Main Engine Cut Off - T+50: Boeing Gets XS-1, SpaceX Gets X-37B

Episode Date: June 15, 2017

Boeing’s proposal won Phases 2 and 3 of DARPA’s XS-1 program, and I’m pretty bummed about it. And the Air Force announced that SpaceX will launch the fifth X-37B mission in August. This episode of Main Engine Cut Off is brought to you by 14 executive producers—Kris, Pat, Matt, Jorge, Brad, Ryan, Laszlo, Jamison, Guinevere, Nadim, and four anonymous—and 52 other supporters on Patreon. Thoughts on XS-1 - Main Engine Cut Off DARPA selects Boeing for spaceplane project - SpaceNews.com Bulgariasat launch realigns; SpaceX secures X-37B launch contract | NASASpaceFlight.com SpaceX will launch next secret X-37 Air Force mission - SpaceNews.com Tory Bruno says ULA didn’t get to compete for Air Force X-37B launch that went to SpaceX - SpaceNews.com Email your thoughts and comments to [e-mail] Follow @WeHaveMECO Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Google Play, Stitcher, or elsewhere Subscribe to the Main Engine Cut Off Newsletter Buy shirts and Rocket Socks from the Main Engine Cut Off Shop Support Main Engine Cut Off on Patreon

A couple of weeks back, DARPA awarded Boeing a contract for Phases 2 and 3 of their Experimental Spaceplane 1 program. This program was originally in Phase 1, and that was the proposal phase. So a couple of different companies, a couple of different groups of companies were working on different proposals on how to achieve the goal of this XS-1 program. The goal of this program is to have a launch vehicle that can fly 10 flights in 10 days and launch 2,200 kilograms to a low Earth orbit. in 10 days and launch 2200 kilograms to a low earth orbit. And the goal is to have something that is a reusable first stage. And that could take any form. They didn't specify that it needed to look like a plane, but they were using the space plane term to describe how it worked. So

some sort of flyback booster, and then a small expendable upper stage that will come further down on in the program. So this phase two and three development is awarded to Boeing now as a winner of this program. So all the other companies that were bidding, which were companies like Mastin, XCOR, Northrop Grumman was even in there, Blue Origin was in around these things, which we'll talk about, and even Virgin Galactic was involved in phase one of this program. But for now, it's Boeing is the pick. They're moving forward ahead with this proposal that they had for this program. So all the other ones are out, and at this point, it's a DARPA and Boeing project that will take place over the course of the next three years or so.

So phase two is the development phase. That is for vehicle and ground tests that will carry it through 2019. And then phase three is a series of 12 to 15 test flights that will happen in 2020. Now, the value of this award is about $146 million from DARPA, but it is one of those programs that they like to say public-private partnership a lot, which means that Boeing is putting in some of their own money to the development of this program and the operation of this program. They didn't say how much, but in the past, these things have tended to be a 50-50 agreement, but in some ways, you know, that can shift based on who the company is. With a company like Boeing, you could expect it to be a 50-50 or even just, you know, something close to that. I wrote a lot about XS1 over on the blog,

but I haven't covered it too much here on the podcast yet. And I figured with the slow weeks that it has been, now is as good a time as any to discuss XS1. And I want to talk about it because it is a program that I think will be very telling by the end of it because it seems to have pitted itself against this whole new space, old space argument in a very interesting way that will be very indicative of these hypotheses that we've been talking about

for so long. Because we tend to have the same argument that the old space players can innovate, they do things the way they know how it works, the costs will stay high, and the new space players are the ones that will really drop the cost. And there were a range of proposals in phase one of XS1. They ended up going with Boeing, a very old spacey proposal, because Boeing is the company that has worked on several of these kinds of projects before. Most notably, they are the prime contractor on the X-37, which is flying operational flights. And this is really a bigger version of something like the X-37. This time, it obviously has a first stage engine on it. And they are also using a space shuttle main engine derived engine

to power this first stage. So it's a very heritage choice in this program. And specifically, it went against companies like Mastin and XCOR, who are some darlings of the new space world. I want to dive into some of the technical topics of the vehicle that Boeing has proposed, and we'll start with that engine there. Based on the information that we have from the release, the engine is going to be called the AR-22 engine, built by Erjet Rocketdyne, and it's derived very heavily from the Space Shuttle main engine, so much so as it's actually being assembled from parts that were remaining in inventory after the shuttle program

ended. So this is yet another Space Shuttle derived engine, much in the same way that SLS is going to be flying with the RS-25, much in the way that the RS-68 was derived from the Space Shuttle main engine to be a different alternative, a little bit more power, and the goal originally was different than what it turned out to be, which was a very expensive engine. Now, what's curious is that sometime between phase one and phase two, Blue Origin was dropped off of the Boeing proposal and Aerojet Rocketdyne was added on. So originally, Boeing was thinking about building this with the BE-4 engine from Blue Origin. It would fire Methalox engine, but now they've switched to the Space Shuttle main engine, which is a Hydralox engine. So interesting choice there, interesting differences, but really curious that Blue Origin has dropped off of this,

and no one has said exactly why that is. I have some theories of my own, but no one's quite sure whether Blue Origin pulled out, whether Boeing bailed on them because of technical concerns, or whether Boeing bailed on them, as is my theory, because of political motivations. Now, the timeline of this program could have something to do with it, that Blue Origin is working for ground tests of their engines towards 2019, both for themselves and for Vulcan. So maybe there's just not enough engines to go around in the Blue Origin capacity as they work out the kinks in the BE-4 that Boeing wouldn't be able to rely on having access to a BE-4. That is a totally valid reason, but no one has quite said that yet. I feel like if that was the reason, that no one has quite said that yet.

I feel like if that was the reason, that might have been pushed a little harder. Instead, what we got from the Boeing press release and from the Aerojet Rocketdyne press releases was Aerojet Rocketdyne's leadership saying that the RS-25 is a flight-proven engine, flight-proven reusable engine. They're using as many terms from SpaceX as they possibly can. You know, SpaceX that gets a lot of shit for using terms like flight-proven. I find that kind of funny. But Aerojet, Rocketdyne, and Boeing were pushing the fact that this has flown so many missions, it's being used in so many different regards from shuttle to SLS to now

XS-1, that they really seem to be pushing that heritage choice line like we typically hear from them. Now that gets a little more complicated because Boeing is also the prime contractor on SLS. SLS flies with the help of RS-25s. We only have a few of those engines left. We only have four flights worth of RS-25s left. So at some point, if Boeing wants to keep making the SLS, which they clearly do, they're going to need to help Aerojet Rocketine get a new production line of RS-25s up and online. That's something that we've talked about a lot over the years that we're not quite sure how that's going to happen yet or when it's going to happen or anything like that. But if this

heritage choice kind of pick for the XS-1 program helps in any regard to solidify the decisions that have been made on the SLS side, that is something that while DARPA might not care about it, the government as a whole cares about it. And that is who funds DARPA. synergy between these different programs and really lock yourself in as that heritage choice, which the government loves, then that sort of thing plays very well to the U.S. government, especially when you're Boeing and Aerojet Rocketdyne, these companies that they have a vested interest in keeping around because of how much they do for the government in every different regard, not just space, but also the military side of things, Boeing's case, the commercial side of things. There's so many different things that they're attached to that the government does like keeping them around. And this sort of connection between these programs is often seen as a good thing because it makes every program more reliant on each other, which makes it that much hard to cancel. Aerojet Rocketdyne's situation is curious in a lot of regards because they're trying really hard to build the AR-1 engine, which is the RD-180 replacement that Vulcan is probably not going to use. And beyond that, they don't have many other first stage class engines in the works.

The RS-25, I said they're going to be building that for SLS, but that future is a little bit murky. The RS-68 is being used on the Delta IV, but those are being phased out over the next five to ten years, so that line of engines is going away. So without SLS, without Delta IV, they don't have many other engines in the works that would be a first-stage-class engine. So if this is a way to get them to stick around a little bit to solidify that base, as I said, that is seen as a good sign and a good reason for Boeing to bring them into the program. Now, I'm not sure which of these reasons it was that Blue Origin was dropped. Whether Blue Origin said, you know what, we can't make that many BE-4s because we're locked in with ULA, we're locked in with ourselves. We don't want to promise that. Or Boeing being uncomfortable with the timeline,

you know, needing to do ground tests in 2019 when they're not even sure that the engine will be ready by then. Or if it was something on the more political side and seeing how useful aerojet rocketdyne is to Boeing and wanting to help them out a bit and make sure that their future together is more solidified. I'm not sure which of those reasons it were. It might be a combination of all three because honestly, they are all good reasons if you're Boeing. So I don't know that we'll get any more clarity on why Blue Origin was dropped. I am very curious about it. So if there's any little birdies out there, you can fly right up to me anytime and

let me know what's going on in that regard. The last bit on the engine is that we don't have many details about whether this is a different engine in any regard, whether it is manufactured differently, whether it has different components, or whether it really is just a RS-25 built from scrap parts that they had after the shuttle engine ended. The thing that you have to be wondering here, though, is 10 flights in 10 days, those engines required quite a bit of reworking after they landed on a shuttle mission. You know, quite a bit. They were almost completely disassembled between flights. So you've got to wonder what they're doing in the AR-22

to make it better than that, to make it able to be, you know, reused so quickly. Now, is it a question of whether the engines on the shuttle were in space for, you know, two weeks at a time, and that put a lot of wear and tear on the engines? They were coming back through a very intensive heating environment through the atmosphere when they were coming back down from orbit. I'm not sure exactly which one of those factors was the biggest reason that the shuttle engines needed so much work after they flew. But that's the question that I think we're all waiting to hear answered is how is the AR-22 going to address the refurbishment needs of the RS-25? And that is number one biggest question mark for me with regards to the XS-1 program, because in general, we've seen space

planes like this. We've seen flyback boosters. Quite honestly, we are seeing a two-stage to orbit flyback booster in SpaceX's Falcon 9 now. So the concept itself isn't even as impressive as it might have seemed if we didn't have an actively flying two-staged orbit flyback booster today. So overall, the biggest question mark for me and a lot of others out there that I've seen commenting on this is, what is happening to the RS-25 that's going to make it easier to work with, and easier to turn around. Now, my bigger issue with the XS1 program is that it is intended to lower the cost of launch, but it's doing that in a way that I don't think has ever worked, which is reconfiguring hardware that we have today with existing old timey players that we have today and putting them together in a new way and saying that that is going to lower costs in its own right. I don't know of a single time

that launch costs have ever dropped that didn't involve bringing in a new player into the industry, bringing in a new player to the competitive landscape that you're talking about. The biggest example is obviously SpaceX. You know, they came in and they were going at things a completely different way with a completely new take on it. They were totally fresh and they got a lot of flack for that in the early days. But eventually it led to pretty massive cost drops across the board. You know, ULA is a great example of a response to SpaceX, where they are drastically changing the way they do business,

drastically cutting the costs that do business, drastically cutting the costs that they incur on the production lines, phasing out an entire line of rockets that isn't viable anymore, and overall just really revamping the Atlas V and also working on the Vulcan, a new launch vehicle entirely that is meant to address this market. On the European side, they haven't exactly jumped in on the reusability bandwagon, but as some SpaceXers have said, they wouldn't have jumped to Ariane 6 that quickly if not for SpaceX coming in and dropping their prices so incredibly as they have done. Now, I think in general, we look at the commercial cargo and crew programs as doing a lot to lower costs and lower launch costs and

service costs across the industry. But I don't think that would have been true unless SpaceX was brought in. I don't think if commercial crew or cargo was a collection of Boeing and Lockheed Martin and Orbital ATK, all the same people that work on SLS, I don't think prices would have dropped as drastically as they did when NASA really took the opportunity to cultivate a new player in SpaceX. Because that's what that commercial cargo and crew program is about, is taking these new players and cultivating them and bringing them into the industry and seeing what they can do and letting them have their own roadmap, letting them have their own abilities and plan their own goals and do things that others aren't willing to. That is what the big change was when SpaceX came into the

industry. And without SpaceX being a part of commercial crew or cargo, NASA wouldn't have been credited with cultivating a program that did so much for launch costs. And that's the predicament I think Boeing and DARPA is in with XS1, is that they're looking to lower launch costs, but they didn't take the opportunity to widen the market, expand the market. Instead, they took the same old players, some of which have worked on their previous program. You know, Boeing was the one partnered with DARPA just a few years ago working on a launch vehicle that would be dropped from an F-15, and that didn't work out too well. What I really was hoping to see was DARPA to choose Mastin and XCOR, two companies that are thinking of things very differently, are working on things

way differently than most others are in the industry, and use this program to cultivate them and bring them into the market and bring them up to operational status. Because, you know, $146 million, that's peanuts to Boeing. You know, it's a lot of money, but to Boeing, who sells $300 million airplanes, that is nothing on a grand scale. But to somebody like Mastin or XCOR, that is a massive amount of funding that they could do incredible things with. XCore. That is a massive amount of funding that they could do incredible things with. So to really think about the missed opportunity here on XS1, to take the opportunity to build up a new player, build up a new entrant into the market and see what they could do, that was the real opportunity to lower costs here. I don't think Boeing and low cost access to space have

ever been in the same sentence before. Just recently, just recently, just thinking about SLS, Delta 4, they don't have the greatest heritage in this new era of spaceflight of lowering cost to space. So I'm pretty bummed that this program didn't take the shot to bring a new player in, didn't take the shot to bring somebody else in with fresh eyes and a fresh take on the game that could actually work to lower cost to space. Mastin specifically, I hope they continue work on Broad Sword, which is that 25,000 pounds of thrust class methane engine. That seems like it would be a very useful engine for us on the surface of Mars or even anywhere else.

So I hope they continue work on an engine in that class. I hope they find some way to get funding for that and to work on it into the future. And for X-Core, quite honestly, I don't know where this leaves them. They sort of went all in on this and the engines for the Aces upper stage from ULA. They are in the running for the engine on that, but they have some pretty stiff competition between Aerojet Rocketdyne's RL-10 and Blue Origin's BE-3U. So we'll see how that shakes out. I don't know where X-Core is. There's been that mystery surrounding them for a while where they've slimmed down their workforce,

they've drifted away from the links, though there are still some people working on it. Not sure where that leaves them, but overall, I'm just pretty bummed that DARPA chose such a quite honestly boring project in this regard and not something fresh and new and exciting that they could really tout as a win if it worked out for them. Now, I mentioned the X-37B a couple of minutes ago when referring to where the X-S1 is growing out from, and I want to get back into that in just a second because we've got some cool news in that regard. But before I do,

I want to say a very big thank you to the Patreon supporters of Main Engine Cutoff over at patreon.com slash Miko. This episode is brought to you by 14 executive producers, Chris, Pat, Matt, George, Brad, Ryan, Laszlo, Jameson, Guinevere, Nadeem, and four anonymous executive producers. They made this episode possible, and I'm hugely thankful for their support. I could not do it without them and the 52 others over on Patreon. So if you want to help support the show, head over to patreon.com slash Miko, give as little

as $1 a month, and you will be joined in this group of people that make this show possible every single week. This is an independent creation that I'm doing here. I'm not taking any outside funding or advertising or anything like that. This is entirely supported by the listeners and the readers out there. So thank you so much. If you like what I'm doing, head over to Patreon and help out. There are other great ways to help out to spread the word a bit about Man Engine Cutoff, tell a friend, tweet a link, post it somewhere on one of your favorite social networks, or head over to the shop at shop.manenginecutoff.com, buy yourself a shirt or some rocket socks. All of that helps support what I'm doing here. So thank you so much for that. All right, the X-37B. This is the space

plane that the Air Force flies that has flown four missions, all flying on the Atlas V in a 501 configuration, and has spent hundreds of days in space every time. The Air Force has awarded SpaceX a contract to fly the X-37B on the fifth flight coming up this August. So this is a very short notice of this launch. It actually came out in a congressional hearing, was the first reported news of this. So we haven't heard about this for quite a long time, but it is pretty interesting. This is the first Air Force mission for SpaceX. They had just flown the mission for the NRO, NRO-76. So this is the first mission for the Air Force, first of many, for sure.

They've got some GPS-3 flights coming up in a few years' time, and they've got one on the Falcon Heavy. The second flight is actually going to be an Air Force test flight. So they've got some Air Force missions on the books, but this is a surprise one that's happening in just about two months and will be the first time that Air Force flies on top of a Falcon 9. Now, in the wake of this news, everybody wanted to talk about why SpaceX was chosen and not ULA. And the Air Force has made it pretty clear that the X-37 program was meant to fly on many different rockets. They've flown four flights on the Atlas V, so it sort of seems like they went directly to SpaceX. The ULA did not get a chance to bid on this flight,

so it seems like the Air Force went directly to SpaceX to prove out that the X-37 could fly on another launch vehicle, and to maybe work through some of those things, the payload interfaces and different things like that, that need to happen for the X-37 to actually fly on a different launch vehicle. So that is a very valid reason for the Air Force to do this flight. It's something that I think is very smart of them to do to make sure that their vehicle is not just specifically designed for a rocket that is being phased out in the Atlas V. And, you know, they're going to have to do this eventually for Vulcan or whoever else wants to fly the X-37 at some point. So it's a very good move for them now that the X-37 has been worked out a bit. They've landed in Florida for the first time. They seem to be getting into a good flow of operations for this program. Take the next step and see if you can fly it on any rocket, not just the Atlas V.

So that's a valid reason, but also there's a cost aspect to this as well. The SpaceX Falcon 9 list price is $62 million. The Atlas V 501 configuration is starting at $120 million. Those are the base prices before anything else gets added. So right there, we've got a $60 million gap. Consider that SpaceX government launches in the past have bumped up to the $80 to $90 million range. We really don't know the ins and outs of what the Atlas V price is above the list price

for governmental launches recently since they've been doing all this cost restructuring. But you can assume a similar jump upwards, maybe a little less because they've just done so much for the Air Force, for NRO, for all those different agencies that require different things. So maybe there's a slightly less bump there. But still, when you're comparing even just the base price of an Atlas 501 configuration, $120 million, $124 million if you get the longest fairing, to the governmental price of a Falcon 9, which is $85-ish, we'll be generous and say $85-ish million, that alone is a huge cost savings. So

yeah, this is good that the Air Force wants to jump on and make sure that they can fly on another vehicle. But you know, that only is valid so many times. So if we start seeing this series of missions that they are flying on SpaceX, and they give ULA one every once in a while to make sure they maintain capability, make sure that they're still up and operational, but they tend to go towards SpaceX. That's when we'll know that cost is really becoming a driving factor. I'm not sure it's there yet because the difference is a sizable difference, but for the government, $20 to $30 million is not a crazy jump. But the thing that ULA has to be careful about is that, yeah, at first people might say,

well, we want to make sure that we can fly on other launch vehicles. And then they go fly on it and it works out and it's easy and it's quick and it's efficient and it's cheap. It's cheap. And then that starts to work its way into the decision makers' heads that, man, what are we getting out of this extra $40 million, $30, $40 million that we're paying ULA when we've had such good experience at SpaceX? So it is very, very important that SpaceX pulls this mission off flawlessly. We say that obviously because they've had a rough couple of years, but if they really want to make these inroads with the Air Force, with the NRO like they just did, with these different agencies that tend to favor ULA, they really need to be perfect on this first mission for the Air Force and make it easy for

the Air Force to get through, make it easy to integrate with Falcon 9, and make it a flawless launch to orbit. That's going to be a very important thing to focus on in the next few months. In general, the Air Force has been very supportive of SpaceX. They've worked with them pretty closely through a couple of different things. And they are even looking at how they're going to certify reflown stages, reusable boosters. So they have an open mind when it comes to the way SpaceX is working. They obviously are critical of them when things go wrong, but they do have an open mind towards the way that SpaceX is working into the future. So it's really good signs to see the Air Force jumping on board so quickly with SpaceX. Who knows exactly when they made this decision? I'm a little skeptical of whether they made it after they launched the NRO flight, but I could see that

being a possibility that they saw how well that went and they said, you know what, let's put one of these on there for the summer. Now, there is an interesting note here that the flight of this Falcon 9 that flies this X-37B is actually going to be the second Block 4 vehicle that flies for SpaceX. The first seems to be CRS-12, which is happening in early August. This will happen in mid to late August. And this is a big deal. We've seen Block 4 second stages fly, and we've heard that Block 4 first stages are coming soon, but this seems to be an August thing that we're looking at now. As I said, we've seen the Block 4 second stages fly already, and that also featured quicker loading of the liquid oxygen and helium. So they've clearly made some design changes in the wake of AMO6, and they are finally starting to

work their way into these different vehicles. So keep an eye on the loading timeline for fueling over the next couple of launches, and you'll see some differences as they get different vehicles on. They get Block 4 second stages, maybe some refitted Block 3 first stages, until they fully switch over to the Block 4 vehicle in August. This is a big deal because they are on a mission to get to the Block 5 ultimate design of Falcon 9, which is the one humans will fly on, which is the one that will be reusable very quickly. You know, the whole infamous 24-hour turnaround thing that we've discussed in the past. Big deal to see SpaceX making progress in their hardware like this. So keep an eye on the hardware for the X-37 flight and for CRS-12 as we get closer to August.

So in general, good news for SpaceX. They're having a great tempo right now. They're on a great roll with missions just coming one after another. And we've got one coming up this weekend, launching BulgariaSat on a reflown stage. And that's going to happen just 13 days after the previous CRS mission. So making great progress, great tempo, keeping up their launch cadence that they need to to really hit a surprising number of flights in 2017, and that is going to be so crucial for them. They need this strong year. They're on a great roll. I hope they keep up on it because they really, really do need

this year to be something special. They also seem to be making good progress on Slick 40, their pad that was a victim of AMO-6. We'll keep an eye on that as well because that's going to be important to see at the end of the year, how they manage that if they're flying from both 40 and 39A simultaneously, if they are flying from 40 while they refurbish 39A for Falcon Heavy and crewed flights. All of that's going to be fun to watch as we get closer to the end of summer and the fall. So all in all, great times for SpaceX right now. Great day to be down in Hawthorne. So that'll be it for me this week. I wanted to cover a few things that have been on my mind. I was away last week at Apple's

WWDC, had a good time out there, but unfortunately didn't get to keep up with the space news. And when I got home, realized there really wasn't that much that happened. So it was a good week for me to be off the grid a bit. So we'll keep an eye as fun things happen, but summers do tend to slow down. So if you've got any things that you want to hear from me on, any questions you want answered, any guests you'd like to see, any topics that you'd like to see covered that we just haven't got to yet or did in the past, but haven't recently, let me know. I want to hear from you what you want to hear this summer as we have these slow weeks. So email me, anthony at mainenginecutoff.com. Let me know if you've got any ideas for the show. I would love to hear them. And thank you once again to everyone over at Patreon supporting Main Engine Cutoff.

Thank you to the executive producers for this episode of the show. and I will talk to you next week.