Props to Northrop for standing up this group. I’m definitely not a fan of solids for spaceflight at this point, but it’s cool to see a company like Northrop starting a team focused on speed and innovation.
If Lockheed is subcontracting with Terran, Northrop is subcontracting with Oneweb, and Ball is subcontracting with Loft … Why not take out the middleman and award those companies directly?
At least York is a prime, but I don’t get what Lockheed, Northrop, and Ball are bringing to the table other than middleman cost.
I think they make enough from their non-launch side that they’ll be fine.
I’m guessing their goal is to win constellation contracts where they handle everything but the payload, including buses, launch, licensing, and mission ops,
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I got a bit worried when they had that round of layoffs, but it looks like they’re cruising right along. I assumed the layoffs were for financial reasons, but I wonder how much the shifting company identity was part of it…
I wonder why they would pay $15 million for a Firefly launch instead of like a tenth of that to fly on a Transporter. There must be a specific orbit they want? Or to fly sooner?
If this starts launching en masse at the same time as Kuiper and continued Starlink… Hoo boy we’ve got some proliferation on our hands. I can’t blame China for wanting their own megaconstellation, though.
Detailed analysis of the telemetry that was available led engineers to conclude that there was an “unexpected electrical arc” within the power supply for the upper stage. That shorted the battery packs that power the upper stage, causing a loss of power.
Beck said that arc was the result of several factors. That included a “ripple voltage” in the power system, the presence of traces of helium gas and an “undetectable” flaw in insulation in the power system. Those factors combined, under conditions governed by a relationship called Paschen’s Law, to create the arc.
Great investigation work by the team. That’s a pretty impressive turnaround for a return to flight (2 months).
I’m always blown away at how it is possible to pinpoint precisely what went wrong after failures like these. Congrats to the Rocket Lab team, and I hope they are able to resume launches soon!
Cargo contracts starting in 2028 for a station that should deorbit in 2030 seems like a tough sell. ESA should probably formally partner with one of the CLD stations and set up a longer research (and cargo) contract there. Maybe Starlab, which Airbus is a partner on? In my perfect world, ESA would fund a 2nd Starlab, either to dock to the first one or as a separate station in a different orbit.
As far as the US vehicles go- Crew Dragon is really the exception, not the rule, for signing commercial contracts (free flyers, ISS private flights). I’ll give Cygnus some credit for getting absolutely milked by NG for every pressure vessel they can think of, with the only contract I know of being the Lunar Gateway HALO, plus a partnership to deliver cargo to Starlab. I would lump Starliner and Dreamchaser in the same category until proven otherwise, but hopefully Dreamchaser has a better first flight (as long as no one crashes a forklift or something into it at Plum Brook).
It wouldn’t be feasible to move it to a higher orbit and make it more permanent, and it can’t stay there forever. At some point it’s going to have to be deorbited on our terms.
It’d be cool to see a similar shaped station with new components put in orbit, but I also think a ring-shaped station is king overdue, despite how impractical it may be.
Genuine question to someone with more aerospace knowledge than me, if there is risk in letting it deorbit as a solid mass, what’s the risk of firing its thrusters to get into a slightly higher orbit, and just… Disconnecting all the station joints and kicking them away from the bulk of the station? It separates them slightly and allows them to spread out for reentry, allowing for greater liklihood of disintegration of most of it.
I think they would have to be able to actively jettison all the modules. For one, a loose cluster will be really hard to predict the impact zone. NASA does try to make sure debris falls over large areas of open ocean.
But I also think it isn’t operationally workable. I don’t think the joints can be remotely disconnected. That means your suggestion requires having crew on board or maybe even doing a series of spacewalks to do this work. I don’t think NASA would be ok with having a bunch of loose and uncontrolled modules in the vicinity of crew spacewalking and eventually a departing capsule. It would be really hard to manage collision risk in that scenario.
So I think either they would try to ditch the solar panels in a controlled fashion so they can more accurately deorbit the whole thing into the pacific, or they’ll have to develope small bolt on thruster packs that can safely jettison the modules 1 by 1.
And exactly as I feared, Mars Sample Return becomes the next black hole project sucking up the funding that could be spent far more efficiently on other stuff.
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