Main Engine Cut Off - T+51: The SpaceX Steamroller, Blue Origin Chooses Alabama

Episode Date: June 29, 2017

SpaceX launched two missions last weekend, flew new titanium grid fins on Falcon 9, and are really picking up the pace. And Blue Origin got cozy with the Alabama Launch Alliance by announcing that they’ll build the BE-4 production facility in Huntsville—if the engine is chosen for Vulcan. This episode of Main Engine Cut Off is brought to you by 15 executive producers—Kris, Pat, Matt, Jorge, Brad, Ryan, Laszlo, Jamison, Guinevere, Nadim, Peter, and four anonymous—and 55 other supporters on Patreon. SpaceX Doubleheader — Main Engine Cut Off NASASpaceflight on Twitter United Launch Alliance Issues Layoff Notices at Vandenberg AFB | Business - Noozhawk.com Blue Origin retains engine lead as House considers limitations on launch system funding - SpaceNews.com What just happened between Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin and Alabama? | AL.com Aerojet Rocketdyne bringing 800 rocket jobs to Alabama | AL.com The Alabama Launch Alliance - Main Engine Cut Off Thornberry Walks Back Vulcan Intervention - Main Engine Cut Off 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

We've had quite a week here with SpaceX and Blue Origin. There's been a lot of movement in both departments, different types, SpaceX operationally and Blue Origin politically. So we're going to break both of those things down. It's been a weird summer so far. We've had these spurts of activity and then very quiet weeks. And I've been on the road for most of June, so I'm sorry about my infrequent posting and somewhat less frequent podcasting. But that is just about to end. I'm going on one last trip for June and then I'm back not traveling too much anymore after that. So things will pick up as normal.

So I just wanted to say that quick note that there's been, if you've noticed some scheduling inconsistencies there, that's what's been going on. So I'm excited to kind of settle back into a rhythm now that I won't be on the road so much. So let's dive into the SpaceX side of things first. This has been an incredible week for SpaceX, maybe one of their best ever. I think in certain ways, you could argue this is the most meaningful week. And I would certainly argue that as well. For the general public, I think there's been other meaningful moments when they first flew to the space station, when they first landed a booster, when they first reflew a booster. But I think we had a real watershed moment this week in SpaceX operations. And that's not the actual turnaround

time, which is quite interesting in its own right, but it's more about the switch to titanium grid fins. I think this is one of the biggest moments for SpaceX because it's something that can only happen in the era of reusability. In other words, you wouldn't take a component of your booster that is built with aluminum that is working perfectly fine and move that to titanium, which takes longer to build. It's more expensive to build. It's heavier. There's certain drawbacks, but it has this incredibly long life and these great thermal properties that will make it so much more valuable than an aluminum grid fin on the Falcon 9 booster. You wouldn't make that move on an expendable booster. If something was built with aluminum and it was working just fine,

you would keep it that way because it's cheaper to produce, you don't worry about throwing it away as much. But the fact that SpaceX is now so comfortable with reuse, that it's cheaper to produce. You don't worry about throwing it away as much. But the fact that SpaceX is now so comfortable with reuse, that it's becoming routine. We hate to say that in space because that's what we said about space shuttle flights when things started to go wrong. But in this sense, it is starting to become routine. We had a weekend here where SpaceX flew on Friday from the East Coast. They flew a reflown booster, landed it on the drone ship, and then turned around Sunday on the West Coast, flew a new booster and landed that on the drone ship with these new grid fins. We've had an incredible week here of turnaround time. So it is getting routine. There are two boosters at sea right now on their way back to port.

So these things are starting to become an operation, not an experiment. And I think we're really starting to see that take hold because they're making these upgrades to these more expensive, more long-lived materials. And that is something that just does not happen on an expendable booster. But the fact that these reusable boosters are going to start to get these upgrades that make things more reusable, more hardy to the environments that they live in, and more like an operational vehicle than a single-use throwaway booster that only needed to work for two minutes. They're making these decisions with tens of flights in mind, not just two minutes worth of a flight. So I think this is a real watershed moment to see

this upgrade happen. And these are bigger grid fins. They're going to allow boosters to glide a bit more. So that might change some reentry dynamics. It might make some of these trajectories a little less intensive for the booster. They might be able to glide a little bit more and make things impact the longevity of the booster less. So I think as we see this change, they probably haven't changed the trajectory too much on this first flight, but now that they have some data on these grid fins and they're going to keep flying them, we might see some changes to trajectories and flight patterns on the way back to a drone ship or back to the landing pad. So that's an extremely exciting thing if you're somebody who watches this sort of transition from expendable to reusable.

To see these more expensive upgrades happening is a big, big deal. And I think it's obviously something that you're not going to read in the newspapers, other than the super nerdy sections way in the back page. But to you and I who really get in and dissect this stuff, it's a big deal to see these upgrades happening. So I think that is one of the watershed moments for SpaceX this year. I think it's one of the most encouraging things about reusability, that there are decisions being made because reuse is normal to a company now. And that goes a long way to say where we're at with reusability today. And now obviously it's just the grid fins, but these upgrades are going to happen to the landing legs. We're going to see a new version of the landing legs that are more reusable, that can retract on their own, that improve their the landing legs. We're going to see a new version of the landing legs that are more reusable, that can retract on their own,

that improve their workflow and processing. We're going to see this throughout the Falcon 9. We're going to see it on things like the new Shepard and new Glenn boosters from Blue Origin because these reusable boosters, as they become operational, they start to play a different game than every other booster out there. And there's going to be this divergence in materials and in decision making.

So, you know, grid fins are just a leading indicator of this, but we're going to start to see it through the rest of the booster and the rest of the reusable rocket families out there. So keep an eye on these decisions as they go. We might start to see, like we've heard with the ITS from SpaceX, composite tanks and different things like that that are probably too expensive and not very useful when you're talking about a single-use booster. But when you start talking about a vehicle that flies multiple flights, tens and hundreds of flights, these things start to make sense and the price of those start to make sense

because you wouldn't want to spend money on something that expensive unless you could use it a certain amount of times. In the case of these grid fins, they're saying that the lifetime is fairly unlimited, whatever that means. They don't know exactly how long they'll last or what kind of upgrades they'll need in the future, but titanium is going to last through the heating environment that it takes, through the aerodynamic environment that it takes. So these things are just exciting to watch as we transition from an era of let's make this work once to let's make this thing last. Now, as I mentioned, SpaceX did two launches within that weekend that we just had, and that was an incredible achievement.

But it points at something larger. SpaceX now has two independent launch teams, one on the East Coast and one on the West Coast. And that's a big deal for their own tempo reasons. We've talked about launch cadence with SpaceX so often because it's an important factor in what they're doing. They want to launch once a week and keep rolling through their manifest. And before, they had a single launch team that would do a launch on the East Coast and then have to relocate to the West Coast, do a launch there before flying back East. So that puts some severe limitations on the rate that they could do these launches. And it also puts some timeline considerations because a delay on the East Coast would push back launches on the West Coast. This is proof,

and we've had confirmation of this, that SpaceX does have two independent launch teams on each coast, which will let those sites have their own tempo to them. So as the Iridium flights pick up on the West Coast, as the SpaceX internet constellation flights pick up on the West Coast, or anyone else that wants to get in on those polar flights, which as of right now is a less used orbit in terms of SpaceX launches, as those flights pick up, the West Coast can keep its own cadence and they can keep flying once every week or two from Vandenberg, and the East Coast can be completely unaffected by that. They can keep flying the flights to the space station, the commercial flights to GTO, and any other flights they're doing out of the East Coast,

and those two schedules do not affect each other. This is also incredibly interesting because just back in April, there was a round of layoffs out at Vandenberg from ULA. We obviously don't have all of the details of that round of layoffs, but from the details that we do have, it seems like that was related to ULA going down to a single launch team. And this is more indicative of the times that we're in that ULA's flight rate, which has never been incredibly high, but it has dropped to the point when they can maintain just a single launch team and go back to the way that SpaceX was doing this previously. So it's an interesting inflection point that SpaceX's launch rate has picked up to the point that having two launch teams makes sense, and ULA's has decreased to the point that having a single one makes more

sense. In the long run, we'll see how SpaceX deals with multiple launch teams. They already have these different launch environments where the transporter erectors at pad 40 and at pad 39A and out at the launch pad out in Vandenberg 4E, they were all different models. They had been built different times. They are kind of retrofitting these all as they go,

building new ones as they go. And hopefully they get those things kind of joined up at some point um but there are differences across all these sites and these launch teams have to be prepared probably to drop in and out of uh these different sites and uh it's interesting to see the 39a pad do so well of late that is the newest pad that they've built, the newest transport erector that they've built. And that thing is just doing fine with all of these launches out of it. They have had very little work between launches to go in and fix hydraulic lines and electrical lines and things that usually need touch-ups after a launch. They've had very little work to do between the last few launches. And every launch, they add a little bit more blast

shielding or protection in some areas to keep their launch rate high, so much so that they are planning another launch from 39A this upcoming Sunday. So they're going to have a launch Friday, Sunday, Sunday, which is a pretty great rate. That would be a nine-day turnaround for 39A, which is the quickest single pad turnaround that SpaceX will have ever done. You know, the two-day turnaround was an East Coast pad and a West Coast pad. So, to see a nine-day turnaround on 39A says a lot about the state of that launch pad, that it's holding up well with all these launches, that they've really ironed out what they need to in terms of a fast launch rate on a particular pad. So, I hope that they propagate that kind of stuff to 4E out at Vandenberg and to pad

40 down at the Cape. And then there's the whole Boca Chica launch pad and launch site that is under works. They've been working on that for a couple of years now. It's not yet ready, but it should be in the next two years or so. Once that comes online, you could imagine that there would be a third launch team down in Texas. And these three sites would have their own independent schedules that could keep rolling. And their launch rate at that point, once you think about that, just becomes mind boggling in a sense. Launch cadence is something that they've been focused on and specifically this year that they've really hit their stride on. That they are already at nine launches,

and we are not even through June yet. That is the most that they've ever done in a single year, and they've done it in the first half of the year. And most of those flights have come in the second half of the first half of the year. So it's an accelerating cadence at this point, and they've been able to keep up with it the past few weeks through some delays and all with weather and payload and whatever else. So to see that kind of cadence pickup is very encouraging for SpaceX's future. I think that they will easily get above 15 launches

for this year, and they could even drift upwards to the 20 range. And if so, that would be, we've talked about the SpaceX steamroller, where, you know, one of these years, they are going to hit that cadence that they've been talking about for the past five. And this seems like it's going to be the year that they are able to get well into the double digits of launches, and keep rolling through their manifest and their backlog that they have. And that's been one of the big pieces of criticism that people have said that they have this huge backlog, they always promise double-digit flights. They always end up with low single-digit flights because of incidents in the past two years, CRS-7 in 2015 and AMOS-6

in 2016. So things are looking good for their cadence right now. Things are picking up. Their tempo is great. They have these two launch teams working. They've got a lot on their manifest for this year. So if they can get this nine-day turnaround on 39A and keep rolling on that, that's going to be a pretty interesting end of the year for SpaceX when we see how many launches they got off and what kinds they got off. If they got any Dragon 2 flights off or Falcon Heavy, any of these flights that are kind of on the border of 2017 right now, they are going an incredibly long way through the things that we talked about at the border of 2017 right now, they are going an incredibly long way through the things that we talked about at the beginning of the year for SpaceX that were so important.

Cadence, Falcon Heavy, Dragon 2, and this reusability, proving out of reusability that they're doing. They are making a good progress through that list of things that they needed to prove in 2017. So far, they are off to an incredibly strong start. I'm very encouraged to see that, and I hope that they can continue through the next few weeks. So I want to dive into the Blue Origin politicking that's happening down in Alabama. But before I do that, I want to say a huge thank you to all of the supporters of Main Engine Cutoff over on Patreon. There are 70 of you supporting this show over on Patreon. I'm so thankful for all of your support, especially the 15 executive producers of this episode of

Main Engine Cutoff. Chris, Pat, Matt, George, Brad, Ryan, Laszlo, Jameson, Guinevere, Nadim, Peter, and four anonymous executive producers. They made this episode of Main Engine Cutoff possible. I could not do it without their support. And I am so thankful for their support and the 55 others over at patreon.com slash Miko. If you want to help support the show, this is an independent thing that I run here. It's just me. I'm doing all of the podcasts, the blog, everything. If you want to help support like these 70 wonderful humans have done, head over to patreon.com slash Miko and sign up there.

There are other great ways to support as well. As always, post a link to something that I'm podcasting or writing or something like that. Helping spread the word is a huge, huge help to an independent person like me. And head over to the shop at shop.mainenginecutoff.com. You can get yourself some t-shirts, some rocket socks. We've got all sorts of great stuff over there in the shop. So that also helps support everything that I'm doing here as well. And it also puts some cool gear on you for when you're heading out to a launch or an event, some space nerd events. Everybody loves a nerdy t-shirt. So head over there and check it out. All right, let's get into the Alabama politics as we always tend to do on this show. It's been a year that is full of Alabama politics as we always tend to do on this show. It's been a year that is full of Alabama politics from everything from ULA's Vulcan, like we'll talk about here, to the SLS program that's

been ongoing. There's a lot of Alabama-centric politicking this year, and Blue Origin is diving right in this week as well. They have announced that if they win the ULA contract for the BE-4 on Vulcan, they will open up the production facility for BE-4 down in Huntsville. We had known for a while that they were searching for a production plant for BE-4. They're going to produce the actual stages for that rocket down in Florida, just outside of Cape Canaveral in Exploration Park. That's just across the waterway from where all the launch pads are. And then they're going to have a test site at the launch pad itself where they'll test the engines before they integrate them with the stages. So

they're going to be very stage centric in Florida, but they had this open question for where they'll produce the actual engines. The initial run is going to happen up in Kent in Washington State, and that is more of the development engines that they're building and they have built and they sent to Texas to test, and that'll be the first run of engines that they build up there. But once they get this contract with ULA, which President Rob Meyerson said should come later this year, they will then start building a facility in Huntsville

to go into mass production of these engines. The facility has been said to employ about 340 people, and the company has said that they would make investments of around $200 million into the area to develop the facility, and that the facility itself would produce about 30 BE-4 engines a year, which is an interesting number that we'll dissect in just a second. Now, this is obviously an interesting move because there's been a very focused effort by some members of Congress to put their thumb on the scale of this Vulcan engine decision in the direction of Aerojet Rocketdyne's AR-1. Aerojet Rocketdyne is very Alabama-focused.

They actually have closed three facilities in the past year, two out in California, one in Virginia, and they're relocating all those people down to Huntsville, somewhere around 1,000 jobs, in addition to what they already have there. They have some jobs in Huntsville now and some split between Stennis and Marshall and a couple of different areas like that.

So they have a presence down in the Mississippi, Alabama area, and they're doubling down on that more by closing down these other facilities and consolidating in Huntsville. So in terms of scales, Eridgett Rocketdyne still has much, much more of a presence than Blue Origin will have if they win this contract. So this is sort of Blue Origin succumbing to what they need to do to get this contract with ULA. They obviously don't need it, but it would be awfully nice to be able to produce these engines to sell to somebody else, not just themselves. I think even if they lose out on that Vulcan deal, BE4 will go on just as it would have otherwise. So I don't

think it's a make or break decision, but I do think that it helps them kind of anchor themselves in terms of manufacturing, in terms of economies of scale. That is something that is attractive to them because they're going to be reusing their own engines. So they need less engines than ULA would need if they're flying Vulcan at the rates that they want to fly Vulcan. So it's a very interesting political move, not an unexpected political move in any way. Back in February, there were two members of Congress, Mike Rogers of Alabama, Mac Thornberry of Texas, who sent a letter to the acting secretary of the Air Force, basically saying that if ULA is going

to get government money for that rocket, we want to have a say in the engine choice. And they indicated that they would pick Aerojet Rocketdyne. And they were kind of putting their thumbs on the scales in the direction of AR-1. And then less than a month later, on March 23rd, there was a report that Mac Thornberry kind of limped away from that statement. They backed down from that statement from saying, you know what, we're actually not going to get involved in this decision. That decision is to make, you know, whatever I said before, forget it. to cause that quick of a turnaround. And I would not be surprised if after that letter was sent, talks picked up between Blue Origin and the Alabama group of people, and they said, hey, listen, if we get this Vulcan contract,

we'll consider putting a facility there. They started talking about different incentives. So it's obviously a multi-month long process to get this all sorted out, to get the details worked out, and figure out what they would need to offer to have Blue Origin come down there. So that quick of a backing down of that statement kind of indicates that something happened between February and March, maybe the early part of March, and maybe that's when these conversations started. And obviously, they were successful conversations. They offered the right thing to Blue Origin. Blue Origin needed them to lay off a bit and let them work on BE4, let them have ULA make the decision themselves. And things seem to be calming down in that department right

now. But there's a huge asterisk with that. As I said, Aerojet Rocketdyne's presence down in these states is much bigger than Blue Origin's is. And right now, Blue Origin doesn't have any. They just have a promise that if they get selected, they will magically appear in Alabama. So it doesn't immediately solve this political issue for Blue Origin. It doesn't immediately make it disappear, like a lot of people are saying, like, oh, this solved all of their political issues that they've been having down in the Gulf States. It doesn't immediately make that disappear because Aerojet Rocketdyne has history with these representatives and Congress members. They have a bigger presence there. They have already, you know, still, they have very big ties to the military. So they've already got those

kind of relationships built up. They have history with these people, history with these relationships. So there is a lot of inertia behind Aerojet Rocketdyne and their relationship with members of Congress and members of the Department of Defense and all these kind of things. So it doesn't immediately make that disappear, but it does balance it out a little bit. It does show that Blue Origin is open to investing in those same areas. It does show these members of Congress, Senator Shelby came out and said so many good things about Blue Origin once they decide this. So it does show people like that,

like Shelby, that they're interested in that area, that they are aware of the effort they need to put in that area to kind of garner the support from these very crucial members of Congress in a lot of ways. And it's also interesting to consider that Blue Origin is doing another thing in the direction of lobbying of some sort. They've been pushing very hard recently that they would be interested in landing on the moon with NASA, not on their own. They've been pushing very hard that they would do this with NASA. I talked in the past about how that was an interesting turn of lobbying from a company that has the deep pockets that they do have. And not unexpected because everyone likes to spend other people's money, but it is interesting to see a company that has been mostly divorced from all

that typical lobbying and all the typical dealings that we hear about, they've been mostly separated from that. And now they're starting to approach that both in lobbying NASA for roadmap plans and now kind of wooing the Alabama group of people within Congress and elsewhere. I'm not sure if that shows that they are maturing in the space industry, they're getting close to operational status, or if they just really want to start expanding outside of their own shell that they've been in the past few years. Either way, I think this will work out for Blue Origin. They are not hurting for funding in any way. They're not hurting for a vision in any

way. I think they would do just fine if all of this dried up and they didn't get picked for any of this. But it does make it very, very interesting that they are one by one kind of picking off these different lobbying areas because that's just going to encroach on the territory of these old spacey minded companies, Airjet Rocketdyne, Boeing, Lockheed, Orbital ATK. They are moving into their territory in the same way that SpaceX moved into their territory a couple of years ago. So overall, good decision from Blue Origin, not unexpected decision from Blue Origin. It does spread them a little wider in terms of politics. Now they have a presence in Washington State, in Texas, in Florida, and now in Alabama. The only other place that I could have seen them doing this was California to get that same kind of backing that SpaceX has from people out in

California and the West Coast. So I kind of thought it would happen either in California or in Alabama. Not a huge surprise, but I do think it is meaningful for them moving forward. Now, the 30 BE-4 engines a year number is very, very interesting. It's not a huge amount of engines. Obviously, that number would change over time as they fly more New Glenn flights, as they fly more Vulcan flights. So when you start to consider these numbers and how they divide out based on that, right, we've got eight BE-4s for New Glenn, two BE-4s per Vulcan, you start to come up with some number ideas, like they might produce two first stages worth of BE4s, six upper stages worth of BE4Us, and then that leaves five Vulcans worth of BE4s over from that to get to their 30 number. So you

start to see how this flight rate might break down, that Blue Origin would produce a smaller number of first stages a year, bigger number of upper stages a year, and then whatever's left, they would hand off to Vulcan. That might be a little flipped where ULA says, hey, you know what? We need seven Vulcans this year. So they would produce their 14. And then whatever's left, they would produce their own New Glenn vehicles with. So it's an interesting number because it's not that many. But obviously, you have one of these rockets that's going to reuse everything but the upper

stage and one rocket that's just going to keep throwing things away. So I think the numbers might ebb and flow a little bit based on how many new glens Blue Origin gets back successfully. If they're consistently landing these things and those BE-4s can fly, I think it was 10 times or 25 times or something like that, they obviously need to produce less of those so they could have one year where they barely produce any new glens and one year when they produce more new glens based on their inventory. So I think that's, you know, management yet to be seen. But the 30 number is very interesting to start when you consider Vulcan flight rate as it would start low, maybe in the single digits,

and then eventually ramp up to about Atlas rate right now, if all goes well for ULA. So overall, very interesting things coming out of this BE4 announcement. I'm interested to hear what any of you out there think. So if you've got any thoughts on either the SpaceX Tempo thing that I was talking about or this Blue Origin political thing that we're talking about here, email me anthony at managingcutoff.com. I always love hearing from you. I've been getting a lot of great emails in the past weeks based on feedback on the show, some interviews that we've been doing, or different topics to cover. So I love hearing that from you. Please send me an email, anthony at mainenginecutoff.com. Thanks once again to all

the supporters of Main Engine Cutoff. I am hugely thankful for your support week in and week out over at patreon.com slash miko. Thank you very much for listening, and I will talk to you next week.