…may be running out of engines a lot sooner than it thought.
What a policy mess.
And on top of that, the new Falcon 9 may require additional certification:
NASA says if the Falcon 9 is upgraded in the future, the agency will review the performance and design changes and make a judgment as to whether those changes will require a new certification.
“A thrust increase alone would not immediately result in a new common launch vehicle configuration,” Buck says. “However, often such changes are accomplished by major design differences throughout the engine and include propellant tank changes that affect the burn time and vehicle mass significantly,” he says, adding that NASA considers the effect on loads, controls and aerodynamics when making such a determination. If the agency finds modifications that constitute a new launch vehicle configuration, then a certification strategy that complies with NASA regulations would be put in place and that “such a strategy would define the number of flights required to achieve NASA certification,” Buck notes.
LSP says it is unclear how many additional flights of an upgraded Falcon 9 may be necessary, if any.
“It will depend on what changes, their magnitude, and when the contractor would desire to cut them in,” Buck says, adding that the agency does not currently plan to certify the vehicle for higher-risk Cat. 3 missions, which would include planetary and astronomy missions.
And then there’s this:
Both agencies expect to complete their respective Falcon 9 certification efforts mid-year, though NASA says once the vehicle is certified to launch riskier missions, in the future it does not plan to fly science payloads on SpaceX launchers utilizing refurbished Falcon 9 cores.
“Our current Category 2 certification effort assumes the use of an un-refurbished core stage,” says NASA spokesman Joshua Buck, referring to the ongoing effort to certify the Falcon 9 to launch Earth-observation spacecraft, starting with the Jason-3 ocean altimetry mission set to lift off in June from Vandenberg AFB, California.
See, in a sane world, you’d have more confidence in hardware that had already successfully flown, not less. This would be like insisting on a brand-new airplane very time you flew. Hopefully we’ll get there over time.
[Mid-afternoon update]
Note the first comment by Dave Huntsman on this latest demonstration of NASA’s ongoing aversion to reusability, going back to the X-33 fiasco.
Also in a sane world, an auditor would certify the full design & build process including change management. Then they would only need to re-audit changes to the process rather than the vehicle. This is how every other industry except maybe nuclear energy does this kind of thing.
Luckily NASA is a very big and disjointed organization. Hopefully ISS resupply and similar services will continue to foster change and drag the rest of the apparatchik along kicking and screaming.
Does anyone have an estimate as to what loss or long delay of NASA (and USAF) orders would mean for SpaceX’s business plan? Presumably the commercial customers would make up their own minds about continuing to buy SpaceX rides and, I’d guess, not be overly concerned about USG certifications.
I don’t know, but at some point USAF and NASA are just going to have to suck it up, unless they want to buy rides from Russia or Arianespace. As I’ve always said, NASA (and now the Air Force) need SpaceX much more than vice versa.
Hmm, maybe SpaceX would be content to have NASA pay for new cores that they then reuse multiple times for other customers. It wouldn’t be great for the taxpayer but SpaceX would make out like bandits.
“It wouldn’t be great for the taxpayer but SpaceX would make out like bandits.”
Which is to say, like certain other aerospace contractors have been making out for years.
If NASA is so set on being stuck on stupid about reuse, is it SpaceX’s responsibility to change them? They fly a mission for NASA, recover the stage, refurbish as necessary (details TBD) and reuse the vehicle for subsequent launches. That may work equally well for Dragon 2 capsules (TBD). NASA gets a fresh ride with that new spacecraft smell every time and SpaceX does the environmentally responsible thing by reusing it. What’s wrong with that, other than NASA being stupid?
I like the part where they say that requalifying the upper stage with a motor upgrade required 5 consecutive successful flights with extra instrumentation, whereas it wouldn’t have if only they’d test fired it in a full vacuum chamber on the ground first. (if I recall correctly)
Because of course “real-world experience” is more real in a vac chamber on the ground than in real-world flight.
Huh?
(Ok, they might have been able to have even heavier instrumentation and exhaust product observation on the ground, but still…)
It’s about firing duration. You can do a longer test campaign in the ground than you can in a single flight.
So, thought I read in some comments someplace that ULA was required to be working on a replacement engine or that every year they received money to do so in their contract? If this is the case, how are they not getting their butts chewed out right now?
If this is the case, how are they not getting their butts chewed out right now?
Because they have the best politicians and generals that money can buy in their back pocket.
The problem with the RD-180 engines is largely of the Air Force’s own making. They could buy more Delta IVs, admittedly at a higher price. They could look at their certification process and see if it has any basis in reality. They could buy Falcon 9s for payloads that are currently being launched on the lighter Atlas V variants, such as GPS satellites. There are a lot of things the Air Force can do. The question is whether they’ll do any of them. Likewise, when the new Atlas variant becomes available, will it be held to the same standards as they’re applying to SpaceX? Somehow, I doubt it.
Like I wrote at Aviation Leak and Space Treachery, bureaucrats love process. The old joke about the ISO standards is that they’re a European plot to destroy American innovation by getting us bogged down in endless processes. Prematurely locking a design into the processes is a great way to stifle innovation and guarantee obsolescence.
SpaceX can do what the Linux software vendors like Red Hat and Ubuntu do. They have a similar problem because Open Source Software such as the Linux kernel has a continuous development model vs what say Microsoft offers. Stodgy corporations don’t like change at a rapid pace like that.
SpaceX can offer two vehicles: one is the certified vehicle, which is like a 1-2 year old rocket design or whatever, and the other is the non-certified bleeding edge vehicle which has a much smaller launch history. The flights on the certified vehicle cost more (a whole lot more) than the flights on the non-certified vehicle. With a large enough flight rate they can get the business model to work.
The USAF and ULA have plenty of options and they had this coming to them. LM/RD Amross cheapened out by not starting licensed RD-180 production in the USA like they promised to do. Now they have to pay the price of outsourcing a national security resource to a foreign country. If they have to eat some of the cost by using a more expensive Delta IV then tough luck.
PS: Can someone elaborate on the Rocketdyne reorganization and the possible impact on RS-68 engine production?
http://spacenews.com/aerojet-rocketdyne-plans-consolidation-job-cuts-to-reduce-costs/
Not to mention GEM-60 production now that Orbital bought ATK Space.
Actually (AIUI), Russia/Energomash has never been forthcoming with the metallurgy and “secret sauce” coating they use. Even if we had wanted to set up (read: been willing to pay for) domestic production, without those it would have been next to impossible.
In addition, IIRC the license to produce had a drop-dead date of like 2020 or so.
I’m fairly sure my recollection is wrong in there somewhere. Feel free.
I don’t know a lot of the facts but I have always assumed the answer was a lot more prosaic than that. They asked the Russians for the technical data on the rocket engine and then translated the whole thing from Russian to English. The problem is the high-end technical spec does not capture a lot of the details involved in actually building it to begin with.
An analogy is say I am an architect and I do a bunch of construction plans. I give them to a contractor and he builds a house. A lot of knowledge like how to mix materials isn’t encoded in the blueprints. Plus the contractor himself might actually find a flaw in the plans and make modifications which don’t get reflected in the plans.
They should have first translated the documentation, then done parts assembly in the USA, then done actual part construction in the USA, until they built it 100% in the USA. Instead they just translated the documentation, did a couple of component tests, and dropped the paperwork into a vault somewhere. Then they are surprised they cannot build anything and by now the political environment has changed dramatically and the Russians aren’t as forthcoming with sharing all their expertise and giving access to their facilities as they used to be.
The Chinese have managed to do licensed production of several pieces of critical Russian technology more than once using this exact method. In some occasions they did not even have a production license and had to reverse engineer a lot of the product and managed to do it regardless. The US did much the same after WWII in Operation Paperclip.
It was IMO a poorly used opportunity. The US did get access to the RD-180 and NK-33 but the knowledge of how to actually build these engines was not fully assimilated.
Also regarding dates they had all the time in the world to start US production. The first rocket using the RD-180 was the Atlas III first launched in 2000. They had 15 years. 15 years do do US rocket engine production. They didn’t do it to save less than a billion dollars setting up RD-180 rocket engine production. They’ll now probably waste 2-3 billion dollars because of that.
Even the Chinese, with a much smaller budget, have managed to build a staged combustion LOX/Kerosene first stage rocket engine.
What a far cry this NASA is from the NASA of James Webb.
And yet, it was inevitable. This is what bureaucracies do over time, especially without any grave urgency.