Main Engine Cut Off - T+175: Delays

Starting point is 00:00:00 Hello and welcome to Main Engine Cutoff, I am Anthony Colangelo. There have been a handful of stories in the last month or so of delays to some bigger, longer running projects that are in a phase in which they don't really come up a lot on the show, honestly. I like to keep the show focused on things that I'm analyzing or something I have to add to the conversation about a certain topic or digest current goings-on and strategy and all that. So some of these longer-running projects that are kind of in the middle phase in development,

Starting point is 00:00:43 working their way to the launch pad, don't come up as much. But there have been a lot of news stories in the last month about some of these. A lot of people using the pandemic cover, which certainly has delayed a lot of projects in actual real hard ways. But it's also a really good reason to say

Starting point is 00:01:02 we've been delayed in our project. So I just want to run through because there's a few of these things that I have some bones to pick or thoughts to provide about what's going on with these projects. So I want to start with the news that broke this last week. Lauren Grush over at The Verge had a scoop on what is a pretty big story for Orion. a scoop on what is a pretty big story for Orion. SLS has been taking the lion's share of the delays for the SLS Orion program overall, but this last week, Lauren Grush had a big article about an issue with a power and data unit on Orion. Specifically, the power and data unit, there's eight of them in the adapter between the spacecraft

Starting point is 00:01:44 and the service module, as I understand it, and eight of them in the adapter between the spacecraft and the service module, as I understand it, and one of them has lost redundancy. It's not a total system failure, it's a redundancy failure. So they could decide to fly as is, but that's really not a NASA thing to do, especially on something as high profile as Artemis 1. You know, they really can't afford, given the state of play with SLS, with Orion, with Artemis overall, the political environment they find themselves in, they really can't risk any issues on Artemis 1. So I would highly doubt they fly without this redundancy in place that they were planning on. So some of the stuff that could come from this, the way that

Starting point is 00:02:22 they could actually address this issue, are really lengthy time periods. Lauren Grush says she's seen an email and a PowerPoint presentation that's about this issue, and two of the methods they proposed, one would be to fully disassemble the spacecraft. They have to take Orion off the service module to actually get access to where these power and data units are. They're not something that you can just open up a little hatch and get access to.

Starting point is 00:02:47 The other option would be to cut through the panels on the outside of that adapter ring to get access to the unit to be able to fix it. They're still working on what that procedure would be, but that would cut the length of time down significantly. So depending on the route they choose, we're looking at anything from four to nine months or more of delays to the schedule for Orion. Now, four to nine months right now in late 2020, given the current schedule for SLS Orion and that

Starting point is 00:03:14 first flight of Artemis I, would present some challenges. The solid rocket boosters for this flight that is due to fly in November 2021 right now per the current schedule, the solid rocket boosters are being stacked on the mobile launcher as we speak. That's started to get underway. There's a lot of articles over at nasaspaceflight.com. I have some of those in the show notes about that stacking process. But those are being stacked in advance of the core stage of SLS showing up to be integrated. The core stage is beginning the final two tests of its green run down at Stennis. They've done several tests thus far. They are now working on the wet dress rehearsal

Starting point is 00:03:53 for SLS, and then that would lead up to the actual firing of the engines for the full flight duration. And that is currently scheduled to happen, and then it would be shipped to the Cape, And that is currently scheduled to happen, and then it would be shipped to the Cape, be integrated in time for November 2021 launch. Orion would obviously be stacked on top after that. So we are getting down into crunch time for Artemis I, given the current schedule. Now, lucky for Orion, and this is related to the way I think this news came out, I don't know anyone that thinks the SLS Green Run is going to go off without a hitch entirely. It's going to go exactly as planned. They're going to be right on schedule. They're going to ship this thing to Kennedy right after the Green Run. I don't know anyone, you know, outside the program that has been talking about this that thinks that's how it's going to go.

Starting point is 00:04:36 I don't know anyone in the program that has been talking about this, but I would imagine not everyone there thinks things are going to go perfectly, because when do they ever? You know, we're all familiar with how hard this stuff is to get right and how much work it takes to pull projects like this together, and there are always issues. It's just a matter of how quickly you can respond to those issues. So it is likely that Orion's delay here will not meaningfully impact the delay to the mission overall, if in fact the SLS Green Run fires and they have some issues to fix that delay it a handful of weeks, a handful of months. That would be the timing element on Artemis 1 overall. Now, there is one interesting thing I want to talk about with this Lauren Grush scoop.

Starting point is 00:05:22 The timeline here is really interesting. This news broke on Monday, November 30th. So the Monday right after Thanksgiving, Lauren Grush posts this article. And in that article, she has this line that I find very interesting. When asked for a comment, NASA directed The Verge to a short blog post published today outlining the failure. Now, this linked blog post is pretty much useless. It does not indicate the extent of the problem. It really is incredibly vague about what's going on. And it gives a general overview on where Orion is at in the process and says, they're working on some issues and we will continue to work on these issues and we will continue to do everything else around these issues. It does not really address what those issues are or the potential extent of these issues.

Starting point is 00:06:08 So it sounds a lot like NASA and Lockheed were not really ready to get this news out there. Now, maybe that is because they were still working the issue. They want to have the full info before they are ready to announce. But if that's, you know, let's run this scenario again. Lauren Grush says this issue came up in November. If NASA and Lockheed wanted to get this info out, they had the perfect opportunity the Wednesday before this was posted, the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, to completely bury this news story. They can do an update.

Starting point is 00:06:36 It's the Wednesday before Thanksgiving. Everyone's logging off for a few days here in the U.S. It's been a crazy year, so everyone was going to stay away from the news for a bit. You could bury it in that news cycle if you wanted to get the information out without too many people noticing. Instead, what happened was this news got posted after that date, when everyone was back in their full news cycle ready format. NASA had lost control of the narrative, Lauren Grush had the scoop, certainly was not buried, and here we are. Part of me wonders if they were really trying to

Starting point is 00:07:05 wait, not only to figure out the full extent of the issue and decide on a path, but maybe to also wait until that SLS green run happens. There's going to be some scheduled fallout from that in all likelihood. It's very likely that any delay from that would outpace the delay that this Orion issue is going to have, and they can say Artemis 1 is delayed until, you know, sometime in 2022 or whatever. Orion is a little bit delayed as well. We're working through some integration issues, but that's not going to delay this new date of whatever 2022. So the whole thing where, you know, Lauren asked for a comment and then NASA says, here's a blog post. We just put this blog post up between the time that you emailed us and we emailed you back, that indicates that this was like a, oh, oh crap, the news is out

Starting point is 00:07:50 there, let's get something up, get a vague update up to say that we've updated the public on this, and it just has the sniff test, doesn't pass the sniff test on that, that this is kind of how things went here with this story. So we'll see where that goes from here, but it could very likely be that Artemis 1 is going to be drifting a little bit later and certainly looks like it's heading into 2022, along with many other things here that I want to talk about. The next one up, Ariane 6. Now, Ariane 6, back in October, there was an update where it turns out they're going to be slipping aryan 6's first launch date to 2022 that is a slip of almost two years total they've been talking 2020 up for a long time in back in july they said you know we're thinking 2021 now but one web fell

Starting point is 00:08:41 apart which was going to be the first launch on Ariane 6, I believe, and now they're left without a payload for that first launch. And then now it comes out that 2022 is looking more likely and probably sometime into, you know, second quarter or later. Along with that, there's going to be some more budget needed. So they need about 230 million euro more to finish this project off that brings the total to 3.8 billion euro, which is a huge amount of money, right? And this, this, the delay itself is not that interesting to me, because Ariane 5 is still flying. Obviously, this is a big project. They're building a whole new launch site. They're doing it with whole new

Starting point is 00:09:22 boosters. They're doing a lot of new stuff here. So a slip of like two years is as expected. The interesting part to me is that, you know, this brought up a whole new round of Ariane 6 versus Falcon, which we're in an era when everything needs to be compared to SpaceX. I get that. But it did dredge up a lot of thoughts about Ariane space and Ariane 6 that I just would like to touch on for a minute. When this topic comes up, people look at that development cost, right? 3.8 billion euro. And they say, holy crap, how could you spend that much money? Look at how cheap Falcon was developed. It was, you know, however, do the math, however you want, a couple hundred million dollars to do the full Falcon family of vehicles. It's so cheap to launch per flight. Ariane 6 is much more expensive

Starting point is 00:10:05 for each flight. There's no way they will ever compete with Falcon, let alone Starship. This is a common thread that you can get into. And I think it entirely misunderstands the point of Ariane 6 and Ariane Space generally. Europe has a political and security interest in maintaining a homegrown launch capability. The US government has that. We do it through the Department of Defense in many ways. You could argue that, and many people do argue that, SLS is part of that. We used to with the shuttle. There's a lot of good reasons that nations would like to have their own launch capability, not only defense, but commercial side as well. That is a very common thing. So Ariane 6 is built to serve that need.

Starting point is 00:10:50 It is a national program. They also sell commercial launches, but that is not the point of building Ariane 6 to sell commercial launches. It is a way to subsidize maintaining that homegrown launch capability. So this argument about how expensive it is to develop Ariane 6, how much more it is than Falcon per flight and for development,

Starting point is 00:11:09 is completely irrelevant because it misses the point entirely. Ariane 6 is there to serve that need of a homegrown launch capability. It is there to serve a lot of the government customers of Europe that need to fly, you know, Copernicus satellites or Galileo satellites or science missions, all of that kind of stuff bundled in alongside that defense interest as well. And to make all of that more achievable, to make the budgets work, to make ends meet, they're able to sell that excess capacity of commercial launches to make that money back and help the development costs, help the operational costs, help all of the math work out better for maintaining that capability. In some ways, you could say it's the exact opposite of what we do here in the US, where at this point, the US Air and Space Force has the National

Starting point is 00:11:57 Security Space Launch Program because they would like to keep at least two launch providers operating that can do the things expected of the Department of Defense and their space needs. So they do that by handing out these big contracts for a lot of launches. They've picked two people, they do development contracts, and then they split the launches between these two companies. And they are offering a lot of that assurance that there is customers there for these commercial companies to stay in business. So it's almost the exact inverse, where commercial companies came about, like SpaceX, to serve a need, and then the US government has a vested interest in them sticking around,

Starting point is 00:12:36 so they set up a program to make sure that there are assurances that commercial companies have payloads to fly, because not only does the government need to fly payloads, but they would like to be able to buy commercial launches to launch those payloads. In Europe, it is we need a national program because we would like to have this homegrown launch capability. To do that, we need a little bit of extra cash. We can make that by having commercial launchers. So in some ways, the political interest is much more akin to SLS than Falcon 9, if you were to compare Ariane 6 to any US counterparts. It is a program that has very big costs. It's very inflated in the cost perspective. You could probably develop it cheaper if you were a private company looking to make an Ariane 6 clone, but that isn't the point of it, right? It is this big political program that has a reason to exist. The government has, and the infrastructure around the government has decided this is the project to undertake. Now, the only difference there is, imagine if SLS could actually

Starting point is 00:13:36 compete on a commercial launch. There would be a lot of different feelings about SLS. And that's why Ariane 6 does get compared to Falcon 9 or whoever else you want to compare it to, is because it is actually capable of launching commercial customers and actually adhering to their needs, rather than what the SLS is, which is an extremely large program that is extremely expensive. It's going to fly once every handful of years at best.

Starting point is 00:14:02 They are completely different beasts, but the motivation behind developing SLS and Ariane 6 are much more similar than the motivations behind developing Ariane 6 and Falcon 9 are. Now, the real problem with Ariane 6 is not its development cost, necessarily, or its schedule. It is the fact, if you look at the launch manifest that they have, they have not sold a lot of commercial launches for Ariane 6. They have a lot of European anchor customers. They have now, OneWeb has backed out of the launches that they were going to have on Ariane

Starting point is 00:14:33 6. I think there's a Viasat flight on there that got switched over from an Ariane 5, if I'm remembering correctly. It's not a very long manifest of commercial missions. So that is a huge concern because of all this stuff that I've just laid out, how important it is to the ongoing upkeep of the Ariane 6 program. They have not sold nearly as many commercial launches as they need to. Granted, we're a couple years out, so there is a chance that they can make some sales between now and 2022, but that is something to watch over

Starting point is 00:15:01 the next couple of months. As they get closer to the launch pad, you've got to see that kind of market spring up for Ariane 6. And you've got to find a way to make some sales if you're Ariane Space to really make this program work out. Or else it is going to be left solely to be a government launch vehicle. And, you know, like I said, there are reasons to have that exist. There are certainly reasons to want to keep the industry in Europe going, and that is all fine and well, but the current state of Ariane 5 and Ariane 6 requires a certain

Starting point is 00:15:33 amount of commercial launch contracts, and that's just not there yet for Ariane 6. Now, a similar program is over in Japan, the H3 launch vehicle. That has also been delayed to 2022. Right now, they say 2021, the fiscal year that begins April 1st, 2021. They didn't specify when after that date, so I'm going to assume it's going to be late 2021, borderline 2022. They are having issues with the new LE9 engine, specifically a combustion chamber and the turbopump. This was confirmed by Andrew Jones writing for Space News. So this is a very similar program in that this exists because the Japanese government believes they would like that homegrown launch capability, and they're willing to put up the money to develop this alongside Mitsubishi

Starting point is 00:16:22 Heavy Industries. So it is not, again, it's not surprising that this is slipping. This is a thing that is a big new launch vehicle. They are iterating on the H2, H2A design. Now, specifically, they were targeting H3 being a lower cost and more attractive to commercial launch vehicles, because if you go pull up the launch history of the H2 rocket, you don't really find that many commercial vehicles on that list. It's a lot of defense satellites,

Starting point is 00:16:53 it's a lot of satellites that are some commercial stuff, but a lot of government programs, a lot of surveillance satellites, a lot of communication satellites. They also contribute to some programs. They launched Emirates Mars mission this past launch window. They've launched a couple of the weather satellites. If you are a user of my app Downlink, you know that Himawari 8 is in there, and that was launched on an H-2A. But it isn't overwhelmingly a commercial vehicle. So I think they might have a similar idea to Ariane 6 that, you know, we want this national vehicle. Can we make it affordable enough that we can sell it to

Starting point is 00:17:32 other people and we can sell launches on this and also help our operating costs over time by doing so? We'll see if that develops there. I just wanted to call it out that that's another one that's slipping a bit, but is in a very similar mindset. And we'll see if they start, you know, if they start winning some of those commercial contracts as well. And then Ariane 6 has something else to worry about, changes the landscape a little bit, especially in the current launch market. All right, before we talk about the last couple that have come up recently, I want to say thank you to everyone who helps support this show every single month over at mainenginecutoff.com slash support. There are 470 of you. Those numbers have been growing a lot recently. I'm so thankful for that, especially in this year, late in the year

Starting point is 00:18:14 here. Any support is hugely appreciated. And this episode is brought to you by 36 executive producers. Thanks to Brandon, Matthew, Simon, Lauren, Melissa, Chris, Pat, Matt, George, Ryan, 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, 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 your support. If you want to join that crew and get an extra podcast in your feed every single week. Head over to mainenginecutoff.com slash support and join at the $3 or more level and you'll get access to Miko headlines. You get a special RSS feed. You can throw it in wherever you're listening right now. And I run through

Starting point is 00:18:55 every single story of the week, stuff that doesn't come up on the show here, stuff that does, but I expand on a little bit more. It's a great way to stay up on all the space news and help support this show. So for everyone doing that, thank you all so much. For everyone considering that, I thank you as well. Okay, a couple of quick hits to close things out here. Dream Chaser has also now slipped to 2022. So all of the 2020s are now slipping to the 2022 range. And this is for cargo flights up to the ISS. They have the actual space plane portion of Dream Chaser, and then they've got, I think they call it the shooting star module that is attached to the back of the plane that actually is the thing that docks to the space station, carries a lot of cargo, a little bit bigger of a port, would carry the solar panels as well. It's kind of like a service module that can also contain a pressurized volume. it's kind of like a service module that can also contain a pressurized volume. And I've heard that that has been a major area of focus because they also have some Department of Defense contracts related to that or some maybe investigations around what they could do with

Starting point is 00:19:55 that kind of module. So there have been some technical issues. They blamed it on COVID, which, as I said, that certainly contributes a factor because you've got to change operations so much. But there have been some unspecified technical issues there. Now, this isn't a huge deal because we've seen such a big slip in commercial crew, as we talked about on a recent show, that the game kind of changed there for the ISS. Every year that slipped, the needs for the ISS cargo manifest are a little bit different. So I think at this point, now that we're getting into regular crew rotations, that's going to become more and more important. But we'll see how the Dream Chaser program shakes out. What is problematic there, it has a knock-on effect that could be potentially

Starting point is 00:20:37 problematic to Vulcan for United Launch Alliance. Vulcan won part of the National Security Space Launch Program, so they have to have that thing certified in time to launch their first mission in 2022. The first mission as part of that National Security Program. Their first mission right now is slated for 2021 with Vulcan, and that would be launching Astrobotics Lander to the moon. They say that they are still on time to fly that mission in 2021, obviously dependent on Astrobotic's schedule as well. But that second flight would have been the Dream Chaser mission to the ISS. They need two flights before they're certified to fly national security missions. So if they don't have a Dream Chaser flight to fly in late 2021,

Starting point is 00:21:27 they either need to fly it empty with a demonstrator mass or something like that, they need to find another customer. Hell, could they give away the launch to make sure they have someone there so that they're certified in time for that first national security mission? That is a big question mark. But then again, the biggest issue with Vulcan at this point is the BE-4 engines that Blue Origin is working on. They have, obviously, they're making their way, right? We've seen some testing. We've seen some showing up at different facilities.

Starting point is 00:21:57 There are still some issues that they're closing out with those, last I heard, but they are getting kind of close. So that seems to be the timing element there for Vulcan right now. We did see a full flight tank for Vulcan rolling around in a video recently released on Twitter, I believe. But we really want to see those engines get integrated with that stage, maybe even static fire. We want to start seeing some of these things if you start to believe that this is going to happen in 2021. Now, the knock-on effect there is for Blue Origin's own New Glenn. Their first engines in the BE-4 category are heading their way over to ULA

Starting point is 00:22:35 because they have priority of those first couple engines, which is probably fine for Blue Origin. They probably like it that way because they can make a couple engines and somebody else is flying them. So, you know, they want to make sure they work, but it's not their own vehicle that is at risk with those engines. And it's certainly each time is only two engines, not seven, that they'd be flying with New Glenn. So if they are ramping up production, it's going to be easier to fill out a Vulcan vehicle than it would to fill out a New Glenn vehicle. And that right there is the catch.

Starting point is 00:23:05 to fill out a new Glenn vehicle. And that right there is the catch. How many BE-4s can they make right now? Can they make enough to fly as many Vulcan flights as are on the schedule and get new Glenn to the launch pad anytime before two years from now? It doesn't really seem that likely. You know, we're seeing a launch mount show up at Cape Canaveral for Blue Origin a couple of days ago. That was spotted by Stephen Marr on Twitter. He posted a bunch of photos of this launch mount showing up for Launch Complex 36 and New Glenn. We have yet to see any of that flight hardware that I've heard rumored in the factory there in Florida for New Glenn, but it certainly seems like they are still two years, question mark, out from that first launch, given the relative state of what we can see publicly.

Starting point is 00:23:50 And you factor in, like I'm saying, this cadence of building BE-4s, fulfilling their orders for Vulcan, and then also having enough around for that new Glenn flight. That's the thing that we want to see ramp up if we're going to start hopeful about New Glenn's schedule. But right now, it certainly seems like they are slipping their way into 2022 and potentially beyond unless we start seeing some serious hardware get tested and, you know, poked and prodded and everything down there. They've got what looks like a structural test stand, pretty tall structure there next to their factory. So, you know, maybe something's going on in there that would be of interest, but it does still seem like they're quite a ways. So that is the current state of things of all these missions that are slipping and all these projects that are slipping around the schedule. I wanted to share a couple of thoughts there. So thanks again to

Starting point is 00:24:39 everyone out there listening to the show. It means a lot that you are here listening every single time I'm posting one of these and to everyone supporting over at mainenginecutoff.com slash support thank you so much for all of your support it it really means a lot it keeps this thing going it keeps it growing i've seen a lot of numbers ticking up in the last couple of weeks so thank you all so much once again and until next time i will talk to you soon.

Main Engine Cut Off - T+175: Delays

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