Main Engine Cut Off - T+174: SpaceX Crew-1 Kicks Off New Era for ISS

Episode Date: November 25, 2020

SpaceX Crew-1 successfully launched and docked last week, kicking off a new era of the ISS. It’s a good time to zoom out and look at the ISS program overall, and what it means for the future of space development.This episode of Main Engine Cut Off is brought to you by 36 executive producers—Brandon, Matthew, Simon, Lauren, Melissa, Kris, Pat, Matt, Jorge, Ryan, Donald, Lee, Chris, Warren, Bob, Russell, John, Moritz, Joel, Jan, Grant, David, Joonas, Robb, Tim Dodd (the Everyday Astronaut!), Frank, Julian and Lars from Agile Space, Tommy, and seven anonymous—and 430 other supporters.TopicsCREW-1 MISSION - SpaceX - UpdatesNASA's SpaceX Crew-1 Mission | NASACrew-1 Mission | Launch - YouTubeCrew-1 Mission | Rendezvous and Docking - YouTubeNASA safety panel raises doubts about Starliner test flight schedule - SpaceNewsAxiom Space finalizing first commercial ISS mission - SpaceNewsNext-Generation Airlock Prepped for SpaceX CRS-21 Launch – Kennedy Space CenterFirst Dream Chaser mission slips to 2022 - SpaceNewsThe ShowLike the show? Support the show!Email 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 ShopMusic by Max Justus

Hello and welcome to Main Engine Cutoff, I am Anthony Colangelo back again, this time to talk about SpaceX Crew-1 officially onboard the ISS. I have been thinking a lot about this since they got up there, and I just have a couple of thoughts because I think this is a moment that very clearly delineates a new era for the ISS. There have been many eras. This is a new one and, you know, likely the final era for the ISS, meaning this iteration of ISS and the way that this works and things that are going on there should be pretty steady up until we decide that we are done with the ISS, whatever that

means. Or I guess maybe it could be transferred somehow into some other iteration of ISS. But it seems likely to me that this is kind of the final era and the greatest era of ISS coming up. I want to talk about that and what it really means for not only the ISS, but larger than that, you know, programs that are, that would be going beyond ISS, maybe even Artemis or whatever else comes out there and how what we're seeing now could impact the way that those things happen in the future. So to start with, to get people caught up, SpaceX launched the demo mission back in the summer with Bob and Doug, and that was a full success. So they began planning for this Crew-1 mission, which carried NASA astronauts Mike Hopkins, Victor Glover, Shannon Walker, and JAXA astronaut Soichi Noguchi. This is the first full crew rotation flight for commercial crew.

It's a long time coming. It's several years delayed from the original intended schedule, but now they're up there with the spacecraft that they named Resilience. They're going to be on station for six months, and they'll even overlap with Crew-2 that will be going up in about six months' time. And much as we saw in the summer with the original crewed flight of Dragon 2, very smooth flight. The launch was, you know, perfect. The flight to ISS took about 27 hours. There were some small issues. They had some issues with heaters and propellant lines for Draco thrusters, but they got that worked out pretty quick and really had no other issues. And it was cool to see, you know, such a full Dragon. They had four people in there, so could, you, so it could look a little tight at times,

but compared to flying on Soyuz, it's a lot roomier than the other options to get to the ISS. So just a really nice, smooth flight to the ISS. And now they're on board with, they joined the NASA astronaut Kate Rubins and Roscosmo cosmonauts, the Sergeys, as they call them. Sergei Ryzhikov and Sergei Kudshverkov, they are now a seven-person crew on the ISS, which is the biggest full-duration crew the ISS has ever had. There have been more astronauts on ISS when the shuttle was flying, but the shuttle was only ever up there for about two weeks at a time. They would leave an astronaut every now and then and pick them up on the next shuttle flight to do full crew rotation flights. But the actual full-term crew has never

been as large as it has now. And specifically for the U.S. segment of the ISS, a little bit of context, there are two halves of the ISS. There's the Russian segment and the U.S. segment. The U.S. segment also includes the partner agencies, the Canadian Space Agency, JAXA, ESA, several of the private companies like NanoRacks operate there, Maiden Space operates, some hardware there. And that's where all of that activity happens. So over on that side, up until now, in this recent era where it was just Soyuz flights going to the ISS, where it was just Soyuz flights going to the ISS, the full duration crew was up to about three people on the U.S. side. That left the active research time, the time that they could devote to scientific research and, you know, everything else that's going on up there in terms of experimentation,

that left that about 35 hours a week. So about one of those three people could spend almost a full work week doing that kind of work on the ISS. Everything else is all of this overhead that comes with the ISS. There's a lot of maintenance and a lot of management that has to happen. You've got cargo flights coming in, so those cargo flights need to be unpacked. In the past, and up until now with Dragon 2, they had to actually be grappled with the robotic arm and attached to the station. There's preparing for know, preparing for spacewalks, managing hardware, there's so much extra work that goes on. You know, the baseline

overhead of the ISS is so high, which is one of the biggest criticisms of the ISS is that it is so resource intensive to keep flying. That the research time when there's three people on board is less than one person's full work week. Adding a fourth astronaut, which is what commercial crew intends to do, would increase that to 70 hours. So it doubles the available research time quite dramatically. Now, up until, you know, maybe a year, year and a half out when Russia starts flying their crew members on commercial crew flights, there's actually going to be five people from the U.S. segment on board at any given time. So eventually, the idea is that

cosmonauts will fly on commercial crew flights, and partner agencies from the U.S. segment will fly on Soyuz vehicles. That way, if either one of those vehicles has an issue, you know, both halves of the ISS can get crew up on board to maintain everything. Eventually, that will kick in. Russia was a little bit hesitant to sign on to that agreement, whether that was, you know, just them being particular about their requirements, whether it was them being a little bit mad about commercial crew having, you know, right now they're making a good bit of money, or up until now, I should say, they were making a good bit of money flying crew up to the ISS at a pretty penny per seat. But now that's going to be ending, and this swap of crew seats is going

to be no funds exchange type basis. So eventually that will kick in, but up until now, like I said, there's, you know, this flight had three NASA astronauts and a JAX astronaut. Next flight will have the same. So there's actually going to be five people on board that side of the station for the next several months. And that even pushes it higher than the 70 hours. So this is really the biggest change to the ISS since the shuttle departed. The shuttle was flying for several years to build out the ISS, but once we were fully completed construction, the shuttle stopped flying and we were down to a very limited amount of crew. And eventually we got these cargo flights from commercial cargo. Eventually we got these commercial crew flights. And now, you know, if you go back 10 years from now and look at the ISS and then look at the ISS by maybe the start of 2022, things look drastically

different at that point in time. And I think that's worth, you know, thinking about for a bit, because this is one of those things where each change comes on board every couple of years, and it builds up slowly. So you get used to kind of the way it is. We get used to the fact that there are so many cargo flights to the ISS now, but that was not always the case. And in about a year from now, we're going to be really used to the fact that there are so many cargo flights to the ISS now, but that was not always the case. And in about a year from now, we're going to be really used to the fact that there's these large crews on board ISS, but that is not always the case. And these things build up so slowly that you don't realize how big of a change you're witnessing until you hit a moment like this when you can look back and say, wow, the ISS does look really different right now. and say, wow, the ISS does look really different right now. The last few years, you know, from NASA's perspective, the focus on ISS has been, we need to get commercial crew flying. That is,

if you went up to anyone in the space station program and said, what is the number one priority in terms of your future work on the ISS? Commercial crew getting operational would come up almost, if not always, first in the conversation very early on in the list that they would provide you. Because it is such an enabler to future ISS work. It is a requirement to be able to fly people up to the ISS. And at times when Soyuz was having issues, you know, we had an in-flight abort, we had a hole that magically appeared on a Soyuz vehicle. There were times when it was looking pretty sad that, you know, there was a time when we were talking about how long can the ISS live without people on it and how long can

people stay up on ISS without coming back home because of some of these issues. There was a pretty dark time there when it was very concerning to look at the fact that commercial crew was not flying yet. very concerning to look at the fact that commercial crew was not flying yet. And with this, now that we are operational here, you know, Starliner notwithstanding, which we'll talk about in a little bit, the focus on ISS goes from commercial crew development and testing and figuring out everything that is involved with operating commercial crew, back to the ISS operations and how to make best use of this much crew time available on ISS. There is a, certainly, you know, the scheduling here

is drastically different now. And scheduling for the past few years has been pretty hard on the ISS because commercial crew was always about a year away. You know, it was always, well, SpaceX and Boeing have these three tests left, and then they'll be able to get a year away. You know, it was always, well, SpaceX and Boeing have these three tests left, and then they'll be able to get a demo flight, and then maybe sometime next year they'll fly crews. That's been the story for like three years now. So if you're somebody working to schedule your research experiments, your scientific experiments, whatever you've got to schedule on the ISS, and you don't really know when there's going to be a full-time crew member on board that can handle your work, that's really tricky. So I'm sure internally, you know, we don't get to see a lot of this from

external spots that we sit. I'm sure internally, there was a lot of things that kept getting punted on ISS and kept saying, well, that has to, you know, we have to have commercial crew flying to do that task. So we got to keep punting that year for year as these delays build up. And now commercial crew is here to rely on. We have large crew members, crew numbers on the ISS. We have a more reliable cadence of not only crew members flying to the ISS in terms of numbers, but actually specific crew members. Some people are assigned to Starliner flights that have yet to happen. And Starliner right now is looking to be, you know, they've got a really tough year of work ahead of them until they're going to be in regular rotation.

But some of these actual expeditions that are going to fly, those get assigned a lot closer to flight than those demo missions did. The demo missions, you know, crews got assigned to them years in advance. The actual expeditions for ISS can get assigned much closer. So we only heard a few months ago, the crew for Crew 2 coming up at the start of next year. And that's something that, you know, that work can get into the flow. And you know that, you know, for if you've got Victor Glover, you know that he's going to get a flight coming up pretty soon on the ISS. We don't know which vehicle or what particular time slot, but it's much more reliable than maybe commercial crew will be flying next year. Now for SpaceX, they have, really, they have the

run of the place for the next year, year and a half. Boeing has a ton of work still to go. So last December, we're almost a year out from that original orbital flight test of Starliner, where almost everything went wrong. They never made it to the ISS, and eventually determined that they do, in fact, need to fly an orbital flight test again before they can even put crew on board. So right now, the last that I heard is that the second orbital flight test, OFT2, is going to be sometime around March, is one of the dates I've heard earlier than that's been quoted, but I would guess, you know, sometime in that late winter, early spring time period is when the second uncrewed flight of Starliner flies. That then leaves the first crewed flight sometime late next year, late 2021, and the first operational

mission sometime in 2022, if all goes well with those two tests of Starliner. And certainly now that SpaceX is operational, there isn't so much schedule pressure. You know, NASA will tell you there is no schedule pressure because safety is number one. But certainly if you're facing another situation where, you know, maybe the ISS is going to be uncrewed for a while and would maybe need to, you know, we'd have to come up with some crazy operational mission to get it back operational, there are some crazy scenarios in which there would be schedule pressure. But with SpaceX flying, and assumingly reliably through the next year, Starliner does get out of the hot seat a little bit because, you know,

in fact, there isn't as much pressure anymore if you do have some way to get to the ISS. So let's just assume the first operational, first expedition mission that Starliner flies is the beginning of 2022. Well, at that point, SpaceX will have flown Crew-1, Crew-2, Crew-3 will be up on ISS by that point because Crew-2 will fly beginning of next year, Crew-, Crew 3 will be up on ISS by that point because Crew 2 will fly beginning of next year, Crew 3 will fly towards the end of next year. They might overlap a little bit with the crewed flight test of Starliner, but they will be three full crewed operational flights into their six optioned missions so far that is set out by the original contract before Starliner even gets close to putting their first

operational crew on board. Now, depending on how all of that schedule falls, it is plausible that SpaceX could have crew four up to fly before Starliner is fully signed off on. And NASA would want to say, well, Starliner is going to get the second expedition crew of 2022 because, you know, maybe when they get back from that crewed flight test, they still need to do a lot of dotting the I's, crossing the T's before they're ready to plan on that for an expedition mission. So it's plausible that SpaceX flies crew four at the beginning of 2022. So if that's the case, each of these companies, they have six missions set out in their contract. It is incredibly plausible that SpaceX will receive an order for more flights before Starliner completes its first

operational mission to the ISS. And that right there with, you know, SpaceX getting almost half the funding that Starliner received for commercial crew work, which was up to the companies to bid, and SpaceX has said historically they wish they bid higher, that is an incredible achievement for SpaceX. It's a massive boost of prestige for SpaceX, especially when it comes to something like crewed flights to the ISS. So I would bet a lot of money that SpaceX receives another order for more flights before that Starliner operational mission is complete.

And I do find that very, very interesting. Now, I want to talk more about how the fact that Commercial Crew is flying fits into future plans, specifically with the way that work happens in the future. But before we do that, I need to say thank you to everyone out there who's supporting Main Engine Cutoff over at mainenginecutoff.com slash support. There are 466 of you supporting every single month, and I'm so thankful for that. This episode was produced by 36 executive producers. Thanks to Brandon, Matthew, Simon, Lauren, Melissa, Chris, Pat, Matt, George, Ryan, Donald, Lee, Chris, Warren, Bob, Russell, John, Moritz, Joel, Jan, Grant, David, Eunice, pat matt george ryan donald lee chris warren bob russell john moritz joel jan grant david unis rob tim dodd the everyday astronaut frank julian and lars from agile space tommy and seven anonymous executive producers thank you all so much for making this episode possible and if you listened

to the previous episode of the show you heard an episode of headlines that i do every single weekend for everyone over at the three3 or up level on the Patreon. You get a special RSS feed. I should have mentioned this in the last episode, but you get a special RSS feed if you're at that level that you can put right in whatever you're listening to this on right now, wherever you get your podcasts, you can probably put in a link to get that special feed. So it slots right in alongside all your other podcasts and uh it's a great way to stay up on space news so if you want to help support the show and keep me doing these main episodes but also get an entirely other podcast uh head over there at the three dollar

mother a month level and uh you will love it i promise and if not i'll give you your money back it's a money back guarantee from here main engine engine cutoff. So again, thank you all so much for listening and supporting. This is entirely listener supported, and I think that's a special thing in the industry these days. It certainly keeps us going in times that are otherwise monetarily tough for media companies. So it is a small scale operation, but you make a huge difference to it. So thank you all so much for the support. small-scale operation, but you make a huge difference to it. So thank you all so much for the support. Something interesting to consider is the way that Commercial Crew fits into not only the ISS operations, as I just went over, but the actual political debates and the future development plans that not only NASA, but the partner agencies have as well, especially looking

out towards the Moon, even towards Mars, or even to what comes after the ISS in low Earth orbit. As I said, the fact that Commercial Crew is becoming operational shifts the focus of ISS back to the operations of such a productive research environment, but it also puts the focus on the future development of ISS. And really, you know, Crew-1 is only the first of these things that I was thinking about when I'm talking about how different the ISS is going to look by the beginning to middle of 2022. Next month, NanoRacks is flying their airlock up to the ISS. There's going to be a port on the ISS that is dedicated to a private company that has built hardware that can be used to expose

things to outer space. That is a really cool development. I think it's going to be awesome to watch the operations of that thing. I'm sure we'll have the NanoRacks crew back on to talk about that once it gets up there. And that's a development we've been tracking for a little while, but it's finally happening December of this year, per the current schedule. Late next year, per the current schedule. Late next year per the current schedule, Axiom Space will begin their private astronaut flights to the ISS. Right now, there's this initial mission that is filling out with four crew members, a fully dedicated flight up to the ISS, and that's starting in 2021. And they've got, sounds like a lot of plans moving forward with

that at least maybe once a year or so. And in the future they are going to be building out their own modules for the ISS and they're actually going to be extending the ISS habitable volume with their own modules and they've got quite a station planned you might remember an episode or two that we've talked to them about in the past go back and find that in the archives if you would like to. But that's, you know, the future development track of the ISS involves a private company building out modules that are going to expand the ISS habitable volume. By 2022, sometime in 2022, per the most recent news that there was a little bit of a delay, Dream Chaser is going to be flying cargo up to the ISS. So we've got an entirely new cargo vehicle flying up to the ISS that includes the ability to fly back and land

on a runway, which improves the cargo return time to a facility or somewhere that, you know, it can land on an actual runway rather than splashing down in the Atlantic or Pacific Oceans and taking so long to get back to a facility, this thing could land right where they need the whatever they're returning to space from the ISS. And like we just said, Starliner at some point in that time frame will also be flying people up to the ISS. So by the middle of 2022, we're going to have two brand new crew vehicles flying people to the ISS. We're going to have private astronauts on board. We've got a private airlock. We've got a new cargo vehicle with an entirely different cargo return mechanism that can really change the way that we handle cargo return from the ISS. And we'll have, probably we'll be seeing hardware in flow for the Axiom modules that are going to

be coming on later in 2020s. And all of these things were developed with firm fixed price contracts or merely giving access to the ISS to a private company and letting them fund it themselves from that point forward. So you look at an ISS that is massively transformed. It looks nothing like the ISS of five, six years ago. And you realize that it's done with firm fixed price contracts or merely access and self-funding from private companies. And not only is it improving the ISS, it's changing the way that we work on the ISS and adding a ton of capability to what we have right now in the old model. So now when this stuff comes up in political debates about what NASA should be working on, how it should be funded, and when you're, you know, NASA talking with the international

agencies that we tend to work with, and you have such a premier model of this kind of new way of working in action and being very successful, as it certainly seems like it will be, that has to shift perspective a little bit and change the debate, or at least solidify the debate that we've been having for a couple of years. Because even now, you see in Congress, as we're looking towards building out human lunar landers, there's a major portion of not only NASA, but Congress, that thinks NASA should own, design, develop, and drive the actual ability of a human landing system. And there's another portion that thinks we should build these the same way we're building all these vehicles that we're doing things

on the ISS now, which is milestones, firm fixed price contracts, and oversight from NASA and the partners, but not a NASA-owned and developed lander itself. And for a while when that debate was happening, commercial crew could be the thing that gets brought up. You know, it's kind of like the eye of Saron would shift and all of a sudden be looking at commercial crew because it's years behind schedule, it's not flying yet, Starliner's having issues, a dragon blew up once. There were so many things that you could point to and say, you want that model? That's the one that you want to do? The thing that is delayed and is not working yet

and we can't even rely on it? And that was an argument that would work then because that was the situation we found ourselves in. But you extend your mind out a year or two and try to have that same argument, there's almost nothing on the ISS that doesn't fit that model that people are being advocates for. So now that Commercial that people are, you know, being advocates for.

So now that Commercial Crew is working and is reliable, it does change the table stakes for debate for future projects. It maybe is even a little worse that Boeing is way behind SpaceX, so it's not even like the old steady of the aerospace industry has a leg up here. Certainly would tread cautiously on saying commercial crew is a disaster when SpaceX is the premier provider and Boeing is still struggling to catch up. But in this new political environment, we've got a new administration, we'll have a new administrator of NASA. Plans are going to be shifting or slowed or maybe even stalled out completely. And there's going to be another round of debates

about how NASA should work and what they should be doing. And in an environment where you see such a premier model of the way that things could be in space, if you leverage the industry that's built out, it gets increasingly hard to argue against that. And not only is it hard to argue against it, it's a primary reason why you should take advantage of it. Because this new ISS model enabled the existence of SpaceX to some extent, enabled the existence of NanoRacks, Axiom, this entire industry sprung up because of the opportunities there. I think some of these companies would exist regardless because the founders and the early employees and the people that work there now are driven to do

certain things and they are gritty enough that they will find the opportunities that allow them to do what they want to do. The ISS was that opportunity. It was the platform that allowed them to build out the things that they wanted to build out, so they took advantage of it. And when we look back the long view of history of this era, it's going to be hard to separate these companies that sprung up around now from the opportunity the ISS provided, the platform the ISS provided to build out businesses like this. And one day, if there is Axiom Space Station flying on its own, it's going to be hard to not say that thing started out at the ISS. And that was such a big enabler that, you know, you have to put that in the story of Axiom

Space. And what could be the same thing that happens at the moon? Could we have something there that is the platform to develop this lunar economy around it? Seems plausible, and it certainly seems like we have a good model to base our thinking off of right now in the ISS of the 2020s. So every day we go forward with this new ISS model, every day that the new model is working so well for the countries that are flying on the ISS today, and every day that we're not sending funding to a NASA-owned human lander, is a better day for this new model when it comes to the Moon, to Mars, everything else in space, because it's got more time to work, prove itself out. It's got more time to prove. It's really hard to argue against this model of development in space where you allow an economy to flourish

around something that governments are interested in. So I'm really interested in how this affects the arguments that we're about to have for two years as a new administration starts and decides what it's interested in here in the US. I'm interested to see, you know, all the international partners that have agreed to things right now with the Artemis program, how that shifts in the new era. It's just the best time to be a space fan, a space nerd, a space enthusiast. So thank you all so much for being here, for listening along and participating. And I love hearing from you all.

So if you've got any questions or thoughts, send them to me, anthony at mainenginecutoff.com or on Twitter at wehavemiko. And once again, support over at mainenginecutoff.com slash support. Till next time. Thanks for listening. I'll talk to you soon.