Main Engine Cut Off - T+110: Starship, New Glenn, and RS1 Updates

Episode Date: February 11, 2019

ABL Space Systems announced some changes to RS1, Blue Origin broke ground in Huntsville and signed a new customer, and SpaceX has been making steady progress on Starship. This episode of Main Engine Cut Off is brought to you by 35 executive producers—Kris, Pat, Matt, Jorge, Brad, Ryan, Jamison, Nadim, Peter, Donald, Lee, Jasper, Chris, Warren, Bob, Russell, John, Moritz, Joel, Jan, David, Grant, Mike, David, Mints, Joonas, Robb, Tim Dodd the Everyday Astronaut, Frank, and six anonymous—and 218 other supporters on Patreon. ABL Space Systems increases performance and cuts price of its small launch vehicle - SpaceNews.com Blue Origin breaks ground for BE-4 factory - SpaceNews.com Blue Origin’s Powerful New Glenn Rocket to Launch Telesat’s Advanced Global LEO Satellite Constellation | Telesat Telesat signs New Glenn multi-launch agreement with Blue Origin for LEO missions - SpaceNews.com New Raptor Fires Up - Main Engine Cut Off Elon Musk on Twitter: “Design requires at least 170 metric tons of force. Engine reached 172 mT & 257 bar chamber pressure with warm propellant, which means 10% to 20% more with deep cryo.” Email your thoughts, comments, and questions to [e-mail] Follow @WeHaveMECO Listen to MECO Headlines Join the Off-Nominal Discord Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Pocket Casts, Spotify, Google Play, Stitcher, TuneIn or elsewhere Subscribe to the Main Engine Cut Off Newsletter Buy shirts and Rocket Socks from the Main Engine Cut Off Shop Support Main Engine Cut Off on Patreon Music by Max Justus

Hello, hello, it is time for a good old-fashioned episode of Main Engine Cutoff. I'm Anthony Colangelo, and we've got future launch vehicle things to talk about today. We've got some updates across the board of these future launch vehicles. So I want to start on the lower end of the payload scale here. We want to talk a little bit about ABL Space Systems. Haven't brought them up too much on the show yet because they're still an earlier stage launch vehicle company. They are one of the many small launch vehicles that are in development. But they are in a kind of unique payload range that I've been particularly interested in of late. They are around 1,000 kilograms to orbit. You've got the smaller end of Rocket Lab, Virgin Orbit, they're in the couple hundred kilograms to

orbit. And then ABL is right alongside Relativity, Firefly, they're in that 1,000 kilogram to orbit range. So they're sort of the upper end of the small satellite payload scale. And they've had an update recently where they're changing their payload size, their price, and their engine configuration. So I want to break down those things. But first, a little overview of ABL and where they're at. As I said, they're in that upper low-end range of payloads. And for these small launchers, everyone kind of has that one unique kicker

that makes their things stand out. So Relativity is working on this idea where they can 3D print an entire rocket, engines, tanks, and all, and that makes it very quick to manufacture, and then they launch it very quickly. That's their kind of unique thing. Virgin Orbit's doing an air launch thing.

Rocket Lab has their own launch sites, and they're using these carbon fiber bodies with electric turbo pumps and all sorts of other stuff. They've kind of got that. Theirs is also the first mover advantage. They're the first ones to be launching regularly like that. So they all kind of have their own thing. ABL's thing, from what I can suss out, is simplicity and a mobile launch infrastructure. So they're building a very traditional rocket, something with tried and true types of tankage and engines and pressurization and very typical architecture. And then their unique thing is that they can

launch from any launch site with this kind of mobilized, containerized launch infrastructure. The idea being they can transport their entire infrastructure to any of the numerous spaceports in the country, whether it's Cape Canaveral or Vandenberg or Alaska or Wallops Island. They can take their setup anywhere and launch from anywhere. And that's a little bit to market towards that whole idea of being able to be responsive to what needs to launch to where and when, that they can take their whole setup, they don't have to invest in one spot. How well that's going to work out in the long run, I don't know. There's certain niceties that come with having your own launch site, and there's certain difficulties that come with trying to transport that around. So we'll see how that part works out in the long run. So we'll see how that part works out in the long run. But I can appreciate their idea to kind of keep it simple and straightforward in terms of the engineering side of things. Now, as far as the updates go, first one was the payload range. They have increased it a couple hundred kilograms.

They were originally advertising 900 kilograms to low Earth orbit, equatorial, kind of launching from Cape Canaveral. They've bumped that up to 1,200 kilograms. So in that range, that middle range I was talking about, Firefly, ABL, and Relativity, that is the order from smallest to largest of these payloads. They're all within a couple hundred kilograms of each other, but Firefly is the smallest payload range, ABL the middle, and Relativity the upper end. They're all, again, very close within like one to 200 kilograms of each other in that lineup. But now ABL is firmly in the middle there. So that is good. Now, I don't know how much each one of those matters. You know, a couple hundred kilograms here or there doesn't matter once you're in that range,

but it's good to have some relative scale there. They have also dropped price from $17 million for a launch to $12 million. So that brings it right into that range that they're all going for, which is the low double-digit millions. So again, pretty good price there, especially when you compare it to something like Virgin Orbit, which I've heard advertised about $15 million a launch, and that's a much smaller payload. So when you get in that sense, very good price. The biggest one of these updates, which may be the reason for the price and the payload updates, is that they are dropping Ursa Major for their engine developer. They're originally going to buy engines from Ursa Major, who is a company that only builds engines. That's their idea.

They just want to develop engines and sell them to other people. Now, previously, ABL and Generation Orbit were Ursa Major customers, so they had two customers, so it seemed plausible. Now, ABL decided to drop Ursa Major and build their own engines in-house.

So they're going to be building their E1 and E2 engines. E1 will go on the first stage, I think in a cluster of three, and then an E2 engine on the second stage of their vehicle. This is not a new thing where we see, you know, launch vehicle companies bringing their engines in-house. It's kind of the crucial element these days. I always like to bring up, there's a computer scientist, computer engineer in Alan Kay, who's very famous in the history of computing. And he always said, people who are really serious about software should make their own hardware. And that's how I feel about launch services here, where people who are serious about

launch services should build their own engines. Because it is such a driver in vehicle performance, you're not paying that middleman to affect the price. So this was an issue we've seen with Atlas 5, where they have to buy RD-180s from the Russians. That's going to put a limit on what they can do price-wise. They can't really cut the costs in the engine area if you're always buying it from someone else, because that person also needs to make a profit to cover their business needs. So there's always an inherent flaw in the incentives there where somebody in the middle is making profit and you just can't market your launch services for what it is.

You're always paying somebody else as well. So this isn't surprising to see them bring it in-house. I think it's actually encouraging to see them bring it in-house. For Ursa Major, though, I'm not sure where they're going to go from here. Their only other customer now is Generation Orbit, who I don't really know how extensive their plans are. They right now just have these plans for being a hypersonic testbed. I don't know how many launches that is. I don't know if Ursa Major can be sustained on that. I doubt it. So unless Generation Orbit or Ursa Major have something up their sleeves,

I really don't know where Ursa Major goes from here, and they seem to be in a really tough spot. But overall for ABL, I think these are really strong updates, and I think they'll be a really attractive competitor in that area if they can make it. Because right now they're saying they're about a year behind what Firefly has been reporting. Maybe right along what Relativity has been reporting. So all of these should fly in pretty quick succession. And if that's the case, then I think they do have a shot at making it. But this is a pretty crowded space. And as I've said on a past show, this could

be a year when we see a couple of small launchers fold up. As the first couple get underway, get some people booked on their flights, the others that are not yet flying could have some hard times ahead. So that is ABL. I want to move into some updates on New Glenn and Blue Origin. Recently, they did a groundbreaking in Huntsville where they're going to start building their factory to produce BE-4s and BE-3U engines down in Huntsville. This was one of those things that they said if they were selected for Vulcan. This was one of those things that they said, if they were selected for Vulcan, the United Launch Alliance vehicle, that they would build a factory in Huntsville to produce those engines, both for ULA, but also for their own New Glenn

launch vehicle. So the groundbreaking happened. They had that whole ceremony where the bunch of suits behind the line of dirt, and they all take one shovelful, that whole thing. They did that. bunch of suits behind the line of dirt and they all take one shovelful, that whole thing. They did that. So they're going to start building down there, which that alone is an important thing because that's really not just a business move, but it's a politics play as well. They're kind of embedding with that Alabama contingent that is always so attractive to work with. always so attractive to work with. But also in this announcement, they mentioned that they are potentially taking over a test stand at NASA Marshall, which is just next door to where they're going to be building this factory. And this test stand they would use for acceptance testing and testing of BE-4s and BE-3Us. So they would build the engine in the factory, take it across the

street pretty much to Marshall and test it on the stand there. Now that's interesting because previously they said they were going to have a test stand at their launch site at Cape Canaveral. They were going to build a launch site, like a launch pad on the area that they've got. And then the other launch pad that they got, Launch Complex 11, they were going to build a test stand for testing these engines. Now, I wonder if this Marshall plan changes that, or in fact, maybe this changes because there's a factory in Huntsville now where previously they thought maybe they would build the factory in Florida. So it seems like they're just going to center all of their engine work in Huntsville and then, you know, ship those out to

the Cape as needed or ship them across the street to ULA as needed. And they just have an engine center and that's it. And then the Cape is for building New Glenn and integrating engines into the launch vehicle and doing all the launch vehicle processing there. If that's the case, I'm very curious to see what they do with Launch Complex 11. They have these two launch sites at Cape Canaveral right next to each other, Launch Complex 36 and Launch Complex 11. If they don't need a test stand anymore, they could do something pretty interesting with that area, whether that's a second pad for increased cadence or a landing pad if they're ever going to do return to launch site landings, which isn't yet

in the cards from what we've seen, but who knows? Maybe now this gives them a little flexibility to do that. Now, about the same time as this whole factory opening thing or groundbreaking ceremony happened, we got an update that Telesat, they're one of the constellations that are in the works right now, the low Earth orbit constellations. Telesat signed a launch agreement with Blue Origin for some number of multiple launches. They've said multi-launch, they don't tell us how many, but Telesat is going to shoot for around, I think it's somewhere around 300 satellites in their constellation.

So that would be split up along several launches of New Glenn. And in the press release, they said that a factor was the big fairing of New Glenn because you can pack a lot of stuff under that big fairing. So if they can pack more under the fairing per launch, that brings the amount of launches they need to buy down,

which brings their overall launch price down. Whereas if they were going to go with like a SpaceX, they might need to buy more SpaceX vehicles, even if New Glenn was a little more expensive than a Falcon 9 or Falcon Heavy, but they can do it in less launches, then the math starts to work out in Blue Origin's favor. So this is important because New Glenn at this point has a hell of a backlog. This brings their backlog, again, we don't know how many launches this is, but this brings the backlog into double digits for New Glenn. They previously had eight things signed, eight launches signed, now they have somewhere above 10 if it's a multiple launch agreement. And that is pretty amazing for a vehicle that we have not yet seen and that is still a few years away from flying.

It goes to say that there is something about NucleN that is attractive to customers. Whether that's the fact that the early customers got a crazy discount on flight and they sort of subsidized those initial flights by giving them a really, really good deal that was just hard to say no to. That's probably possible for the first three or four people that signed on to New Glenn a year or two ago. This close to the first New Glenn launch date, which is just two years away at this point, somebody like Telesat signing on, I think that one is more indicative that there's a different attraction to New Glenn, and it sounds like it's that fairing size. So this could be the first really good example of New Glenn winning a contract away from a SpaceX, because this sort of thing would have been SpaceX's bread and butter, doing very frequent launches to launch a Constellation

a la Iridium. you would assume Telesat would be somebody that they would be going after pretty hard as well. So if that's the case, man, this is a really interesting turn of events that New Glenn landed this one and kind of made that big impact on the early 2020s lineup of launches. New Glenn's got a big backlog. The others of their 2020s are not selling as much yet. We know that SpaceX has a couple of launches booked for 2020 and 2021. But if you look at the manifest that's listed publicly, there's not a ton there. So maybe they just don't talk about it as openly because it's not as important to, you know, propagate that info as it is for New Glenn, a new launcher. Blue Origin really is incentivized to show all these people being attracted to New Glenn. SpaceX is up and flying.

They're just doing their thing. If they're selling launches, maybe they don't tell us about it. That could very well be the case. But what we can see publicly, they have a couple of Worldview Legion satellites to launch. They have a couple of Sirius satellites to launch. But their commercial backlog, the non-NASA flights and non-Air Force flights are not that numerous. We've recently heard a lot of talk about Ariane 6 not being able to have enough launches on the books to feel confident going ahead. So they're trying to convince Europe to buy a couple more flights because they need to have a couple more signed in order to make the first year or two possible, I guess. How much of that

is political gamesmanship? I don't know. But it is notable that they haven't sold as many commercial contracts recently. And it seems like New Glenn is making a pretty big impact on these commercial sales already, and it has not even been seen yet. So that is pretty huge. New Glenn's been a sleeping giant in the commercial industry, and it's starting to make a lot of effects. As much as there are people out there that doubt that it's going to happen, happen on the timescale that they've said, or be as successful as they said, it is already having these big effects in the industry. And I think you could, you know, hand wave away the other customers that New Glenn has signed on as people jumping on early deals. Telesat is one that, to me, starts to look a lot more like

a legit thing that they won over other companies who could easily fly this sort of mission for Telesat. So that's a very notable event and something that I think we should keep our eye on as we head into the future. Now, I want to get into some Starship stuff, but before I do that, I need to say a huge thank you to everyone who supports Main Engine Cutoff over at patreon.com slash Miko. There are 253 of you there supporting this show every single week. Could not be more thankful for your support. And this episode of Main Engine Cutoff, this episode of the podcast was produced by 35 executive producers. Chris, Pat, Matt, George, Brad, Ryan, Jameson, Nadeem, Peter, Donald, Lee, Jasper, Chris, Warren, Bob, Russell, John, Moritz, Joel, Jan, David, Grant, Mike,

David, Mintz, Eunice, Rob, Tim Dodd, The Everyday Astronaut, Frank, and six anonymous executive producers. Thank you so much for making this episode possible. Could not do it without you. If you want to help support the show, head over to patreon.com slash Miko. If you sign up there for $3 a month or more, you get access to a special little RSS feed where I do a show every weekend running through the headlines of the week. Big stories, small stories. It's a great way to stay up on space news. So go ahead, check that out. It is a great spot to support the show and get a little extra for it. So thank you all for your support. All right, Starship, the headliner.

Everyone's been waiting for this. There's been a lot of activity lately. We've been tracking the whole Starship Starhopper development. We talked about it with Chris Grabehart a couple of weeks back about welding this stainless steel thing together. But recently, we started seeing some new Raptors show up at the McGregor test site. So we heard from Elon that there was going to be some new Raptors that were showing up in McGregor. Those are the ones that will go on the hopper

for those initial hop flights. Then we started getting some pictures flowing in of these things showing up. And then just the last week or so, there have been a couple of test firings of these Raptors. And most recently, the second phase of those, Elon Musk tweeted that they reached 172 metric tons of force, which is two metric tons of force above what the design requirements are for Starship, for the current Starship design. So this thing is working out well already. They're obviously still working through a whole test regime, but they are in the ballpark of what is needed for this round of Raptor. And I think just seeing the Starship hopper thing come together with the new stainless steel

design, seeing these Raptors get to the launch site or the test site and start working out so well, I think this month or two has been a real turning point in Starship. And if you remember, you know, a couple months back, I was kind of sounding jaded about Starship after the Dear Moon incident. And that was mostly because, as I explained at the time, the design was changing a lot, and it was always in this realm of, like, six technical leaps that had to happen for this thing to come together. So we had really, you know, advanced carbon fiber usage that was pushing the boundaries of what was even possible. We had all this heat shielding that was again pushing the

boundary of what's possible. We had this engine that was just amazingly powerful and advanced. And it was almost like every single component of Starship was this crazy advanced thing. And it just didn't feel SpaceX-y to me, you know, because the SpaceX style is to build a thing and iterate on that thing and make it better and make it better over time. advanced thing that was going to require years and years of work just made it seem so far away. And it was so outside of what we've come to expect from SpaceX that to me, it seemed like a leap too far in a lot of instances. So I was kind of grumpy about that, I suppose. But the last month, seeing the changes to stainless steel and seeing all this come together in this way has changed my mind a lot about the way that they're approaching this. And they've changed the way that they're approaching it. So along with that, my mind has changed and it feels so much more SpaceX-y already.

They've got, you know, they're working in known territory materials. They already have the engine, you know, at the level that they need it for the initial design. And that's another update that happened recently was Elon Musk said that they were shooting for a 200 tons of force engine that would be common across the booster and the Starship area or Starship part. So they're going towards this common design rather than developing two different styles of the engine and having it be massively high performance. So they've just brought everything down into the realm of possibility. And they're sticking all these things together. Each component part

is like a known quantity that they can achieve. And the thing as a whole is where they're innovating. Not that they're innovating on every single little component and the entire picture. They're innovating on the entire picture with very known components, things that are within their wheelhouse. So it's just feeling so much more natural at this moment. And it's seeming so much more likely that this timeline is not actually that crazy to hear talked about. Because again, you know, we are operating in the realm of the known at this point. There are obviously challenges remaining. This is a huge vehicle. It's got to do things that vehicles have not done in the past. Particularly the entry aerodynamics are very interesting. And I'm very curious to see how they will test that out. If they'll do like a scaled

model aerodynamic test that kind of helps them figure out their models a little bit better before they launch a huge piece of stainless steel into the sky and see what happens. That's going to be really curious to see. Not so much the landing part, because they'll test that out with the hopper, but the actual atmospheric entry that happens when they're coming back from orbit. But all in all, I think they've picked off the right level to shoot for first and to iterate from. And the Raptor will start out at this level, and then they'll iterate, and they'll make that stronger and stronger and stronger, just in the way that they've done with the Merlin engine, which started out very weak

and got up to this point where it's an amazingly powerful engine. And they're going to try that with Raptor, and they're starting out with the stainless steel, and they're going to try some different things out in the future, I'm sure. But they're starting from this known territory and still pushing themselves, but starting out with these components in known territories. And that is, that inspires a lot more confidence in me for Starship than the past architectures have. So this is very encouraging. I'm really excited to see what happens from here. It does seem like there will be some hopper tests this year. But I'm just, I'm just really,

really pumped up about this and i kind of wanted to give you a little update on where my thinking was since the last you heard from me i was sounding kind of bummed out but um it's been quite a turnaround month or two for starship and totally out of left field too because we got no inklings of this uh during the dear moon thing that happened last year. And then very quickly thereafter, we saw all these changes happen. So it's been kind of jarring. But overall, I'm really enthusiastic about this and very excited to see what happens this year. So those are my little updates on these launch vehicles. I thought it was worth talking through some of those things. If you

want to help support the show again, head over to patreon.com slash Miko. You can help support there. If you've got any questions or comments, anthonyatmainenginecutoff.com is the email, or on Twitter at WeHaveMiko. But for now, that is it. Thank you so much for listening, and I will talk to you next week. Thank you.