Main Engine Cut Off - T+52: XCOR Winds Down, ULA Wins STP-3

Episode Date: July 13, 2017

XCOR laid off the rest of its staff and is closing up shop after losing a contract with ULA, which leaves ULA in an interesting spot for Vulcan-ACES. On the ULA side, they won their first Phase 1A contract from the Air Force, and the contract price sheds some light on just how much they’re cutting their costs. This episode of Main Engine Cut Off is brought to you by 16 executive producers—Kris, Mike, Pat, Matt, Jorge, Brad, Ryan, Laszlo, Jamison, Guinevere, Nadim, Peter, and four anonymous—and 56 other supporters on Patreon. XCOR Aerospace Lays Off Entire Staff But Intends To Keep Going XCOR Loses XS-1 and ULA ACES Contract, Announces Lay Offs - Main Engine Cut Off ULA wins competition for $191 million Air Force launch - SpaceNews.com United Launch Alliance Wins Competitive Contract Award to Launch the United States Air Force STP-3 M - United Launch Alliance Very interesting comments on STP-3 from Tory Bruno on the ULA subreddit NASA - NASA Selects Launch Services Provider for Juno Jupiter Mission Air Force asks SpaceX, ULA to bid on a five-launch contract - 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

This is Main Engine Cutoff. I am Anthony Colangelo. We've got a lot to cover today from some sad X-Core news and related ULA speculation in that regard, and then some good news on the ULA front that they won a contract from the Air Force in the Phase 1A round of contracting that they're in currently, and we'll do some SpaceX-related speculation in that regard. So let's dive in first with the X-Core news. Let's start there. The sad news is that X-Core has laid off its entire staff, everyone that was remaining from the previous round of layoffs that happened back in May 2016. So the writing has sort of been on the wall for a while with regards to XCORS.

Back in May 2016, they laid off about half their staff across their two sites, the Midland, Texas site and the Mojave site. And that was kind of the end of the Lynx program. There were some weird bits of Lynx that were still lingering. There was a spaceport in the UK that was talking about bringing in the Lynx as part of their spaceport buildup phase, I don't know. But there was never really any details around that. Then they kind of tweeted out a couple of months ago a photo of Lynx work still ongoing. So it was a bit hard to tell what was going on,

but from what we could tell, the Lynx program was kind of ended then, and they focused on engine development. They had a contract with ULA to work on an engine that could be used on the ACES upper stage that ULA is working on for its next generation rocket. That is what happened with this round of layoffs, is that ULA decided not to continue funding that work for Aces. So that's what triggered this round of layoffs, especially per this Forbes report that they talked to Michael Blum, the acting CEO and a board member of XCOR, who opened up and said that, you know, this ULA engine decision is what led us to this round of layoffs and to close up shop here. The other thing that plays into this a bit is that they were in the running for the XS1 program with Mastin. And just about two months ago in May 2017, DARPA decided to

go with Boeing for phases two and three of XS1 that I did a whole show about. And that was kind of the third program that XCore had going on. They had the Lynx, the engine for ULA, and the speculative but interesting XS1 proposal. So after all three of those things kind of closed up, they didn't have much else going on, and that's what led to this round of layoffs. So as I said, the writing's been on the wall for a while in this regard. None of these projects seem to be panning out as well as one could hope. So it is a sad end, but it looks like they're trying to sell off the intellectual property of XCore to find a good home, similar to what we saw with Firefly a couple months back, an interesting home somewhere that could give it a future. It might kind of fade out in an obscure way as Fireflies did.

We'll see what happens in that regard. But the management team is working on that to sell off that IP to somewhere else. But the rest of the staff has laid off at this point. So it'll be interesting to see where all of those people go as well, because there's a lot of talented folks there that are going to now be looking for for work in Texas and in Mojave to two areas that are pretty interesting. Texas for SpaceX and Blue Origin specifically. They've got some interesting sites out there that they might want to scoop up some of the folks that was working there. And in Mojave, obviously, that's a pretty big area for spaceflight and related things. So we'll see where some of the pieces fall after this happens.

I'm sure that they'll be headed to interesting spots, which might make for interesting conversation in the future. But right now, I don't have too much to say in the way of XCOR, but this does leave ULA in a very interesting spot. Specifically with regards to Vulcan Aces, ULA is now working with two direct competitors for both engines that they need for that rocket. The first stage of Vulcan is obviously a very big topic of late. The competition is between Blue Origin for the BE-4 and Aerojet Rocketdyne for

the AR-1 engine. That's something we've talked about over and over again because it's one of the most interesting stories of 2017, certainly. So that's the direct competition for the first stage. But now in the upper stage, the ACES upper stage, which will be coming later down the line, I think right now they're aiming for 2023 for the first flight of that upper stage. But now the engines that are going to be powering the ACES is a competition between Blue Origin and Aerojet Rocketdyne once again. Blue Origin is working on the BE-3U, which is a variant of what flies on the new Shepard rocket modified for upper stage use. That would be used by Blue Origin on their three-stage new Glenn variant. And also Orbital

ATK's next generation launch vehicle is looking to use that as an upper stage engine for them in that regard. The Aerojet Rocketdyne RL-10 is what Aerojet Rocketdyne is proposing for ACE's use. That's currently in use on Centaur on the Atlas V, on the Delta Cryogenic second stage on the Delta IV rockets. There's four and five meter variants of that. And it's also in use for SLS, both in the interim cryogenic propulsion stage, which is the delta-derived upper stage that will fly on EM1, and for the exploration upper stage, which will fly on EM2 and beyond. So both of these engines have a couple of different ways that they would be used throughout the industry, and that is what ULA is looking at now. Do they want to go BE3U, or do they want to go RL-10?

That brings up a couple of interesting questions. Like, would ULA prefer to go a single supplier route and have the entire rocket, the entire propulsion for the rocket supplied by a single company, either going the BE-4 and the BE-3U or going the AR-1 and the RL-10? Or do they want to go a different route and split the rocket, have the first stage powered by Blue Origin and the upper stage powered by Arjet Rocketdyne or vice versa? There's probably some cost advantages to the first option there to have a single company working with you because you don't have to have these two different agreements with different

companies. You probably save some overlap of staff because you can have basically one team interacting with the external vendor. But there's also some peace of mind advantages to the split route. For instance, you wouldn't be solely dependent on another company in the industry who might change their plans, who might change the deals that they require of whoever they're selling their engines to. Or in the case of Blue Origin, you don't want to be solely dependent on a company that is a direct competitor to you. Aerojet Rocketdyne, as of right now, has no plans to build a launch vehicle. They've flirted with the idea of flying an Atlas

5 for quite a while. They even tried to buy ULA outright a couple of years ago. But Blue Origin is going to be a direct competitor to ULA in just a few years. So being solely dependent on a company that is a direct competitor is obviously a dangerous position to put yourself in. And the other thing is, if you go with a single supplier, either Aerojet, Rocketdyne, or Blue Origin, you run the risk of a company going out of business, changing their mind, not offering a certain product anymore, and being kind of screwed in that regard if your entire rocket is dependent on that company's existence or current business plan. So there's a big decision to make, whether they want the single supplier route or they want to go with a dual supplier. My bet would be that the BE-4

wins out for the first stage, and we hear that later this year. And then once we hear that, they down select for the ACES stage to the RL-10 by Aerojet Rocketdyne. They have a lot of history in working with upper stages with Aerojet Rocketdyne, specifically with the RL-10. There are variants, as I said, that fly on Centaur and the Delta second stage. So it wouldn't surprise me if they want to keep it in that regard, considering the fact that ACES is kind of bringing the best of both Centaur and the Delta Cryogenic second stage, combining it into one upper stage that's got a lot of new features, they already have a lot of history built up with that engine, with the people that work there, you know, technicians that work on both sides that really understand the engine and know what

they're working with. So it wouldn't surprise me if RL-10 won in that regard. And it wouldn't surprise me if we heard that very quickly after the BE BE4 was downselected for use on the first stage. So I would be looking to that for later this year that we might hear about it a bit and have a better idea of what Vulcan Aces will really look like rather than having these multiple different variants in mind of what it could pan out to be. But this X-Core thing really puts ULA in an interesting spot in that regard, and we'll see how they play it out from here. So next, let's dive into the Air Force contract that ULA won last week. But before we do that, I want to say a very, very big thank you to all of the supporters of Main Engine Cutoff out there that are supporting

the show over on Patreon at patreon.com slash Miko. There are 72 of you supporting the show every single month. It really, really helps make a huge difference, especially the 16 executive producers of this episode of Main Engine Cutoff. They made this episode possible and could not do it without their support. They are Chris, Mike, Pat, Matt, George, Brad, Ryan, Laszlo, Jameson, Guinevere, Nadeem, Peter, and four anonymous executive producers. They produced this episode. I am hugely thankful for their support and everyone else over at Patreon. So head over to patreon.com slash Miko if you want to help support the show. Let's dive into this contract that ULA won from the Air Force. This is the

third of 15 contracts that are part of the phase 1A contracting round from the Air Force. This is the third of 15 contracts that are part of the Phase 1A contracting round from the Air Force. The first two were GPS-3 satellites. Those are the ones that SpaceX won the contract for most recently in March of this year. And this is a very unique round of contracting because this is the first round of contracting in which these awards are put out competitively. So SpaceX and ULA right now are bidding on these contract rounds before this was a block buy from ULA, which is obviously a topic for another day. But this is a competitive round of contracting. We've seen SpaceX pick up two GPS3 launches for a cost much, much, much lower than ULA would have been

able to do those launches for. And now this is the first time that we've seen ULA win one of these competitive bids, so it's quite interesting. This is the STP-3 mission. It is a direct-to-above-geo mission, so that brings an interesting aspect for why ULA won this launch instead of SpaceX. This is actually going to above the graveyard orbit altitude. So it's not going to geostationary orbit. It's going quite a bit above

that. Geostationary is at 35,786 kilometers. STP-3 is going directly to 36,199 kilometers. So that brings up a couple of questions about what this could be doing out there. You know, they talk about what these missions are, but there's obviously some undisclosed parts of the mission, payloads and all that sort of thing. So let's get into some of the details of why this is interesting. ULA won this bid with an Atlas V 551 variant, which is the biggest version of the Atlas V. It's got the most solid rocket boosters. I'm not sure how big the fairing is on this. I'm not sure if it's the biggest fairing or not.

But for all intents and purposes, this is the most expensive version of the Atlas V. And the contract price is $191.1 million, which, if you've been following some of this stuff, is quite a low price for an Atlas V of that size, specifically when you consider some of the different mission operations that they're going to be doing. They're going direct to above geo. There's a lot of different payloads flying on this. So it's a multi-payload launch, especially it's got a propulsive secondary

payload adapter. So there's a lot of complexity to this mission, a lot of capability in this mission, and they are able to do it for $191 million, which kind of goes to show that ULA really is bringing down their prices and doing it. You know, they're not super competitive with SpaceX yet on price, but for some higher priority missions, the price begins to look very, very similar when you consider what is going on top of these rockets. The Atlas V 551 has flown seven times through Atlas V's history. The first flight was New Horizons to Pluto. That flew in 2006. Second flight was Juno to Jupiter. That took off in 2011. And then there was five flights for the Department of Defense's mobile user objective system.

Those were satellites one through five. The first was in 2012, the second was in 2013, third and fourth were in 2015, and the fifth was just last year in 2016. So there's been seven of those launches. Part of those, the DOD missions were part of the BlockFi, so not really a good example for pricing. But the Juno launch that was about 10 years ago now is very interesting in its parallels. The NASA announcement for that launch contract, which again was outside of the block buy, and I'll explain why that's important in a minute, but the launch price for Juno was $190 million, which that was 10 years ago. So if you adjust

for inflation, that price was $225 million if it was contracted today. So that's an interesting difference alone is that the price is about $34 million lower than it would have been 10 years ago. So that kind of shows you a bit about what this cost drop is doing, especially when you consider those different complexities that I've talked about before. Secondary payloads, different mission parameters, and for something that's going direct to geo or above, you need to add some capability to Centaur, some extra thermal shielding, some extra batteries, etc. So there's a lot of different things going on in this mission that would drive up the cost, but you notice that

it is about the same cost as it was 10 years ago, not even adjusting for inflation. Now, when I say the block buy, things that were in the block buy and things that were not in the block buy, this is something that is always referred to as the government subsidy for ULA. This was the Department of Defense paying ULA a given amount per year to maintain the capability to launch Atlas 5 and Delta 4. Any launches that happen outside of the BlockBuy needs to reimburse the Air Force for whatever fixed costs there are to that launch. So this launch price, $191.1 million, includes all the things that are typically covered by that BlockBly subsidy, if you want to use that word. So this is as close to a true pricing for one of these launches as you could get. Obviously,

there's always some fuzziness when you're talking about launch costs and things that make accounting very hard and accountants very important in this regard. So we'll probably get a truer sense after 2019 when the ELC, it's called, expires and they're not getting that money anymore. We'll see how similar these launch prices are for the phase two contracts that are going to come after 2019. But for now, this is interesting to see the price drop in an Atlas V and really, you know, it's a good way to verify the things we've been hearing about the Atlas V price over the last year or two. Now, I mentioned that this is a direct-to-above-geo mission, and that's something that makes it very interesting for SpaceX in this regard.

They did bid on this launch, but they had to bid with Falcon Heavy, so they definitely did not expect to win because they need to have a Falcon Heavy flight in order to win a contract with it. So the statement from SpaceX, from John Taylor, the PR person at SpaceX, he said, we did submit a bid, but with the knowledge that our first Falcon Heavy flight might occur after the time of the award. Given we have not flown Falcon Heavy, we do not anticipate winning this mission. So that kind of shows their thinking there. They had to bid with Falcon Heavy because it's direct to above geo mission. Falcon 9 could not do it. And because it hasn't flown yet, they were not in the running for this.

Claire Leon, who is part of the Air Force Space and Missile Systems Center, said that they would need to see Falcon Heavy fly one time before awarding a contract, and that Falcon Heavy would have to fly at least three times before any satellite could be flown on the launch vehicle. So this brings up some interesting considerations when you're looking at the future of the Phase 1A contracts, which we'll get into in just a minute. But first, I want to talk about the Falcon Heavy performance, why it was needed over Falcon 9, etc, etc. Falcon 9 has shown some long coast demos in the past few launches. They seem to be prepping to show some direct-to-geo capability. There's been a lot of thought that the Falcon Heavy demo mission would show them putting something direct-to-geo or above-geo with that launch vehicle. would be very important for Falcon Heavy to show if they want to win some of these Air Force contracts.

It's something that right now ULA is the only person that can do it with regards to the Department of Defense here. So it's something that could be unique to Falcon Heavy and SpaceX's lineup and something that they would like to show off if possible. So we know they've been making modifications to the upper stage to be able to support it. That upper stage is going to be flown on Falcon Heavy, and hopefully they can demo that later this year. Obviously, with a small enough payload, they could do direct-to-geo with Falcon 9 based on the Long Coast demos that they've done, showing that they can restart the upper stage engine after a given amount of time, which is needed to circularize into geostationary orbit. The problem is that a payload of that side is not typically flown direct to geo. They need a bigger payload capacity, and that is where Falcon Heavy comes in. And you might bring up that the Atlas

5 itself has not done a direct geo mission, because most of those have flown on Delta 4 in the past decade or so. And that's mostly because, you know, the Atlas 5 may be able to put a certain payload into geosynchronous transfer orbit. But the Delta 4 with its bigger payload capacity can take something up. Specifically, the Delta 4 Heavy can take something up and has enough margin to get it direct to geo. So then the DoD might opt for that kind of mission. So the Delta 4 has done a lot of direct-to-geo missions. The Atlas V has not yet, but obviously Centaur itself has shown the capability to be able to do that in the same way that the Falcon 9's upper stage has shown the ability.

Difference is that the Centaur is a much more performant upper stage than the Falcon 9's upper stage. That's something that comes down to the payload mass fraction, the different type of propellants that are flying on both of those upper stages, the efficiency of the RL-10 over the Falcon 9's Merlin-1D. So there's all these different variables that come into play. But the bottom line is that Falcon Heavy needs to get flying if they want a chance at some of these contracts. So with that in mind, let's take a look ahead at what the next couple of missions will be under Phase 1A. About a week after the STP-3 announcement,

the Air Force said that they were going to do another round of launches, five launches in this next round of contracting, and that they need to have proposals submitted by August 14th. So these five satellites in this round that's due by August are two Air Force Space Command satellites, numbers 8 and 12, which are direct-to-geo missions, again, and then there are three more GPS-3 launches. As I said, the first two GPS-3s SpaceX took pretty easily. One of them, ULA did not even bid, even though they submitted a bid, but they weren't in the process of winning it. It's all complicated stuff.

So what it comes down to is that SpaceX might have to bid with Falcon Heavy again. Based on the mass of these satellites, they are just out of Falcon 9 direct-to-geo range. They are a little bit more than Falcon 9 could handle, so Falcon Heavy would be needed. At least, you know, considering I don't know all the details of what Block 5 Falcon 9 can do, we know that there's a substantial payload jump there because of some thrust up ratings and all the different changes that are going into Block 5, but from what it seems like, they are just outside of Falcon 9 range. The other thing about these five launches that are coming up next is that you need to bid for all five if you want any of your proposals

to be selected. So SpaceX can't just bid for the GPS 3 launches and ULA can't just bid for the two Air Force Space Command launches. You have to bid for all five if you want to be considered for these launches. So SpaceX will probably have to bid Falcon Heavy for two of these missions, and they would have to have flown Falcon Heavy by the time the contract is awarded. From what it sounds like, the contracts would be awarded by the end of the year, so there is a chance that Falcon Heavy could have flown by then, and then they would need to get the two other manifested missions, the STP-2 mission for the Air Force and another commercial satellite off before they could fly any of these missions that

they were contracted for. At least three missions before they fly a mission, but they just need to fly one to win the contract. So it's a bit of a complicated workflow, but for these missions and for some that come after this in Phase 1A, that Falcon Heavy demo flight is very, very important, and SpaceX seems to be pushing pretty hard for it to happen by the end of the year. They've got two of the three first stages at Cape Canaveral. The third seems to be en route somewhere, whether it's at McGregor or on its way to the Cape. They seem to be getting close to having all of the hardware at the Cape. Then they need to get Pad 40 back on to shift all the launches there while they redo Pad 39A to get Falcon Heavy off. All of that said, it is of utmost priority to SpaceX if they want to

win some of these contracts to get that Falcon Heavy flight off by the end of the year. And they seem to be pushing hard for it. Gwen Shotwell was on the space show a couple of weeks back and talked about how they're really pushing for that Falcon Heavy flight to fly by the end of this year, we'll see if they do. It seems like they could make it if everything goes as planned for the launch pad work that they have to do. But as always, slips are possible. So if Falcon Heavy gets off by the end of this year, it would be interesting to see what the Air Force would decide here. They obviously have a vested interest in giving launches to both of these companies because they want them to stick around. So I think our baseline assessment should be that SpaceX wins the three GPS satellites and ULA wins

the two Air Force Space Command satellites. But if Falcon Heavy flies, that could change and it could maybe trade one of the GPS launches for one of the Air Force Space Command satellites. But if Falcon Heavy flies, that could change, and it could maybe trade one of the GPS launches for one of the Air Force Space Command launches to kind of give Falcon Heavy a contract to get itself going and up there and flying and give ULA one of the GPS-3 satellite launches just to kind of spread it around a bit, make themselves a little bit more secure if there are any incidents on either side.

There's going to be two more bids by the end of 2017. There's another Air Force Space Command, that's Satellite 52, that's going to be bid on in August. And then there's another batch of five that is going to happen this year. That includes three NRO launches, one of these space-based infrared system launches, and yet again, another Air Force Space Command satellite, number 44. So there's a lot of Phase 1A happening this year. By the end of this year, let's see, let's count real quick. We'll have the three flights that we've already got contracted, another five, so that takes us to eight. And then that other Air Force Space Command takes us to nine. And they did mention the possibility of another GPS3 launch.

So by the end of this year, there's a chance that we could have 10 of those Phase 1A contracts, 10 of the 15 contracts in Phase 1A bid on and contracted by the end of the year. So we're moving through that pretty well. All of these contracts are supposed to be bid on and contracted by the end of the year. So we're moving through that pretty well. All of these contracts are supposed to be bid on and contracted by the end of 2019. And then that is where phase two picks up. And along with phase two comes that another round of EELV funding from the Department of Defense. So that's where we might see Orbital ATK

get some funding for a new launch vehicle. And we'll see how the funding shakes out for ULA's Vulcan, for Falcon Heavy upgrades, et cetera, et cetera. That's a great topic for another show, but I think we've rambled enough on this topic for now. So that is all I've got for this week. If you've got any thoughts on either XCOR or ULA's decisions around Vulcan or Phase 1A contracting, as always, email me me anthony at mainenginecutoff.com or follow me on Twitter at wehavemiko and let's chat there.

But otherwise, thank you so much for listening and I will talk to you next week.