Main Engine Cut Off - T+75: March Roundup

Episode Date: March 23, 2018

A few interesting documents have been released: the late-but-final 2018 appropriations, NASA’s lunar cargo lander request for information, and the public summary of the NASA Independent Review Team���s investigation into the CRS-7 mishap. And a few interesting announcements were made: NASA Acting Administration Robert Lightfoot is going to retire, and the Air Force awarded contracts for another round of EELV Phase 1A launches. This episode of Main Engine Cut Off is brought to you by 28 executive producers—Kris, Pat, Matt, Jorge, Brad, Ryan, Jamison, Nadim, Peter, Donald, Lee, Jasper, Chris, Warren, Bob, Brian, Russell, John, Moritz, Tyler, Laszlo, Joel, and six anonymous—and 147 other supporters on Patreon. Off-Nominal Events NASA Budget To Soar Over $20 Billion in Final FY2018 Appropriations - SpacePolicyOnline.com Acting NASA Administrator Lightfoot Announces Retirement - SpacePolicyOnline.com Lunar Surface Transportation Capability Request for Information (RFI) - Federal Business Opportunities: Opportunities NASA Independent Review Team SpaceX CRS-7 Accident Investigation Report Public Summary (PDF, 763 KB) NASA investigation linked 2015 Falcon 9 failure to design error - SpaceNews.com Air Force awards big launch contracts to SpaceX and ULA - SpaceNews.com 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 Managing Cutoff. I am Anthony Colangelo, and I'm back after a short, unplanned hiatus. I've been working on buying a house, among other things, and it's been taking me away from this space world a little bit But I'm back and I've got a bunch of little stories to cover We're gonna do one of those lightning round shows where kind of run through a couple of stories that I've missed and I've got some thoughts on So we'll we'll head into that in a second But before I do want to remind you that we are having a meetup in Philadelphia tomorrow This is coming out March 23rd. On March 24th, we will be in Philadelphia at 6 p.m.

at Yards Brewing Company here in Center City at 5th and Spring Garden. Jake from Wee Martians is going to be in town, so we're doing a little meetup. There's going to be a couple of us hanging out, having a drink, bite to eat, talking about some space. So if you're in the area and you want to come hang out, head over to events.offnominal.space and find out more

information there. All right, so let's dive in. I've got a couple of NASA things to talk about that has been happening the past couple of days, and this one is pretty recent. The House and Senate Appropriations Committees finally released the funding bills for fiscal year 2018. This is the fiscal year that started last October. So we are a little bit late getting into this. But there's some interesting things that are in there. Basically, everything across the board for NASA got an increase. The budget breaks $20 billion this year by a good margin. And there's, you know, among other things, they've kind of rejected some of the administration requests to cancel some climate observation missions. Uh, the NASA education office has funding. Um, this has a statement in there about not canceling W-1st, though that is a battle that will be fought in fiscal year 2019 appropriations.

but there's a very strongly worded statement about not canceling things that were found to be important in decadal surveys. So this does seem to make a statement about that, even though it's not yet time to have that fight. One of the things that's in there, and this was something I covered a show or two ago, is there is funding in there for the second mobile launcher for SLS. In a recent show, I talked about how a second mobile launcher really doesn't accelerate the schedule of SLS any more than a year, maybe. So it's a

massive amount of money for a year of savings that I believe NASA is cautioning themselves that they may slip into that year anyway with the other elements of SLS Orion for EM2. So this second mobile launcher, I don't think really buys them anything other than, you know, an additional piece of hardware, which is interesting. And it does open up some options to fly a second EM1 style mission or a second Block 1 mission before you get into Block 1B. That opens up some interesting possibilities for things like Europa Clipper or an earlier crewed flight in the Block 1 configuration while they get Block 1B ready. But NASA had said that they were not going to pursue this route. And here's Congress going ahead and saying, here's $350 million to build a second one to get started with that. So that's

one of the interesting things coming out of this. We'll see how that is handled by NASA themselves after making such a strong statement that they do not want to proceed with that funding. There's also funding in there for the Europa lander, in addition to Europa Clipper. The lander is something that NASA had not pursued as of yet, even though they had a congressional mandate to do that. And, you know, so there's some battles to be fought here, even though that they're getting money for things that they said they don't want to do. That's going to make things very interesting. And that's even more complicated by the administrator issue that we're having. And that's what I want to get into next. So Jim Bridenstine's nomination has been sitting out there for quite a while. The thinking is that he does not have enough votes to get confirmed. All 49 Democrats are against Bridenstine. Marco Rubio has come out against him. So that puts 50 in the no column. There are 49 in the yes column, so we believe. The one outstanding is John McCain, who is not present because of a health issue. And apparently some of the rumors are that he is a no on Bridenstine anyway. If he

were a yes, it would be 50-50 and Mike Pence could confirm Bridenstine, get him in. So now there's a lot of pressure coming from the House towards the Senate to confirm Bridenstine. And that's amped up by the fact that Robert Lightfoot announced that he is going to retire in another month or so. We had all assumed that Lightfoot would retire once an administrator was picked, and he would step down and exit NASA. But he's been doing the job of the administrator for well over a year now, approaching a year and a half. And I guess, you know, I guess he's had enough of this. He wants out. But, you know, I understand this. I think from his perspective, here's if I were to jump into his head, here's what I think he might

be seeing. He wants to retire. But there's this stalemate going on with the administrator position. And maybe from his eyes, if he seems to be doing a good job or in the eyes of Congress, he's doing a good job, and in the eyes of the administration, he's doing a good job, there's not a lot of motivation to confirm the full administrator, and there's not a lot of pressure to be put upon the people that are holding out. So maybe he's thinking that he retires anyway, like he wants to do. He gets out of the way. It shakes up the situation enough to put pressure on the Senate to confirm an actual administrator. And if they're not going to confirm them, it puts pressure on the administration to nominate a different one. So it could be a very calculated idea for somebody who wants to leave

NASA anyway, to put pressure on the situation to shake things up and not just have the stalemate go on forever and ever and ever. So, you know, I believe that that's where it's coming from. I don't know. I'm not in his head. There were a lot of people surprised that he announced this retirement when he did. So, you know, to me, this seems like the most likely option that he saw a route out, which was put pressure on the political structure to get an administrator in. And he's going to put a timeline on how long he's going to be there being this interim administrator. Now, I said that's interesting with this budget stuff in mind, because the budget that is given to NASA from Congress does have line items defined. It does say you have this much

money to do this mission, but the NASA administration is in charge of implementing that strategically and, you know, you know, planning out what the work is going to be done, how it's going to be done, all that kind of stuff. They need to implement that. If they don't have a leader to really make, you know, call the shots on this front, it is kind of weird to be getting all this funding for things that you've already said you don't want to do. And now you're being told to do it and you've got to figure out how to do it. And so there's so many decisions to be made that it does get to a point when somebody needs to make these decisions.

And I've said in the past that I don't think an administrator has much effect on what NASA is told to do by Congress, at least in this era. Maybe in a previous era, they did have more influence on telling Congress this is what we're going to do. But it does have effects on how they implement things. And if Congress and NASA are in a lockstep, that's okay. But in this case, if Congress significantly diverges from what NASA has proposed,

things get a little weird and you do need somebody there to make the final call on how these implementation things go. So it's a really weird situation that NASA is in right now. I was joking on the blog the other day, Lightfoot was talking at a conference or something and said that we're in a pretty good spot policy-wise right now, which I find is a hilarious statement for such a, you know, policy is not a good spot right now. You know, maybe the money's good. Maybe the missions that are being defined are good, like Europa Clipper and Europa Landers and things like that.

But policy is kind of all over the place, a little bit scatterbrained, and there's all these different motivations and, you know, routes that people would like to see NASA go. So it seems to be in a messy spot. I wouldn't say it's in a good spot. It's good if you just care about raw funding, but if you're caring about strategy and roadmap and things like that, I do think it's quite messy right now.

And these two things, these two situations make it even more so. So I'm really interested to see how that goes from here. All right, the last NASA story that I want to get into is the Lunar Surface Transportation Capability Request for Information. NASA finally announced the request for information about the cargo lunar landers that they're envisioning taking place in and around cislunar space near the lunar gateway, etc., etc. We've been hearing about this for a while, that they were going to reach out to industry

to start getting some work on cargo landers that would eventually lead in to human-scale landers. So let me read a chunk from this request for information here. NASA is now beginning conceptual development of a human-class lander. NASA envisions using a series of medium-to-large landers with payloads in the 500-5,000 kg range to assist in requirements development and establish an approach to a human class lander in the next decade. So what they're doing here

is starting to get some ideas about how different companies would approach this. That's what request for information is. You tell us what your ideas are, what kind of architecture you would be foreseeing, how that would evolve towards something in the human class lander scale. And this is really just information. Next comes a request for proposals in which these companies that submitted information kind of harden things up, develop an actual roadmap, put some technical specs together,

and then it would be down selected from there, like we've seen with a lot of other missions. It's going to be really interesting to see who responds to this and how they respond. And quite honestly, we might not get a lot of info in this case, like a lot of this might not be released because it will be proprietary data, data that NASA wants to keep private for now. We'll probably hear more once it gets to that request for proposal round. But I did want to talk a little bit about what I hope to see out of this sort of initiative from NASA. So first, let's talk about some of the possibilities here. Companies that we know would respond to this or we would hope respond to this or who knows if they'll respond to this. You can be pretty sure that all of the major primes that you know and love or you know and hate will respond. Boeing's, Lockheed's, Northrop Grumman, etc.

They're all going to respond to this because why not? They'll have their space arm put together something. And I think overall, I think we can all agree that those will be pretty uninspired, but there will be the heritage choice in a lot of ways, and that's something that plays well in this kind of realm. Now, on the other side, I think we've got these new entrants, or companies that have not yet been in this kind of game that are looking to get into it. Blue Origin is the obvious one in my mind. They've talked up their Blue Moon concept. They've even kind of lobbied NASA in a lot of ways to say,

hey, we'd build a lander of this scale if you go in on it with us. So I fully expect Blue Origin to be throwing their hat into the ring here. And I think, you know, they've shown some visualizations of what their lander could look like. I don't know how close that is to reality, if it would be something very Lem-looking or if it would be a little different than that. But they will obviously be throwing their hat into the ring. The other one I really hope to see is a Mastin and United Launch Alliance team put their Zeus concepts up for this thing. Mastin has a contract as part of the Lunar Catalyst program where they're developing small landers, and I really would hope to see them put Zeus

into this running here. This is the lander that is based on Centaur. So it is a Centaur from ULA that has a landing kit developed by Mastin. So it's a very interesting concept. There are landing engines that are facing what you would think is perpendicular to Centaur. So take a typical Centaur with an RL-10 on the bottom, tip it sideways, and put some landing legs on it and some landing kit engines on each of the four corners facing horizontally there, and that would be the lander. So the idea would be to use the RL-10 to do a lot of the horizontal braking and then the landing kit facing horizontally to land it on its side on the moon. And that's a concept that's been around for a little while. They have not yet gotten a massive amount of funding to proceed with that, but it is

a very capable concept. And interestingly, given the advent of starliner and atlas 5 flying starliner centaur centaur 5 and aces will all need to be human rated to fly those kind of missions so it is not unlikely that you could see some sort of uh crew cabin being stuck on the front of a zeus lander instead of a cargo kit and turning that into a human scale lander. It is interesting when you consider, you know, I'm not sure how that deal, that does really work well for getting payloads down to the surface. I'm not sure what they have envisioned for getting up off the surface. So that may be their limitations there. I don't know a lot about where Zeus is at these days, if they've developed plans for an ascent vehicle there. But that would

certainly be part of the human class lander development and, you know, where they would need to go for it. So that's an interesting gotcha there for that concept. But maybe they do have something up their sleeve in that regard. Now, the other one that you would say is obvious is SpaceX. It gets tricky in this regard. We know that Red Dragon is cancelled and propulsive landings with Dragon 2 is cancelled, so I can't necessarily see them proposing that anymore. I don't think that they think it's worth their time to develop that. And that also has a similar problem of not really being an ascent vehicle or capable of being an ascent vehicle because of a fuel type it uses, the architecture that it uses, etc., etc.

I can't see them putting anything but BFR in the running for this, or BFS specifically. Maybe they can propose a scaled-down version, but it's hard to see NASA going for that. It's also hard to see SpaceX seeing a very scaled-down version of BFS as worth it to them when they've obviously we've just heard they've got some space in the port of LA where they're going to manufacture BFR. They're pushing ahead with full scale BFR. Not sure how much time they want to waste with a scaled version that's built for NASA landings that would happen in the 2022 timeframe. That's the other thing I should mention is that part of this RFI that NASA released specifies that initial landings should take place in 2022-ish,

and that would be in the 500 kilogram range or whatever your payload range is. So it's hard to see SpaceX seeing this effort as worth it because it doesn't necessarily tie in with their mission moving forward. So I'm not sure how they would play that, if they would even spend any time thinking about this at all, but we'll see. Smaller companies like Moon Express, Astrobotic, the ones that are in the Google Lunar XPRIZE, the ones that are in the Lunar Catalyst program with NASA, I'm not sure if they'd want to push up towards this scale, and if they have any ideas for human scale landers. But it's know, it's not unlikely that some of them would respond with information on what they would do given a massive amount of funding.

So we might see something like that. So that's kind of where we're at here. There's a bunch of others that you could throw out there as ideas. But I think my overall take on this is very similar to my take on the DARPA XS-1 program, which was that space plane program that eventually was awarded to Boeing and Aerojet Rocketdyne. I want to see this kind of initiative expand the market. Pick some new entrants. The heritage side of NASA, you know, the old primes, Boeing, Lockheed, Northrop Grumman, Orbital ETK, etc. They have their work cut out for them

with the Lunar Gateway, which is what I'm now calling it because it's a better name, and you know what I'm talking about. With Lunar Gateway, SLS, Orion, they've got plenty of stuff to work on. This is the chance that NASA has to expand the market. Bring in new entrants. Bring in new ideas. Expand the market, because when you do that, you not only introduce some new players that have new ideas, that have a little bit more energy, that can have a different approach to this kind of stuff, you put pressure on the old existing companies to change the way that they're working. You put pressure on these new companies to be more competitive, to be more forward-thinking,

to do better work. And I think that's what we need now. We're seeing an explosion in the marketplace, but what we need to do is keep driving that. So we need to keep promoting new entrants as best as possible. And we need to support them because expanding the market is what changes things. It's what changed things in launch services. As we see now, there's plenty of changes going on on that side of the market because there are new entrants introducing a little bit of chaos to the system, introducing some competitiveness, and things are starting to change. We need to do that with some of the in-space architectures as well. So that's what I really hope to see here. Now, it doesn't have to be all entirely new entrants. You can pick,

you know, one that's been around a while that has some expertise, but please at least pick two or three new entrants to kind of expand the market a bit in ways that will make the future more interesting. If the only thing that comes out of this is a Boeing or Lockheed or Northrop as a prime and that's it, I would be, you know, disappointed, but I would also be a little shocked because NASA seems to be laying the groundwork for picking a new entrant and for promoting this whole like commercial private lander situation in their the way that they're selling the Lunar Gateway politically. So I'd be a little surprised and I really hope to see that. Now, I don't know that we'd hear anything about this until 2019 because there's this RFI process and

an RFP process. But I really hope when we do, we see some new entrants coming into this side of policy. I've got a couple of more stories I want to dive into. SpaceX, CR7 related, and some EELV awards. But before I do that, I want to say a huge thank you to all of you supporting Managing Cutoff on Patreon. There are 175 of you supporting this show every single month, and I could not be more thankful for your support. Peter, Donald, Lee, Jasper, Chris, Warren, Bob, Brian, Russell, John, Moritz, Tyler, Laszlo, Joel, and six anonymous executive producers. They made this show possible. I could not do it without their support and everybody else over at patreon.com slash Miko. Head there if you want to help support the show. And there's also some great perks there. $3 a month or more, you get access to Miko Headlines, a show I do every single Friday, run through the headlines of the week and give some quick thoughts on it.

It's a great way to stay up with Space News every single week. And it's a short 10 to 20 minute show each Friday morning. And $5 or more a month, you get access to the Off Nominal Discord. This is a little chat room where you can hang out,

talk some space with some fellow nerds. It's a joint thing with Jake from Wee Martians and his listeners. Great community, and I really, really recommend checking that out if you want some place to talk about space. So that's it. Thank you so much for all your support over at patreon.com slash Miko. All right, let's dive into this CRS-7 situation. Two years after the investigation of this, NASA's independent review team released a public summary of their investigation findings. And it is important. I think in context, it is important, but context is also important. So the findings were that CR-7 was caused,

the incident that had a disintegration in flight, if you will. SpaceX had always said that it was a bad strut that they got from a manufacturer. What NASA's team found was that it was a design error in Falcon 9, and a pretty big one at that. The findings were that they used the wrong grade of stainless steel in the structures that held the helium tanks inside of the upper stage. This was a material that was not rated for a cryogenic environment like that, that was not rated for that kind of load. They used it the wrong grade in the wrong ways and massively overlooked this issue.

So, you know, cut and dry, this was a design error on Falcon 9. Now, that is, you know, what came out of the investigation. But in the investigation, they also say that these issues were solved in the next flight, the Jason 3 launch. That was the last launch of this version of Falcon 9. It was a NASA launch. So all these issues were solved by then. There's also some comments in there about telemetry and that they didn't have basically a fast enough telemetry system. So they did lose data. It was very hard to reconstruct the anomaly. But all these issues, they say, were solved by the time Jason 3 flew. But it is,

you know, it is a very bad look for SpaceX because it was a very glaring design issue. It wasn't a strut manufacturer that slipped up. It was SpaceX design issue. Now, you know, that's the news there. But the context is that this is old news. You know, they solved these issues. They moved on from them. But that isn't always what matters. Because what matters here is that, you know, even though this is behind them, this is exactly the kind of thing that the SpaceX critics and competitors often give them grief about. That they're fast and loose with recommendations that have been there forever. That they are maybe a little too reliant on commercial parts, off-the-shelf parts, to make things cheap and quick.

And, you know, even though this is old news, it gives their critics that much more ammo. And, you know, even though this is old news, it gives their critics that much more ammo because before they could always say CRS and it was just a scary looming thing that not a lot of people knew the ins and outs of. But now they can point to this report and say, look, they've made bad design choices in the past. They overlooked glaring issues that anybody should have caught. And this is more easy ammunition for the detractors in politics, detractors in the market, etc. It just plays on that stigma that everyone tries to apply and most times successfully applies to SpaceX. Now, it's tough to see their recent history here of getting on a roll, being reliable, being on schedule, that kind of thing, and really let this affect your view of SpaceX. But it is an important note that this was a design issue from SpaceX. Yes, it was old news, but it is easy ammunition for

people out there that need some against SpaceX. So, you know, this just reinforces that doubt that is there about SpaceX and reliability and that kind of thing. So it's important to know, and I think it's, you know, not a very extensive summary, but it is important that this is out there in the public now. Next story I want to get to is some recent EELV awards from the Air Force. This is EELV phase 1A. This is the first phase of EELV launches that are competed between SpaceX and ULA. Those are the two entrants right now.

And we do have some history here. So the recent news is that SpaceX recently won three GPS3 launches and ULA won two direct-to-geo launches. So SpaceX won three GPS3 launches for, I think it was like $290 million total. ULA won these twoEO launches, Air Force Space Command 8 and 24, for $351 million. These were just awarded a couple of weeks ago. And it's exactly as expected. There's really no surprise in this particular award. SpaceX has now swept up all five of the GPS 3 awards. They won their first in April April 2016, their second in March of 2017, and they just won three more here in March of 2018. ULA won the two direct-to-geo missions, a mission that SpaceX needs Falcon Heavy for. So they couldn't actually win this yet because

Falcon Heavy hadn't flown by the time, I guess it had flown by the time of the award, but man, they were really cutting it close if they thought they were going to win this by flying it a month before. They probably already had the report done by the time Falcon Heavy flew. So this is exactly as expected. Complex, high priority missions from the Air Force and direct-to-geo missions went to ULA again, as have happened in the past. So, you know, just looking at where we're at now, SpaceX won the five GPS-3 launches. ULA won STP-3 in June of 2017. That's flying on an Atlas V. SpaceX said that they would have required Falcon Heavy to fly that mission, so they were not eligible to win. And then these awards here went exactly as expected again. So there's really been no surprises yet.

When this phase was coming about and we knew they were going to be competed, this is exactly what everyone expected. SpaceX would sweep up the GPS-3 missions because those are cost-concerned, but ULA has won all of the higher-priority missions or the more complex missions and things that Falcon Heavy was required for could not yet bid. Interestingly, there are two other competitions out for bid right now. Air Force Space Command 52, which is a classified mission, went out for bid in September 2017. Responses were due in October of 2017. We haven't heard yet who won that, but

apparently that was a very heavy GTO satellite that Falcon 9 could conceivably fly. We'll see if they do win that one. And there's this other batch of five that were announced in February. There's two NRO missions heading to low Earth orbit. There's Silent Barker, which is heading directly to GEO. There's a space-based infrared system, GEO-5, that's a GTO mission. And then there's Air Force Space Command 44 heading to GEO. This is the first one that Falcon Heavy could bid and win with. They would have to be certified by the time they flew the mission, but that would be, you know, two, three years off.

And at that point, you would hope that SpaceX could fly enough Falcon Heavy missions to get certified, though there are still some questions about what exactly is on their manifest. So I don't think EELV awards are surprising yet. And I really think that, you know, there actually hasn't been that much of a shakeup yet, other than ULA costs are coming down. We're seeing that in the responses and the awards. SpaceX is sweeping up the EZ Awards. Their prices are rising as they get more used to the government contracting and as they find that limit of what they can bump up against ULA and still win. sometimes towards the end of the year, I think, will be very telling. If SpaceX is able to win something that is more complex, if they're able to win a Falcon Heavy launch, that is when things really get shaken up for EELV. But as of yet, we are not yet there. Things are as expected. And, you know, all is good there. But I think it really is important if SpaceX wants to make a move in this Department of Defense market, they need to pick off one of

these more complex Falcon Heavy missions before anything drastically, drastically changes. So those are the stories I had in my little lightning round here. If you've got anything else you want to hear about on the show, please email me, anthony at mainenginecutoff.com. If there's something I missed the last week or two that you were hoping to hear about, please let me know. Otherwise, I will be back next week. And I've got a couple of really good interviews lined up for the next couple of weeks here. I'm just nailing down a couple of dates. And y'all on Patreon will hear about those early. If you $5 or more a month, you get access to hear about upcoming interviews and contribute some questions. So you should be keeping an eye

on there if you are at the $5 level on Patreon. But the next couple of weeks should be a lot of fun on the podcast. So stay tuned. Thank you so much for listening. Thank you again for all your support on Patreon, and I will talk to you next week.