Main Engine Cut Off - T+63: Centaur V, BFR Updates

Starting point is 00:00:00 Welcome to Main Engine Cutoff, I am Anthony Colangelo. This week we've got a little bit to talk about about Centaur V, we've got some updates about BFR from Elon Musk himself. But before we get into either of those things, I do have a little housekeeping to do up front. I wanted to tell you about a new little project that I'm working on. If you've been listening to the show for a while or reading the blog for a while, you probably know Jake Robbins from Wee Martians. He does a podcast focused on Mars. It's an excellent podcast. If you have not listened to it, go check it out. We Martians, you can find it wherever you're listening to this right now. But he and I started a new little project called Off Nominal. We wanted a place to kind of talk about things in the space realm,

Starting point is 00:00:56 but outside of our general areas of focus, because he's got a podcast focused on Mars. I've got topics I generally focus on. We wanted a place to hang out and talk about things that are still about space, but a little outside of those areas. And Off Nominal is that spot. It's going to be a monthly podcast where we grab a beer, we hang out for about an hour and talk about whatever is on our collective radar. Sometimes we'll bring in friends or try some different things around that. So it's more of a laid back kind of space hangout. And I had a lot of fun with the first episode, and I think you will really enjoy it as well.

Starting point is 00:01:27 So head over to offnominal.space if you want to listen to that. Again, it's going to be monthly, so it's not a very high-frequency show, but I do think it's a lot of fun, so check it out. Let me know what you think. I wanted to tell you about that up front because I am very excited about it. The first episode was about a week ago, and as I said, it's monthly. So beginning of November, there will be a second episode out about topics to be determined. But check it out. Let me know what you think.

Starting point is 00:01:53 All right, so let's dive into some of this Centaur V stuff. To give you a little background, maybe it was a couple weeks ago that the Air Force put out a request for proposal for the second round of the Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicle Program. This is launch vehicles that are going to take national security payloads up in the 2020s. Right now, SpaceX and ULA are competing the current round of EELV payloads in the 2020s. It will be some new entrants. So this RFP went out to talk about what the Air Force needs in the 2020s and to get proposals from industry to see who will be as a part of that program in the 2020s. The first round of awards in this era of EELV will be to three companies to work on prototypes and development of launch vehicles. That would be down selected to two companies to push forward with those developments all the way to deployment. And

Starting point is 00:02:49 then those two companies would compete the launches in the 2020s. A couple of months back, I talked about some projections for what EELV2 would contain. So I'll link to that in the show notes as well. But that's not a lot of that has changed. I read through the RFP. There's not a lot of new information in there other than, interestingly, it specifically called out hardware reflight in the language in there. So I think it's specifically touching upon reusable boosters from SpaceX and potentially others as well. So that's an interesting development in its own, but I don't think the playing field has changed that much since I talked about it a couple of months back. Interestingly, timed with this was an op-ed that Tory Bruno, the head of ULA, posted to Space News. He was addressing some rumors that the RD-180

Starting point is 00:03:35 and Atlas V were going to be sticking around to the mid to late 2020s, but he wanted to dispel that rumor and say that Vulcan is on schedule, it's scheduled to take over for Atlas in the 2020s, and they are working on it and they are making good progress on it and it will be ready for when they need it to retire the RD-180 at the mandated date. In it, though, he talks about upgrades to Centaur that they're going to make with the initial version of Vulcan. ULA currently flies the Atlas V and a Delta IV Heavy because those two are needed to cover all of the missions, all of the reference orbits in that EELV

Starting point is 00:04:13 launch service agreement. So this recent proposal and the one years back lists in it reference orbits. They give you nine of these. There's actually 11, but the last two are kind of additional, not necessary. So of these nine, they give you an orbit, altitude, inclination, the payload size, and the payload fairing that it's going to need. So it gives you orbit, destination, mass, and physical size that it needs. And with that, those are the missions that you have to be able to cover to fly these missions for the Air Force and for the rest of the Department of Defense. Atlas V and Delta IV Heavy right now are needed to cover all of that. There are some missions that Atlas V can just not get to with its current configuration,

Starting point is 00:04:55 and that's why the Delta IV Heavy is sticking around. ULA has said that they want to move off of those two things, and they want to have a single rocket that covers all of these missions, because the Delta IV Heavy is a very expensive rocket, and it's very expensive to keep around because of all the overhead that it brings. It needs different launch infrastructure, different production hardware, different production buildings, locations. It needs so much unique stuff that it's a lot of overhead for ULA to handle. So if they can do it all with one rocket, they can really cut their costs down, they can bring their prices down, and they can be more competitive with SpaceX and the rest of the industry. So they have stated with this Vulcan

Starting point is 00:05:34 rocket, they want to phase out Atlas V and Delta IV Heavy, and they want Vulcan to cover it all. Their plan to get there was to introduce Vulcan's first stage first. They need to get off of the RD-180 engine because the U.S. government has mandated them to move off of that Russian-built engine. So they are working, as we've talked about frequently, with Blue Origin and Aerojet Rocketdyne to come up with what engine will power the first stage of Vulcan. And that's the first step in the Vulcan deployment. Their step after that was this thing called the ACES upper stage. And this was going to be a new upper stage that would take over from Centaur that would bring with it three specific things. It was going to bring heavy lift. It was going to bring long, long duration, much longer than Centaur right now. Instead of hours, it would go to days and weeks.

Starting point is 00:06:21 And it would bring distributed lift through in-space refueling. Those were the three components of ACES. And that was both to get off of Delta IV Heavy, but to also push ULA into a different area that they had not been previously with this long duration distributed lift, and really using ACES as an in-space services vehicle. It's a different thing than they're doing now with just a simple upper stage. It's a different thing than they're doing now with just a simple upper stage. So that was where they were at just a few months ago. Now, Tori Bruno, in this op-ed for Space News, and also he's been talking on Twitter and Reddit a lot, as he tends to do, and giving us some other information on Centaur,

Starting point is 00:07:03 this is an upgrade to Centaur to bring forward some of those components of ACES. Specifically, the Centaur V upgrade, that's what they're calling it, Centaur to bring forward some of those components of ACES. Specifically, the Centaur V upgrade, that's what they're calling it, Centaur V, that will bring the heavy lift component of ACES forward onto the initial version of Vulcan. So this upgrade to Centaur is going to fly on Vulcan, cannot fly on the Atlas V, it will fly on Vulcan, and it will fly on Vulcan on day one. This brings with it a little bit of a slip, couple of months, but in terms of the EELV program, that doesn't really matter that much given their current schedule. My thinking has evolved a lot on this topic in the past few days. This was last week when this was all written up by Tory Bruno, and my initial reaction

Starting point is 00:07:42 was a bit of disappointment because the way I read it up front was that Boeing and Lockheed Martin, the parent companies of ULA, were not invested in the future that ULA sees, or maybe still are not really invested in that future that ULA sees, and were unwilling to put up the investment into Aces right now, and unwilling to put the money in at this current time for that ace's future and bring aces itself forward, the entire thing of aces forward. But as I thought about it more and more, I really, really like this strategy from ULA. I think it's a really smart idea for them, and I think it's actually going to be a better path forward for them than jumping straight to ACES. And I'll explain my thinking a bit.

Starting point is 00:08:28 As I just laid out, ULA needs to get from where they are now with Atlas V and Delta IV Heavy to Vulcan only. They need to get the entire company focused on Vulcan. They need to get all of their launch infrastructure trimmed down to just handle one rocket. They need to get their production facilities trimmed down to just handle one rocket. They need to get their production facilities trimmed down to just handle one rocket. They need to get all of their support staff trimmed down to focus on one rocket. This is the same way that Elon Musk said the way to make BFR affordable is to transition the entire company away from Falcon 9 and Dragon and onto BFR. This is the same kind of thing. ULA needs to get the whole company away from Atlas

Starting point is 00:09:05 5 and Delta 4 Heavy and onto Vulcan. But to do that, they need to make Delta 4 Heavy go away. They need to bring forward that heavy lift part onto Vulcan sooner so that they can do away with Delta 4 Heavy and they can do away with what is the biggest area of overhead for ULA today. do away with what is the biggest area of overhead for ULA today. And the reason that I think bringing Heavylift forward first to Centaur is so smart is because if they can't transition from Atlas 5 and Delta 4 Heavy to Vulcan, if they can't successfully make that transition, the long duration, distributed lift, all of that associated ambition doesn't matter one bit. They need to be able to get the company to Vulcan as soon as possible, as quick as possible, as efficiently as possible, or else none of the other things that they've been talking up matter.

Starting point is 00:09:55 None of the other parts of ACES will ever come to fruition, will ever be used because the company would not be able to survive. So they need to facilitate that move as quick as possible, as smooth as possible, and get there efficiently, and then iterate their way to ACES. So looking at the technical side of what this means to pull forward the heavy lift part of ACES into Centaur. Centaur right now is a 3-meter diameter stage. ACES was planned on being a 5- meter diameter stage. The length of ACES

Starting point is 00:10:27 was going to be about the same length as Centaur today. So what it seems like is that they are going to move Centaur to a five meter diameter and then upgrade the engines, either switch engines or add more engines. ACES was always planned on competing these engines either between Blue Origin's BE-3U, the upper stage version of the engine that's flying on New Shepard today, or adding more RL-10s from Aerojet Rocketdyne. That's what they use currently on Centaur and on the Delta Cryogenic second stage. So that seems to be the heritage choice. But what always makes more sense to me is going with that BE-3U.

Starting point is 00:11:06 So they're going to move Centaur to this 5 meter diameter, and again, not all of this is confirmed, this is conjecture based on what I've read from Tory Bruno and reading the tea leaves otherwise. They'll move to that 5 meter diameter, upgrade the engine probably to the BE-3U, and that would bring with it the ability to provide heavy lift, to provide more thrust, to get more out of that rocket itself, and bring that heavy lift portion forward and phase out Delta IV heavy. In terms of engine selection, I find it very, very hard to believe that they would go with the RL-10

Starting point is 00:11:41 because of how expensive that rocket engine is a rocket engine is, and how many they would need to add. They would probably need to go up to three, four more RL-10s on that five meter diameter. I think some of the standard graphics of ACES have shown four engines on that. They would probably only need one BE-3U because it's a much more powerful engine. So I think that would be a logical choice because it's also kind of hard to believe that Aerojet Rocketdyne would be able to get the cost of RL-10 down enough that multiple RL-10s would be competitive with a single BE-3U in terms of affordability. The only wrinkle is that if Vulcan goes with the BE-4 from Blue Origin for the first stage, would ULA want to have the

Starting point is 00:12:26 same engine provider for both the lower and upper stage? Or would they want to have two companies that are working on this? Are there benefits that come with bringing just one company in as a partner and being able to get some economies of scale of providing them all those engines? Or because those two engines are so different, does it not really matter? And they'd rather the flexibility to have these two different companies to focus on. It's hard to see Aerojet Rocketdyne become competitive again in that way, specifically because ULA is moving away from Aerojet Rocketdyne in all of the other facets. They probably are going with the BE-4 for the first stage of Vulcan instead of the AR-1 from Aerojet Rocketdyne. They are even currently moving away from Aerojet Rocketdyne

Starting point is 00:13:09 solid rocket boosters on Atlas V, and that will be used on Vulcan as well. They're using Orbital ATK solid rockets. So they're moving away from Aerojet Rocketdyne because Aerojet Rocketdyne is so expensive and they need to be more cost competitive. So it's hard to see them going with anything but the BE-3U, but we will see. Whatever the case, I think that they will move to that 5 meter diameter, upgrade the engines for more thrust and for, you know, to better fit that diameter. But there's also some other interesting considerations that come along with that. Locking into a 5 meter diameter upgrade on Centaur, to me, says that they're going with a 5 meter diameter upgrade on Centaur to me says that they're going with a 5 meter diameter first stage on Vulcan and what that means is they are going with BE-4 the AR-1 from

Starting point is 00:13:54 Airjet Rocketdyne is an RP-1 LOX engine just like the RD-180 just like Merlin engines from SpaceX and with that is a smaller diameter core stage because the fuel is denser. They can't use that five meter diameter with that dense and heavy of fuel with the AR-1 engine. So they would either need to go with the AR-1, maybe two AR-1s or something like that, or stick at that 3.7 meter diameter that is common for those kerosene stages. So if they're going forward with a 5 meter diameter, I assume maybe they could figure out the structures to handle that 5 meter diameter stage on top, but I'm not so sure.

Starting point is 00:14:36 None of the configurations of Vulcan that we've even seen in graphics have shown anything but a 5 meter diameter core stage, so to me this says that they're going forward with the BE-4 as the most likely path, and they're confident enough in that that they're working on this 5 meter diameter upgrade to Centaur. It also presumably means that they would be consolidating on the big 5 meter fairing rather than the two fairing configurations that they use right now on Atlas V and were projected to use on Vulcan. If that's the case, I think it's a good decision because consolidating on a single size fairing will bring with it benefits to production. Vulcan's fairings will be built by Ruag, which is a company that has set up shop in Decatur right alongside ULA.

Starting point is 00:15:25 They will be manufacturing the fairings for Vulcan, these nice big composite fairings. And they've even interestingly talked up reusable fairings recently. And Tori Bruno has said that they've talked to Ruag about it quite a bit. So if they consolidate on this big fairing, maybe they start to look at reusable fairings on this Vulcan rocket because bigger fairings are more expensive and it means more to get those things back. So if they're consolidating on fairing size they can really focus their effort on that size they can work out all the kinks in that size and maybe even start to get some of those fairings back in a similar way that SpaceX is working on now and bring their costs down even further.

Starting point is 00:16:05 But overall this seems to be that they are consolidating their focus on Vulcan Centaur, they are they are really polishing off the design of this rocket, they are moving ahead with upgrades to Centaur to iterate their way to the Vulcan Aces future that they still have in mind, and they still have Aces on the table, They still want to get there eventually with the long duration and the refueling. But first, they need to get off Delta IV Heavy. They need to get to this heavy lift Vulcan rocket from day one. And to do that, they need to upgrade Centaur in this way. So I think it's a good decision from ULA. I think that focus is really what they need at this time. They are in a critical transition point in their lifetime, and they need to focus really heavily on getting to Vulcan as quickly and smoothly as possible.

Starting point is 00:16:54 So we'll see what they pitch in for that RFP from the Air Force. We'll see if any more details come out of that that we can read the tea leaves on or anything like that. But overall, very, very good decision from ULA from where I'm sitting here. And I'm curious what you think. So if you got any thoughts on that, send me an email, anthony at mainenginecutoff.com. Now I want to dig into the AMA that Elon Musk did on Reddit about BFR. There were some interesting updates coming out of that. But before I do that, I want to say a very, very big thank you

Starting point is 00:17:24 to all of the supporters of Main Engine Cutoff on Patreon. There are 113 of you supporting on Patreon right now, which is just an incredible number. And this particular episode of Main Engine Cutoff was produced by 21 executive producers. Chris, Mike, Pat, Matt, George, Brad, Ryan, Jameson, Guinevere, Nadeem, Peter, Donald, Lee, Jasper, Chris, Warren, and five anonymous executive producers. They are responsible for this episode of the show, and I could not do it without their support. Thank you so much for producing this episode. Thank you so much for your support throughout Main Engine Cutoff's recent history. And thank you to everyone else over at Patreon that is kicking in some support for the show.

Starting point is 00:18:03 And don't forget, if you support at $3 or more a month on Patreon, you get access to the headlines show. I do a show every Friday where I run through the headlines of the week, the smaller stories that I don't get to on this show, and keep you up to date on all things space. It's a really great little project that I've got going. People have been really enjoying it. So if you're interested in that, head over to patreon.com slash Miko and $3 a month or more will get you access to a special RSS feed where you can have those headline shows every Friday. And if you're at the $5 level, you get access to the Miko Discord, which is a little chat room to hang out with some other fellow space nerds and talk space in there. It's been a lot of fun in

Starting point is 00:18:39 there. So if you're at that level and you have not joined the Discord yet, I really highly suggest checking it out. It's a low volume chat room, but when we do talk, it's very interesting in there. So I highly, highly recommend checking out that chat if you are at that level. Or if you're interested, head over to Patreon and get up to that level. Thank you so much for your support as always. All right, this AMA from Elon Musk wasn't a ton of info, but the things that we did get out of it were very interesting updates to the BFR system that we've heard about before. Just going to run through some of his comments here. I would recommend, I had some people ask about, was I

Starting point is 00:19:17 going to touch on the AMA because it was hard to follow? What I would recommend, and I'll put this link in the show notes, is head over to Elon Musk's user page on Reddit specifically, because you can just read through all of the comments that he had there. You can click the little contacts link to see the question that was asked. That's the best way to really read through his AMA. So I'll put that link in the show notes, but for anyone out there that wants to look it up right now, just go to reddit.com slash you slash Elon Musk, and you'll see all of his comments. So I'm going to run through these

Starting point is 00:19:45 little updates in no particular order. The first one that's quite interesting is that they've already added a third sea level Raptor to the ship in the BFR system. Elon said that this was made for a couple of reasons, but the two most important reasons was that it allows engine out capability to only lose one third of the thrust rather than a half of the thrust. So it would still be much more controllable in an engine out landing scenario. And it also allows landings with higher payload masses. Specifically, he mentioned that in terms of the earth to earth transport function. But overall, I think, you know, they like more engines, they like clustering engines for more security in the engine-out scenarios and more margin in general.

Starting point is 00:20:31 The next little interesting tidbit was something that I had speculated on and is now confirmed, that they're going to be starting with a full-scale ship doing short hops on Earth, a few hundred kilometers in altitude and lateral distance. hops on Earth, a few hundred kilometers in altitude and lateral distance. And, you know, he says that this is specifically easy on the vehicle because you don't need a heat shield. You have a large amount of propellant to work with and you don't need to have the vacuum Raptor engines on there. You can do it all with the sea level Raptors and work out, you know, the different aerodynamic properties, the landing algorithms, all the things that you need to do to take off and land, they can do with that full-scale ship and just the sea-level Raptors. You know, you got to start

Starting point is 00:21:11 thinking about where they're going to do this. Are they going to do it out at White Sands or maybe somewhere out by Edwards Air Force Base, somewhere with a lot of room, a lot of empty space? I could see them doing that. Maybe they'll do it down at Boca Chica, out to a landing platform or a launch platform or something like that. We'll have to see where they end up doing it. I would not be surprised if it's somewhere in the desert or something like that, sort of like DCX did back in the day. It might be very reminiscent of those DCX flights back in the day. The next really interesting piece of information that was dropped, somebody asked about the ISRU system, the system that will be able to create propellant when they're on Mars. Who's designing that and building it? Elon answered that SpaceX themselves are designing and building that system, and the design is already pretty far along. So that's a big deal. That is one of the pieces

Starting point is 00:21:57 that has not yet been proven on Mars or not yet been tested in space. We've done that Sabatier process a lot on Earth, but we have not flown any of these modules yet. So to fly a demo of that, I think would go a long way to validating their system in general. I'm very curious if it's something that they're going to have to deploy separately and then fuel up the ship, or if it's something integrated in the ship itself. We'll have to see about that. But really interesting. And, you know, I think confidence inspiring that SpaceX is taking on that part themselves because it is so crucial to their system overall. They need to

Starting point is 00:22:30 be able to refuel on the surface of Mars. That is an important part of the system, and the fact that they can take it on and really develop that themselves to be working tightly with their ship is a really good sign and something we all assumed, but it's good to have verification that that is the case. Elon also confirmed that the tanker version, the thing that's going to do the refueling, at first is going to be a ship with no payload, presumably a cargo ship with no payload. That would allow a lot of extra fuel to be brought to orbit since it doesn't have to push all of that payload to orbit, and then it would refuel from there and land. This would allow them to build only two variants, the cargo ship and the passenger ship, and use the cargo ship as a tanker with no payload.

Starting point is 00:23:15 Though he said down the road that they will build a dedicated tanker that will have an extremely high full-to-empty mass ratio, yet, warning, it will look kind of weird. So they will build a dedicated one that would maybe let them do less refueling flights. But at first, they can focus on just two variants of BFS, the big frickin spaceship, which I think is a smart move to just focus on those two variants and not get too complicated from there. You know, you can use the cargo version to launch satellites and launch other payloads, but also as an empty tanker when you need it. Now, the last piece of information

Starting point is 00:23:50 that was notable was about the development Raptor in terms of how it compares to the production Raptor. It's still not clear to me that the development Raptor on the stand in Texas is or is not the same physical size as the production Raptor will be. The current development Raptor on the stand in Texas is or is not the same physical size as the production Raptor will be. The current development Raptor is rated at a thrust of about 100 tons. The production Raptor that was shown in the presentation is going to be about 170 tons. So somebody asked about how is that development Raptor in terms of scaling up to the production Raptor? How's that all going? Where are we at on that? Elon Musk said that thrust scaling is the easy part. Very simple to scale the dev Raptor to 170 tons. The flight engine design is much lighter and tighter and is extremely focused

Starting point is 00:24:34 on reliability. So nothing in there really says to me that it is or is not the same physical size as a production Raptor, though I feel like he would have said that if that was the case. So size as a production Raptor, though I feel like he would have said that if that was the case. So I'm still under the assumption that the Raptor on the stand in Texas is the same physical size as the production Raptor, and they're working out reliability, they're working out all the kinks in that process, and they're going to scale up thrust, reliability, and bring all of that down to a tighter design as we get there. But in terms of physical size, it sounds like it is the same dimension, which is a really, really big deal when you consider how much work lies ahead of SpaceX. So really interesting AMA overall. It was pretty fun. He was having a good time in there. So

Starting point is 00:25:16 if you haven't read it yet, check it out. I'll have a link in the show notes to that. Or as I said, just go over to Elon Musk's user page itself. It's easier to read there overall. said, just go over to Elon Musk's user page itself. It's easier to read there overall. That's about it for today. Quite a bit of updates there on Centaur and BFR. I really enjoy both those topics, so I had a good week reading all this. And we've got this EELV RFP out, so responses are due in the middle of November. I think it was like November 20th or something there, so about a month away until that. I don't know how long until we start to see some of that information come out. But, you know, we'll keep an eye's peeled on that

Starting point is 00:25:50 and try to figure out what we can about Centaur V from this point forward. But for this week, that's all I've got. Thank you so much for listening and I will talk to you next week. Thank you.

Main Engine Cut Off - T+63: Centaur V, BFR Updates

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