Main Engine Cut Off - T-0: The Near Future of US-Based Competitors

Episode Date: April 20, 2016

An analysis of the intricate dance between United Launch Alliance, SpaceX, and Blue Origin as we enter the next era of spaceflight. Launch Mega-Session at the 32nd Annual Space Symposium (Photo) ULA and SpaceX see the future of space launching very differently By the Numbers: How close Atlas V came to Failure in this Week’s Cygnus Launch Lockheed-Boeing rocket venture needs commercial orders to survive 55 years after Gagarin, ULA & Bigelow present commercial space stations United Launch Alliance’s CEO weighs Blue Origin’s chances in multibillion-dollar rocket engine race Tweet from Jeff Foust — Bruno’s take on commercial market risk mitigation Tweet from Jeff Foust — Shotwell on SpaceX’s launch frequency Tweet from Jeff Foust — Meyerson on BE-4 testing Email feedback to [e-mail] Follow @WeHaveMECO Support Main Engine Cut Off on Patreon

Hello and welcome to Main Engine Cutoff, a short weekly podcast about spaceflight exploration, colonization, policy, strategy, all of the nerdy bits of the spaceflight industry. The show is going to stay focused on the current state of the industry as well as the near future. We're not going to get too far off into theoretical realms with warp drives and things like that. We're going to stay focused on here and now, and how what's happening today affects what will happen tomorrow. And this may be the best week possible to start a show like that, because we've had a lot going on in the last two or three weeks that will have some big impacts over the next few years in the industry. We had a couple of launches up to the space station,

a couple of resupply missions. Orbital ATK's Cygnus flew up on an Atlas V from United Launch Alliance and that got to the space station successfully. And then just last week, SpaceX launched a Dragon on top of their own Falcon 9 booster up to the space station. The first stage of that Falcon 9 was the first to successfully land on their drone ship at sea, kind of proving out that part of their business model, which we'll talk about in a bit. Aside from that, we had an announcement from United Launch Alliance and Bigelow Aerospace regarding some commercial space stations coming in the 2020s. And then just last week, we had the 32nd annual Space Symposium in Colorado Springs, Colorado.

That's a trade show of sorts, so there's all these different companies and agencies there showing off what they're working on, where they're going, and just kind of generating excitement around what they're doing actively day to day. In the last day of that conference, there's something called the Launch Mega Session. This had about 10 leaders of the industry up on stage together talking about all those different things that they're working on and how they're interacting with each other. Among them, we had Gwen Shotwell. She is the president and COO of SpaceX. Tori Bruno, the president and CEO of United Launch Alliance. Robert Meyerson, the president of Blue Origin. And then we had representatives from Aerojet, Rocketdyne, Arianespace, Rocket Lab, Strata Launch, Virgin Galactic, you name it, they were up there. It was a really interesting event,

and there were some couple interesting tidbits that came out of that that I think kind of play into this topic that I want to talk about today, which is the intricate dance going on between a couple of different providers, commercial spaceflight in the United States. We have United Launch Alliance, SpaceX, and Blue Origin. And we have this interesting thing going on where they're all influencing each other in interesting ways, putting pressure on each other to get better in certain areas and driving each other forward. As a little background to dive into this, United Launch Alliance, or ULA, is a joint venture between Boeing and Lockheed Martin. It was created about 10 years ago, back in 2006, when both of those companies combined their space launch divisions.

Since then, and up until very recently, ULA has been the sole provider of military launches for the U.S., with both Delta IV rockets and Atlas V rockets. And even before that, Boeing and Lockheed were the sole providers for that market. So really, in a market not filled with a lot of commercial launches over the last 10 to 20 years, they and their heritage companies have pretty much been the only game in town. They even were so dominant at one point that they had to get antitrust clearance from the FTC. So that just goes to say how dominating they have been as a force in the industry for quite a while now. And very recently, SpaceX, it was considered a space startup for a while. They came in and they were the first major player to really shake things up, offering

drastically lower costs than ULA. And just last year, they were certified by the Air Force for national security and military launches. So just with that, they've taken by the Air Force for national security and military launches. So just with that, they've taken a good chunk out of ULA's market with some military launches coming up for them in the next five years. In addition, like I said, SpaceX offering lower costs has gained a lot of control of the commercial launch market in the U.S. ULA has had little to no commercial launches in the last couple years. I think of their 14, maybe 15 now, previous launches, 13 of them have been for the U.S. government. One has been for the Mexican government, and the other one had been for a commercial company, but that commercial company made almost all their money based on government

contracts. So really, ULA doesn't have that big of a commercial footprint in terms of what they're launching. To give you an idea about that cost, just to put some numbers out there, the lowest-end rocket that ULA flies, the Atlas V, that costs $164 million per launch, and their highest-end rocket, the Delta IV Heavy, million per launch, and their highest-end rocket, the Delta IV Heavy, costs upwards of $350 million. SpaceX, on the other hand, their Falcon 9 right now costs around $60 million for an orbital launch, and with the reusability plans they have, as I mentioned, they just landed on the drone ship recently, and they had a ground landing back in December, so they're kind of proving this out still, and the next step is to fly one of those again. But with those reusability plans, they're hoping to bring that number down from 60 million

to 40 million. Now that's a pretty big decrease. I mean, if anyone else was talking about we're cutting a third of our price, it would be big news. If a Delta IV Heavy came down from 350 million to 200 million, that would be pretty big news. And 60 to 40 doesn't sound that big, but cutting a third off of that price is pretty substantial. So just between these two companies, SpaceX and ULA, they're kind of, you know, ebbing and flowing based on different advantages they have. SpaceX has the advantage of their low-cost solutions to orbit. And when the Falcon Heavy starts flying, hopefully later this year, if all of their plans shake out, that will actually have better performance than the Delta IV Heavy. It'll be able to lift more payload to orbit.

But still, that hasn't flown yet, so that's not really a factor at this point. Their main advantage is that low cost. And, you know, low cost for comparable performance. ULA's main advantage is schedule certainty. They have had an incredible, incredible streak of successful launches. They've had 106 successful launches in a row, two partial failures, but both of those have just achieved a lower orbit than they were intended. So they weren't failures, they were just partial failures. Their most recent launch, that Cygnus up to the space station on an

Atlas V, that was incredibly, incredibly close to failure. And I'll put a link into the show notes to this article that goes through just how close to failure they were. We're talking seconds away from missing orbit entirely. So that was very interesting. But to this point, they've been an incredibly, incredibly reliable launch provider, the most reliable that the world has ever seen at this point. So that's their main advantage there. And with that reliability is schedule certainty. So ULA has very, very few launch scrubs. And most of those that they do have are weather related. So they don't have a lot of scrubs due to their process, you know, whereas SpaceX in the last few months have had a lot of scrubs based on their tech not really working out. So their most recent redesign of Falcon 9

includes a densification of propellant, which means they're taking the propellant that they're using for their rocket, super cooling it so that they can fit more of it into the same volume. They've had issues getting the propellant cold enough over the last couple months, so they've had some scrubs based on that not being ready to launch at their launch window. Their most recent mission to the ISS, like I said, that was a flawless, flawless mission. They hit their launch target right on time. They hit the opening of their launch window.

They had no scrubs. Flawless launch. So their big thing that they need to catch up on is schedule certainty. They need to catch up to ULA in terms of that, because ULA is just crushing them in that component right now. But SpaceX is taking strides to get there. You can see that with that flawless launch, they're going to want to build off that.

And Gwen Shotwell, at this mega session that I mentioned previously, she had repeated a number that they had said a few times this year, which is that they're hoping for 18 launches this year, which sounds crazy because we're in the middle of April right now and they've had three. They're coming off of that failed launch last year on CRS-7, but 18 launches is just a ton of launches for this year, but there are signs that they are going to pick up the pace. Last week, they launched up to the space station with that flawless launch, and at the end of the week, the first stage of Falcon 9 for their next mission showed up at the Cape for preparations. And when that first stage was leaving their test

facility in McGregor, Texas, the next flight's first stage showed up before testing. So there are some signs that they're beginning to pick up the pace, and that'll be really important for them to gain that ground back on ULA. On the other hand, ULA, you know, their disadvantage right now is cost. So they need to do some work to catch up on that cost front. And that's exactly what they have plans for. I think they're seeing, you know, Tori Bruno, the CEO, is doing an incredibly good job, I think, over the last couple years. He's been interacting on Reddit and Twitter. He's very active, engaging the community. I even got a chance to meet him down at the launch of Orion back in December 2014. He was a great person to talk to, just very down to earth, very excited when I was

talking to him about the launch and all that kind of stuff. And he's been doing a great job setting the roadmap for their future. Their main plans are to phase out the Atlas V and the Delta IV. They're going to replace it with a new rocket called Vulcan. And this rocket is in the design phase still. It's going to fly right now around sometime maybe 2019 to 2020, based on their current projections. But the point of that is they need to cut the costs and they need a new rocket to do that. So this rocket is going to be somewhat reusable.

Instead of landing the whole first stage like SpaceX is going to do, they're going to detach the engine component and catch that on the way back down to reuse those engines for future flights. So it's not a fully reusable rocket, but they say that they're reusing the expensive parts, which will lower their costs. And I think this is an interesting play from ULA, because what they see right now, as the incumbent in this market, SpaceX came in with lower prices, which got them the share of commercial launches. And then they got certified for Air Force, National Security and Military launches. So that's going to begin to eat away at their market. And just back in 2015, so just last year, there was an interview with Tory Bruno. And in it,

he talked about the fact that they need to get commercial orders to survive the next five to 10 years, because there's a decreasing amount of military launches, and they're not competitive right now on the commercial front. So they need to redesign their business to be able to get commercial launches. And I think that's where this partnership with Bigelow Aerospace comes in. So they announced a partnership with Bigelow Aerospace to launch in the 2020s, two BA330 modules from Bigelow. These are expandable habitats, so think of them like an inflatable balloon that you can launch up to space, expand to get some more living space. So under the deal, which is a little bit murky still, no one's quite sure if Bigelow has bought the rocket or just reserved a flight. It's still kind of hard to tell what's going on there. But in the 2020 range, they will

launch two of these things and then offer tourism up to those stations. Maybe they will attach one to the ISS. Nobody's quite sure yet. They'll offer commercial science missions. So if you want to go up and do some experiments up there, they would take you up or take your experiment up, uh, as it'd be a commercial space station, you know, just like we're using the ISS, but commercially. So I think that was a big play for them to say, Hey, look, we're doing this. We're doing this commercial thing. We have this, this company that has a lot of heritage, uh, in the industry.

We're, you know, they're flying something on the ISS right now, we speak, Bigelow, they just got a module of theirs up there. So for ULA to say, we have this trusted commercial partner willing to fly with us, I think that's a big play to say, here we are commercial, come talk to us. Now, the tricky thing is that Vulcan is not going to be ready until 2020. So they've got about five years where they are the expensive yet reliable competitor. And SpaceX, you know, as they, if they can get that schedule certainty up, they're going to continue to eat away at ULA's market share. So I think ULA is playing this right, though they are, you know, they might have a few years of catch up to play, but I think they're making the right play long term. They're

not just sitting back and waiting. They're actually making the changes they need to. It's just going to be interesting to see if SpaceX can take advantage of this little bit of a head start that they have in the new era. They've got a few years now where they can work out all of the kinks in their launches, keep those prices low, hopefully lower them with reusability. But this is a big time to see if they can prove themselves as reliable as ULA has been. And ULA, on the other hand, has these few years to catch up and figure out how to get their costs down to be competitive with SpaceX in the commercial industry. Now, the third party here I want to talk about is Blue

Origin. Blue Origin might have the most interesting play between the other two companies, because they're competing with SpaceX a little bit now on the reusability front. They're beginning testing for a reusable rocket in the same way SpaceX has. As of yet, they've launched a smaller version that is, you know, they're launching their own rocket and capsule suborbital, so it just kind of flies up to the edge of space and back down, lands back near the launch pad, both the rocket and the capsule. They say that this is in prep for their own orbital vehicle, so you have to imagine that their orbital vehicle will feature the same type of reusability as they're prototyping out with their suborbital vehicle. Now the rocket they're flying now

flies with a BE-3 engine, and that is the rocket that is capable of that suborbital flight on that first stage, but will probably be used as an upper stage in the future. Their orbital rocket, however, will need a bigger engine, so they've been developing for a couple years now. They've been developing the BE-4 engine, which is a big, big engine. It's got about 550,000 pounds of thrust, which is slightly higher than the RS-25, which is the space shuttle's main engine, and just slightly less than the RS-68, which is the engine for the Delta IV. So it is a big, big engine that has a lot of thrust. They've been developing this on their own for a while, but recently ULA has invested in them to develop their engine

to be used on Vulcan. So ULA is investing as a partner with them in this engine because they want to be able to use that engine for their new rocket. ULA needs to move away from the Russian made engines that they've been using for Atlas Vs due to some congressional demands on them with the geopolitical situation right now between the United States and Russia. So ULA needs to find another partner, and they see a lot of hope in this BE-4 engine that Blue Origin is working on. So at this point, Blue Origin is planning an orbital launcher that should compete with the Falcon 9, both in terms of cost and reusability and that kind of stuff.

And they need their own engine to do that. And they're getting subsidized by ULA, who would become their partner for those launches that ULA would be doing. You know, they'll be skimming a little off the top of all those launches by selling their engines to ULA. Now, that's an interesting play because they're sort of dipping their toes into both sides. They start supplying ULA, who's flying these commercial and military missions, but what happens when Blue Origin's orbital rocket comes online? Now they're going to be competing directly against somebody that they supply engines for. So you could see how this is kind of an interesting situation that is on the horizon where you've got a company supplying a competitor with engines that

they're going to compete against directly, theoretically with, you know, all the advantages of that engine, and maybe a little on top if they're doing full reusability. What happens if Blue Origin comes online in the time that ULA is kind of playing catch up to these lower cost reusable launchers? Then you have SpaceX and Blue Origin, you know, using that lower cost advantage to drive commercial sales, gaining more and more of that market. Maybe Blue Origin gets certified as SpaceX has, and they start stealing some of those security and military launches. And then ULA finds themselves in a very interesting situation. And I think partnerships like the one they announced at Bigelow Aerospace will really come in handy to solidify that commercial segment.

So towards the end of this year, we should see pieces of these strategies come into play, because we will hopefully see a Falcon Heavy demonstration flight before the year is out, and we should see the static firing of the BE-4 engine for the first time. There's been some talk about that recently, that there's going to be a full-up test of that engine by the end of this year. So very quickly, we're going to see the pieces at play in these dynamics between these three companies get real and get physical and be able to see what these things have to offer. So this is a really, really exciting time to be a spaceflight nerd and to follow this stuff because it's just, you know, we haven't seen this type of action in a long, long time. So thank you very much for giving this podcast a shot, this first show. I'm going to keep this thing going weekly and talk about this kind of,

these kind of topics as we go. You can find all of the show notes on mainenginecutoff.com and this show should be listed on iTunes within a day or two of the show notes on mainenginecutoff.com. And this show should be listed on iTunes within a day or two of the recording here. So thank you again, and I will talk to you soon.