Main Engine Cut Off - T+136: Starship to GTO, SSO from Florida

Episode Date: October 12, 2019

A few bits of follow-up on Starship to GTO, the Bridenstine-Musk show at SpaceX HQ, and flying to polar orbits from Florida.Meetup alert! Sunday, October 20, 2019 in Washington, DC. Hang out with me, Jake, and a ton of amazing people of space the night before IAC 2019 kicks off. Details at events.offnominal.space.This episode of Main Engine Cut Off is brought to you by 39 executive producers—Kris, Pat, Matt, Jorge, Brad, Ryan, Nadim, Peter, Donald, Lee, Chris, Warren, Bob, Russell, John, Moritz, Joel, Jan, David, Grant, Mike, David, Mints, Joonas, Robb, Tim Dodd the Everyday Astronaut, Frank, Rui, Julian, Lars, Tommy, Adam, Sam, and six anonymous—and 284 other supporters.SpaceX targets 2021 commercial Starship launch - SpaceNews.comWATCH LIVE: Elon Musk and NASA chief give an update on SpaceX's astronaut spacecraft – 10/10/2019 - YouTube45th Space Wing commander: Changes underway to support commercial launch - SpaceNews.comMichael Baylor on Twitter: “The official government website states that Cape Canaveral is the launch site for SAOCOM 1B, and I have verified that this is not an error. SAOCOM 1A was launched out of Vandenberg last October.”Flight Club on Twitter: “This one’s better. 97°”Canaveral’s Polar Express - Main Engine Cut OffEmail your thoughts, comments, and questions to [e-mail] @WeHaveMECOListen to MECO HeadlinesJoin the Off-Nominal DiscordSubscribe on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Pocket Casts, Spotify, Google Play, Stitcher, TuneIn or elsewhereSubscribe to the Main Engine Cut Off NewsletterBuy shirts and Rocket Socks from the Main Engine Cut Off ShopLike the show? Support the show!Music by Max Justus

Hello and welcome to Managing Cutoff. I am Anthony Colangelo and I've got some Starship follow-up today. Got some thoughts on the Jim Bridenstine, Elon Musk meeting out at SpaceX. And then we've got a really fun thing to talk about, which is Polar launches out of Florida. We've got a little update there with an actual mission that's going to be flying. But I want to start with Starship follow-up. Last week, you may have heard the Starship extravaganza that happened on this show and on We Martians. Jake Robbins and I did a little crossover episode extravaganza between his show and mine. We talked all about Starship in the light of the recent Starship updates. But one thing that didn't come up

during that conversation that we got to talking about this week after that came out was the Starship numbers that we have for a geosynchronous transfer orbit launch. This is stuff that's kind of been rumored, not officially announced, but has leaked out in certain areas. I don't even know if leaked is the right word. But this is something that I want to cover. So on the past shows, we were talking about refueling and how critical that is to the Starship architecture in general, which it is. But one thing that didn't come up during the Elon Musk discussion were missions that could happen without refueling. And I think this is an important thing to harp on. And I wish that they would have in those presentations because it definitely changes

the way that you talk about Starship a little bit. So we've heard that the payload number is 150 tons to low Earth orbit. That is apparently enough to launch that enough of mass and still have a few left over for landing without refueling. And I wish they would give stats for other orbits as well. So the one that we heard most recently was a GTO number, that's geosynchronous transfer orbit, the typical launch that Falcon 9 does, where it launches a satellite to have a very low perigee over Earth, but a very high apogee to get it out to geosynchronous orbit. We heard talk recently in the recent months that I had totally forgotten about until somebody mentioned it, that Starship itself is able to do 20 to 30 tons, something in that range, to GTO without refueling. And that is such an important number

in the shape of everything that we've talked about in the industry right now, because it's a launch that they would sell. And not only is it a launch they would sell in Starship, it is a launch they could sell in Starship that could fly in the very, very near future. And it doesn't rely on the refueling architecture to be up and running at that point. And I think that's important to note for Starship, because it's the way that they're going to have to sell Starship if they want to get some early contracts signed up. So in the episode that just came out, I talked about how New Glenn itself is signing launch contracts for the early 2020s and Starship has not yet. There was a report from Caleb Henry, I believe it was, over at Space News that they're in

talks with the first commercial customer to sign the first commercial customer for Starship. They haven't done so yet, but I think if they do get that, we would get some more official announcements in this department. But I just want to talk about why I find it important first. For missions that Starship could do that require refueling, that's anything to the Moon or Mars or any of those higher energy orbits that require refueling to get there and get back, that kind of sets a lower bound for when those kinds of missions could happen. Because to do them, you have to have a whole host of things up and running smoothly, right? You've got to have a handful of boosters, a handful of ships, a handful of tankers.

You've got to have operations smoothly running so that you can launch frequently enough to do the refueling in orbit. You have to have enough propellant storage or production or production lines or even shipping lines to your launch site to be able to refuel all those boosters and tankers and launch them. You've got to have all of these things ironed out. And not to say that any one of them is impossible or hard to do or something that is going to present SpaceX a massive challenge, but it just sets a lower bound for when they can achieve that level of comfort with the Starship architecture to be able to carry out those missions. But if you're able to do 20 tons to GTO, let's just take the

lower bound number for what we've heard. If you're able to do 20 tons to GTO with a single launch, one booster, one ship, launch up to GTO, release your payload, do some particular maneuvering on your way outbound to that geosynchronous height, maybe some maneuvering at apogee to set yourself up for a landing when you come back around and you're able to get your heat shielding, you know, ironed out to be able to survive re-entry from that orbital regime and then come back and land on a landing pad. You could do that all in one launch. That sets a lower bound on when you could do that. That's when you have a booster, a ship, and heat shielding. And that is drastically closer, drastically near term compared to a full refueling architecture up and running.

So in the past, when there's been these announcements from Elon Musk, I've always gotten annoyed how much time he spends on the very far future of flying to Europa or doing point to point on Earth. The far future stuff always annoys me because it takes our eyes off the prize of what is near term and what are you working on today that is going to impact today. And I just wish a little bit more time was spent on what missions they could do without refueling that aren't just low Earth orbit, but show how they could do one of these GTO launches and for a drastically lower price than they're able to do today because you have that full reusability. You can do it with a single booster and a single ship and you can start making some sales. And that's important to keep the funding flowing

for Starship, but to also develop some very realistic mission profiles for things that people could envision today that are not SpaceX missions, but are, you know, other missions in space. So I bring it up as an important note here to keep in mind as we go forward, and we might start hearing some Starship contracts come up. You know, it's just really important to focus on what they're able to do in the very near term while having the mind for what their longer term architecture is so i thought it was worth bringing up here now also on the starship front there was a an event this week elon musk had jim bryanstein out with him at spacex headquarters they did a tour talked about commercial crew stuff and then they had this kind of press conference thing that was live streamed. And it was kind of the makeup event for the public fighting that there's been happening

between Elon Musk, SpaceX and Jim Bridenstine over the past couple of weeks. Right before the previous Starship announcement, Jim Bridenstine put out that tweet where he was saying, you know, it's great that you're doing this event, but you should have the same enthusiasm for commercial crew. And, you know, it was kind of throwing some shade at SpaceX being grumpy that Commercial Crew was behind schedule. SpaceX and Elon Musk kind of fired back. A little bit of snark from Elon, but also a lot of announcements and tweets of like, here's all the things that we're working on for Commercial Crew and why we are shipping hardware to the launch site at the same time that you're tweeting out that we're not working on Commercial Crew hard enough. So I guess, you know, after that, they decided it would be good to do an event like this,

have Bridenstine out at SpaceX headquarters. Seemed like everything went really well. It seemed like a nice day there. They did a tour. And then during this conversation afterwards, they kind of bonded over the fact that they just want to see the future of space be interesting. And towards the end, you know, Jim Bridenstine did open up and say Starship is something that NASA has an interest in. Obviously, NASA has had these couple of contract and development contracts for Starship to help them with different technology pieces and see what could happen there. So it's nothing that we didn't know. But I think it's even more indicative of what I said on the last show,

where this is just politics, right? It's positioning in public. It's dealing with press. It is base-level politics. So, you know, Jim Bridenstine had to go to headquarters and eat a little crow and say, yeah, basically say, we're sorry without saying we're sorry. It's just politics. It's nothing to get worked up about. And I'm glad that that event happened to put that all behind him to, you know, both show that SpaceX is serious about commercial crew. They had the astronauts there that are going to fly DM-2, and both showed that, you know, SpaceX is serious, but NASA is also interested in what Starship could do for the future of space. So kumbaya moment, good news. It's just good to follow up on the fact that politics are politics, but let's focus on the

exciting stuff of space. Now, I want to talk about a nearer term thing for Falcon 9, Falcon Heavy, but also a little bit of Starship stuff, talking about polar orbits from Florida, which is something that I'm always harping on here on the show. But before we get into that, I want to say a huge thank you to all of you out there who are supporting Main Engine Cutoff. If you want to help support the show, it's entirely listener supported. If you like what you're hearing, help support the show. Head over to mainenginecutoff.com slash support and do it there. This episode was produced by 39 executive producers. Chris, Pat, Matt, George, Brad, Ryan, Nadeem, Peter, Donald, Lee, Chris, Warren, Bob, Russell, John, Moritz, Joel, Jan, David, Grant, Mike, David, Mintz, Eunice, Rob, Tim Dodd, TheEverDashNaut, Frank,

Rui, Julian, Lars, Tommy, Adam, Sam, and six anonymous executive producers. Thank you all so much for your support at that level. Thank you for making this show possible. And to everyone else supporting the show, thank you so much for keeping this thing going. You make things possible. You make it possible to do some of the events that we're going to do next week. I'm going to be at IAC down in Washington, D.C. We're having a meetup October 20th. Check out events.offnominal.space if you want to see

what the meetups are. But your support helps us plan things like that, organize things like that, and also travel to these conferences where I'm sure a lot of interesting content is going to come out as well. And if you are one of the supporters, you're probably going to be getting a nice bonus content throughout the week as we find our way through IAC. I don't know what to expect, really, but there's going to be some interesting stuff. And if you are a supporter, you're going to get an inside look at all the things that happened down in Washington, D.C. So good time to join up if you would like. MainEngineCutoff.com slash support. Thank you all so much. All right, so the last week, there was some interesting news breaking from a couple of different angles. So Sandra Irwin of Space News had an article

talking with some of the folks from the Eastern Range, which is who runs the Cape Canaveral Kennedy Space Center airspace. That's from the 45th Space Wing, Patrick Air Force Base out in Florida. And they mentioned in this article, they mentioned the fact that SpaceX is working on a mission to do a polar launch from the eastern range, and we are supporting that. I think that gives us more flexibility if something happened at Vandenberg. Now, that piqued my ears because back in January 2018, so almost two years ago at this point, there was talk about having a polar corridor from Florida that kind of skirts the edge of Florida, just cruises past Miami and then flies over Cuba.

And it kind of deals with the drop ranges for debris and things like that that aren't over land, aren't harming people. So there's a very small window to be able to do this dogleg trajectory out of Florida and get to a polar orbit. Now, that's something that piqued my ears because it's important to be able to fly to polar orbit. There's a lot of interesting stuff that happens there. A lot of imaging satellites are flying to sun-synchronous orbit. That is the favorite for imaging satellites or environmental monitoring, things like that that are very popular. If you look at a list of launches, it feels like half go to GTO and half go to sun-synchronous orbit. So it's a very popular orbit and only getting more so. But the other problem is that in the US, we have a very limited amount of launch sites that are capable of reaching polar orbit. So we have a

collection of them at Vandenberg Air Force Base, but there's not many left. And the ones that are there are hard to work around because it's an Air Force base. You know, there's a lot of other stuff there that impedes the ability to fly frequently out of Vandenberg Air Force Base. We have another one up in Alaska. It's very hard to get to, and nobody has a really big presence there. So we have a very limited number of launch sites that are capable of supporting polar launches. So when this started being announced that the 45th Space Wing was working on finding this trajectory to be able to fly out of Florida, that's something I find interesting because there are a bunch of vehicles that have an East Coast launch site that don't have a West Coast launch site, but might want to fly to polar orbits.

So the fact that this resurfaced again, that SpaceX is working on a mission to use that corridor that was found back in January 2018. Well, actually, it was found way back in the day, but it resurfaced in January 2018. Well, now SpaceX has a mission scheduled out of Florida for sun-synchronous orbit. This is SALCOM-1B. SALCOM-1A flew out of Vandenberg last October, but now they've moved the launch to Florida. So after this announcement, this confirmation that Salcom 1B was going to fly out of Florida, Declan Murphy over at Flight Club did some modeling to find the trajectory, and I think he came up with a pretty good visualization

of it. So I've got a link in the show notes to his tweet showing that. It's also going to be the album art for this section of the podcast. Take a look if you would like. And this is modeled after the Salcom 1B mission. Salcom 1B is pretty light. It's got a lot of payload margin on Falcon 9, so they have enough payload margin to be able to pull off this dogleg trajectory. And that's important because it's very expensive in terms of performance to change your inclination quite a lot from where you start out of your launch site. So typically, you're flying out of Florida, you're flying directly east, and you're going to end up at a 28 degree inclination, 27 if you do a little legwork. To switch it around and then end up

flying south out of Cape Canaveral, that is a pretty big payload hit for your vehicle. So you can really only fly these missions if you have enough margin between what your vehicle is capable of doing and the mass that you're trying to launch to orbit. So maybe SpaceX realized Salcom 1B is a good test case to fly this kind of mission and still have the margin, pull it off, be able to recover the booster, and successfully fly to sun-synchronous orbit. Now, at first, you might say, well, why are they going to do this? They have a launch site for Falcon 9 out at Vandenberg. Why not just fly it out of there like they've done before? Why would they even want to put the work in to do this trajectory, knowing that it's that much more work? Certainly knowing that the paperwork on this is going to be quite extensive because they're flying over, I know if something goes wrong, they're in a much

skinnier corridor than just the Atlantic Ocean. They're flying over southern Florida, the Bahamas, Cuba, and even down through Central America. Well, extend your thinking a little out beyond Falcon 9. Falcon Heavy right now only has one launch site, Pad 39A at Kennedy Space Center. Vandenberg is not set up for Falcon Heavy. They never did the work there to support it. And then you start thinking about Starship. Well, Starship's going to have a launch site in Texas and in Florida. They don't have work going

on out of Vandenberg. There's no room for it there. So this might be a really good pathfinder for them to figure out how these polar corridors from Florida work for Falcon Heavy flights, for Starship flights. And then there's other vehicles as well that are in the works right now that don't have a West Coast site, notably New Glen. They have a launch site out at Florida. They do not have one at Vandenberg yet. They've been working on getting one as part of the Air Force round of funding and contracting that they're working on, but right now they don't have a deal for that. So I would bet the team that works on New Glen is watching this mission quite interestingly because it would have big effects for their ability to fly to polar

orbit with New Glenn, which has a massive payload margin and could fly quite a bit to polar out of Florida. So in those three vehicle cases, right, they've got big performance, they've got plenty of margin, and they don't have a West Coast launch site. This is a really good example for Falcon Heavy, Starship, and New Glenn. And I'm excited to watch this mission. It's going to be coming up early next year right now. We'll see if they're able to pull this off or if they'll just shift back to Vandenberg if it becomes too much. But I think this is a really important Pathfinder mission for SpaceX. And I would think that the reason they're doing it is for Falcon Heavy and Starship, with the knock-on effect being we might see New Glenn

do this some point in the future. Now, some of the smaller launch vehicles that are going to fly out of Florida would probably not be able to pull this off and still have enough effective payload to make it worth it. But you never know who's going to make use of this in the future if they have missions that fit the bill, that, you know, don't need a lot of payload and they can fit it within their smaller margins. That could happen as well. But, you know, I should mention as well, this is also possible out of Wallops Island, Virginia. There is a path to do a dogleg from there as well and hit polar orbit. So this could become popular, especially given the log jam that we've got out at Vandenberg. It's very hard to build there. There's not a lot of launch sites

left. There's a lot of traffic from the other parts of the Air Force that operate out of there. So this is something that is very important if you're worried about access to polar orbits from the mainland US. I think that's something that we should be watching carefully. And if you've been listening to the show for a while, you know that's something that I've been harping on a lot here. So this excites me greatly to see this come together. So with that, that is all I've got for this little update on all things SpaceX and Starship and polar orbits. If you've got any questions or thoughts, email them to me, anthony at mainenginecutoff.com or on Twitter at wehavemiko. And don't forget,

the meetup coming up at IAC, October 20th, Washington, DC. Head over to events.offnominal.space to check out all the details on that. And for now, thank you for listening. I'll talk to you next week.