Main Engine Cut Off - T+177: NASA VCLS 2, Relativity, Astra, and Firefly

Episode Date: December 21, 2020

NASA awarded Venture Class Launch Services contracts to Astra, Firefly, and Relativity. Astra almost made orbit with its most recent test flight of Rocket 3.2. And something is up at Firefly, but I don’t know what yet.This episode of Main Engine Cut Off is brought to you by 35 executive producers—Brandon, Matthew, Simon, Lauren, Melissa, Kris, Pat, Matt, Jorge, Ryan, Donald, Lee, 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 six anonymous—and 447 other supporters.TopicsNASA Awards Venture Class Launch Services Demonstration 2 Contract | NASANASA Awards Venture Class Launch Services Contracts | NASAAstra, Relativity, and Firefly Win NASA Venture Class Launch Services Contracts - Main Engine Cut OffVirgin Orbit on Twitter: “Our vehicles, hardware, and software are all ready to go. With two rehearsals already complete, one final wet dress rehearsal is all that remains for us to do. However, the Covid-19 pandemic is impacting our ability to safely operate, and thus our schedule.”Astra narrowly misses reaching orbit on second launch - SpaceNewsAstra’s smallsat launcher reaches space on second test flight – Spaceflight NowAstra on Twitter: “A quick video recap of our 8.5-minute flight to space today!”A Small-Rocket Maker Is Running a Different Kind of Space RaceAt Astra, failure is an option | Ars TechnicaMain Engine Cut Off on Twitter: “Something is up at @Firefly_Space, though. Max Polyakov and Mark Watt have been removed from Firefly’s about page within the last month or two. Here it is on the Wayback Machine from October…”About - Firefly AerospaceAbout - Firefly Aerospace (as of October, 2020)Savage Memes and Lunar Dreams: Deceptive Dating Sites' Intimate Ties to Firefly AerospaceThe 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

NASA's Venture Class Launch Services 2 contracts, Astra's rocket 3.2 almost made it to orbit, and something weird is happening at Firefly. Those are the things I want to talk about today here on Main Engine Cutoff. I am Anthony Colangelo, as always. let's get started with the news out of NASA. The Venture Class Launch Services Demonstration 2 contracts have been awarded three different awards here to three different companies. Number one, Astra Space won $3.9 million. Relativity Space won $3 million and Firefly won $9.8 million. All small launchers, Astra, very small. The other

two about medium sized of the small launch, medium to large, I guess, of the small launchers. We'll talk about all that, but some context on what the VCLS is. This is a initiative that NASA undertook and it started a couple of years ago with the previous round of these contracts, that NASA undertook, and it started a couple years ago with the previous round of these contracts, where NASA is trying to provide payload opportunities to small launchers that are coming online to kind of stimulate demand there, to get some insight into what these companies are working on, how they're working, and really just start engaging these companies so that they can rely on them in the future if and when they get launching. The first round of these awards was back in October of 2015, and this is a little bit of a throwback because some of the names on here

are funny in that they've changed form, or two have changed form, one is still operating. So at the time, the awards were Firefly Space Systems for $5.5 million, Rocket Lab for $6.9 million, Virgin Galactic for $4.7 million. So of those, Rocket Lab actually did fly theirs. Virgin Galactic turned into Virgin Orbit with LauncherOne, and the next launch of LauncherOne is supposed to carry their award, their Venture Class Launch Services contract from 2015. Firefly Space Systems has completely reconstructed itself. The former failed. It has been reconstituted in Firefly that we know now, and they have won a new contract for the VCLS-2 missions. So while VCLS-1 is still being closed out, let's talk about what these missions are.

There were two mission options that were proposed here that these launchers could take advantage of. Mission one was 30 kilograms of CubeSats into 500 kilometer mid inclination orbit. So that would be launching from like an East Coast site or something that is closer to the equator. And then mission two would be 75 kilograms of CubeSats into a 550 kilometer sun synchronous orbit and then do a plane change of at least 10 degrees and release another 20 kilograms. So I keep saying of CubeSats, that's because the VCLS contracts are to launch CubeSats that are awaiting launch from NASA. So Astra chose mission one, they'll be flying that 30 kilograms of CubeSats into a 500 kilometer mid inclination orbit for $3.9 million. And the payload range that

Astra flies currently, this sounds like a dedicated mission that these would be the only payload on board. And there was a stipulation that for these contracts, the NASA payloads had to be the primary, but you could fly other payloads if you had room and the desire to fly them. But Astra is a pretty small launch vehicle. So for that payload and that destination and that price, that's going to be a dedicated launch. Relativity and Firefly are probably going to be shared launches, ride shares. But Firefly is flying that Mission 2 with the 75 kilograms and then a plane change and the other 20 kilograms. And Relativity said in a tweet, it sounds like they're flying Mission 1. Both of those seem to be ride shares. Relativity is just about $3 million. And 30 kilograms is almost nothing because their

payload range at that orbit is about 1250 kilograms. So this should be some sort of rideshare or whatever the case is, maybe it's a fully dedicated rideshare mission. But that is definitely only a portion of the relativity launch because they're like I said, their payload is much bigger and their price is about four times that. Their list price right now is $12 million to orbit. Now, Firefly, on the other hand, $9.8 million and they're doing a more complex mission. This is likely some sort of rideshare and they might have some other payloads on board, but it also could just be a steep discount for the early launches.

They can definitely fit more payload than that up to 550 kilometers sun-synchronous orbit, but their launch price overall is $15 million. So it's not out of the question that they could be offering a cheap launch to get some early payloads that they can fly. Because notably, this is a program that NASA likes to take a little more risk for. They want this to be like payloads that can survive higher risk loads so that they can actually start flying sooner and that is evidenced by the fact that right now virgin orbit is trying to get their second launch off their second launch attempt ever the first one failed earlier this year and nasa is actually saying that they're okay with the vcls payloads being on that second launch attempt even though they have not officially made orbit

yet or even gotten close. Their engine failed after a couple of seconds on the first attempt, and it was the end of the mission. They haven't even gotten close to the edge of the atmosphere yet, but NASA is okay with their payloads flying because they're okay accepting a little more risk for this kind of mission. So for these three launchers, I expect these VCLS missions to be pretty early on in their manifest because that's the point that they serve. And they're all really close to making orbit, or at least attempting to make orbit. Astra, as I said, and we'll talk about in a few minutes, just about got there this past week. Relativity and Firefly are both getting closer to the launch pad. It sounds like Firefly's was supposed to be the end of this year, but it's slipping into 2021. And Relativity is probably mid to late 2021 for

their first launch. But they're all relatively close to the launch pad. And per the contracts here from NASA, these all need to be flown by the end of June 2022. Now that requirement is probably a little bit softer than an actual requirement because that first round of contracts that I was talking about, they originally were supposed to be flown by April of 2018. The only one that has ever flown is Rocket Lab and they flew in December of 2018. One of them completely failed and the other one is about to fly in probably 2021 because Virgin Orbit is delayed because of COVID delays and delays getting back to flight. So it's probably not the hardest requirement of all time. I don't know what happens if you miss that deadline, but that is when they would like to see them off the ground. But again,

like I said, given the current schedule with Astra almost making orbit, the other two having their first mission coming up next calendar year, I would expect to actually see these a lot closer to that deadline than the first round of ECLS. I do like to see NASA doing these kind of things where they're taking on a little more risk and engaging the industry. I think it's interesting to consider how they could use these kind of launch providers if and when they do get flying successfully. And that's really the intention here is to be able to rely on these when they are flying regularly to launch small payloads to space. Astra's payload range is I'm unsure how much NASA would use that other than for things like these kind of collections of small sats. Firefly and Relativity have much bigger payload ranges that I think would be a lot more used by

NASA. Certainly in the past several years we've seen NASA science missions in the few hundred kilogram range that would fit well on firefly and relativity. And I think they would offer a really good opportunity because, you know, right now some of those missions have flown on like Pegasus, which is really expensive, or even some Minotaur vehicles, which are also very expensive. Falcon 9 has been stealing away those payloads more and more because their launch price is actually lower than the former small launchers like Pegasus and Minotaur. But when you get down into this, you know, 12 to $15 million range for Firefly and Relativity, that could be a really good option for NASA to fly those smaller science missions, weather satellites or Earth observation satellites, small telescopes, that kind of stuff

would fit really nicely on these two launch vehicles. So, you know, part of this is to stimulate that demand to see what they can do, what these companies can do. The other part of it is to get a peek in the door here and see what these companies are like to work with, so that NASA knows what they can rely on in the near future. So I want to dive into this Astra launch that happened last week, and then I want to talk a little bit about some Firefly stuff that I dug up while I was working on understanding these VCLS contracts. But before we do that, let's say thank you to everyone who made this episode of Main Engine Cutoff possible. Thanks to the 35 executive producers,

Brandon, Matthew, Simon, Lauren, Melissa, Chris, Pat, Matt, George, Ryan, Donald, Lee, Warren, Bob, Russell, John, Moritz, Joel, Ian, Grant, David, Eunice, Rob, Tim Dodd, the Everdashnaut, Frank, Julian, and Lars from Agile Space, Tommy, and six anonymous executive producers, along with 447 others over at mainenginecutoff.com slash support. Head over there if you want to help support this entirely listener-funded show. I've got no one else paying me. You are my boss. So if you don't like what I'm doing, then I guess tell me about it because I only answer to you. And if you want to help support the show and get a little extra, if you head over to mainenginecutoff.com slash support and you are at the $3 a month or more level, you get an entirely separate podcast that I do called

Miko Headlines. Every single weekend, I run through all the stories of the week. And the past couple of weeks, they've been very long. They've been pushing the upper 20 minute range. And that's a lot longer than usual because there's been a lot of stuff happening. So it's a great way to stay up on space and help support the show. So consider it. And if you are there now, I thank you so much for your support throughout this entire crazy year. It means a lot. It keeps us running this thing and it keeps us growing this thing. I'm really, really thankful for it, especially at this time of the year. Astro's rocket 3.2 almost made it to orbit last week. They launched out of the Pacific Spaceport Complex, Alaska. They were heading south over the Pacific Ocean. They made it through its initial phases of flight a lot further than we've seen their first couple attempts at making orbits or even launching generally. So they made it all the

way through the first stage burn, they made its main engine cut off, they had stage separation, upper stage ignition, and they made it all the way to a 390 kilometer apogee. The upper stage was burning well, but it shut down about 12 to 15 seconds early. They say that they had the mixture ratio wrong, so they didn't get through all of its fuel, I believe. And they were eventually about 500 meters a second short of orbital velocity, so they re-entered over the Pacific. But they made it a lot closer to orbit than they expected themselves. They talked up this idea of having really iterative approaches. So I'm calling this one Rocket 3.2, as they call it. And that's because they made three of them that they were going to try to make orbit

with. And then I guess they just keep iterating, but sort of do these small blocks to have a basis for, you know, it's kind of almost the Starship model where you are just continuing to build hardware and make tweaks as you go and make each one a little bit better. They were not expecting to get to orbit with this one still. They were being realistic in their hopes and dreams, I guess. But the next launch of Rocket 3.3, they say that vehicle is about 75% complete. They are expecting to put a payload on that because of how well this flight went. It's still kind of hard to believe

that we are here at the end of 2020, and Rocket Lab is still the only small launcher that is up and operational. The commercial small launchers, I should say, is up and operational. They have a three-plus-year run on the place, but Astra seems to be the closest one to getting launching. Virgin Orbit has a lot of problems to solve. I still think they have a little while to go. I'm hopeful that their second launch can make it all the way but i would not be shocked to see another issue there firefly and relativity are going to give it a shot next year as i was just talking about there are some that are a little further further off their abl with rs1 vehicle the last update was something in 2021 so there could be a lot of opportunities this next year

to see someone finally make orbit in this smaller end of the commercial launchers. And it's a bummer that Astra didn't make it, but it was an impressive flight for them. With the expectations set as they were, to make it all the way to 15 seconds short or whatever, they ended up, it was pretty impressive. Now, I'm generally still trying to figure out Astra. whatever they ended up, was pretty impressive. Now, I'm generally still trying to figure out Astra. I've heard some things from people that make them sound like on the low end, a slightly more put together vector, which is not a compliment. But that might just be the perspective of the people I've heard from, because I've also heard some others that make it sound

pretty good there. There were a couple of features back in February of 2020, one from Bloomberg Businessweek and one from Eric Berger over at Ars Technica that gave a little behind the scenes look because they've been very secretive and still are very secretive. So I'm still not honestly sure what to make of them considering how little we know about them. But in terms of the numbers that we do have a sense of, the payload range is still in, you know, the tens of kilogram range. In the Bloomberg feature, it was quoted at 75 to 200 kilograms. I think that seems a little where they're headed, not currently where they're at. In Eric Berger's article, the estimate was kind of like the hundred-ish kilogram range

for two and a half million dollars, which is, you know, less than half of Electron for Rocket Lab, less than half the price as well. Now, I'm someone who's been generally not looking too keenly on the very small end of payload ranges like this. I even think and thought for a while and still think to some extent that Electron is a little small, and that the one ton range is going to be very useful to, like I was saying, with NASA science missions, even some smaller DoD missions for the US military and other militaries around the world. I think that's going to find a lot more of a market than something on the really small end. But if Astra is serious in that they can get these launch prices right now in the two to$3 million range down to the $1 million range, maybe there is enough there that they can have the appropriate

demand to launch tens of kilograms for that. Now, the other thing is that they also have this kind of containerized launch system where they can launch from anywhere. I think Eric Berger had an article about how they set this one up with about five people. If that's true, then that's a pretty big improvement on things. I think launching from different locations around the world is probably more useful and more interesting to me than the overhead of air launch. I still am not an air launch believer. I know there's a handful of benefits that people will tell me. I've yet to be convinced that that's a good idea or really a good architecture. But being able to take your launch site around and set up at Kodiak or out at Guam or the

East Coast here or Vandenberg or wherever it is, that could be an interesting thing. And if you are trying to target not only science missions, but some Department of Defense missions and things like that, that's something that could be useful for those missions as well. ABL, while much bigger of a launch vehicle, they're about 1,300 kilograms to low Earth orbit, about 1,000 kilograms to sun-synchronous orbit. They have a similar idea as well. So I'm kind of interested to see if one of those does make it. Firefly and Relativity have set facilities at Cape Canaveral and Vandenberg Air Force Base, but ABL and Astra can move around a little bit.

I want to see how that battle shakes out to see if it's something that people actually want to take advantage of, or is it just extra overhead to manage the transportability of all of your hardware. So we'll see how Astra does here in the next year or two. If they're able to keep those prices down that low, I'm a little bit more optimistic about their chances, but I still tend to be not super optimistic about such a small payload range. I'm really curious to see that about one ton range between Firefly, Relativity, ABL. Some others are in the mix there as well. I think one of those could survive and thrive at that point, but all yet to be seen as we head forward. Now, Firefly. Speaking of Firefly, as I was looking into all this stuff, I was kind of poking around with Firefly and their website

and found some interesting things. So the beginning of last year, there was this Snopes investigation into the guy who bought and founded, this new iteration of Firefly. His name is Max Polyakov. He is from Ukraine. They looked into all this different stuff, where he got his money, because he invested in Firefly, but some other space companies as well. And it's all this really shady internet stuff that I don't want to get too into, but you can read the whole Snopes investigation if you want. There's a lot of weird shadiness that they are uncovering, and

none of it is really proven in a court, but seems very likely. And there's some stuff going on in Ukraine as well, some investigations. So they did this entire research into Max Polyakov, but also Mark Watt, who is a partner at New Sphere Ventures, which is the investment firm that was founded by Polyakov. And they are the ones that at the time, Mark Watt was the CFO of Firefly Aerospace, and Polyakov was, I guess, listed as founder, I believe. So anyway, all this stuff was going on, really shady seeming, everyone got kind of a bad taste in their mouth about it. I was just poking around the Firefly website and I noticed that they had been removed within the last two months from the Firefly about page. or you can click on Fireflies currently, but I also have a link to the Wayback Machine from October where you can see the page as it was with the section there that had both Polyakov and Watt, but they just removed the picture and the names. The team header is still

there, so you can kind of see the vestigial section of the website. Anyway, I bring all this up because it seems to be like something's happening there where they have been removed from the team they've been scrubbed from the website uh there was always a little bit of unresolved something happening with firefly since that investigation caused this stir up and got uh the attention of certain people within the government that might have contracts with firefly uh and you know i even thought it was a little funky that about a year ago at IAC talking with people from Firefly, there's like an entire half of the company that was in Ukraine, which Ukraine is not a problem, but the history there with some of the launch vehicles coming out of

there, the history between Ukraine and Russia and the launch vehicles that they had in common, it's definitely something that would cause concern for people that are looking to invest in Firefly. So couple that with this kind of shady investigation of where all the money's coming from. Now they're being scrubbed from Firefly's presence online. Keep an eye out for Firefly. I would expect there to be some news because I don't think that was just like, oops, we toggled off the about section in a weird way. I expect there to be something coming out about Firefly soon, and we'll see where that leaves them. Coming up to their first launch here, it would be good to announce some good news alongside of that,

or some news that makes people more comfortable with their offerings, but I guess we'll see as they get closer to the launchpad. So anyway, for now, that is all I've got for you today. Thank you all so much for your support, as always, over at mainenginecutoff.com slash support. Head over there if you want to jump in and get access to Miko Headlines or help support the show otherwise. But for now, I hope you all enjoy. If you have some time off, enjoy.

And I will be here when you get back. And until next time, thanks for listening. I'll talk to you soon.