Main Engine Cut Off - T+32: Soyuz-U Failure and Satellite Servicing

Episode Date: December 8, 2016

A Progress launch failed on its way to the ISS, so I discuss how this may affect the politics of the ISS and NASA going forward. And then I get into some thoughts on satellite servicing in general, and specifically surrounding Restore-L and Orbital ATK’s Mission Extension Vehicle. This episode of Main Engine Cut Off is brought to you by 3 executive producers—@spacepat_o, Matt Giraitis, and one anonymous—and 25 other supporters on Patreon. Progress launch to space station fails - SpaceNews.com Progress MS-04 fails to reach orbit Stage III of the Soyuz rocket Issue #7 - Main Engine Cut Off SSL, Orbital ATK, and Satellite Servicing - Main Engine Cut Off NASA’s Restore-L contract nudges SSL closer to in-orbit servicing - SpaceNews.com NASA Awards Contract for Refueling Mission Spacecraft | NASA The Space Show, Mon, 10/31/2016 - 14:00 | General James B. Armor Mission Extension Services - Orbital ATK Email feedback to [e-mail] Follow @WeHaveMECO Subscribe on iTunes, Overcast, or elsewhere Subcribe to Main Engine Cut Off Weekly Support Main Engine Cut Off on Patreon

Welcome to Main Engine Cutoff, I am Anthony Colangelo, and this week I've got two smaller topics to talk about because the year is winding down and things are kind of quiet right now, so there's not a whole lot going on that I am interested in breaking down on the show, but there were two things that have been in my mind recently, and one a current event, one a general topic that I thought would be worth discussing here as we close out the year. The first of which is the Soyuz-U and progress failure that happened last week on a flight up to the ISS. I'll save all the speculation about what this failure means for Soyuz or for Progress or for Russia as a whole once we find out what the actual failure was. We haven't heard yet what the root

cause of it was, what the fix would be, how dangerous this is for other flights, how likely this is to occur. We haven't heard any of that yet, so I'll save the conjecture for what this means in that regard for when we actually hear about what the failure was. But that's not the only thing to think about when you look at a failure like this. The Soyuz-U uses the same third stage, which is where the failure occurred, or at least the thing that was firing when the failure occurred. So that uses the same third stage as the Soyuz-FG launch vehicle, which is the launch vehicle that are used for crewed flights up to the ISS. And right now, as you know, I'm sure you're well aware if you're listening to this show, the Soyuz is the only way for crew to get to the ISS because there are no American

launch vehicles flying, commercial crew flights have not yet started, and ESA and other partners don't have a crew vehicle that is capable of getting up to the ISS, let alone a crew vehicle at all. So right now, there is a single point of failure in crew flights to the ISS, and that is the Soyuz launch vehicle and spacecraft. And in this case, the same third stage, the common third stage between the Soyuz-U and the Soyuz-FG, is the thing that failed. Again, whether or not the failure is something that is going to hold crew flights for months or a year or whatever, we don't know yet. We don't know enough about the failure to say how long this would affect crew flights. But we are at a very interesting time of the political cycle here in the United States, and this failure could have at least some impacts

in the way that things play out, specifically regarding commercial crew. We're getting a new presidential administration, as I've talked about over and over again here on the show as it comes to space policy. Congress is right now probably going to pass a continuing resolution into April of 2017. So there's not going to be any big budget decisions that happen until four or five months from now. But at that point, there's going to be a new budget. There's probably going to be a new NASA Authorization Act. There's going to be priority shifting, money shifting. There's going to be a lot of decisions that are going to be made. And Commercial Crew, as one of the biggest programs within NASA right now, at least in

terms of importance, that is one that is going to be looked at specifically with a close eye because the flights seemingly get delayed and delayed and delayed. There are big supporters. There are big people that are criticizing the program. So there's a lot of attention given to commercial crew, and this is something that could play into that. Because any failure in the single system that is capable of getting crew up to the ISS, that's something that can be used by NASA and Congress or other interested parties to push the importance of commercial crew. It's something they can use. It's something they should use. And it is something that they will use when discussing these issues. So, you know, again, even if this is a minor failure, the point stands

for those people to say, what if this were a bigger failure and we didn't have a way to get the ISS for months or years? It's something that, you know, a single failure on a SpaceX rocket is enough for their critics to say, look how unreliable they are. And this is something that would give at least some politicians or decision makers or influencers to say, this is an unreliable launch vehicle. We can't have this be the only way to get to the ISS. Whatever they're going to say about it, right or wrong, this does give them ammo to use when having those conversations. So regardless of how small this failure is or how big it may have been, either way, this is the ammo that NASA or a member of Congress needs to say commercial crew needs to be a high priority. It needs to get additional funding or it needs to get additional priorities given to it so that it can make its schedule.

Whatever the decision that comes out of that is, this is a piece of ammo that can be used to get there or to get there quicker or safer or, you know, however the effect would actually come out. It is something that's going to affect those conversations. And it's certainly something that's going to be present in those conversations. So all that's just to say that regardless of the failure mode or how big or small it was, this is something that's going to affect commercial crew, especially as we come up to the first flight of commercial crew over the next year or two years, however long it takes to actually see a launch get off. that entirely. I think it's a bad policy to have only one way to get to the ISS. Because even if this was, you know, a Boeing provided spacecraft or launch vehicle that failed on the way to the ISS, and we didn't have any others, that would still be a bad situation that we would find ourselves in. And that would still be some sort of ammo to be used to say, we need other launch

vehicles to work with. So this is kind of a concern that's separate from all that. Certainly, it plays into it to say, hey, look, we're relying on Russia right now. They just had a failure. This isn't a situation we want to find ourselves in. That's certainly a factor here. But my point is that in general, we should have more than one way to get the ISS, just like the EELV program was for the Air Force, where they said, you know, we need at least two launch vehicles online that can do what we need at all times to assure us access to space. That needs to be a policy for the ISS. If we're going to have the ISS around, you know, whether it be the ISS or other stations, I think our policy should be there's two ways to get crew into space. And, you know, that's certainly becoming less of an issue every day as we get closer to seeing

some private companies launch humans into space. And I hope that within the next five years, we see that flourish even more and it becomes something we don't even have to worry about. I sort of see that as likely. SpaceX isn't slowing down at all. We'll see how this Starliner shakes out. I still have worries that that might be something that if they don't use it outside of the NASA flights, it's still going to be very expensive. So there's some things to shake out there. But SpaceX is working on it. Blue Origin is obviously heading that way. And who knows who else will get there sooner rather than later. So, you know, hopefully this isn't something we have to worry about for too long. But for right now it is. And I could see this failure having big impacts when it comes to

congressional decisions or conversations or, you know, those things that are going to come down the line over the next six months. Now, I want to get into satellite servicing and talk a little bit about that market and what that market may be. But before I do, I want to say thank you to all of those out there supporting Main Engine Cutoff over on Patreon. Patreon.com slash Miko is where you can go to help support this show. Your support makes this show possible. And I want to say a big thanks to Matt, SpacePatO, and one other anonymous executive producer. Those three are the executive producers of this episode of Main Engine Cutoff, and I could not do it without their support. If you want to help support the show, head over to patreon.com slash Miko

and give as little as $1 a month. All of your support really, really helps me do this week in and week out, and it is very much appreciated. So thank you to all those out there who are on Patreon. So now I want to break down some satellite servicing ideas. This is something that's been kicking around my head since I listened to another podcast a couple of weeks ago.

And recently, NASA awarded a contract to SSL as part of the Restore-L mission that's going to be launching in 2020. And that's a mission that is intended to do some research into how to refuel satellites, specifically satellites that have not been designed to be refueled. specifically satellites that have not been designed to be refueled. This is a mission that's part of the NASA Space Technology Mission Directorate based out of Goddard, and it's kind of a tech demo of sorts that's supposed to kind of develop technology and then eventually pass that on to the private sector because it's been proved out and kind of demonstrated so that at some point somebody could pick that up and create a business out of it or, you know, supply services like that back to NASA, or at least at that point, NASA could rely on those services for missions in the future. And I wanted

to bring this up because there's sort of an interesting inflection point that we're hitting right now in the potential market of satellite servicing. And on this show, I like to break down potential markets and talk about what is and is not a viable business, what may be a viable business, what will not be, do some of that conjecture based on the private industry side of things that we're watching. So I thought this might be an interesting one to tackle, especially during a slow week like this.

So here's where we're at. The Restore-L mission that NASA just awarded this contract to SSL for, that is intended to refuel satellites that were not made to be refueled. And that is something that is kind of a big sticking point when it comes to refueling satellites in orbit, that, you know, a lot of satellites that are out there right now, in fact, all of the satellites that are out there right now, were not designed to be refueled, both in their structures and the way that they work and the fuel type that they use. They weren't specifically designed to be refueled. So right now there is no way to refuel them. This mission from NASA is looking for a solution to

that problem. But, you know, the big point there has been, is satellite servicing and refueling specifically an actual market? Because this entire generation of satellites are not a fit for something that would be in that market. So right now there is no market for satellite refueling because nobody actually created it. It's a little bit of a chicken and egg problem here, if you see what I'm saying. The thought being that the next generation of satellites would be designed to be refueled, but the next generation of satellites is going to roll out over the next 15 years, since that's the typical lifespan of a geostationary satellite or something else like that. You know, it would take an entire generation to turn over before there's a sufficiently large market to make satellite refueling a viable industry. If NASA and this mission,

this Restore-L mission, can figure out how to refuel satellites that weren't designed to be refueled, maybe that's something that becomes a viable market. But there's also an entire other half, or even more than half, to the satellite servicing market right now, and that is spearheaded by Orbital ATK. Orbital ATK has been working on their mission extension vehicle for quite a while now, and apparently they are ready to go with it, or at least they've signed their first customer, and to them, the business case has been made that this is a viable market that they could enter. Jim Armour of Orbital ATK was on the space show back on Halloween. This was something I linked to recently on the blog over at ManagingCutoff.com.

And I kind of had forgotten to link to it for a while after I caught up to it in my podcast feed. But it was a long interview with Jim on the space show. And he was talking about all sorts of things from Orbital ATK's perspective. Launch vehicles, ISS, you know, a lot of different topics that they hit in that show. But towards the end, I think I put here at the 54 minute mark, or 54 or 55,

they started talking about their satellite servicing business that they're going to try to get into within the next couple of years. He talked a lot about their mission extension vehicle, which is the first thing that they're going to do

to enter that market. They've determined that this is a business case, that they can make work in terms of satellite servicing. So they're going to give this a shot as their first entry into the satellite servicing market. And he gave a lot of details about this, about how it might work, what kind of flight profiles it would do, what kind of missions it would do, how it would make its money. He broke it down to a pretty surprising amount on the space show there. So I would highly recommend listening to at least that portion of the show. Again, it's at 54 minutes, 55 seconds. I have a link in the

show notes over at managingcutoff.com. Check out that episode of the space show from back on Halloween because it is really worth a listen. Jim describes the way that these missions would actually work, and there are a few different options. There is the mission extension, the basic level mission extension, and what this would do, you know, their satellite bus, which is kind of a small geostationary communication satellite powered by solar electric propulsion, that would go up to another geostationary satellite and latch onto it, kind of on the back area where the satellite's original engine would be. This MEV, as they call it, would latch onto that satellite and take over full control. So attitude and actual orbit

raising, orbit lowering, orbit changing, all of that stuff would be done by the mission extension vehicle at this point. That is their baseline mission, which is flying up to a satellite that is towards the end of its life because it's out of maneuvering fuel or whatever other reasons that it might want to extend its life. It would latch onto it and extend its life up to, you know, a handful of years or 15 years or whatever they determine they need for that mission. But that's not the only thing that they're going to be doing with the mission extension vehicle. The other things that it can do are latch onto a satellite and change its orbit entirely, reposition it, change the type of orbit

it is, whatever that would be. In a lot of ways, he was describing it taking a geostationary communication satellite that's serving a particular place on Earth and changing its orbit so that it can serve another place on Earth. So he talked about how some people are going to get into the idea of buying used satellites because developing economies don't need the newest and best bands of communication. They can use something that's been up there for 10, 15 years at this point. So they would buy a mission extension vehicle or time on a mission extension vehicle that would go over, latch onto that satellite, and change its orbit, reposition the satellite in the sky so that it can serve a different market entirely.

And this is a way for a company who might not need that satellite for the market that it was put up there for anymore, but it could be useful in another market. Or like he said, somebody buys an old satellite from Intelsat or any of the companies you could name that are putting up these communication satellites, and they reposition it over their area. He did mention a couple other ideas, which one would be they would use the mission extension vehicle to do the transfer from geostationary transfer orbit up to geosynchronous orbit, or to do the changing of the operational orbit to the graveyard orbit that they all need to go on after they're done. You know, that's just saving fuel here or there. And he even said that the mission extension vehicle, each one, can do multiple missions. You know, it could go latch onto a satellite for a while

and take over full control, move it to a different orbit, and then leave that, go to a different satellite, and do a whole nother mission on that satellite. So what he was describing was a very versatile vehicle that can do a lot of different things and make money by doing all these different things. You know, Orbital ATK launches one of these up, and they're able to serve a handful of customers

and actually make the business case work for something like this. So this is a type of satellite servicing, but as you can see, it is an entirely different market. The refueling market is still a little bit murky in how it would work, whether something like the Restore L, you know, refueling satellites

that weren't made to be refueled, or something like a satellite designed to be refueled going up in a handful of years and then being refueled 15 years down the line. That's all a little bit still murky, but for Orbital ATK, they figured out how to take this mission extension vehicle and make the business case work for it because of how many different things it can do when it's up in space. because of how many different things it can do when it's up in space. But all of this as a whole, satellite servicing as a whole, is still murky in general, because we are at an interesting inflection point right now, where we're seeing this kind of head-to-head between putting up these expensive monoliths of satellites that can do a lot of amazing things, They're very expensive, but there's just one of

them. And contrasting that with something like the approach that SpaceX and OneWeb are going to take for satellite internet and the approach that Planet is taking for low Earth orbit imagery of Earth, they're going to be putting up a ton of cheaper satellites to do the job of what they would have done with, well, in the internet constellation case, they would have done that with a bunch of satellites. But the planet case specifically, they're very cheap satellites that they're just blanketing in orbit rather than doing one really expensive, high quality imagery satellite and using that to do their imagery. They're doing these lower cost, cheaper things that because they're using so many of them,

they get different advantages out of that. So there's this kind of head to head going on right now. Do we put a bunch of effort and resources and money and everything into these one off monoliths? Or do we go the route of more and cheaper satellites and expect a certain amount of them to fail? But if enough of them work well, we can gain the benefits of being cheaper. And this is a lot like what we saw back in the 90s with Google and how they came to power. What they decided was, we don't need to go all in on a handful of really expensive servers. What we'll do is buy a bunch of old servers, used servers, cheap servers, buy as many as we can. However cheap, crappy they may be, if we get enough of them, yeah,

5-10% is going to fail, or whatever the particular failure rate was, a bunch are going to fail, but we'll have all of these resources to use and become very powerful because of that on the internet. And we're sort of seeing the same thing, the same thought process now, which is, yeah, one giant imaging satellite with a high quality lens is great, but what if we had hundreds of smaller ones that can do the job differently, but better in aggregate? If we were to put a lot of effort into these big monolithic satellites, satellite servicing is something that could come about and be very useful. If enough of the people go the way of SpaceX, OneWeb, Planet, and say, let's use a bunch of cheaper satellites to accomplish the same goal, maybe it doesn't become as useful then,

because you're expecting a certain failure rate, you're expecting a certain decay rate, and you're expecting to just keep putting more and more up as ones fail or de-orbit. And that's kind of a philosophical difference, but it's a philosophical difference that will drive the market or potential market of satellite servicing and even, you know, launch. And that's a whole nother angle, which is launch is getting cheaper and cheaper as we get closer to the reusability dream. And ideally, as SpaceX and Blue Origin and others work out the reusability of orbital launch vehicles, that price would continue to drop to the point when, is it cheaper to

launch a whole bunch of satellites that can do the job in aggregate? Is it cheaper? Does it become cheap enough then to make satellite servicing even more viable? Because if all the price keeps dropping, the money you have to make to make it viable does drop as well. So, you know, I hope you have to make to make it viable does drop as well. So, you know, I hope you can keep up with all that. But sort of my point is that there's a lot to keep up with, which is there's a lot of different things in flux right now, which is launch prices,

satellite prices in general, component prices in general, this philosophical difference between launch a bunch of cheaper satellites or fewer really high-end satellites, there are all these different angles that are coming together to make it very murky right now about which way is the better way to go. If launch is cheap, do you launch more satellites and expect some to fail or die or decay or whatever? Or do you launch fewer high-end satellites and then launch servicing buses in between? It's something that is going to play out over the next decade. That's kind of a catch phrase here, over the next decade, because that's sort of where I focus with this show. But there's so many different forces at play when it comes to satellite servicing

and the philosophical difference between what kind of constellations or single one-off satellites you might need. It's just going to be very interesting to see these develop, specifically Orbital ATK working on the mission extension vehicle, the NASA project for refueling satellites that shouldn't be refueled or weren't designed to be refueled, and then seeing how these different mega constellations come about as SpaceX, OneWeb, and others start to launch them. Obviously, there's always going to be some sort of need for those larger monolithic satellites. The Department of Defense is someone that will always be using them somehow because they tend to like to put a lot of effort into these giant, incredibly powerful satellites that do things that you and I can't even think of yet. But on the consumer side, on the private industry side, there seems to be a movement again

towards the constellation idea. Planet is certainly doing some amazing work with their imagery. Over the past couple of days, I've seen some articles coming out about how they've used that imagery. And Worldview did a lot of talk about the way they use their imagery. Again, they use less, better satellites. So it's just really interesting right now to watch all these different forces at play and see how things might come out in the equation that all of that goes into. So to wrap up, I would highly recommend listening to that episode of the Space Show to hear what Orbital ATK is working on at the mission extension vehicle. Check out in the show notes, I have a link to the NASA Restore-L mission and the award that they just did to SSL.

And, you know, just keep an eye on this as we go forward. And as SpaceX's constellation goes up, as OneWeb's constellation go up, all of these things are going to be very fun to watch. And I'm sure we'll be talking about them here on Main Engine Cutoff as we go so keep an eye on it it's going to be a lot of fun to watch develop. So that's about all I've got for you this week I will be back next week at least I'm planning on it I'm getting married towards the end of next week so I might do one middle of the week or early in the week to kind of hold you over until I get back from a short hiatus that will follow but I'll keep you updated on that over on Twitter. If you want to give me a follow there, you can stay up to date.

Twitter.com slash WeHaveMiko, at WeHaveMiko. Give it a follow and you can keep up with what my plans are as we close out December. And thanks again to all of you supporting over on Patreon, especially the executive producers, Matt, SpacePatO, and one other anonymous producer. Head over to Patreon.com slash Miko if you want to help support the show, and as always, email me your thoughts on any and all topics, anthony at mainenginecutoff.com. Thank you.