Main Engine Cut Off - T+2: SpaceX’s Red Dragon, Falcon Performance, and the Political Fallout of OA-6

Episode Date: May 4, 2016

SpaceX officially announced their first Red Dragon mission to Mars, which will pave the way for future missions. They also posted new performance metrics for Falcon 9 and Heavy, which position the launch vehicles very differently in the market. And a brief discussion of the potential political fallout over the OA-6 launch anomaly. By the Numbers: How close Atlas V came to Failure in this Week’s Cygnus Launch – Cygnus OA-6 | Spaceflight101 OA-6: Atlas V booster shortcomings due to MRCV anomaly | NASASpaceFlight.com Mixture ratio valve the culprit in Atlas 5 anomaly, next launch this summer – Spaceflight Now HASC doubles Air Force allotment of RD-180 engines, focuses funding on building its replacement - SpaceNews.com Capabilities & Services | SpaceX SpaceX's new price chart illustrates performance cost of reusability - SpaceNews.com SpaceX plans to debut Red Dragon with 2018 Mars mission | NASASpaceFlight.com Can SpaceX really land on Mars? Absolutely, says an engineer who would know | Ars Technica NASA Talk - Mars Entry, Descent and Landing with Humans Space Act Agreement SAA-QA-14-18883 Space Act Agreement SAA-QA-14-18883, Amendment 1 Email feedback to [e-mail] Follow @WeHaveMECO Support Main Engine Cut Off on Patreon

Two weeks ago on the show, I had mentioned in passing the anomaly that had occurred on the most recent Atlas V flight, the flight that launched Cygnus up to the ISS. ULA has finally made a public announcement about that anomaly, and has said that the engineering team tracked that down to a mixture ratio control valve in the RD-180 engine that powers the Atlas V's core stage. They said that the mixture ratio had led to a reduction in fuel flow during the closing seconds of that stage's performance, and it led to that stage shutting down six seconds early. I'll post again in the show notes the article about how

close to failure that flight came, but the long and the short of it is that that stage shut down a few seconds early, which led the upper stage, the Centaur upper stage, to have to work really, really hard to get Cygnus up to its intended orbit. It did get to that orbit successfully, so it was a mission success, but it was dangerously close to a failure for the Atlas V. ULIS said that in response to the findings, they are going to inspect all of the RD-180 engines they have in their possession right now, especially as it pertains to their upcoming launch, which is for the U.S. Navy on June 24th. Now, this anomaly is not that technically interesting but it is something that could be used as political ammo in the Senate and House as they work through

budgets for 2017. The RD-180 is a Russian-built engine that has been the target of a lot of political maneuvering over the past couple years. There are some members of Congress trying to impose a ban on that engine for use on U.S. military flights because of concerns over Russian officials having knowledge of what is going on with those flights. These bans are part of sanctions against Russia that have been going on the last few years over some geopolitical situations happening. ULA has been fighting this ban for the past couple years with help from some members of Congress because they've said that it impacts their ability to fly certain U.S. military flights over the next five to ten years as they get their new next-generation rocket Vulcan online. The Vulcan will be powered with an American-built engine, so it won't be

subject to these Russian bans. The National Defense Authorization Act of 2017 was approved by the House Armed Services Committee on April 28th, so that'll make its way to the full House and then through the full Senate before it's being approved. That initial bill gives the Air Force access to as many as 18 Russian RD-180 engines for this year, which is a pretty big increase over the numbers that have been doled out the last couple years in terms of the ban. Now, when this goes through the Senate, it's likely to get a lot of fire from certain senators, one of which is John McCain, who has been the leading voice in terms of the RD-180 ban over the past few years. So again,

while this is not a very technically concerning issue, given Atlas 5's incredible track record of 62 successes in a row, never with a failure. It is something that can be used as political ammo when working through these kinds of terms. Now, the ban would not apply to any of ULA's commercial flights or civilian flights like flights for NASA, but it does apply to those U.S. military flights which SpaceX just got approval for recently and just received their first contract for one of those flights. So it comes at an interesting time when there's a lot of pieces at play in terms of SpaceX and ULA fighting for these military launches. So we'll keep an eye on this over the next couple months as it makes its way through Congress. There's not that much going on with it now, but I just kind of wanted to put it out there as

something that will be interesting to watch. Now switching over to SpaceX, there were some interesting things that have developed in their world over the past week. Over the weekend, they posted new performance metrics and price changes for the Falcon family of rockets, which were pretty interesting. The listed price for a Falcon 9 is now $62 million for 5,500 kilograms to geosynchronous transfer orbit, which is up from $61.2 million for 4,850 kilograms. Falcon Heavy is now listed at $90 million for 8,000 kilograms to GTO, which is up from 6,400 previously. Now those are pretty big performance improvements that have apparently come from testing they've done over the past couple of months on their engines, and it shows that they can push the engines a little harder, cut down on some of the margins that they've been using, and just squeeze a little more juice out of those

engines. Now aside from the price changes that they put up there, they've also listed the max capability of these rockets, which is probably the more interesting part of this. Falcon 9 now maxes out at 22,800 kilograms to low Earth orbit, which is more than the most capable Atlas V, the 551, which can loft 18,850 kilograms to low Earth orbit. In terms of geosynchronous transfer orbit, it now maxes out at 8,300 kilograms, which is just 600 kilograms less than the Atlas V 551-2 GTO. What all that means is that Falcon 9 in the fully expendable mode can now be classed as a heavy lift launch vehicle, which means it can lift between 20 and 50,000 kilograms to low earth

orbit. That puts it in a class with the Ariane 5, the Proton M, the Angara A5, and the Delta 4 Heavy. The fully expendable Falcon Heavy just crosses the threshold for the super heavy lift launch vehicle category, which is anything more than 50,000 kilograms to low Earth orbit. The only successfully flown Super Heavy Lift launch vehicle in history is the Saturn V. Technically, the space shuttle and the Soviet counterpart, the Buran, could be classed as Super Heavy Lift, but their payload capacity puts them in the Heavy Lift class. So as of right now, Falcon Heavy and the as yet unflown Space Launch System are the only super heavy lift launch vehicles in development. It's important to note that there are no prices listed for these max capacity launches, but

the fact that SpaceX is marketing these numbers shows where they're headed with this kind of stuff. SpaceX can now fly US military missions, which up until recently ULA has had the monopoly on, and while those payload weights are not ever disclosed, you can bet that some of those satellites are very, very hefty things. So the fact that SpaceX can now fly more than the Atlas V to low Earth orbit is pretty important for some of these types of missions. I'll bet we'll see the US military purchase an expendable flight of Falcon 9 in the near future for an undisclosed amount of money, but that just goes to show that this is something that SpaceX has to offer. We'll see how the next few flights of Falcon 9 shake out, because we haven't seen this type of performance publicly yet,

but it's something to keep an eye on over the next few months. Shifting gears a bit to the other announcement that SpaceX made recently, that was their Red Dragon mission to Mars. Tentatively set for 2018, though I bet we might see it launch in the 2020 window, this will send a partially loaded Dragon 2 to the surface of Mars. Dragon 2 is their crew vehicle that has been in development for the past few years that will fly crews up to the ISS and other locations in the near future. SpaceX has always said that the Dragon 2 was meant to land on every surface in the solar system, both with parachutes and with power descent like we'll see at Mars. So this is a very interesting precursor to how SpaceX will operate their Mars missions,

but other exploration missions as well. You could bet that SpaceX will send Red Dragons multiple times to the surface of Mars to investigate future landing sites for their colonization plans. But it's also an interesting precursor to how SpaceX and NASA are interacting, and how that might shape out as they get into their Mars colonization plans. Or even how NASA would interact with another commercial partner that has these types of ambitions that SpaceX has shown. We've already seen a little bit of this over the past couple years as SpaceX has been doing their Falcon 9 first stage recoveries. NASA and SpaceX had signed a SpaceX agreement back in 2014,

which was regarding the data that they would get back from those stage recoveries. The really interesting thing is that where the first stage is doing its re-entry burn is exactly parallel to the environment that you would experience entering Mars's atmosphere. So as SpaceX was working on recovering those first stages, they were actually doing research on how to land at Mars, specifically with supersonic retropulsion. Supersonic retropulsion is something that's been talked about a lot over the last couple years because it's a way to land heavier payloads at Mars. We're currently stretching the limits of what we can do with parachutes plus a little bit of power descent like we've seen with all of the

Mars landers and rovers over the past 30 to 40 years. The Mars Science Laboratory, or Curiosity Rover, was the heaviest payload we landed at Mars at around 2,000 pounds, and that was just about at the limit of what we could do with that technology. Mars is a tricky place to land because it has just enough atmosphere to require heat shielding, but not enough atmosphere to slow you down with parachutes alone. So for that reason, some sort of power descent is needed when you have these precious payloads like the Mars Science Laboratory or humans in the future. And when you have humans in the future, those payloads are going to be a lot, lot heavier than what we've landed already. So parachutes are not going to be able to operate under those conditions.

Now, it's not only about getting that mass down to the surface, it's also about getting it there with high precision. As a little background, the Mars Exploration Rovers, the ones you know as Spirit and Opportunity, landed in an ellipse that was 150 by 20 kilometers across. And that was a pretty big ellipse because of the type of landing system it had. It didn't have a lot of precision. precision. Mars Science Laboratory, or Curiosity, landed within two kilometers of the center point of its 20 kilometer landing ellipse, so still a pretty big margin of error. NASA has stated at this point that for human missions, we'll need to land within 100 meters of the intended target, and that's because we will most likely not just be landing one thing on the surface, we'll be landing a series of packages to be used while humans are on the surface. So we need to be able to do these high mass, high precision landings, and really supersonic

retro propulsion offers the best way forward for that. And that's what SpaceX has been going for. They've been doing research on how supersonic retro propulsion works, and they're getting the benefit of getting their stages back while doing that research. It's kind of incredible, two birds with one stone, where they're saving money by reusing these stages, and they're getting their costs down with the reusability, but they're also doing this high-tech research for how to land at Mars. So that's been something that SpaceX and NASA have been sharing knowledge about already under that previous Space Act agreement. They've been providing NASA with the data they get from those tests, and NASA have

been giving them feedback and some consultation on how exactly to make that data useful. Under the Red Dragon Agreement, NASA will share their deep space communications and telemetry, their navigation and trajectory design, all of their entry, descent, and landing systems engineering support, hardware and environmental consultation, planetary protection advice, hardware and environmental consultation, planetary protection advice, all of the things that NASA has already learned about landing at Mars they'll share with SpaceX for a successful Red Dragon mission. In return, SpaceX will provide NASA with all of the data they get from their supersonic retro propulsion entry descent and landing system, as well as scientific data gathered when they're on the surface there. From some of the initial announcements, it sounds like NASA Ames and JPL will have some science packages aboard Red Dragon when it does land. Last week, we talked a lot about the political struggle that NASA finds itself in. It's an environment that's holding NASA down in a lot of ways because of the pure politicking going on.

Private companies are playing a larger and larger role in space exploration, both in supporting the International Space Station, but in SpaceX's case, they're actually going out to another planet to do some scientific research. I find this is a very interesting model for NASA to take in the future, and it's a model that will probably work out better in the environment that NASA operates. I think the guiding principle for NASA over the next 5-10 years should be, what can NASA do to facilitate spaceflight exploration and colonization now that we have these private companies up and running and we have these people willing to take risks and put their own money on the line to do these things. NASA has all of this research and operational and

scientific expertise to offer, so they might as well offer that to the people that are going out there and doing it. If NASA's having trouble getting their missions off the ground, but other people are doing it, you might as well see what you can offer them in return for some of that data yourself. So in a way, NASA becomes the hub for this space exploration infrastructure as we move forward. Different people are looking to NASA for their expertise that they have, and NASA's getting a little kickback in terms of being able to put payloads on those missions, being able to get data back from those missions, being able to aggregate all of that knowledge that we're building up. You could even see this happening with things like the European Space Agency's Moon Village idea.

If they're going to the moon to build this colony and they need some data from NASA, NASA should accept that offer and see what else they can get out of the deal back. It doesn't always have to be this exchange of money and funds and different things like that. It can be this knowledgeable exchange and NASA stays the forefront in the research and scientific and operational knowledge that we build up about space. So to me, this is a much better use of NASA's money and time if you have these people already going out and doing these missions. And I'm really excited to watch this mission come together over the next few years. We obviously need to see Falcon Heavy fly first since that's what Red Dragon flies on, and SpaceX still seems hopeful to get that off by the end of this year. They've

got another launch coming up at the end of this week, so hopefully they can hit that on time and get their flight rate up as we've talked about in the past and start making good progress towards these future missions. That's it for me this week, and I'd love to hear your feedback on Twitter at MECOPodcast, M-E-C-O podcast, or the email link that's in the show notes. And as always, if you're enjoying the show, a rating on iTunes would be great, or just spread the word to some other fellow spaceflight nerd out there in your life. Thanks again, I'll talk to you soon.