Main Engine Cut Off - T+240: NSSL Phase 3, and a New Glenn Check In

Episode Date: February 28, 2023

The Space Force rolled out the draft RFP for Phase 3 of the National Security Space Launch program, and it looks pretty good! Elsewhere, NASA selected New Glenn to launch ESCAPADE in 2024, so I check in on the state of things over at Blue Origin—as always, it’s about the engines.This episode of Main Engine Cut Off is brought to you by 44 executive producers—Simon, Kris, Pat, Matt, Jorge, Ryan, Donald, Lee, Chris, Warren, Bob, Russell, Moritz, Joel, Jan, David, Joonas, Robb, Tim Dodd (the Everyday Astronaut!), Frank, Julian, Lars from Agile Space, Matt, The Astrogators at SEE, Chris, Fred, Dawn Aerospace, Andrew, Harrison, Benjamin, SmallSpark Space Systems, Tyler, Steve, Theo and Violet, Pat from KC and seven anonymous—and 821 other supporters.TopicsSpace Force to change how it buys national security launches - SpaceNewsSpace Force looks to energize industry with next round of launch contracts - SpaceNewsSpace Force Reimagining Launch Service Procurement – SpacePolicyOnline.comNational Security Space Launch (NSSL) Phase 3 DRAFT Request for Proposals (RFPs) #1 and Industry Day - SAM.govT+236: SpaceX Starshield, NSSL Phase 3 - Main Engine Cut OffEric Berger on Twitter: “Col. Douglas Pentecost of the US Air Force says the military recently signed a "three-flight" option with Blue Origin for certification of the New Glenn rocket. This means three flights, but less data than ULA had to provide for a two-flight certification.”Gallery | Blue OriginNASA Selects Blue Origin to Launch Mars’ Magnetosphere Study Mission | NASABlue Origin wins first NASA business for New Glenn - SpaceNewsAfter Vulcan comes online, ULA plans to dramatically increase launch cadence | Ars TechnicaThe ShowLike the show? Support the show!Email your thoughts, comments, and questions to [e-mail] @WeHaveMECOFollow @[e-mail] on MastodonListen 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 NewsletterMusic by Max JustusArtwork photo by SpaceX

Hello and welcome to Main Engine Cutoff, I am Anthony Colangelo. The U.S. Space Force has put out its draft request for proposal for the National Security Space Launch Program's Phase 3 contract round. National Security Space Launch Program's phase three contract round. This is a bit of a follow up show to one that I did back in mid-December when I was talking about things that we might see in this next round of the program. And the draft request for proposal as described, and I say as described because they actually have not given us the official document. They are reserving that for bidders only. But it lays out a program very much like what I was hoping to see, what I was talking about, that was potential. And it's this two-phase setup, or the two-tier

setup, I should say. Two-lane, I think is the official word they use for it. One which follows much of the same pattern that it has in the past. And this new lane is a little bit more open to new entrance, new launch vehicles, smaller launch vehicles. So I think this is a really sound strategy. There's still a bit of work to go on the paperwork side here, so this is not a done deal that this is how this round is going to go, but I wanted to unpack what we know so far. So as a little primer,

we're currently in phase two of the National Security Space Launch Program. There was phase one back in the day that was just United Launch Alliance. There was a phase 1A that added SpaceX to the mix. Phase two was the previous round of bidding that, if you've listened to the show for a while, we unpacked pretty extensively over the past several years. SpaceX and ULA were the winners of that round. And the way this program works, or historically has worked, is that the U.S. Space Force selects two providers to fly all of these missions,

usually around 30-some missions, and they split those missions up 60-40. So ULA won the 60% award. They're going to get 60% of all the missions that are awarded under phase two. SpaceX will get 40%. They are doled out annually, but there's sort of a known bucket or size of the launch manifest for this program. And in order to win that contract round, you have to be able to have a certified vehicle or a plan to certify your vehicle that is approved by the Space Force. And your vehicle needs to be able to hit a bunch of reference orbits that they give you

in the paperwork when you're applying. So you need to be able to take a certain payload to a certain orbit and do so through a certified launch vehicle. So those are very taxing orbits, right? Some of them are easy, go to low Earth orbit, sun synchronous orbit, that kind of thing. Some are really challenging, like go directly to geostationary orbit, a much higher energy location, a longer mission. So there are more requirements around actually being able to get there. And that's something that, you know, we've only seen SpaceX do somewhat recently for some of their missions. So phase two itself, you know, that contract round was a couple years ago. And it takes a while for these missions to

make their way into the manifest. And just past January, we saw SpaceX fly the first phase two mission. ULA has one coming up as well. First one would actually fly on an Atlas V before they move over to their new launch vehicle, Vulcan. So that's the state of play where we're at now. Phase two is still working its way through, but they know exactly how long it's going to take to get through those missions and they need to be ready for phase three to do this entire round of contracting, put out the request for proposal, take the bids, see who's going to win, decide on based on what they received, who wins, and then go ahead and actually start awarding missions. So it's a much longer process, not only because of the timeline of building these payloads, but the timeline of

paperwork, right? And just general like administrative duties that go on here. So the thing that the Space Force was grappling with is the changing industry. And not only that, but still, you know, needing certain things from their own internal requirements, needing certain expectations to be met or requirements to be met by the people flying their missions. So there had begun to be talk of this two-lane approach and that's very much what i talked about back uh in episode what was it episode 236 uh just a couple episodes ago talking about you know reading the tea leaves seeing how it was being talked about in the press and having some hopes about the way that they could structure this and uh that's exactly how it shook out. So for phase three,

lane number two is pretty much exactly what phase two did, right? Which is two providers will be selected that can meet all of those unique orbits and capabilities that they need from the missions. They will split the launches between the two bidders on a pretty even basis. There will be about 40 launches in lane two, and I will split 60-40. So it's a couple more launches than we have in phase two here. And the launch vehicles in that phase or in that lane need to be fully certified or have a certification plan in place to be able to support these launches on the timeline specified. in place to be able to support these launches on the timeline specified. The contracting for this round will run from 2025 to 2029.

That's fiscal year, so slightly different than the calendar year. And the launches themselves will have to take place from Cape Canaveral or Vandenberg Space Force bases. Lane 2 also comes with it. And again, this is like sketched out in some draft paperwork that they've put out, but also some media reports of this draft RFP. So I'm assuming some of the journalists have gotten their hands on that document. I have not been able to yet. If you know someone that can give me the document, that would be super cool. So I don't know the specific detail down to this level, but it looks like Lane 2 would also have some launch support services payments that are outside of the launches themselves that keep this kind of, you know, this is the thing that was attacked as the ULA subsidy for years, but now everyone's getting access to this kind of funding.

That, you know, keeps certain mission capabilities and requirements on the table for this lane that otherwise doesn't necessarily fit within some of the launch contracting that happens. Now, lane one is the big change here. And what this is, is an area that is a little bit more flexible on not only the requirements, but also the end result. It's more risk tolerant it uh is is there to take advantage of new launch vehicles new companies that are coming online new capabilities that are coming online smaller launch vehicles right maybe a launch vehicle for instance rocket lab's upcoming neutron launch vehicle or relativity spaces terran one or terran r maybe they can't hit every single one of those reference orbits that i talked about. They can't do, you know, six tons directly to geostationary orbit,

but they can do a whole batch of satellites to low Earth orbit, or they can do, you know, an imaging satellite that's a couple of tons to sun-synchronous orbit. They can do some subset of these missions, but they don't have the full capability of those bigger launch vehicles. Well, they have a space in Lane 1 now, which allows the National Security Space Launch Program to be a little bit more inclusive and get what is the best deal for those payloads, because there's going to be a bunch of launches that the Space Force is going to be managing that are going to low Earth orbit as the Space Development Agency builds out their proliferated constellation that they've been working on. There's a bunch of different tranches that we've talked about,

the tracking layer, which is a missile warning layer, transport layer, which is communications. All of these things are going to low Earth orbit. So you don't need a launch vehicle that can do eight tons directly to GEO to put these up. Neutron will do just fine. So that's what this lane is really there for. And by having a bigger net of bidders, you're hopefully getting better and better pricing for those missions that are a little easier to hit, are more akin to a commercially available launch, not some really specialized service that ULA, launch, not some really specialized service that ULA, SpaceX, Nuclein, that kind of stuff can offer. Now, this is kind of like NASA's Commercial Lunar Payload Services Program in that you have to be on-ramped into this lane. So every year, there will be an opportunity to on-ramp in, which means if you're a company out there building a launch service that would be applicable to this,

you would have to go through a bunch of paperwork and get officially on-ramped into this lane. And then the next time a task order comes around to bid on, when the Space Force says, we have this kind of launch, this payload range going up to this orbit, give us your bids on what you could do that service for, then you would have an opportunity to throw your hat into the ring and potentially win a task order for a launch service in the future. This lane is going to run from fiscal year 2025 to 2034. That's five-year base period plus five-year option.

I guess if it's going well, they'll extend it for that period. And importantly, you don't have to have a fully certified vehicle to be in this reign, but you do have to have a vehicle that has flown to orbit so it's a quite an interesting um you know the way to slice it is that they want you to have at least some history of going to orbit but you don't have to do the whole certification plan because this is specifically for more risk-tolerant spacecraft that are launching or more commercially available services that are needed. So it's meant to kind of knock down the requirements to be included in this thing. Now, the pricing works a little differently in Lane 1 as well. There's not going to be any of that launch service or launch support service contract.

There's going to be a straight-up fixed up fixed price contracting on a task order level. So the bid that you give for that launch has to be the full price for that launch, full cost for that launch and service, whatever the related services are. And I guess I should mention that as well. Lane two includes certain payload and integration requirements as well. Security and integration requirements that are specialized would go in that lane so sometimes you know vertical integration or secure payload processing that kind of stuff would be lane two lane one would be seemingly much more open than that so probably the less classified stuff would be over in lane one um though i'm sure itar makes everything really fun right as we've found out

even from sls and such so anyway So anyway, that's kind of the basic setup here. There's a lane one, a lane two, and, you know, it's supposed to be this more kind of open-ended experience. Now, there are some funny quirks to this, right? So, just to give you a general roadmap, we have the draft RFP out now. Today, as I record this, there's an industry day going on that is something I can't get access to either, unfortunately. I don't know if any info will come out of that, but if there is, I'll add an addendum to this podcast if anything pertinent comes out. That's meant to get feedback from people that would be bidding on this and incorporate their

feedback into a second draft, which would be issued in May. And then the final version would come out the end of the third quarter this year. So sometime in the fall, we would see the official RFP go out when people can start submitting their bids. And the awards are expected in summer of 2024. So probably about a year from then, right? We'd late summer 2024, we'll actually see the awards. Now, there are, like I said, kind of funny circumstances in the different requirements. So lane one, you don't have to be certified or have a certification plan, but you do have to have flown to orbit. So anyone who has not flown to orbit by the time the bids are due would have to wait a year to be on ramped into lane one, right? It doesn't mean they're totally out for phase three lane one, but it just means they have to wait a year to, um, to get on ramp to the program. So, you know, if

relativity doesn't do so great on their first launch or two, and they haven't made orbit by the time the bids are due, they're not going to be on ramped. Firefly can already be in, you know, rocket lab can already be in obviously virgin orbit, uh, ABL where they at. If they're, if they're not able to get a successful flight off by the time the bids do, they're not on or after this year. The funniest one might be New Glenn, because New Glenn now has a certification plan in place per a tweet I saw the other day from Eric Berger. They have a three flight option for certification for New Glenn, which is the same kind that SpaceX did. So you have to fly three times

to orbit successfully, provide a bunch of data, less data than you would for a two-flight certification. And there's probably other requirements that are kind of hand-waved away to the general public like me. So NucleN has that certification plan in place, which means they are able to bid on and win lane two. But if they don't fly to orbit by the time the bids are due, which seems unlikely, then they won't be able to be on-ramp to lane one, though potentially they would win lane two. So it's just kind of a funny circumstance. It makes a lot of sense with the intention behind these two lanes. But, you know, overall, it's kind of of it does make funny scenarios

in the long run. So I want to take a sec to dig in some to some other new Glenn topics as well, because it seems particularly relevant at the moment. But before I do that, I want to say thank you to all of you out there who support main engine cutoff over at main engine cutoff.com slash support. There are 865 of you, which is an awesome number. And I'm so thankful for all of you supporting this 100% listener supported show every single month. This episode was produced by 44 executive producers. Thanks to Simon, Chris, Pat, Matt, George, Ryan, Donald, Lee, Chris, Warren, Bob, Russell, Moritz, Joel, Jan, David, Eunice, Rob, Tim Dodd, David Ashtonot, Frank, Julian, Lars from Agile Space, Matt, the Astrogators at SCE, Chris, Fred, Dawn Aerospace, Andrew Harrison, Benjamin, SmallSpark Space Systems, Tyler,

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gets you access to Miko headlines which i do i run through all the stories of the week and give you some hot takes some quick assessment of the stories and keep you up to date on all the stories that you should know about it's not all the stories because there's certain stuff that i'm like you don't need to know about that and i i am the great filtering mechanism for space news uh for you that's the service i provide so if you want to get that head over there uh join the crew i'm sure you will love it and take a shot. I think you would really enjoy it. So once again, thank you all so much for your support. And hopefully I put out some good content for you. All right. So the Blue Origin talk there, the New Glenn talk, got me thinking about a recent story

that we saw, which was that NASA selected New Glenn for the launch of the two Escapade spacecraft that are going out to Mars. And this is due to launch late 2024. I think I saw October right now. This is the first NASA contract for New Glenn, a somewhat surprising contract for a handful of reasons. One is that each spacecraft weighs before propellant about 120 kilograms. I think it's about 200 kilograms fully loaded with propellant. So the total payload mass is like less than, you know, 500 kilograms on a launch vehicle that can place 45 metric tons into low earth orbit. So, uh, that will look amazing in the giant fairing for

sure. Now, the other reason this caught my eye is the launch price. People dug through some of the funding amounts for the simplex missions. This is the NASA program that that is supposed to do these. It's called small, innovative, innovative missions for planetary exploration. That's what simplex stands for. And those missions were cost capped at 55 million dollars a piece now they've all had problems right this is the program that has had uh missions moving all over the place none of them made their original launch they all had some sort of delays whether it was themselves or the launch they're going to hitch a ride on and the escapade mission

itself was removed from the psyche launch which launch, which didn't even happen. But when they changed that mission's trajectory because of its switch from Falcon 9 to Falcon Heavy, Escapade no longer could go to Mars, go into orbit of Mars in the same way. So then the mission overall was they had to take a step back and figure out if this was even still a thing. And Rocket Lab then announced they were going to be redesigning the payload bus for or the spacecraft itself for uh escapade and now it's in full-scale development but the launch was still up in the air um so this is where this all shook out escapade now has a total cost of more than 78 million dollars that includes a launch and reserves to the project eventually people found their way through

paperwork to figure out that the blue origin award for launching Escapade is valued at $20 million. Now, given all the info I just told you, right, that this is a less than 500 kilogram payload, you know, I'm assuming there's some adapter hardware there that mount them together, and there's 45 metric tons available on New Glenn, you could think that, yeah, this, I guess they could put some rideshare payloads on board this launch, um, and fill the space and make up whatever the extra money is between $20 million and the launch price of New Glenn. And I would be right there with you if $20 million is not a number that stuck out to me because I've heard that number said, uh, in the past about launch costs

for New Glenn. Like the cost that a customer would pay for a launch on New Glenn is about $20 million. I've heard that from a place or two, and it's just stuck in my brain. I don't have a lot of good confirmation of that, but I want to float this here as we watch some of these new contracts come out that, you know, this value stuck out from a thing I was told years ago about New Glenn. Now, at the time, I couldn't figure out, all right, is that like a kind of dual launch situation that the overall launch is $40 million and it would be $20 million if you're buying half of it on your way up to GEO or something like that? It was unclear at the time, which makes this even more interesting because I'm pretty sure this is a dedicated launch for New Glenn. Now, maybe New Glenn pitched this as a dedicated launch and they'll eventually find

some other things that can fill the void. I don't know. It's just really interesting. I want to flag it because I want to keep tracking it in the future. And then I want to be able to refer back to the show that I'm doing today if and when I'm either right or wrong and we'll figure it out from there. Now what's interesting about the timing of this, right, late 2024, October 2024, this isn't going to be New Glenn's first launch, meaning Escapade itself will not be New Glenn's first launch. There's going to be some sort of demo mission, hopefully more than that, beforehand. But it is interesting that we are only a year and a half away from a mission that has a launch window going interplanetary, right? It's not like they can just move this six months. And now again, maybe if they're flying 500 kilograms on a 45 metric ton vehicle, they can

launch whenever and just brute force it the rest of the way. At some point, you're meeting the laws of physics, and that's not possible. But your launch window is probably a little bit wider than it would be if you're launching on something that barely has capacity for you. So that matters a little bit. It probably gives them a little bit more wiggle room than they would otherwise have. But it's not infinite. But we don't really have any good timeline estimates on Nucleon, at least no recent ones. The latest date that we heard was fourth quarter 2023. So presumably that is, you know, the end of this year. And we know end of the year dates tend to go. Although there was a photo kind of sneakily posted to

the Blue Origin image gallery on their website. I got a link in the show notes if you want to check it out. The most recent photo as I record this is a stage of New Glenn in their tank cleaning and processing facility, which is the big tall building that if you've ever been to Cape Canaveral, you might have seen some Blue Origin buildings. And there's one really tall one that is clearly for tanks of this size and scale, and that's where this stage is hanging out. And if you click on it, the image caption from November 22nd, 2022 is the New Glenn Stage 1 Qualification Tank. So it's not a structural test article, it's not, you know, some other kind of hardware that they're testing for, it's a qualification tank. And we've seen photos of a second stage floating around the Cape as well.

But there's no, on those photos, there's no explanation as to whether that is a qualification tank or what. It kind of looks like it. It certainly looks a little more real than just a structural test article. It's got insulation. It's got some tank domes. It's got, you know, hardware that you would think is on a real tank. So if they've got qualification tanks floating around from July to November of 2022, it's

like not completely implausible that New Glenn flies this year. Now, the biggest long pole item on that would be the engines, right? The engines, as always, are the big storyline here. Vulcan now has a launch date for May, which, if you've listened to my trip out to Astrobotic, you might know was the date that I had in mind for this. And that does seem a little tight to me even now, so maybe I was a little too optimistic. But the BE-4 engines are being integrated onto Vulcan, already integrated onto Vulcan, getting ready for a static fire test. At the same time that they were doing that, they still had qualification engines that were firing out at their test site in West Texas, and one of those had an issue that had to be investigated and sent back to Kent, Washington, to unpack and figure out what was going on. to unpack and figure out what was going on.

They eventually found that this particular engine that they were firing was producing 5% extra oxygen out of the main oxygen pump. And they don't really, I don't know if they know exactly why yet, but they said that it was a unit-to-unit variation. So, now with that, you know, that particular story is, you know, whatever. Like, they'll figure that one out. I think the fact is, though, that we're that, you know, that particular story is, you know, whatever, like they'll figure that one out. I think the, the fact is though, that we're here in February, 2023, and they're still finding things on qualification engines that they're still investigating, which means that

they're just not up at the big scale up engine production phase to support, uh, a bunch of Vulcans and a bunch of new Glens flying at the same time. Because again, every Vulcan needs two, and they've got kind of run of the place for the first couple, is my understanding off the line. New Glens going to need seven, and some upper stage engines as well, that we haven't really seen any info about recently. Now, of course, we didn't see any info about that qualification tank

until they posted a beautiful photo of it uh in existence so presumably there could be upper stage engines somewhere that are doing fine and we just don't know about it um but we haven't seen that yet so all this is to say is you know watching Vulcan and the rate at which they're able to fly their first mission and then fly their second and third is going to give us a little insight into the engine production line at Blue Origin, and we'll start to know how they can support new Glenn flights from there. But it's not completely implausible to say we're less than a year away from a new Glenn flight. I haven't done a lot of thinking on what I would predict yet, but if Escapade's launching October 2024, and that's probably its second launch,

it kind of feels right, honestly. Now, the benefit is if Escapade slips at all and it misses its launch window, then it doesn't look bad for Blue Origin that they missed the launch window. There's going to be that same kind of scheduled chicken game that we're witnessing with Vulcan and Astrobotic right now. But, you know, I'm just I think I'm just talking this out because I'm starting to have like a little hint of hope in the New Glenn schedule. And I don't know what to do with that

after all these years of ups and downs. I'm excited. You know, I said when we went to Artemis one, the first launch attempt and we were hanging out on the beach at Port Canaveral, the view of the launch complex for New Glenn from Port Canaveral is just spectacular. That is going to be amazing. I think that'll be the closest spot that you can be to that launch, you know, public, private, or I mean, I guess if you're working the launch, you're probably at a place a little bit closer, but like the media site, the press site, the VIP site is going to be farther away at Kennedy Space Center and Cape Canaveral than it is on that beach at Port Canaveral. So this thing's going to be an absolute spectacular site when it does get flying. And I feel like we might be turning the corner. We're starting to see some hardware picks that

are looking pretty good. They're looking pretty real. The biggest thing to track is still, as always, those engines and you know how quickly can they get up a production line and actually produce these things to the scale that they need to you know because they need to be into the 20s and 30s of engines produced before they're going to have uh the full slate of vulcan engines that they need for the first you know however the contract is structured however many of the the engines they get first for their flights before New Glenn gets its set of seven. Unclear to us externally, but it's just by numbers. They need to be creating tens of these, and if they're still finding issues with the qualification engines right now, it's not a great sign that they've produced tens of these already and that they're fully

confident in the tens of those that they've produced. So all in all, I'm excited about phase three contracting. I think New Glenn's got a good shot at playing a big part in that over the next couple of years, whether it be lane two or lane one. And, you know, winning Escapade and getting on the track for launching is certainly a good sign for New Glenn. So and not to mention, if this 20 million thing is right, that would be a real sight to behold in the industry. Because, you know, the whole thing right now is that SpaceX has got the run on the place because they have, you know, all the scheduling or all the pricing flexibility on that part of the market until someone else comes in and

applies some pressure. And we don't yet know who that's going to be that's going to come in and apply pressure to the commercial missions that SpaceX is flying. Is it going to be Rocket Lab with Neutron? Is it going to be Relativity with Terran R? Is it going to be Blue Origin with New Glenn? Somebody has to come in and put some pricing pressure on SpaceX. Otherwise, they can go out and bid, you know, Vulcan minus a dollar and just, you know, take pretty much every contract from here until anything else flies that's remotely close to Falcon 9, or again, till Starship. So that is the kind of situation of the industry right now. And we'll see how it goes. So anyway, that's all I've got for you today.

Thank you all so much for listening. Thanks for your support, as always, at mainenginecutoff.com slash support. If you've got any questions or thoughts, hit me up on email, anthony at mainenginecutoff.com, on Twitter at wehavemiko, though I'm not checking that as much anymore because I'm checking mastodon at miko on the spacey.space instance. I've got links to those in the show notes. And as always, join the OffNominal Discord,

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