Main Engine Cut Off - T+70: Polar Launches from Cape Canaveral

Episode Date: January 17, 2018

The US Air Force has developed a viable corridor for launching to polar and other high-inclination orbits from Cape Canaveral. I spend some time thinking through who may be interested in using that corridor and what its existence could mean for the newer launch vehicles in development. This episode of Main Engine Cut Off is brought to you by 24 executive producers—Kris, Mike, Pat, Matt, Jorge, Brad, Ryan, Jamison, Nadim, Peter, Donald, Lee, Jasper, Chris, Warren, Bob, Brian, Russell, John, and five anonymous—and 113 other supporters on Patreon. Off-Nominal 04 - In The Year of Our Lord Steve Squyres | Off-Nominal Ninkasi Brewing - Ground Control 2017 Air Force: Cape rockets could fly new southern corridor toward poles Canaveral’s Polar Express - Main Engine Cut Off Polar XS-1 Launches - Main Engine Cut Off Email your thoughts and comments to [e-mail] Follow @WeHaveMECO Listen to MECO Headlines Join the Off-Nominal 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

This is Main Engine Cutoff, I'm Anthony Colangelo, and welcome back after our holiday hiatus here on the podcast. Couple of programming notes up front, there's some hammering somewhere out in way yonder that makes its way through the walls every once in a while. Trying to wait them out. Doesn't look like that's happening, but I did want to get a show out today. So sorry if there's some noise every now and then. It should be okay, but we will press on no matter what. Another one is if you've not yet been listening to the off-nominal podcast that I've been doing with Jake from Wee Martians, I would highly, highly recommend checking this out. It's a great time, too, because last week we did a show all about the New Frontiers missions

that are finalists for selection from NASA. The general idea of the show is we grab a beer, we talk some casual space topics. They are typically topics that are outside of our usual realms that we cover in both of our main shows. It's a lot of fun. And this one is particularly fun discussing new frontiers. And we're also drinking a beer from Ninkazi that actually went to space. That was quite delicious. So it's a fun show. So if you have not checked it out yet, I would recommend going over to offnominal.space, a sweet domain name that we've got there, and check out the show. I think you're going to love it.

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you get access to that Discord channel. And there's special channels for Miko and for Wee Martians, if you're a patron of either of those. It's a lot of fun. It's a great little community, so if you are interested in hanging out somewhere with people and talking space, having little launch parties, things like that, I'd urge you to check that out.

It is a lot of fun, and it's a place that Jake and I are always hanging out, and it's a fantastic community that we've got growing over there. So I wanted to get those couple of programming notes out of the way. But today we're going to talk about polar launches from Cape Canaveral. So for a little context here, a couple of weeks back, this news was making its way around. And the long and the short of it is that the U.S. Air Force has been doing some research into polar corridors from Cape Canaveral to either polar orbit or high inclination orbits that are typically flown out of Vandenberg.

And it seems like this kind of train of thought grew from all of these wildfires that we've been having out in California this year. And from what we've heard, somebody asked the question, what would we do if Vandenberg was shut down for a given amount of time and we had an urgent national security need to get something up into a polar or high inclination orbit? What would we do? Could we fly it out of Cape Canaveral? Do we need to find some new launch sites? Would we use Kodiak? All of these things were kind of talked about. And it seems as if the Air Force has found a trajectory that could be used to go polar from Cape Canaveral. Now, to give a little background, we fly from the east coast of Florida so that when we launch to the typical direction, this is all here in the U.S., by the way, obviously, when we fly in our typical direction to lower inclination orbits,

equatorial orbits, geosynchronous transfer orbits, the ISS, for instance, that all of our rocket stages drop into the Atlantic Ocean because the flight path is heading out to the east. And, you know, obviously, if anything goes wrong during the launch and something needs to be terminated, the explosion would happen over the ocean and nothing is raining down onto populated areas where there could cause damage destruction death etc um but some of these launches that need to go to polar high inclination orbits you know whether it's circling over the poles or actually retro retrograde orbit so going backwards in reference to the way the earth is spinning those launches how happen out of vandenberg on the west coast so that all of their

rocket stages fall over the Pacific Ocean when they're heading south or west. So when you think about something like the Iridium flights that SpaceX does out of Vandenberg, that launches and flies south past LA and then heads out over Antarctica and it's into a polar orbit in that way. So that is the basic setup of these two launch coasts. And the idea here would be to be able to launch to a polar destination or high inclination destination from Cape Canaveral. But to do so, you have to fly east at first to clear Cape Canaveral and to clear the coast of Florida and then turn to the south. And there's a corridor that you can fly that goes just a little east of Miami and down past the Caribbean. And at a certain point, it will begin

overflying land. But at that point, the rocket is high and in orbit, and there's very little concern about things landing in a populated area. For a little context on that, back in the 60s, in a populated area. For a little context on that, back in the 60s, on August 19th in 1960, there was a launch out of Cape Canaveral on a Thor Abelstar. And it was carrying a satellite up

and the rocket first stage shut down early and had to be destroyed by the range safety officer. And part of the rocket landed on Cuba, right inside of Cuba. And apparently it killed a cow or something like that. Led to an international incident. Fidel Castro sold parts of these engines, apparently, and there was a big international incident around it. And then obviously, once the Cuban Missile Crisis started happening, we didn't necessarily want to be firing ballistic missiles towards Cuba, triggering other incidents. So we stopped doing that in the 60s because of an incident like that. This would be kind of going back to that direction and maybe modifying the flight path a little bit. So we didn't, you know,

pass over Cuba in the same way. They haven't released the exact trajectory yet. But what they've said is you launch from Cape Canaveral, fly east to clear the coast, and then you turn south and you kind of skirt by Miami. And at a certain point, you are too high, too fast to be a danger to the land down that way. So that's a general idea here, is to be able to fly those high inclination orbits from Cape Canaveral, missing all of the land masses and giving you a little redundancy between the West Coast and the East Coast. And in the Air Force's view, in the case that one of these is put out of service for a little while, whether it's a natural disaster or some other mishap, and there's an urgent national security need that needs to be flown,

that it is technically possible from Florida. This announcement got everybody scurrying about who could use this corridor, and would SpaceX use it, would ULA use it, would Blue Origin use it. There were a lot of questions and ideas being thrown around about this particular proposal from the Air Force. So I thought it would be good to talk through some of those things because I've been thinking about it a lot the past couple of weeks. And it's interesting the implications and the questions that it brings when you look forward into the launch market here in the U.S. Before I get into all that, though, I want to say a huge thank you to all of the supporters of Main Engine Cutoff over at patreon.com slash Miko. There are 137 of you supporting this show week in, week out, and that includes 24 executive producers who made this particular episode of the podcast possible. Chris, Mike, Pat, Matt, George, Brad, Ryan, Jameson, Nadeem, Peter,

Donald, Lee, Jasper, Chris, Warren, Bob, Brian, Russell, John, and five anonymous executive producers. Thank you so much for your support. You make this show possible every single day, and I'm so thankful for all of your support. And don't forget, there are some good perks if you want to join the crew of patrons over there. $3 a month or more, you get access to the headlines show that I do every single Friday. Run through the headlines of the week, the small stories, the big stories. Give a couple of thoughts on each of the stories of the week. It's a great way to stay up on Space News if you don't have a lot of time to read during the week. And $5 a month or more, as I mentioned at the front of the show, you get access to the Off-Nominal Discord, a fantastic community that I think everyone will enjoy being a part of. So head over to

patreon.com slash Miko if you want to get either of those things or just help support this blog and podcast. It is a huge, huge help and it makes this possible. It makes me be able to expand what I'm doing, what I'm working on, upgrade hardware, and just generally keep all of this thing going. So thank you so much for your support. And I think with that brings up a lot of trade-offs to make. You know, you got to think through what's worth it to you, what you can do with different infrastructure, etc. So let me walk you through my thought process on this. The general theory that is leading, you know, everyone's thoughts on this topic is, can someone like SpaceX or ULA who has infrastructure at both coasts, can they consolidate and just fly out of Florida to cover

all of their launch needs? Or do they have to maintain these two infrastructures on both coasts? You know, there's a lot of overhead that comes with having a launch site, maintaining a launch site. And if you're not using one so heavily, it does begin to make you wonder, why do we have this operating? Can we handle this a better way? So the first, you know, the basic arithmetic you got to work out is how much does it cost to keep a West Coast launch site up and running, maintained and operational? And can we, with that launch site in operation, get enough business to fly out of there to warrant keeping it open? Now, this is for the commercial market I'm talking about. Obviously, the government wants that launch site open and operating because they

have different needs in the commercial market. But for someone like SpaceX, who really is focused on the commercial side, can they get enough business to fly out of Vandenberg to make it worth it to keep that open and operating? You know, they've had a couple of Iridium flights every year. They've had a few other missions out of there. They've got their own things that they want to fly out of Vandenberg. So right now, it seems like for SpaceX, they do get enough business to cover that overhead. Maybe it takes two, three flights, maybe more than that to cover the overhead of operating that launch site. But given where their operations are, you know, out in L, it's a little bit easier than for somebody like, you know, Blue Origin, which we'll get into. But for SpaceX and ULA that have infrastructure out on the West

Coast, you know, they have to figure out, is this worth it to keep it up and running? Can we get enough out of this launch site to make it worth having a team there throughout the year and flying a team in for launches and everything that comes with operating a launch site. So I think the answer for ULA and SpaceX is yes, they want to keep those open, but you know, they have infrastructure already. Like I said, ULA has plans to transition the Atlas 5 pads on both East and West coast to Vulcan pads for the future. So I think for Falcon 9 and Vulcan, the answer would be yes, we want to keep that infrastructure open. But for somebody like Blue Origin with New Glenn, they are initially launching out of Cape Canaveral. Their factory is going to be down near Cape Canaveral. And they have, you know, quite a bit

of infrastructure going in at Cape Canaveral. And they have almost nothing. You know, they might have some studies for Vandenberg, but they have nothing other than that on the West Coast. We haven't heard them talk about polar launches at all. I'm sure it's in the back of somebody's mind out in Washington. But for now, we have no hard plans for a West Coast infrastructure. So if they see this proposal for a trajectory that allows them to fly polar from their already in production launch site, I think that does pique their interest quite a bit.

And it opens up a new market for them from the launch site they're already building on. So I could very much see them saying it's not worth the investment at the West Coast up front to establish a launch site because we don't know the market yet. We don't know how many polar launches we would land anyway. And I'm not sure we can warrant the millions and millions of dollars it would be to build that infrastructure on the West Coast, especially as we're just getting our flight operations rolling, especially as we have our factory out by the Cape, especially as we're going to have this reusable fleet of boosters that are coming back from the Atlantic Ocean back to the

Cape, etc. It seems like they've got a lot going for them at the East Coast that I can't see them saying it's worth it to build out something on the West Coast. So that's where I'm at on who would be interested in this. Somebody like Blue Origin. The other instance would be Orbital ATK with Next Generation Launch Vehicle. They're going to launch that out of Cape Canaveral. They have no infrastructure at the Cape yet. We've heard them bring it up a couple of times. But so far, they are an East Coast-focused launcher. So these new entrants that don't have infrastructure out west already,

they seem like good targets for something like this, you know, to take advantage of this polar corridor from Cape Canaveral. Now, the other thing you got to think through is the actual performance of your launch vehicle in something like this. So to preface that, when you're launching to equatorial or low inclination orbits or anything that's flying east, you get a little advantage of using the Earth's rotation and adding that to the speed that you need to achieve to get to your given orbit. When you go polar or retrograde, like radar satellites use, when you're flying over the poles or backwards around Earth, you are fighting that rotation of

Earth a bit. So it brings with it a payload hit. Your payload capacity to polar or high inclination orbits is lower than your payload is to a prograde orbit, something that's flying from the west to the east. So that's one payload hit right there when you're flying to a different direction than Earth is rotating. There's another hit that comes with a trajectory like proposed here for Cape Canaveral, that includes with it that dogleg maneuver to fly east first and then south. Changing direction like that brings with it another payload hit. In some cases, depending on how far of an inclination change you're doing, quite substantial,

because you're spending so much energy changing the direction that you already are going. So for that reason, that brings your payload down even further. So when you're considering flying polar from Cape Canaveral, your payload capacity is substantially reduced compared to flying just to the east from Cape Canaveral. And that is something else that needs to be factored into all of this. And when you get into that area, you start realizing the differences between these launch vehicle architectures. Launch vehicles like Falcon 9 and like New Glenn, specifically architectures that are

reusable with a full stage being reused rather than just an engine compartment like is rumored for Vulcan, any full stage reuse has a certain kind of architecture to it that lends itself to being overpowered in a certain sense. So if you look at the payload capacities of Falcon 9 and New Glenn, compared to the typical payloads that they're going to fly, the payload capacity far outstrips their typical payload mass. So Falcon 9 can do 20-some tons to low Earth orbit. New Glenn can do 40-some tons to low Earth orbit. The heaviest satellite that SpaceX has ever launched is an Iridium flight, which is, you know, 8 or 9 tons to low Earth orbit. So it far outstrips what they are carrying on an average flight

in terms of payload capacity. And the reason there is that the booster is set up for, you know, obviously they need margin for reuse, in SpaceX SpaceX's case to do all those landing burns, the boost back burn, the reentry burn, the landing burn that gets their stage back intact. But you also, in the case of a reusable launch system, you want to be able to use that for as many payload classes as possible to make the benefits of reuse really come to fruition. classes as possible to make the benefits of reuse really come to fruition so that you just have one first stage to reuse or in the case of Falcon Heavy of three but you have one type that you can launch and fly back and reuse exactly as it is you don't want any extra solid rocket boosters or anything else that needs to augment your first stage that makes reuse a harder target to achieve so in that case you see you know you you see Falcon 9 and New Glenn that have this very

oversized architecture, but it's done for the reason of reusability. Now contrast that to something like Atlas V or Delta IV or Vulcan. They are built for the low end of the payload range, so the base model of these, the Atlas V 401, you know, just the Atlas V with no solid rocket boosters or the similar Delta IV or Vulcan variants, those are targeted for the low end of the typical payload range so that the base model covers, you know,

the base level satellites that you would be launching with this thing. And then as you upgrade the payload size, you have to start adding on solid rocket boosters to increase your payload. And that brings with it some added concerns, you know, specifically cost. The basic guideline is any solid rocket booster that you see ULA adding to a launch vehicle is about $10 million in an increase of cost. So an Atlas 5401 is something around $109 million right now. An Atlas 421, which is the same rocket but with two solid rocket boosters, would be up to the

$130 million range. They may be old figures, I don't know exactly, but that's a general way to work it in your mind when you're thinking through this kind of stuff. So in that instance, you don't want to be hurting your payload capacity with doing these kind of maneuvers because that's going to be adding cost substantially. So if something that could get to a pro-grade orbit on an Atlas 5401 needs to use an Atlas 5421 to go polar from Cape Canaveral because of those payload hits that I've been talking about, both in flying against the Earth rotation, but also doing that dogleg maneuver, you're adding $20 million of cost right there on top of it. So this kind of maneuver that they're talking about with Cape Canaveral here and flying polar

tends to favor architectures like Falcon 9, like New Glenn, that are overpowered and reusable than something like Vulcan or Atlas 5 that is built for the low end and upgrades with cost from there. But you can see how this gets a little more complicated for something like Vulcan, because, you know, maybe you're adding cost to each polar flight and that makes you less likely to win that polar mission. But could that money be better spent keeping open a West Coast launch range? You know, if there's money that needs to be spent either by your customer to upgrade the payload capacity of your vehicle or by you to open a West Coast launch site, making yourself more cost effective, more attractive in terms of pricing, maybe then the trade starts to come out on the side of keeping open a West Coast launch site. But if your New

Glen, if your Blue Origin flying New Glen, and the price for a New Glen is the price for a New Glen, regardless of how much stuff you put in it, and you have the extra payload margin to fly polar from Cape Canaveral, that starts to become really attractive because you can bid for those polar missions. You can go out and try to get contracts for polar missions, and you know you're flying the same vehicle that you would if somebody was putting something up to geosynchronous orbit. So you can see how this starts to get very specific to each different use case, very complicated with these different trade-offs that you want to make.

But it is interesting to consider. And I very much could see Blue Origin taking advantage of this corridor with NucleN. And other than that, I'm not quite sure who would make use of this. The other one is, you know, maybe Falcon Heavy, because they don't yet have the infrastructure out of the West Coast. SpaceX hasn't upgraded the Vandenberg launchpad to support Falcon Heavy, because they don't yet have the infrastructure out of the West Coast. SpaceX hasn't upgraded the Vandenberg launch pad to support Falcon Heavy. There have been plans for that in the past. But, you know, maybe they can cover what they need with Falcon Heavy from the East Coast

because the payload capacity of Falcon Heavy is so much more massive than anything else that we have to launch today that they could take the hit. It gets them above the Falcon 9 payload capacity, gets them into a different class for polar orbits from Cape Canaveral, and they can still maybe land a mission from the U.S. Department of Defense that they wouldn't have been able to otherwise without putting substantial money into their Vandenberg launch pads. The other one that came to mind is DARPA and their XS1 program. We've talked about this a couple of months back when they chose who was going to be building that launch vehicle. There's a lot of questions out how that project is going to turn out. DARPA doesn't have the best track

record for this kind of stuff. But there was an announcement back in June that XS1, this reusable space plane kind of thing uh would be based at cape canaveral and would fly out of cape canaveral and then land back at cape canaveral so maybe the department of defense had this in mind or the air force had this in mind when working on that polar corridor because the department of defense might want to use xs1 to launch small payloads to polar orbits and they want to just have one single launch site rather than duplicating their infrastructure that they need. The problem there is that XS1's payload capacity is very, very small. It's like 300 kilograms or something

like that. So the effective payload that you could get to polar from Cape Canaveral doesn't seem like it would be all that much, though it would be competitive with something like Rocket Lab or Virgin Orbit. So they could, you know, pursue that route with XS1. But for now, let's see who, you know, who this gets looking at at polar launches from Cape Canaveral. Let's see if anyone starts marketing this idea, something like Nuke Land maybe books a polar launch. You know, they've signed a couple of launches right now for launches out of Cape Canaveral, but we'll see if they start signing some polar launches in the near future as this launch site comes together down there.

It'll be interesting to see if anyone does take them up on this. But for now, I guess that's just all the speculation we can handle for this topic. But if you've got any thoughts on who may use this polar corridor from Cape Canaveral, I would love to hear it. Email me, anthony at mainenginecutoff.com. And we're always talking on the Discord, as always, as I mentioned. So that is all I've got for that topic this week. We've got some interesting things coming up.

Commercial crew launch dates were pushed back again, and they have a hearing in the U.S. House of Representatives this week. So we'll see if anything interesting comes out of that. And I'm sure I will be back with you not too far into the future with some interesting topics coming up as Falcon Heavy is sitting on the pad, getting ready for a static fire as I record this. So very exciting times coming up here in space. I'm excited to be back for 2018. this. So very exciting times coming up here in space. I'm excited to be back for 2018. I'm going to try to do some more small shows as topics come up to keep things more active as we get started in the year here. So keep an eye on your feeds. And as always, thank you so much for listening, and I will talk to you next week. Редактор субтитров А.Семкин Корректор А.Егорова