Main Engine Cut Off - T+66: A Visit to NanoRacks, and Virgin Orbit Books a Department of Defense Launch

Episode Date: November 27, 2017

I was in Houston last week and I visited NanoRacks for a bit. And Virgin Orbit piqued the interest of the Department of Defense, which has some interesting implications. This episode of Main Engine Cut Off is brought to you by 22 executive producers—Kris, Mike, Pat, Matt, Jorge, Brad, Ryan, Jamison, Nadim, Peter, Donald, Lee, Jasper, Chris, Warren, Robert, Brian, and five anonymous—and 104 other supporters on Patreon. Virgin Orbit wins first Defense Department launch contract - SpaceNews.com STRATCOM chief Hyten: ‘I will not support buying big satellites that make juicy targets’ - SpaceNews.com Revival of Cape Canaveral’s LC-46 begins with Minotaur Pathfinder Assembly - Spaceflight101 Orbital ATK’s Next-Generation Composite Case Passes Structural Acceptance Test - Main Engine Cut Off Orbital ATK Successfully Tests First Motor Case for Next Generation Launch Vehicle | Orbital ATK News Room Orbital ATK on Twitter: “Our Next Generation Launch Vehicle achieves critical milestone with completion of structural acceptance test” Email your thoughts and comments to [e-mail] Follow @WeHaveMECO Listen to MECO Headlines Join the MECO Discord Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Pocket Casts, Google Play, Stitcher, TuneIn 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

Welcome to the Main Engine Cutoff, I'm Anthony Colangelo, back after a brief hiatus. Those of you that have been listening to the headline shows over on Patreon know that I've been on the road a bit the last couple of weeks. I spent a week in Houston a little while ago, maybe last week, I guess, before Thanksgiving. So that's why I was offline. But when I was down there, I did a couple of things that were interesting to note here. First was I went to Johnson Space Center for a day. This is my first time in Houston, so I've never been down that way to see everything that's going on there. day. This is my first time in Houston, so I've never been down that way to see everything that's going on there. So my wife and I went on the Level 9 tour over at Johnson Space Center. Jake Robbins

of the Wee Martians podcast went on it back, I guess it was March or so when he went on that, when he was in Houston for a conference. And he recommended it that we go on it. So we did. One day we spent, it was about four or five hours long. And it kind of changes, you know, every day based on what's going on in the Space Center. You can't go everywhere in Johnson every single day. It changes a little bit if there's, you know, some events going on somewhere that they can't accept visitors that day, yada, yada. So we did a couple of things. We went out to Ellington Field first in the morning and saw a little bit of activity out on the flight line. We saw some astronauts fly in on T-38s.

Chris Cassidy flew in with one of the new astronauts that are training up to go to space. So that was pretty cool to see some activity out at Ellington. You know, you always see so many photos and videos of everything happening out there. So that was pretty fun. And then the rest of the day, we went through Johnson Space Center. We saw mission control for the current mission control for ISS, even though the astronauts were right about to go to sleep. So there wasn't too much activity in there, but it's always cool to see that room. And you see the mission elapsed

time clocks and all that kind of nerdy stuff that you love to see. And we went and saw a couple of different rooms in mission control. We saw the Mission Control that they're working through simulations for, you know, the future Mission Control teams that will be flying Orion missions, Deep Space Gateway, that kind of stuff. It's a smaller room set up pretty similarly if you've ever seen photos of today's ISS Mission Control. But apparently that's the room that they're going to be using for EM-1 to probably Deep Space Gateway kind of stuff. It seems like that's the room that all that's going

to be based out of, which makes sense. They do need a separate room because given the timelines that we're looking at currently, ISS will still be active when those missions are active. So that's the side of the things that we really haven't talked about a lot here because there's not a lot of people talking about that kind of, you know know gritty in the details kind of stuff the planning that they're doing there for uh running these two missions alongside each other but it is pretty cool to see some of that work taking place obviously we can't find too much out about that yet um but it was an interesting note from that tour that i took there was one other thing um we were getting on an elevator in in the mission control building and. There was one other thing. We were getting on an elevator in the mission

control building, and there was one empty mission control room that we walked by. And our tour guide said that that is a mission control room that is being used by some commercial partners when it comes to commercial crew. What I found out was that that is a room that Boeing is using. There was some, you know, papering up on the window, so you couldn't look in there because I guess there's some proprietary data that they don't want people peeking in on. But Boeing, I guess, is going to be using one of those rooms as their commercial crew mission control, which is a very, very Boeing thing to do. You know, it seems very much like them that they already have, you know, a lot of experience in that mission control center.

So why not, I guess, extend their commercial crew footprint into that room as well? Whereas SpaceX is building their own similar to how they fly Dragon today. They're building their own mission control that will be based in Hawthorne. And they've got some tracking dishes down in Boca Chica. So SpaceX building up a lot of their own infrastructure, Boeing kind of leveraging all the NASA stuff. And you can make your own conclusions there, but I think that's a very predictable thing.

But it still was interesting that we found out on that tour. There was a couple other things that were pretty fun to see for space nerds. We went through the space vehicle mock-up facility, got to see the space station mock-up and some things like the rovers that were designed way back when that were part of the Constellation design reference missions. There's two of them. One of them was out when we were there. It was actually driving around the moon yard that they've got.

Apparently, that's what we were told. We didn't get to see that part, but that's apparently where it was. Only one of them was in the space vehicle mock-up facility. There was a mock-up of Resource Prospector, the rover interesting thing that I was trying to listen in on as best I could, but couldn't really pick up anything of note. But when we were in that mock-up facility, we were walking by a kind of a hub module for some sort of space station. And our tour guide, the people we were with were not the most nerdy space fans, I would say. So the kind of tone of the tour wasn't

for somebody that is listening to this show and super into all the details and nuts and bolts of everything. But he was kind of giving some general hints as to what things were around the facility. And he pointed at that group of people that were surrounding this kind of hub module and said that these people are working on a proposed future space station sort of thing around the moon. So this is obviously some sort of Deep Space Gateway work that is going on in there that I'm not sure what group it was or what they were working on or who they were with or anything. But it's interesting that there is some sort of activity in and around Johnson Space Center for Deep Space Gateway. Couldn't pick how many details, was hoping to.

So if there's any little birdies out there that know what was going on there last week or so, feel free to email me, anthonyatmanagingcutoff.com. I would love to hear what that was exactly. And then later in the week, on Friday, I had a free day. So I was trying to think of what else I would want to do while I was in Houston. And one thing popped in my mind was I should go visit NanoRacks. You know, we've talked about them so much on this show. We've had Mike Johnson on a year and a couple of months ago, who was the chief designer at NanoRacks and very interested in their work and always interesting to hear what they're working on. I know there's a couple of NanoRacks employees and team members out there that listen to this show and I've talked with in the past, and I even met some when I was down there. So I thought it would be a good idea to go visit

NanoRacks and see what's going on, try to get a glimpse of some of the hardware that they've got in action down in Houston. That is where their headquarters are. They've got an office in DC and an office out in the Bay Area of California. But Houston's the headquarters. So I stopped by on Friday, spent some time talking with people there about what they're working on, where their different projects are. I don't want to give away too many things because we were just kind of casually talking. So I don't know exactly which pieces of details they want out there and things like that. But a couple of things that I know is safe to share and some of those other things, you know, maybe we'll get back to in a couple of weeks. I'm still talking with a few of the members of NanoRacks to see if I can get some of them on the show to talk about some of the things that I learned there related to their airlock and some of the deep space habitat plans they're working on, the wet lab kind of thing that they're working on with United Launch Alliance and SSL.

SSL. That's been a very interesting topic that people are, you know, it's a hot topic because people like to debate whether or not it's a good idea or not. But NanoRacks and their team members are just working on this plan and this idea and seeing what they can do with it, which I find quite interesting. But again, I don't want to get into too many proprietary details that they don't want out there. So we'll wait on that until we get some of them to talk about directly. But the one thing, there's two things really that when you walk around their office that you're struck with. One is the sheer amount of hardware that there is in that office. It's an incredible amount that's just laying everywhere.

There's so much that they can't really organize it in a very logical and systematic way because there's just so many old deployers and things that have went to space and come back and then they're going to wait to package up again and send back up. Even a deployer that was recovered from the Antares explosion a couple years ago. Apparently there was a couple of deployers and a couple of satellites that were recovered from that explosion and are still functional. One of these deployers I got to see up close, there's still sand on it from Wallops Island. So that was a pretty interesting little note that there were some things that survived Orb 3. And I know, you know, there was some Cygnus cargo that survived as well. But this deployer looked in fairly good shape, which is a testament to the hardware that Anoraks is building.

But there's just so much of this everywhere that it really goes to show that they are working on so many different things. They have so much to work on. They are so busy that they don't have time as much as other companies to sit around and talk about what they're working on or talk about the ideas they have. They are just building it, and they are overflowing with hardware. It's a pretty incredible thing to see,

and I think that says a lot about their company and what they're working on there and what they're doing in space every single day. And a lot of people will say, well, without the ISS, their business kind of falls apart. And yeah, maybe that's true today, but that's because that's what the market is. I don't think that's a very simple one and done kind of statement to make because they have built a business with the things that are existing in space and they get in there and they figure out a way to make money. They figure out a way to operate a business and they're very flexible and responsive to the things going on in the industry. And that's why I've always been so

interested in them is that they kind of have that agility that, you know, they're ready to jump into the next thing rather than just talking about it for a while. And you really get that sense when you go to visit them. And that carries through for, you know, when I was walking around on a little bit of a tour through the facility there, including some of the things of their mission control and a lot of interesting stuff going on there. But towards the back of their office, they have the mock-up of their airlock module. If you remember, they're going to build an airlock and send it up to the ISS themselves. They've gotten approval to use one of the nodes on ISS as an airlock that will expand the amount of stuff that they can put out into space.

Right now, they use the airlock in the Japanese module on the ISS, which is very small, and it takes a lot of crew time to use because of how small and piecemeal they need to make things to deploy. With their own airlock, they can really maximize the volume that they deploy at any one time, and that's what they're going to do with that. They're building their own airlock, they can really maximize the volume that they can deploy at any one time and that's what they're going to do with that. They're building their own airlock to put it on the ISS to maximize the time and efficiency to deploy things from their ISS-based platform. This is towards the back of their own office next to a small clean room that they have and all that.

You get to walk up to this thing and see the size of it. I was totally struck with how big this thing is because, you know, we all see photos and mock-ups and renderings and videos of all this space hardware, but you really never get the sense of it, of the scale of it, until you are walking right up next to it and seeing how big it is for yourself. And you get to see how big the birthing mechanism is for the ISS, for everything that's attached to the ISS that flies on Cygnus and Dragon and all this kind of stuff. The actual CBM, that mechanism itself is so huge. And the airlock, for all intents and purposes, is just built right on top of that. They're using as much of the hardware on stations as they can to not have much duplication of

things. They don't have too much complexity built into their own airlock. They're relying a lot of things that are up on the ISS already so they can maximize their space and maximize their performance on the ISS to make it as simple as possible and to get as much volume out of it as possible. So they're basically only constrained by the doorway of the hatch zone ISS itself. They have nothing impinging on that space. They can get a lot of cargo, a lot of mass and volume through that space into the airlock to be deployed out to space. And when you stand in front of it, you really get a sense for how big this thing is and how much of an upgrade it is over the deployers that they have on it now. So, you know,

that's pretty incredible to be able to stand there and see what this thing looks like that's going to go up to the ISS. I think they're about, let's see, a year and a half away or so. It's looking like 2019 was the last date I saw in the news, and I'm sure we'll be hearing about that more. So as I said, we're going to try to get some NanoRacks people on the show, talk about these kind of things, and hope to get more into depth about what I've talked about them with them and what I saw in their office and all that kind of stuff when we do have them on the show. But I did just want to mention that because those are two really fun trips that I took. So I had a really good time in Houston and would recommend both of these things going on the Level 9 tour

at Johnson and if you get a chance to visiting NanoRack. So I want to get into some related small launch updates. It's been a little while since we talked about our small launchers out there, but we do have some fun stuff to talk about. But before I do that, I wanted to say a very, very special thank you to all of you supporting Main Engine Cutoff over on Patreon. There are 126 of you out there on Patreon supporting this show week in, week out, and I am so thankful for all of your support. on Patreon, supporting this show week in, week out, and I am so thankful for all of your support. But this episode in particular was produced by 22 executive producers. Chris, Mike, Pat, Matt,

George, Brad, Ryan, Jameson, Nadim, Peter, Donald, Lee, Jasper, Chris, Warren, Robert, Brian, and five anonymous executive producers. That list is incredible. I am so thankful for all of your support and everyone else over at patreon.com slash Miko. That's where you can go if you want to get access to things like the headline shows, $3 a month or more, you get access to a special RSS feed to drop into whatever podcast player you're listening to right now. And you will hear a headline show that I do every single week on Friday. I run through the headlines of the week, smaller stories that we don't get to on this main show and just about everything else going on in the space and spaceflight industry. It's a really great way to stay up on the news. And $5 a month or more, you get access to the Discord, which is a

chat room to hang out with other Main Engine Cutoff fans and people and everyone in the community. It's been a really fun place to hang out and talk about spaceflight and everything else that's related to this kind of nerdy little sector that we love. So if you want access to any of that stuff or just want to help support the show in any way, patreon.com slash Miko is where you can go to do that. Thank you so much again for all of your support. All right, so some Virgin Orbit news. We haven't talked about small launchers in a little while.

Rocket Lab had their test launch a couple months back, and it's been pretty quiet on that front. Sounds like they'll have another soon. Virgin Orbit, we were supposed to maybe see a launch by the end of the year. Now it looks like the first half of 2018. But we did have a cool announcement recently. About a week ago, or 10 days ago or so, they announced that the U.S. Air Force Space Test Program and the Defense Innovation Unit Experimental were teaming up to award them a launch for the future, obviously, because they're not launching yet. But they awarded them a launch contract that right now is slated for January 2019, but it could launch in late 2018 if they make it through their test program quickly enough. But this is really interesting because it's the

first sign of governmental interest in Launcher One. You know, we've heard people talk about it before, but we've really got a launch contract here to talk about and to see that, you know, there's interest in Virgin Orbit and Launcher One from the Department of Defense. We've heard a lot of talk in the last year or two or so from the Department of Defense saying how they want to go towards the small launch sector more. They want to have more constellations and less big, expensive single targets. They're really focused on resiliency in space. They don't want anyone to have some sort of anti-sat technology that comes online

and totally renders their four expensive satellites useless in any way. They want to diversify a little bit and spread out their assets. And with that, they want to make things smaller and launch on just about anything they can. We've heard a lot of talk about that. But again, just like the Nanoracks, talk is cheap. We want to see some action. And that's what we've got here. They've awarded a launch contract to Virgin Orbit. And I find this very interesting because it sort of gets back to a topic from a couple of shows ago when I was talking about, are we beginning to see a divergence between commercial and military launch? Where do these things overlap? How do they overlap? And do we at all, at any point,

see these things diverging in any specific way? So I wanted to take this announcement and kind of put it in context with what we've got today in the small launch sector. And really when you're talking small launch, right now all you have that is active and flying are the Minotaurs. We've got the Minotaur 1 that flies a couple of times, Minotaur 4 that's flown a couple of times, Minotaur C that just had a successful launch of planet satellites about a month ago or so.

Those are really the only things that are active today in the small launch space. So when we compare capabilities here, Launcher 1, to give us a baseline, the payload capabilities that they've got are 300 kilograms to sun-synchronous orbit, 500 kilograms to LEO. All of that comes for $12 million. Rocket Lab, on the other hand, is about half the size, 150 kilograms to sun synchronous orbit, 225 to LEO at a $5 million price. So when you're looking at Launcher One and Rocket Lab, the new entrance, $12 million for Launcher One for 300 kilograms to sun synchronous, $5 million for Rocket Lab for 150 kilograms. So, you know, less than half the cost, but just about half the payload capacity. So that's where the new entrants are at. Now, the Minotaur lines, we don't have specific

numbers on these launches a lot of times, but the general range is, you know, 30 to 50 million-ish, depending on which line of Minotaur you're talking about. The smallest one, Minotaur 1, is 330 kilograms to sun-synchronous for $30 to $40 million-ish. Minotaur 4 and Minotaur C gets up into the 1,000 to 2,000 kilogram to LEO range for anywhere between $40 to $50-ish million. So quite a bit more expensive, and in the case of Minotaur 4 and Minotaur C, quite a bit more capability. But if we just look at Minotaur 1, 330 kilograms to sun synchronous for 30 to 40-ish million dollars, that is going to be put out of business when Launcher 1 comes online. Now, Launcher 1 matches that capability almost exactly. Rocket Lab still has quite a bit between it and Minotaur 1, so, you know, if just Rocket Lab existed, I think Minotaur 1 would still be around because there

are some payloads in that class that sometimes the Department of Defense likes to launch on. So if you're comparing these straight up, when Launcher 1 is online and active, they have cut the cost of getting 300 kilograms to sun-sink in its orbit to a third of the previous price. If we figure about $30-ish million for Minotaur 1, that cuts to $12 million for Launcher 1. So if the Department of Events can help get Launcher 1 up online, they can do quite a bit of cost saving.

You know, they can get three launches for the price of one previously. So they can get a lot more payload up to space for the same amount of cash. They can send it to multiple, you know, if they're launching something like a constellation, they can send it to multiple planes for, you know, multiple satellites to multiple planes for the same amount of money as one launch cost them previously. So Launcher 1 could be a pretty big thing for the Department of Defense when you consider how expensive Minotaur 1 is. Now, you could say, well, Minotaur 1 exists. Why aren't they using it as much if it does exist, if it's necessary?

This gets back to that thing where, you know, Minotaur 1 is so expensive that it really has to be worth it to, you know, kind of make you want to launch on it. kind of make you want to launch on it. It's not so cheap that you can kind of, you know, be a little bit more flexible with what you're launching on it, when you're launching with it. If you're paying $30 million, you really got to be sure that you want to make that launch. You know, if you're comparing against something that's $12 million. So LauncherOne is going to drastically change the landscape for minotaur one specifically the question in my mind is what happens with that next rung up you know 40 to 50 million dollars ish for one to two thousand kilograms to space to orbit what becomes of that market we have no small launchers that i know about today that are out of stealth mode or anything like that, that do anything close to that payload capacity.

We've got Antares that is a smaller launcher on the EELV scale, but that is very expensive as well. We've got Falcon 9 at $60 million that does, you know, a magnitude more payload capability. So for the Department of Defense, that typically, if they have a payload in that range, launches on a Minotaur IV, maybe a Minotaur C, they're at the point now where there's no small launchers in development that are going to come close to that payload capability. But the upper end of the market is getting cheaper via reusability to make those things totally irrelevant. So if Falcon 9 can truly get down to the $40 million range with reusability, could that alone put Minotaur 4 and C out of business the way that Launcher 1 is going to put Minotaur 1 out of business? That's the question in my mind, or

is the Department of Defense going to want a smaller, more responsive launch vehicle at that size that isn't being developed today. I personally can't see that if Falcon 9 really lives up to its case of being $40 million per launch when it's reusable. You know, maybe they can eat that market if they get the price down to that range, and that would be pretty interesting to look at. But for this Launcher 1 deal, you know, I just wanted to bring up that it is going to put Minotaur One out of business if they are successful with their launches, if they are successful with their price point that they've said so far, and it can make a big difference for the Department of Defense, and that's why they're putting money into it. They're putting this launch contract behind

Virgin Orbit in this case and seeing where it goes because it could pay off for them big time in the long run. Now, I've got one other thing that's just a little bit of follow-up. We were talking about Orbital ATK and their next-generation launch vehicle, and they are sending their static test article to the launch site. That was something that I speculated on in a past show, that they're sending this composite structure. It's just one segment of their next generation launch vehicle first stage. They're sending it to the launch site to do some testing. I was wondering and kind of philosophizing what they might be doing at the test site and how that's interesting that they have hardware at the test site already.

And I got a note from somebody who is in a very, very well-placed position with some really good insight on this. I'm keeping this anonymous to not out who this person is, but wanted to read their feedback because it's very valuable when you think about that Orbital ATK Pathfinder. And I'll have a link in the show notes about that story again if you missed it. But the long and the short of it is that Orbital ATK built a test article, is sending it to the launch site for some unspecified testing. And this helpful person sent in a note that I'm going to read in full because it is very helpful to understand.

Hey Anthony, you were wondering about what OrbitalATK would be doing with that inert motor at the launch site. I have some insight. It boils down to the fact that for safety purposes, for all handling equipment like lifts, slings, cranes, trailers, etc. you really need to walk through all of your procedures with a dummy motor of the same geometry and the same mass, hence the inert propellant, before you ever touch a massively explosive live motor with that equipment. If you have a snafu built into your procedures you want to find that out by dropping or bumping an inert test item, not the real deal. These tests are

usually called mechanical pathfinders and a good test runs all the way up through stacking the motors on the launch stand and destacking them to ring everything out. A good example of this sort of procedure is the recent Minotaur 4 launch from Launch Complex 46 back in February of this year. And they've got a link to Spaceflight 101 article with some nice photos from when Orbital ATK invited media members out to the pad. This was the first launch from Launch Complex 46 of Minotaur 4, the first one from Florida, actually. So they needed to do one of these tests. And this article explains that. Anyway, back to the note. The handling ops are very different, I'm sure, for the next generation launcher solids, but the objective of proving out all the handling hardware and procedures before you lay hands on massive explosions would be largely

the same, I think. That is a great note and explains a lot about what's going on. And obviously, you know, you don't want to be screwing around explosives before you've got everything worked out. But the couple of things that are still very interesting is that they have the tooling necessary to handle that next generation launcher segment down at the Cape. And that's where I got into wondering, you know, how common is this with the segments from SLS, from, you know, STS back in the day, and how common are these segments

and the tooling that it takes to handle all this stuff? Because that's a lot of cost saving for Orbital ATK. They don't need to build all this new hardware to handle the segments of the next generation launch vehicle, but they've already got this hardware for handling SLS segments and all the shuttle era segments and all that kind of stuff. That is a big cost savings for this new launch vehicle. It saves a lot of infrastructure that they would need to build to handle this launch vehicle down at the launch site. So very interesting there for Orbital ATK

to know that they've got so much of this already worked out. I mentioned last week or a couple weeks ago that they have a mobile launcher set aside that they would use for this launch vehicle. There's an old shuttle mobile launcher that is not being used by NASA that Orbital ATK has an agreement to use for the next generation launch vehicle. So they seem to be doing a lot of work to eliminate all of the work that they would need to do down at the Cape and at the launch site to handle this sort of launch vehicle that could play very, very well into their initiative to get this thing into reality. That's all I've got for this week. If you've got any thoughts on any of this, email me as always, anthony at mainenginecutoff.com or on Twitter at wehavemiko.

Thank you very much again for your support for everyone over at patreon.com slash miko. Thank you very much for listening, and I will talk to you next week.