Main Engine Cut Off - T+274: The Vulcan and Artemis Roadmaps

Episode Date: May 17, 2024

United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan debut went smoothly, but sluggish hardware integration raises doubts about meeting commitments, while Orion faces heat shield issues, potentially shaking up the Artemis manifest.This episode of Main Engine Cut Off is brought to you by 33 executive producers—Lee Ryan, SmallSpark Space Systems, Benjamin, Pat, Lee, Fred, Warren, Josh from Impulse Space, Bob, Jan, Kris, Russell, The Astrogators at SEE, Tim Dodd (the Everyday Astronaut!), David, Harrison, Steve, Matt, Will and Lars from Agile Space, Joonas, Theo and Violet, Stealth Julian, Tyler, Frank, Pat from KC, Better Every Day Studios, Donald, Joel, and four anonymous—and 817 other supporters.TopicsPentagon worried by slow pace of ULA’s Vulcan rocket development - The Washington PostULA could fly dummy payload on next Vulcan launch if Dream Chaser is delayed - SpaceNewsFirst Dream Chaser spaceplane needs more work when it gets to launch site | Ars TechnicaAmazon’s new satellite technician certification and Kuiper facilityNASA says Artemis II report by its inspector general is unhelpful and redundant | Ars TechnicaNASA may alter Artemis III to have Starship and Orion dock in low-Earth orbit | Ars TechnicaThe ShowLike the show? Support the show!Email your thoughts, comments, and questions to [e-mail] @WeHaveMECOFollow @[e-mail] on MastodonListen to MECO HeadlinesListen to Off-NominalJoin the Off-Nominal DiscordSubscribe on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Pocket Casts, Spotify, Google Play, Stitcher, TuneIn or elsewhereSubscribe to the Main Engine Cut Off NewsletterArtwork photo by SpaceXWork with me and my design and development agency: Pine Works

Hello and welcome to Main Engine Cutoff, I am Anthony Colangelo. I've got a bit of catching up to do, to be honest. It's been a little while since I did a show here on the main feed. I've done a lot of headlines show in the past month, but hasn't been a lot that's been catching my eye in terms of things that I had to break down or analyze or whatever. But a few things have kind of built up to this point. I want to talk about some United Launch Alliance storylines from Vulcan, Atlas V, and what their plans are moving into the future. And then a little bit about Artemis manifesting. And I guess in both cases, it's,

you know, planning for schedules that are sure to slip. And what do you do in the cases where things arrive out of order? It's sort of a connector between both of these storylines. But to start on the ULA one, since that may be a little bit shorter, they flew their first launch of Vulcan a couple of months ago, and it went really well from what we could see on the outside. There hasn't been a lot of post-flight publications, I would say, in terms of how things went, other than general reports that it went really well.

I talked about it at the time, but I was pretty surprised how smooth it looked, like the Blue Origin BE-4 engines on the first stage worked out on that first launch that they had no issues with that or this brand new centaur that they're flying uh on vulcan as well so all in all for a first flight of a vehicle things went really well um and i'm not sure what i expected the pace to be beyond that, but I did expect it to be a little bit faster in terms of seeing the ULA side hardware come together. And what I mean by that is we've only recently, as of three days ago, saw that the second BE-4 engine was mated to the first stage of Vulcan for the second flight. stage of Vulcan for the second flight. We always knew that the payload for the second flight, Sierra Nevada's, or I guess Sierra Space's Dream Chaser spacecraft that'll be carrying cargo up to the ISS, we always knew that was going to be, schedule-wise, the longer item for the second

flight of Vulcan. But I did expect the rocket to be waiting around more than it appears that it will be. The second engine, they tweeted a month ago that it was rolling into the factory for integration, and only three days ago they tweeted a picture of it fully integrated. Now, how old were one or both of those photos, we don't know, but it does seem like they're just now getting the first stage together for the second flight here. And certainly there was work to be done between the two flights. It's not just, you know, if the hardware was ready, they're going to fire it off the next day, even if the first flight went well. There's stuff that they need to do and run data on and do analysis to make sure that things went as well as they thought it did and be ready for the second flight,

implement any changes they need for procedures or whatever. But the hardware still does seem pretty slow. And you factor that in with what's going on elsewhere in their business. And it does, you know, similar to the math that I did for Project Kuiper a couple of months back, the math builds up in a strange way for ULA at this point. So much so that there's been a story in the past week over on the Washington Post, Christian Davenport had this, that there's worry from the U.S. military side of things about the pace of ULA's development for Vulcan, so that the Air Force Assistant Secretary Frank Covelli sent a letter to Boeing and Lockheed and said, I need you to look into what's going on here and their ability to scale up to meet the things that they've committed to, to this point, you know, they're years late on the first national security launch with Vulcan.

They're still months out, because they need to fly the second mission to be certified for military launches, to actually then go ahead and fly the contracts that they won as part of the most recent round of the National Security Space Launch Program, where they have 25 national security launches to fly. The original agreement was by the end of 2027. Now, are payloads going to be ready enough in time for those 25 launches by the end of 2027? Always a mystery. But that was what the original agreement was for. And SpaceX has flown a handful at this point, but they fly fewer missions for that program under this phase of agreements than ULA does. ULA won 60% of those launches, SpaceX won 40. So SpaceX has fewer to do total, and nobody

at this point doubts the ability for SpaceX to put up a lot of rockets into space. They've flown 50 this calendar year, as in 2024. Now, the pace on the ULA side has grown increasingly slow over the years. They've done just a pretty tiny amount of launches each year, and that's the payloads dwindling for Atlas V, for sure. Amazon Kuiper, they have bought a bunch of Atlas 5s and have not really gotten anything up yet on that. There's still no dates coming from Amazon and when they'll be ready for their first full-scale satellite launch. So the final Atlas 5 missions, the things that they're flying out,

you know, we've got Starliner that's still sitting on the pad right now, or soon to be sitting on the pad. It's sitting in the integration building right now. They're working on a helium leak issue and after ULA worked on a valve issue in Centaur. So Starliner is a little bit of a logjam out at the launch site. I don't think Amazon is going to be a logjam for those last Atlas 5 missions because Amazon's schedule of building these satellites seems to be quite slow. But these are all things that Vulcan competes with. And so when you look at what a typical schedule is for a new launch vehicle to get up and running, how many launches do they do the first few years, right? It's like very few. It's like two to five launches a year

for the first couple before you're able to ramp up to whatever your normal operating cadence is going to be. Even Falcon 9, you know, it flies pretty much every other day at this point, and it took a couple of years to get flying to a regular rate. And it was clearly designed to be able to operate at the scale that it's doing now. You've got a scale of operations, but the vehicle itself was capable of doing what we're seeing. And Vulcan has always been touted as that as well. You know, ULA said when they signed this big agreement with Amazon, that they were going to be scaling up, building a second mobile launch crawler. They're going to be building, doubling, you know, the hardware that matters to be able to process these vehicles in flow. But that's a really long

process. So right now, they still have the case where they've got to share that pad with Atlas V. Atlas V has missions like Starliner that demand a certain importance from their operations and also take up a lot of time because there are, you know, this issue that we saw that delayed the first Starliner launch was a valve issue that they could have kind of resolved on the pad during the launch flow if it was not humans sitting on top of this rocket. But there was different flight rules because of that. And then when they went to address that, there was an issue with the Starliner side. So that has now grown to eating up an entire month, basically, at the launch site, if not more, with all the prep and the actual activities and then the stuff they'll have to do after the fact, it's going to eat a huge amount of the calendar.

And that's a confounding factor. You know, it's less worrying now when there's still a lot of Vulcan hardware that's in the factory being worked on. But when you're the assistant secretary of the Air Force and you're worried about ULA scaling up to meet cadence, you kind of look at that and say, all right, well, if this happened during the flow of one of our launches, how much would this have set us back or how many launches would this have pushed out of the calendar year where we need these things to be up on orbit and operating for us or the way that we've planned needs to demand a certain schedule?

the way that we've planned needs to demand a certain schedule. That is stuff that should cause concern for a company that has talked a lot about upping cadence and we've seen very little of that in action. Now, I don't think Frank Calvelli should be worried about Amazon Kuiper blotting out the sun for ULA's manifest. But how do they get to certification here? They've flown their first mission, they need to fly the second. Dream Chaser does not appear to be ready until next year at this point. ULA says they'll have the Vulcan side hardware ready by mid-2024, so they're expecting around the summer sometime to be ready to fly again. Dream Chaser has wrapped up some environmental testing out in Ohio,

and now it's now heading to Florida. But there's a bunch of work to be done when it gets to Florida, including finishing its heat shield and then doing more integration for the actual mission. So there's a long road to go there. Sierra Space says third or fourth quarter this year. It seems very unlikely that that will happen before 2025. If you're ULA, you really risk sitting and waiting for Sierra Space to update schedules accordingly.

And then all of a sudden being like, well, now at this point, we just got to wait for Dream Chaser to be ready because now we're only a month or two away. And, you know, the lag between whatever the second and third flight hardware is for ULA is going to be a certain distance and we just need to fly this vehicle. And that's kind of where I feel like they're at right now. I really do feel, you know, I don't know what's going on behind closed doors. I don't know what communication they've received from CR space about Dream Chaser that the public does not have access to. I don't know what ULA is planning internally in terms of the hardware flow for Flight 2 or Flight 3 or whatever,

but it does feel like from the outside at this moment, ULA really needs to make the call and say, we're just going to fly this Flight 2 hardware the moment it's ready, put the mass simulator on top and fly this thing. The moment we're ready to get through this portion of Vulcan development, get certified so that we can begin flying those national security missions, that we can basically move on from the development test phase of Vulcan into the operations phase. Dream Chaser itself, even if, you know, let's say ULA was confident that third quarter is possible, and they're going to wait for that. Dream Chaser itself is the first flight of a vehicle going to the ISS that presents so many different potentials for four, five, six month slips. You know, if one

thing happens with Dream Chaser that needs a little bit more work before launch. They discover it in the final flow. They've got a valve issue. They've got some sort of leak. Not only do they have to then fix that technical issue, but you got to get remanifested on the ISS schedule. And that can bump you months at a time. It's a busy place. There's crew going up and down from the US, from Russia. There's cargo going up from both places. There's certain demands of what docking ports are needed and what configuration and where the sun angles are at for the ISS that either prevents docking or makes it more possible. There are so many competing demands on the manifest that it literally can bump you months if you miss a very small launch window. So I don't even feel like Dream Chaser is a reliable thing on the

calendar. And the fact that ULA is stuck waiting on that is really problematic. Now, if they are using that to play Schedule Chicken, and they know that because of hardware they're getting from Blue Origin on the engines, you know, they only got these engines for the second flight quite recently. So if they know there's a huge delay before they'd even have engines for the third launch, or maybe they've got some internal hardware that they're still working on for the third launch, and that pushes them to say, you know, we literally can't do the third launch until May 2025, then you're fine sitting around waiting for Dream Chaser, right? You can just make it look like that's the thing that's delaying the second launch and sort of smoke and mirrors your way into looking like

you've got a normal delay between the second and third launch. So maybe that's what's going on. You know, we don't have a sense from ULA on what the timing is of their third launch. They keep saying we've got US military launches on the schedule for late fall and then early 2025. U.S. military launches on the schedule for late fall and then early 2025. But that feels similarly made up until the Dream Chasers schedule is clear when you've got Sierra Space saying third or fourth quarter. So there's some things that just don't add up here. And there are some confounding factors from elsewhere, you know, the Blue Origin suppliers, supply concerns, the Amazon Project Kuiper mystery of how frequently that's going to fly. And if all goes well with Starliner this month, you've got another one of those coming up in six months to a year. And again, that can eat

a month on your calendar, no problem, let alone the switch that they need to do between Atlas 5 and Vulcan configurations for, you know, hardware or launch mounts or whatever work there is to do to switch between those things. It could be a while as well. So yeah, I guess I'm just sort of having a similar rumination on sort of the episode I did about Project Kuiper, where you start looking at the hard numbers of a project like this, and it breaks down pretty quickly. So what does that mean? Does that mean that the US Air Force is going to, or Space Force is going to look and say, hey, actually, we're going to reassign a bunch of these things over to SpaceX and make SpaceX the 60% winner for this phase and get these payloads flying? Certainly plausible.

I think there was talk a couple months ago about what clauses they have to be able to reassign these missions as needed. The other aspect around all this is ULA being up for sale, reportedly. That's still a thing out there. I still cannot make sense of this. Blue Origin continues to be the one that's named as the most likely person or company that would acquire this, but it doesn't make any sense to me. I don't know why Blue Origin wants to buy ULA. You know, Blue Origin has a launch site out on the East Coast. They don't have one on the West Coast. So you could say, is this them buying it for space at Vandenberg Space Force Base? Maybe, but that's not that important, I don't think. It's not that motivating to buy something with this much hardware and baggage, really. You know, SpaceX flies a lot of missions from the East Coast to polar orbits.

They now fly a bunch of launches from the West Coast to mid-inclination orbits. So with a size of a vehicle of New Glenn, you could fly a respectable payload to polar orbit from Cape Canaveral. You know, that doesn't need to go all the way to geostationary where the New Glenn performance sounds like it drops off a bit. You know, it does really well to low earth orbit. And that's mostly where things are going to if it's from polar. So they could do polar orbits fine from East Coast. So I'm kind of counting that one out as a reason. If they're looking at it as like a real estate acquisition. The other option is, you know,

a real estate acquisition the other option is you know they they do want to uh own the actual vehicles that ula is flying and maybe that's true but it's a weird message to send the same year that new glenn is supposed to get off the launch pad and then the other option i'm left with is blue origin was worried sufficiently worried about somebody else buying ULA and unleashing them in a world not burdened with being the child of Boeing and Lockheed Martin. You know, if another prime contractor was to buy ULA or if private equity was to buy ULA, those were the other rumored competitors, Maybe Blue Origin was seeing that as something that would threaten their positioning in the market in the future. And they want to sort of like predatorily jack the price up quite a bit so that those other competitors don't follow through with the acquisition or buy it so that there are only two competitors,

SpaceX and Blue Origin. If that is the reasoning, will that kind of acquisition get through in today's acquisition market? Unlikely. This isn't the case where it's a giant military prime buying another one, which we've seen happen a lot and have been things that have increasingly got a lot more skepticism applied to them from the regulatory environment in the US. This isn't that exactly, right? It's not not consolidation of the aerospace market, but it isn't the same kind as we've seen in the past. So I still am flummoxed by the storyline. It does tie into what is happening at ULA right now. I still honestly don't really believe it.

So I guess we'll see when we get there. All right, I got a couple of Artemis things I want to talk about before we're out of here for today. But I do want to say thank you to everyone who supports Main Engine Cutoff over at mainenginecutoff.com slash support. There are 850-ish. Patreon made the number so hard, guys. It's so hard to understand now. But it's something around 850-ish. Patreon made the number so hard, guys. It's so hard to understand now,

but it's something around 850 of you paying every single month for Main Engine Cutoff and supporting what I do here, and I'm so thankful for that. That includes 33 executive producers who made this episode possible. Thanks to Ryan, SmallSpark Space Systems, Benjamin, Pat, Lee, Fred, Warren, Josh from Impulse Space, Bob, Jan, Chris, Russell, the Astrogators at SCE, Tim Dodd, the Everyday Astronaut, David Harrison, Steve, Matt, Will and Lars from Agile Space, Eunice, Theo and Violet, Stealth Julian, Tyler, Frank, Pat from KC, Better Everyday Studios, Donald and Joel, and four anonymous executive producers. Thank you all so much for producing this episode, for making this possible. And I will say, the vast majority of those 850 people on Patreon are at the $3 a month or more level, and they get access to

Miko Headlines. It's a show that I put out every week to 10 days. Sometimes it's a little longer because stories break right before I'm about to record. But I run through all the headlines of the entire space industry. I sort through everything that you need to know. I take out the ones that aren't important, and I get you caught up on what you need to know in the space industry. And I do all that while you support the show. It's a great little back and forth we've got going here. So if you like this show, I think you'll dig that one. Check it out over at mandatedcutoff.com slash support. And I thank you all so much for that. All right, the Artemis side is stories that have come out recently that make me just say, what's going on here? That's generally what this vibe is. So two things. First was,

we did finally get some pictures of the heat shield of Artemis I's Orion vehicle by way of an Inspector General report. It was something that we had heard about, that there were issues with the heat shield and that it was in pretty rough shape, but we have never seen these pictures before. And it's pretty bad. It's the really, really bad photos. They look terrible. The heat shield looks rough. And more worrying than that, NASA has not yet, they've recreated the issue in a lab, but they have not yet fully understood the root cause of this. Now they say by the end of June, they should have a report done that would contain that. So maybe there are people within NASA that already know the root cause and are

just working on publishing that. But they say they have recreated it, you know, in laboratory conditions. They obviously can't test a full size one of these things because it's huge and they publishing that um but they say they have recreated it you know in laboratory conditions uh they obviously can't test a full size one of these things because it's huge and they don't have the capabilities to uh recreate the re-entry environment for something of that scale on the ground down here um but this is a huge risk to the schedule of artemis 2 it is a huge risk to artemis 2 itself if they can't solve the heat shield issues um and there's been a lot of talk in the in the media of uh Victor Glover being out on the you know interview trail talking about he's the one following along with the heat shield for the Artemis 2 mission and

talking about the fact that you know they're going to understand this they're going to figure out what they need to to make sure that they're flying a safe mission for artemis 2 um we debated on off nominal a couple of weeks ago of you know will artemis 2 become not the moon mission as intended it is intended to be do they want to do another mission with a lower re-entry speed to characterize this further or try some changes out or whatever i think that's unlikely because they've already done a crew assignment for a moon mission, and there's pressure around making sure that that's true. And there's pressure around the fact that they don't have that much SLS hardware left until that new upper stage,

the exploration upper stage, is ready to roll. So there are some hard constraints on the actual manifesting of these missions. Overall, I think it's really bad that these photos didn't come out if you applied this to any other you know uh organization in the space world and a heat shield came back looking like that on a human vehicle and those photos didn't come out for this long um they would be torn to shreds by nas and Congress. So that is a big deal. I think they'll figure out what they need to do for Artemis 2 and fly this as the lunar mission it's intended to be. I don't really think there's another option and whether that means this gets

delayed quite a bit. Then I think they're in a similar situation that i mentioned with ula in their flight two and three that uh well guess what artemis three the schedule for that is who the hell knows at this point so if we're going to take another year or two to sort out the heat shield or artemis two and make sure we can fly a lunar mission safely and that pushes artemis two into 2027 then it doesn't look so bad that artemis 3 is happening in 2029. Um, and you've kind of like, you know, hid that crazy delay that would happen, uh, rather than flying something in 25 and waiting until 29 for the actual lander mission. I think they might end up in a territory like that because at this point, you know, the, the Artemis 2 is slated for late 2025.

I think it was September 2025 right now. If they have to, based on what they find in these investigations of the heat shield, if they have to rework something or go in and analyze the heat shield itself, that's going to be a year delay at a minimum from that schedule. Because they're going to have to demate Orion from its service module and go in and look and do whatever work they need, remate things. It does push it back quite a bit. So I think, you know, if there's work to be done here and they can't get to their flight rationale by way of a different trajectory or different operations or whatever finding would be,

I think we're looking at another pretty hefty delay for Artemis 2 to get to the point where they're flying it with full sign off. That does make Artemis 3 schedule up in the air. But I think that's up in the air anyway. There's another story about the decision around Artemis 3 and what they actually want to do with that mission. Eric Berger at Ars Technica, uh, had a story a month ago or so that NASA's looking at alternate plans for Artemis 3. Maybe they'll have Starship and Orion dock in low Earth orbit and not actually do the full landing on Artemis 3 mission, but make it more, you know, one of the Apollo missions that happened in the run-up to the moon landing. Take it in pieces and develop this out slowly. Um, it's, I really don't even know what to make

of this because part of that mission is that they want to test the whole docking system and make sure everything looks good for the integration angle on that. Um, fine. Is docking the thing I'm concerned about on a mission that goes all the way out to the lunar surface and back? No, I'm really not concerned about docking. NASA has docked things before. SpaceX has docked things before. They dock things together constantly. Like, this is not a major concern that I have of that mission. I don't look at the Artemis 3 manifest and go, man, if it weren't for that docking, I'd be so confident in this mission happening on a good timeline. Not at all is docking anywhere on the list of things that I'm concerned about for that mission. So again, I think a lot of this is the Artemis manifest

is completely up in the air at this point, in my view. There are a weird situation we're in right now with sls where we only have a couple of icps stages left and we're not yet we got good visibility into what the schedule for the exploration upper stage is for sls block 1b so that is math that everyone has to do in terms of like when is it worth spending an orion and an icps to do a certain mission. There's talk, you know, our conversion talking a lot about the fact that they could fly, could they fly one of these missions without the ICPS to just an SLS with just an Orion and a service module and do a Leo mission that would dock with Starship and save that ICPS for a landing mission in the future. You know, on the lander side of things, SpaceX and Blue Origin both have uncrewed demos that

have to happen to the lunar surface first. Stars has to do a lot of uh orbital refilling demonstration before they're able to even do one of these full-up missions um and all of that is just intermingled into this crazy jumble that nasa's in the hardest budgetary environment it's seen in years in terms of uh a lot of competing demands and in things that are imposed from the Congress side and uncertainty on what to do, while at the same time, not really having a good sense of how all of these pieces come together and how brittle all of the pieces are in the way they fit together. You know, if one thing isn't ready for Artemis 3, the whole thing's not ready. And the same goes even for gateway missions. You know, if one thing's not ready for a gateway mission, that thing has to be co-manifested on an SLS Block 1B with the

exploration upper stage to go dock to the gateway. If the gateway's not ready, if the hardware that's going to dock to the gateway is not ready, if the EUS is not ready, if Orion's not ready, all of these pieces are so intermingled because of how much they're jamming into each individual mission of this program, that it makes a real log jam when you're looking at moments like this where you need to replan. So I find myself a little stuck on both of these on the ULA side and the Artemis side of like, what, how does this schedule even work? What is the forecast for not the next mission, but the ones beyond that? And how does that impact planning for flight two in both cases? In the ULA case, I think they should fly flight two as soon as they can, unless they're embarrassed by how far away flight three is. And in the NASA case, they probably should wait a little bit for flight two to make sure that they're flying a good heat

shield because flight three is very far away. And we all know that that's sort of where I stand. So I thought it was worth running through some of these thoughts. Sorry if it was too rambly, but there's been a lot going on in both these departments. So if you've got any questions or thoughts on all of that, hit me up on email, anthonyatmanagingcutoff.com, or on Twitter at WeHaveMiko. And until next time, thank you all so much for your support.

As always, I appreciate you, and I appreciate you listening, and I will talk to you soon.