Main Engine Cut Off - T+276: Mars Sample Return Studies, NSSL Phase 3 Lane 1 Selections

Episode Date: June 14, 2024

NASA selected the organizations who will be carrying out mission design studies for the Mars Sample Return rethink, and the US Space Force selected the first 3 bidders for the National Security Space Launch Program Phase 3 Lane 1.This episode of Main Engine Cut Off is brought to you by 33 executive producers—Lee, Kris, Joel, Ryan, Russell, Steve, Theo and Violet, Better Every Day Studios, Joonas, Harrison, Pat from KC, Tim Dodd (the Everyday Astronaut!), Frank, Josh from Impulse Space, Stealth Julian, SmallSpark Space Systems, Will and Lars from Agile Space, Tyler, Bob, Fred, Donald, Warren, The Astrogators at SEE, Jan, David, Matt, Benjamin, Pat, and four anonymous—and 817 other supporters.TopicsNASA Exploring Alternative Mars Sample Return Methods - NASANASA selects seven companies for MSR studies - SpaceNewsT+273: Mars Sample Return - Main Engine Cut OffBlue Origin, SpaceX, ULA win $5.6 billion in Pentagon launch contracts - SpaceNewsT+254: Mars Sample Return, Vulcan, NSSL Phase 3 (with Eric Berger) - Main Engine Cut OffT+255: NSSL Phase 3 Addendum - Main Engine Cut OffThe 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 Managing Cutoff, I am Anthony Colangelo. There's two stories I wanted to comment on briefly. I'm not sure I have a ton to say on each of these, but a few things worth mentioning. The first up is Mars Sample Return. This is a follow-up to a show two months ago, I think we did, when NASA announced that they are heading back to the drawing board on Mars Sample Return. They wanted to get proposals for mission studies in from all parts of the industry, NASA centers, really anyone remotely willing and able to chip in with some thoughts on Mars Sam Emperor Return.

And what's interesting, it wasn't proposals for a new all-up mission. It was proposals for mission studies. This could be you're proposing a piece of the mission. It could be that you're proposing an end-to-end new design or new architecture for the mission. They left it pretty wide open in terms of what you could propose to study in this case. And now they've selected teams to go after those ideas. They are going to be getting these studies done by NASA's JPL, John Hopkins, APL, a handful of NASA centers as well, but most notably seven industry proposers selected that are receiving $1.5 million for a 90-day study that would kick off mid-July. A 45-day study would be due, and then the full report in 90 days.

And that point forward, what's interesting is NASA would basically then just have all these studies in hand and get to decide what to do with Mars Ampereturn. So this could be, you know, we hate all these ideas, we're keeping it exactly as is, and 2040 will do fine. It could be we're re-baselining this entire program around this idea. They are very open-ended in terms of the inputs they want, the outputs they're going to generate, and what they're going to do with that. So I think there's some concern around that I want to touch on. But let's talk about the companies selected here for these mission studies. Seven companies selected, and all we received was the title of their proposed study.

So we don't have any details on any of this unless the companies want to start releasing some of that. So I'll just read the list and call out notable titles. Lockheed Martin, SpaceX, is going to be working on a proposal titled Enabling Mars Sample Return with Starship. So they in fact did the thing that I was telling them to do in the last show. Aerojet Rocketdyne, Blue Origin, they mentioned Artemis in their headline, so Blue Moon something or other. Quantum Space, Northrop Grumman, and Whittinghill Aerospace. The last one, I found some references to Whitting Hill Aerospace, having worked on suborbital rockets before, solids, I'm sure. So it looks

probably mostly, yeah, this is like a single stage ascent vehicle is what they call out in their proposal. It's a pretty uninspiring list, if I'm honest. It's weird. This whole thing is very strange, honestly. Seven companies for $1.5 million. Jake Robbins, my co-host on Off Nominal, keeps pointing out that Mars Amperturn got like $300 and some million this year in the budget, and they're giving out seven $1.5 million contracts. So, you know, he wants some itemized lists on where the money is going otherwise and what it's being spent on. I thought this list would have been a lot longer. You know, seven companies, most of which are kind of like have been roughly involved in this program to some degree.

You know, Lockheed Martin and Aerojet, they've landed a lot of stuff on Mars. Northrop Grumman was involved in the program already. SpaceX is doing the right thing. Blue Origin is doing, you know doing the new technology thing as well. Quantum Space is a little bit of a kicker. Whitting Hill is a smaller company that there's not a lot of results for on Google or Space News. But that's kind of it. And I know there were tons of companies working on proposals. I've heard from a few. I've got a couple of texts in the last couple of days of people being kind of bummed out at how this turned out. I figured this would have been spread around a lot wider than just seven companies. And in particular, you know, just

just these five companies of, you know, if we count quantum space and Whitting Hill Aerospace as a little bit of a kicker, just those other five counties. It's very, I don't know. There's something about this that, that feels very strange. Um, you know, the starship aspect here is still remains the most interesting because what are they going to do on the ascent?

That's a, that's a curious question. Um, and you know, I guess the other aspect here would be think about the timeline, mid July, 90 day study. So the studies are due mid-October.

Presidential election happens early November. Bill Nelson is probably like, this seems like a problem for the next NASA administration. This NASA administration doesn't seem to want to deal with Mars sample return. They seem to put this timeline together in a way that distinctly kicks it to the next one. Because these studies are going to come in, they're going to, you know, analyze them for a couple of weeks. That puts you into knowing, all right, did Biden win election again? Did Trump win? Is there going to be a new NASA administrator either way? Is this a situation? If you remember the trailing days of the Trump administration last time, there was a lot of reports that Jim Bridenstine was going to be out regardless,

whether Trump won or not, that he had, in that case, it kind of been like a fractured relationship with the administration over a series of issues, and he was going to be heading on out. So there would be a new NASA administrator either direction. This time, I don't know, maybe Bill Nelson does want to retire and wants to step down, enjoy doing it for these four years. No big deal. I'm going to, you know, got a bunch of state dinners out of the Artemis Accords and I'm going to head on out and not deal with Marsamp return. But that definitely puts the timeline in a weird spot. You know, they're not going to be, they're going to be getting these proposals back at the start of next fiscal year. We're going to be in a continuing resolution. There's

not going to be a budget here in the U.S. during the presidential election. Never is really anyway, even when it's not a presidential election, especially so then. That then sets up for either the Biden administration submitting their budget request for the following year in like February, March, whenever that comes out. If it's a change of administration, the transition team is going to come in. There's not going to be a budget until like March or April or later. So Marsamp Return is not really going to know their budget shape until that time period. Not even sure there's enough time between getting proposals in October and the budget request being put together that they could inform their request based on what they heard from the studies. That doesn't seem like a long enough timeline either.

So this is a very awkward way to land the schedule and a very short list of uninspiring, an uninspiringly short list. The individual, you know, contributions here can be inspiring on their own for sure. Enabling Mars Emperor and Starship sounds really cool. Leveraging Artemis for Mars Emperor sounds cool. Single stage Mars Ascent Vehicle. Sounds awesome.

But a short list like that, you know, I don't know. It just feels a little bit like you probably could have made this 14, 15, 16 selections. Some companies out there that are thinking

about Mars on a commercial basis, whether that's Relativity or Impulse or, you know, Rocket Lab certainly doing a lot of interesting planetary stuff on the private side. I don't know that they submitted a bit in this case. But there were definitely a ton of other proposals submitted in this case. And to come away with only seven is kind of interesting. So I don't know that I have that much more to say on this, to be honest, other than, I guess, just me flagging my confusion and discomfort generally with, uh, with this situation and the open-endedness of this.

I think the open-endedness is good to some extent, but I think, you know, I still am, if you go back and listen to that show I did two months ago, I'm still much of that same mindset that the messaging was very strange. You know, you're saying this many billions of dollars in 2040, it's too much and too late. So we're going all the way back to the drawing board in 2024 to try to do the most complex mission that we've ever undertaken in a robotic sense sooner for less money, using new ideas, but they need to be new ideas that have been tried before so that we know they're tried and true new ideas. None of it made any sense. It was completely disjointed and it definitely felt like they were just kind of kicking this, you know, a couple of months until somebody else can figure out how to actually handle this.

So I want to talk about the National Security Space Launch Program as well. But before I do that, I want to say thank you to all of you who are supporting Main Engine Cutoff over at mainenginecutoff.com slash support. There are 33 executive producers who made this episode of the show possible. Thanks to Lee, Chris, Joel, Ryan, Russell, Steve, Theo, and Violet, Better Everyday Studios, Eunice, Harrison, Pat from KC, Tim Dodd, David Ashtonot, Frank, Josh from Impulse Space, Stealth Julian, SmallSpark Space Systems, Will and Lars from Agile Space, Tyler, Bob, Fred, Donald Warren, the Astrogators at SCE, Jan, David, Matt, Benjamin, Pat, and four anonymous executive producers.

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You'll get the same content in both places once I get this all configured. So I'll let you know how that comes together. But for now, thanks all so much for the support. All right, the National Security Space Launch Program. We are back talking about this. This is about phase three. This is the next generation of national security space launches here in the U.S. The U.S. Space Force runs this program.

We talked about this a while back on the show. It was probably a few episodes back now where we were talking about phase three there was a show or two we did about this because it's a really interesting setup this is different than um phases one and two right those were very much uh submit your already certified launch vehicles we will select a batch and we will assign missions accordingly. This is a different strategy. This is a strategy that has two lanes now. There's lane one and lane two. Lane two is very much what I just said. They're going to pick some really heavy lift launch vehicles that are buttoned up and certified and they know they can hit everything they need them to hit very reliably. So that lane

continues on on its own. Lane one, however, is a bit different. It operates more like something like the NASA Commercial Lunar Payload Services Program. They on-ramp competitors that are able to bid for task orders. So the US Space Force would put out a task order that says, we have this satellite that needs to get to this location, give us your best bid. We will select a launch provider for that particular launch, maybe groups of launches if there's something that needs to go up in two or three batches or something like that. But it's all task order based. So these companies are not being selected in this case for launch contracts. Whenever they get picked by the Space Force, they're getting on ramped to the program. So we got news yesterday that Blue Origin, SpaceX,

and United Launch Alliance have been on-ramp for the first of the Lane 1 contracts. These contracts are worth potentially up to $5.6 billion over five years if one were to win all of them at maximum price, which I don't know how that balance works. But they're going to be competing on these awards for orders that start in fiscal year 2025 through 2029. So think October to October of 2028, maybe through 2029. So October of 2029 itself, the launch orders that are going to be placed here could be up to two years in advance. So they might put out a task order in October for a launch two Octobers from then, or one October from then, I guess, if you're if you're one of those people that counts that way. So it will kind of be mission dependent on what the timeline actually is here. Now to be eligible to be on-ramped for

this lane, you needed to either have flown a vehicle by December 2024, or have a credible path to flying a vehicle by December of 2024. And you also need to hit their performance metrics. So for lane one, you know, lane two is like nine orbits that they defined heavy lift to these orbits direct to geostationary in some cases, high requirements in that case, lane one is much lower is they need 15,000 pounds mass to orbit at a 500 nautical miles circular orbit 63.4 degrees inclination. Those are the specifics they give you. But there's this other classifier here that's really interesting. This can be achieved with a single launch or multiple launches,

minimum of 1,000 kilograms per launch. So that is the requirement there. One metric ton to that 500 nautical mile orbit, 63 degrees inclination. So you're thinking, you know, not the electrons of the world, not even the Firefly the electrons of the world, not even the Firefly alphas of the world, not the Terran ones. This is from the next class up and higher. Neutron, Terran R from Relativity, ABL, RS1, that'll be in the mix for sure. And then the bigger vehicles like we've got here with SpaceX ULA and Blue Origin. So it isn't tiny launchers. It's this kind of like medium size and up. I think Firefly with their next version of, or that kind of like collaboration they're doing with Antares, that could probably hit these orbits. I think they

have some fairing questions there on the fairing size, but that certainly puts them in the ballpark for this. Now, competitors can on-ramp to this every year. They on-ramped these first three right off the bat, and certainly they'll be there to bid for the first task orders that are going to hit this fall or whenever their first one goes out. But every single year, there's an opportunity to on-ramp new competitors that are starting to fly their vehicle or getting very close to flying their vehicle. So as Neutron flies, that would presumably get on-ramped at the next opportunity. Same with RS-1.

You know, they had a flight already that failed, so they're still working on their second. So we'll see how that goes. And as they roll out, they may on-ramp in the future if they want to. Same goes when Relativity gets around to Terran R, etc., etc. So as this program rolls on, there will be more and more competitors bidding for task orders, assuming that they want to get on-ramped to the program.

A couple interesting things to note here. There's some reporting out there that SpaceX bids Starship for this, which, like, yeah, why not? They're going to probably bid Falcon 9 over in the Lane 2 variant because they've got that all certified and everything, but if this lane, they can scoop up some Starship launch contracts. It seems like a no-brainer win to have Starship involved in this side if it's not a make-or-break situation for the company, but it could feed a lot of interesting launch contracts. It puts them into the mix competing with these other vehicles in a really interesting and dynamic way. I think

that's awesome. The news on the Blue Origin front here is that the Space Force thinks they have a credible path to flying by December 2024. I feel optimistic about that as well. We're starting to see more BE-4s heading to ULA for Vulcan flights. That presumably means the production line is going pretty well with BE-4s and maybe they've been, you know, building up a little bit of a stable of engines for Nucle-N. They're doing a lot of tests out at the Cape. They've got a lot of hardware flowing around the Cape. We haven't seen the engines attached to a Nucle-N stage yet, but that's kind of the last thing that we haven't seen yet. And, you know, overall, it looks like they're making good progress. It seems launch license is starting to get processed for a launch late in the year for New Glenn.

So it does seem like they're getting close. Now, maybe they don't hit it exactly. But again, they either needed to have launched already or have a credible path to flying by December 2024. Doesn't even mean that you need to hit the path to fly by 2024. You just needed to have a credible path to get there. mean that you need to hit the path to fly by 2024. You just needed to have a credible path to get there. So, you know, there was no paper rockets being bid and on-ramped in lane one until they're actually meet whatever specifications the Space Force deems a credible path. They have pretty high standards, so I would trust that. And that's a good validation that this is the case.

Now, this lane is going to make for interesting bidding. You know, the fact that they called out single or multiple launches means that some of these bids are going to be able to be handled in that way. You know, if it's a constellation of some satellites and you've got Vulcan saying, we'll do this all in a single launch and distribute them, or New Glenn certainly saying, we'll do this in a single launch and distribute them. Or you've got Starship or small launch vehicles saying, we'll put these up, you know, as we fly onesie twosie missions, and we'll get them all up there over the series of a mission. And then you're able to actually compete those proposals against each other and say, well, for the same price, I can do, you know, a single mission on Vulcan as I can with this series of missions on this other vehicle.

And you can put these things head to head in interesting ways. And I feel like some of the insight we're going to get here will be really valuable to understanding how this market's shifting over time. The Lane 2 awards are always more buttoned up in terms of price, and you don't really know what's going on internally there. There's not a lot of visibility into what those prices mean. But on something like this task order-based side, they usually are more open to posting details about it. And even what we've been able to glean from the commercial lunar payload services side of NASA is interesting data that we can compare things,

how prices change over time, how task orders change over time, what the relative values are of these task orders based on how hard we can assess the missions to be, who wins, the single launch or the multiple launch offerers. All of those things are going to come out through this process, and it should be a really interesting watch as plans go forward. So we'll circle back to this again in this fall, because lane two, I think will be picked this fall as well by the Space Force. So they're going to be deciding if that's three launch vehicles in lane two, or if it's just two again, it seems like it's going to be three there. And they're going to divvy up those launches. So yeah, I mean, there's some movement in this department that is going to make for very

interesting content, at least, if nothing else. So I'm looking forward to that and thought it was worth a little bit of a call out here on the show. So that's all I've got for you. If you've got any questions or thoughts, hit me up on email, anthony at mainenginecutoff.com, on Twitter at wehavemiko, on Mastodon if you're there. Miko at Spacey.Space. And otherwise, thanks for listening. Thanks for your support over at manageandcutoff.com slash support. I appreciate all of you listening, and I will talk to you soon.