Main Engine Cut Off - T+3: Falcon 9 GTO Mission Drone Ship Landing, Orbital ATK’s Current and Future Launch Vehicles

Episode Date: May 11, 2016

SpaceX landed another Falcon 9 first stage on their drone ship—this time on a GTO launch, which is a major milestone on their way to full reusability and Falcon Heavy flights. Orbital ATK’s Antares launch vehicle is set for an early July return to flight, and they’re in the planning stages of a new heavy-launch vehicle. Falcon 9 launches with JCSAT-14 – lands another stage | NASASpaceFlight.com SpaceX undecided on payload for first Falcon Heavy flight – Spaceflight Now Antares Fact Sheet Key return to flight milestone looms for Antares rocket – Spaceflight Now Orbital ATK eye VAB and MLP for potential EELV-class rocket | NASASpaceFlight.com Jeff Foust on Twitter: “Dave Thompson: Orbital ATK starting work on a “modular” large launch vehicle; Air Force contract earlier this year covers initial work.” Jeff Foust on Twitter: “Thompson: decision in the first half of next year on whether to proceed; overall program would take about four years.” Email feedback to [e-mail] Follow @WeHaveMECO Support Main Engine Cut Off on Patreon

Last week was an exciting week for SpaceX, as they had another picture-perfect launch of Falcon 9 last Friday morning. At 1.21am, it lifted off carrying JCSAT-14, a Japanese communications satellite, so this was another commercial flight for SpaceX, and that was right at the beginning of a two-hour launch window for the night. It was delayed one day from Thursday morning, but only for weather reasons. This was the second launch in a row now that has had zero technical issues leading up to launch, zero technical issues during launch, so SpaceX is going to these great efforts to get better at reliability, to get better at schedule certainty. All of those things that they need to improve on to catch up in certain ways to their other competitors, they're showing big progress towards those goals. So we'll see over the next

few months as they get that launch rate up even more if they can keep this going. They have a launch scheduled for the end of May right now. They have another few in June, and it's a pretty exciting next few months in their launch manifest. The other big deal about this launch was that it was a launch up to geosynchronous transfer orbit, which is a much higher energy orbit than is needed for low-earth orbit like the space station missions, and that being the case, it's a much harder landing to pull off. But this mission featured a successful landing back on the drone ship out in the Atlantic Ocean. Back in March, SpaceX launched SES-9, which was another GTO mission, which ended with the first stage putting a hole in the deck of the drone ship. It ended up

running out of fuel a few seconds too early and crashing down into the deck of the drone ship. It ended up running out of fuel a few seconds too early and crashing down into the deck of the ship. Seems like SpaceX took whatever they learned from that launch and applied it to this one, which ended up nailing the landing on the drone ship. For these higher energy missions, there are two issues at play with the landing. One is the less fuel that you have left over after putting the second stage up on such an energetic trajectory. And the other issue is that you're coming over after putting the second stage up on such an energetic trajectory. And the other issue is that you're coming into the atmosphere much, much faster, which increases the heat that you have to survive on re-entry.

So it may be the case that SpaceX was overcompensating and trying to put a little more oomph into their re-entry burns on those past missions to come in with a little less heating, but maybe now they've learned that they can take a little more heat than they thought originally, so they can save some fuel for that landing burn. The other thing they seem to have improved is the three-engine landing. So all the successful landings to this point have featured a single-engine landing burn, so that final burn of the two or three that they have in their landing profile is just that single middle engine. On these GTO missions, these higher energy missions, they can only do one re-entry burn and one landing burn.

So that landing burn is actually now using three engines at a time when it starts firing, which then gets cut down to one engine, you know, a mere second before it hits the deck. This is a big deal that they're working these details out for these GTO missions, because it has big effects not only for the reusability of their GTO missions, which are their most profitable missions, but it has big effects for the Falcon Heavy flights in the future. The outer two boosters on the Falcon Heavy are probably going to be able to come back to a land landing at two different landing pads on the Cape. And that's because those boosters are not so far downrange when they are actually jettisoned from the side of the rocket. But that center core of the Falcon Heavy, that's

going to be traveling so fast and so far downrange that it's not going to have enough fuel to get back. So the landing profile is going to be pretty similar to a GTO type mission, which means they're going to have to land pretty far downrange on the drone ship and survive a hotter re-entry. So I've sort of assumed all this time that they've been waiting for that Falcon Heavy flight until they've got all of these kinks worked out on the Falcon 9. They're sort of testing these different components on these Falcon 9 launches. So they needed the propellant cooling that they've got in this newest version of the Falcon 9 rocket. Now they've got a little more thrust like we talked about last week in the Merlin engines, and now they've nailed the drone ship landing, which they need for the center core of the Falcon Heavy. So all in all, this was a big step towards the future of SpaceX, proving out that they can do these reusability plans like they've shown, and now taking a big step towards getting them ready for that Falcon Heavy flight.

And speaking of that first Falcon Heavy flight that's set for later this year, hopefully in November sometime, SpaceX has offered up a couple more details about that flight. Apparently one of the boosters, the side boosters, is already being constructed at the SpaceX factory, and the other two are due to be built sometime this summer. According to Gwen Shotwell, the president and COO of SpaceX, she said that all of those three cores will be at the Cape by the fall timeline. So once those three cores are at the Cape, they will be integrated together into the Falcon Heavy flight stack, and then rolled out to Pad 39A, which is where all of the Falcon Heavy missions will

take off. Once they're at the pad, they'll complete a test firing of all 27 engines at the same time, which is actually the first time that SpaceX will test that out, so that's a big step right there for the launch as well. There was no real timeline given for when we might see that test fire, but given a November launch, you can assume late October, early November, depending on the exact timeline. Shotwell also said that they're only going to fly Falcon Heavies from Pad 39A. They're not going to retrofit Pad 40, where they fly all of their other missions from, and that's probably due to the frequency of Falcon Heavy flights, which won't be as often as Falcon 9, and could use the bigger structures of Pad 39A to make things a little easier for them. Shotwell also said that they're still

conflicted on what to fly on that first flight. Originally they were thinking it would be just a demo flight, so it would fly some sort of dumb payload, something that isn't a real satellite, something that's not useful. It's just really a technology demonstration at that point to show off what the rocket can do and that it actually works as they have intended. But now they're starting to think that they might fly a commercial mission on that first flight, given the amount of interest that there is in taking part on it. So that goes to show that some of these partners that SpaceX has had a good relationship with over the past couple years are really confident in the ability of the Falcon Heavy to get off the ground. It seems like the one thing that SpaceX is holding out on is that they might use that mission to show that they can do a direct injection to

geostationary transfer orbit, which is something that the Department of Defense needs for a lot of their communication satellites and different things like that. Right now, only the Delta IV Heavy can do those types of missions, which instead of the geosynchronous transfer orbit like Falcon 9 flies for commercial partners, this is a direct injection up to that geostationary orbit around 22,000 miles up. If SpaceX is able to show off that they can pull off that mission with the Falcon Heavy, that opens up a lot of contracts that SpaceX could win in the future as ULA phases out the Delta IV Heavy. So as we get later into the year, I expect to find out more details about this first flight. We might even hear an announcement soon on what they're going to fly.

But again, that's an important flight for them to get off, especially given their plans for Red Dragon, as we talked about last week. They're going to fly that in 2018 if all goes well, and they really, really need to get the Falcon Heavy off this year in order to make that date. Switching over to Orbital ATK for a few minutes, they have an exciting week ahead of them as they plan to roll out their upgraded Ontaris rocket to the launch pad in Virginia for the first time since the failure back in October of 2014. Since that time, they've swapped out the engines that are used on the first stage of that rocket. They went from the AJ-26 engine to the Russian-built RD-181 engine. Those engines actually burn the same type of fuel, so they didn't have to re-architect the first stage too much,

but their new engines do have a higher efficiency and a higher thrust. So all in all, it's a pretty good upgrade to a launch vehicle. Though it had to come at the expense of a flight, it's something that could work out better for them in the long term. The upgrade puts them at around 7,000 kilograms up to low Earth orbit, which is a pretty respectable medium-class launch vehicle, something that could see a lot of usage from the spaceport in Virginia. It'll also be used to launch Cygnus up to the space station another four times to complete their resupply contract that they got from NASA a couple of years ago. They're planning on rolling the first stage out to the pad to do a wet dress rehearsal, which means they're doing everything that they would in a typical pre-launch scenario,

and they're going to work through every bit of the process all the way up to engine ignition. Once they complete that process, they're going to look over all their data, work out any problems that they find along the way, and hopefully a week or so after that, they're going to do the entire process again, but this time they're going to end with a 30-second test firing of the first stage, and that's right now scheduled for late May, so we'll see how this goes over the next few weeks, but we could very soon see this launch vehicle come back online. Assuming all goes well with that, they're targeting July 6th right now for the return to flight of Antares, which will launch another Cygnus up to the space station. Once they get back flying Antares, it seems like they're going to go after some commercial

customers to fly on the rocket as well. So over the next few months, we could see some contracts coming for flights on Antares. In other exciting Orbital ATK news, they've begun negotiations with NASA over use of High Bay 2 inside the Vehicle Assembly Building, as well as a former shuttle mobile launch platform. So this is two bits of the launch infrastructure at Kennedy Space Center that have been unused for a while now that Orbital wants to use to support a next-generation launch vehicle. Presumably, this is a launch vehicle that would be in the Heavy Lift class,

something that could compete with Falcon 9 and Atlas 5 and all of those launch vehicles that we have come to love, but it's pretty exciting to see Orbital want to become another player in that launch provider space. It is interesting, however, that if they end up using the VAB for these purposes, that they're going to be launching from Pad 39B, which is where SLS is slated to launch from. That brings into question how often SLS will be flying. If it flies with the reduced flight rate we're seeing with their current roadmap to Mars, then that's something that could work out well for Orbital ATK. On the other hand, if something happens where SLS missions changes a little bit, then they could see an increased flight rate and it might get a little tricky for Orbital to find

a launch slot in between all of the SLS launches that are flying over the next decade. It really all depends how things shake out with the future of SLS as we move forward, but it is something that is somewhat of a risk for Orbital ATK. Or maybe this is an omission of NASA that they don't think SLS is going to fly that much, and they'll have plenty of time on Pad 39B for Orbital to fly this new next-generation launch vehicle. All in all, there's not really that many details right now around what this launch vehicle would be, but it is interesting to keep an eye on in terms of how it would impact the SLS schedule or vice versa, and really all of the things that are going on inside the VAB

and at Pad 39B. That's about all I got this week, so thank you again for listening, and if you're enjoying the show, I would appreciate a rating on the iTunes store or just spreading the word to another spaceflight nerd that you know. If you have any feedback, you can send it on Twitter at MECOPodcast, M-E-C-O Podcast, or to the email in the show notes. Thanks very much, and I'll talk to you soon.