says It Will End Space Station Support

This has been coming for a while but Saturday, Dmitry Rogozin announced via Twitter that Russia would suspend cooperation with NASA and other space agencies in maintaining the International Space Station (ISS). 

Rogozin said that the “restoration of normal relations between partners” on the ISS would only be possible with the “complete and unconditional lifting of illegal sanctions.”

I open by saying this has been coming both because of what has already been reported here, as well as just learning that Rogozin set a deadline of March 31 for the West to drop sanctions against Russia or Roscosmos would abandon support of the ISS.  He announced his response via Twitter on April 2nd.  That Twitter thread seems to be largely in Russian, except for letters he included from NASA Administrator Bill Nelson, The Canadian Space Agency's Lisa Campbell, and The Director General of the European Space Agency (whose name I can't read).  

Nelson's response was pledging his ongoing support for the space station but reiterating that the sanctions will not end.  Nelson presumably already knows, as we've covered here, that NASA would most likely not be at risk of losing the space station and could keep it flying even if Russia abruptly pulls out.  In any sort of critical design, like all manned spaceflight, redundant, independent backups dominate the design approach. 

His letter also includes this interesting little statement:  “New and existing U.S. export control measures continue to allow cooperation between the U.S. and Russia to ensure continued safe operations of the ISS.”  The European Space Agency and the Canadian Space Agency have similar sanctions carve-outs for Russia when it comes to supplying and maintaining the ISS.  Rogozin’s threats are more related to Russia’s psychological war against the West than a reaction to the sanctions.

Unlike Rogozin's, Nelson's letter holds no bluster or threats, but instead offers an olive branch. While the US will not lift its sanctions, Nelson writes, if the Russian space industry needs Western components to support the flights of Russian Soyuz or Progress vehicles to the space station, NASA will work to facilitate such technology transfers. "Sustaining safe and successful ISS operations remains a priority for the United States," Nelson writes.

While the news echoes the mistaken conclusion that we have no way of correcting the ISS's orbit without Russia, (including the PJ Media piece), the really important thing to bear in mind is that nothing has happened yet.  Rogozin and the thousands of employees at Roscosmos have taken precisely zero concrete actions that would actually initiate pulling the plug on ISS.  Remember the allegations that they were going to abandon astronaut Mark Vande Hei on the ISS?   I've seen nobody mention that he returned from orbit on a Soyuz capsule to Kazakhstan, exactly as usual, with American and Russian workers and officials on site, exactly as usual. 

Dmitry Rogozin - AP file photo by Pavel Golovkin 

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.  

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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. 

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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.

First Virtual Reality Headset to Include Smells Coming

Human Factors engineers have been working since the onset of the Covid-19 lockdowns, and remote working via Zoom (and other software), to understand why productivity from home has not kept track with productivity at the office.  Maybe their explanation didn't surprise them or won't surprise you, but it sure surprised me; what's missing is the smells of the office.  They don't have detailed lists of the smells, but it could include the mix of perfumes with different coffees, or maybe the mix of lunches in the break room microwave oven (we used to call that "mullet in the microwave" back in the old days).  

It turns out that the virtue reality/augmented reality and metaverse industry was already pursuing the idea of digitally synthesized odors (DSOs) to bring a new dimension of realism.  Imagine playing a video game in which you can smell an attacker sneaking up behind you; or adding odors to a completely virtual world like that in Avatar.  You can almost smell the gaming software industry money flowing in. Now consider it in a virtual office sense.  Maybe two years ago you flew into Mumbai and smelled that... aroma... that starts as soon as the aircraft air system starts to take in external air.  Maybe next year you can smell Mumbai at home. 

Scratch that.  Bad idea.  From what I've heard from co-workers, Mumbai is pretty excruciating.  If going on trips to places like Mumbai makes you feel important and you like that, you'll probably get good feelings when you smell the Mumbai air.

At least one manufacturer, YoYo Dyne Entertainment, in Grover's Mill N.J., is aiming to bring a first-generation olfactory-enhanced (OE) headset to market in time for the 2022 holiday season, despite setbacks caused by two competing DSO technologies competing to dominate this emerging market.  

As with most technologies that show up overnight, the history of the tech behind this "Smell-o-Vision" headset goes back years and is actually a product of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). 

Digital odor synthesis was invented in the mid-1990s as part of a DARPA research program and has proven its value in several generations of the U.S. Army's battle training simulators. As reported in the April 1, 1995 issue of Electronic Design, the original DSO system, developed by Dr. Apri L'Fuhl, was based on a recently discovered class of organic compounds, known as "Primary Odorants (POs)." 

While each PO has its own distinctive smell, they can be combined in precise ratios with one or more other POs to create a wide range of completely different scents. Modern DSO systems typically use a small cartridge, containing an array of capsules each containing a different PO compound. Each capsule is equipped with a small heating element and a MEMS-based valve that can precisely meter the compound into a vortex mixing plenum where the desired scent is created.

Thanks to the POs’ unique properties, it takes only takes 32 different compounds to produce tens of thousands of unique odors. When Dr. L'Fuhl's team sought to commercialize the technology in the early 2000s, they introduced a new collection of 64 POs that could produce what they referred to as high-definition digitally synthesized odors (HD-DSOs).

The problem with this sort of research is that individual perceptions of odors is very individual.  What's needed is a standard way of measuring and rating the DSOs, as well as standard ways of evaluating and reporting the results.  Enter the Microsoft Nose.  Our noses are connected to the brain over massively parallel neural pathways from the roof of the nose into the brain.  That information needs to be conveyed to the processors in the gamer's headset.  Literally, they needed a nasal network. 

Image credit: Microsoft

YoYoDyne was the first company to license the technology, designed into the OE-VR headset seen in the top picture.  The headset will be entering production early this summer in a repurposed automotive accessory plant, located just outside Flint, Mich.

Branded as the Overthruster-Full Impact, the OE-VR headset will take its place as the flagship product in YoYo Dyne's 2023 collection of its iconic Overthruster series of gaming gear. With a retail price of $799.42, it will come with a basic 32-odorant cartridge, suitable for general-purpose use. The company also will be introducing a series of specialized cartridges that can be used to further enhance specific applications.

“We'd anticipated that there would be a big demand for a high-def cartridge that could create exotic odors to complement the alien landscapes that players encounter in many science-fiction-based VR games” said John Bigbooty, YoYo Dyne's VP of marketing. “We also expect our 'Smell the World' cartridge to be very popular, especially, if Heaven forbid, another nasty COVID variant forces us back into lockdown.”

VP Bigbooty is ahead of the crowd.  He's already introduced a product that he expects to be a Big Thing for the working-at-home set, after consultations with Human Factors Engineering consultants where he found a large percentage of former office workers who now work remotely who expressed a deep nostalgia for the smells of their old workplace.

“To meet this demand, we developed the Daily Grind odor cartridge. When combined with a small software app, it can take a remote worker through a full week of the routine and random smells they miss.”

“We worked hard to faithfully reproduce the environment that office workers call their comfort zone” continued Bigbooty. “When you log in to work, your Full Impact VR headset will greet you with the smell of fresh-brewed coffee that will become increasingly stale as the day goes on. Your day will also be punctuated by occasional bursts of ozone and toner from a virtual copying machine as well as random whiffs of body odors from your virtual co-workers.”

Main source for this article is electronics trade journal, Microwaves & RF, in an overview article on the technology.