Main Engine Cut Off - T+96: Blue Origin & Harris

Episode Date: October 10, 2018

Blue Origin and Harris announced an interesting partnership last week that’s worth discussing: Harris will be producing 5-meter fixed mesh reflector antennas that can only fit (for now) inside of New Glenn’s big fairing. This episode of Main Engine Cut Off is brought to you by 35 executive producers—Kris, Pat, Matt, Jorge, Brad, Ryan, Jamison, Nadim, Peter, Donald, Lee, Jasper, Chris, Warren, Bob, Russell, John, Moritz, Tyler, Joel, Jan, David, Grant, Mike, David, Mints, Joonas, and eight anonymous—and 186 other supporters on Patreon. Blue Origin & Harris whitepaper on 5-meter antennas 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, Spotify, 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 Managing Cutoff, I am Anthony Colangelo, here to break down some news out of IAC last week. There wasn't a lot of headline stuff that is really worth talking about. It was a lot of agreements and conversations and a lot of talking about what we've been talking about for months or years, but all in one place, which there's value in that as well. But there wasn't a ton of newsy news stuff. But Lost in the Shuffle, I think, was one of the most interesting stories of the week

that I want to talk about here. And this is the partnership between Blue Origin and Harris. They put out this white paper about some things that they're working on together. I think there was probably a session about this or maybe a poster at the show. I wasn't there, so I don't know exactly how this was pitched at the show. But nonetheless, we have this white paper to look at. I will have a link in the show notes to this. It's like a four-page PDF, very short. Download it, if nothing else, for the pictures, because there's some great pictures in here of New Glenn, different

configurations that they will fly in, and I guess one configuration, but more detailed, updated designs, a lot of stuff worth looking at that we will get to. But the basis of this announcement between Blue Origin and Harris is that Harris, who is a company that builds antennas for, they build a ton of stuff, you know, Department of Defense and otherwise, a lot of communications hardware. They build antennas for geostationary satellites, and they are working on a special version to take advantage of the large payload volume that New Glenn flies with. They have this seven meter fairing in this white paper.

They show the diagram of this, and they actually have the payload volume at 6.2 meters, which is quite a bit less than seven meters. So I understand why they call it a 7 meter because, hey, 5 meter fairings only have 4.6 meters of space, so you round up. But, you know, let's call it a 6.5 meter fairing. 7 meters sounds better, but when I say 7, I actually mean, you know, 6.223, which is still huge, but worth a note. Anyway, so Harris is going to build these large antennas that couldn't fit in fairings of Falcon 9, Ariane 5, Atlas 5, Delta 4, anything that flies with a 5 meter fairing, even a 4 meter fairing in the Atlas 5 case. That's a lot of 4s and 5s, but you can roll with it.

Any of those fairings would not be able to fit as big of an antenna as Harris is working on here. fairings would not be able to fit as big of an antenna as Harris is working on here. They typically use smaller three meter antennas. These are called fixed mesh reflectors. They're not deployable, but you can build deployable variants of their antennas. But specifically, he's talking here about the three meter fixed mesh reflector of FMR. They are going to be building five meter FMRs to fly on New Glenn. This five meter antenna brings with it quite a few advantages. It can achieve performance of bigger deployable antennas, but with, they say here, 30 to 50% lower costs. So they are taking what they see available in this New Glenn architecture and building a product that is

specific to that. And notably, the only way to launch one of these on a commercial geo-satellite in typical configuration is to fly on New Glenn. So this is really a partnership because Harris is going after a market of people that want to build bigger in volume and mass in some cases, bigger satellites that are more capable and specifically fly them on New Glenn. Now, it's an interesting strategy for Harris because you got to wonder how many people are going to jump at this right off the bat. But also, this is a forward-looking thing. We're getting bigger and bigger launch vehicles. We have New Glenn on the horizon here. The cargo BFR is out there as well. Even things like SLS are in the works. There are things with bigger fairings coming down the line.

You know, five meter isn't the top of the size line, and it won't stay that way forever. So Harris is kind of getting out ahead of this curve a little bit by building these bigger things, building things that are a little bit bigger, more capable, and fit the market of large launch vehicles better. And in the case of Blue Origin, it's a really good sign because you get a couple of customers signed on to this thing, and you've got a couple of customers locked down for sure. They go ahead, they prove out that technology. Other people see the advantages of it. They might want to dive in, get their own. And guess what? Right now, all they can launch with is Nuke LEN. So this is a really good partnership, I think, for Harris to carve out a part of the market that is

very unique and for Blue Origin to start touting the advantages of its bigger fairing. They've always said, hey, it's a big fairing. It's a big fairing. We can launch huge telescopes, we can launch big satellites. But to have a very tangible, commercially available product that specifically shows off the unique capabilities of New Glenn itself, that is a very, very interesting thing. Especially at this time, we are a couple of years away from the first New Glenn launch. You want to start getting your geo-satellite orders in because those do take two-ish years or something like that to get built. So you need a little bit of lead time. And to put this out there now, have Harris start marketing it, have people be interested in it. I wouldn't be surprised if a couple of months down the line, maybe even a couple of weeks from now, we hear somebody like SSL or one of these other big

satellite producers jump in with this and say, hey, we're going to build a bus that is the size of that big fairing that has more transponders, more battery life, et cetera, more fuel capability. I wouldn't be surprised to see some other manufacturer jump on in to this partnership and start building things to complement this whole thing. And then bada bing, bada boom, you've got some large satellites to launch on New Glenn. So very good announcement. I think it was swept under the rug a lot of IAC because it's so specific to the industry, but I think this is the most meaningful thing to come out of IAC last week. All right, I want to get into some details about the updates that we saw here from New Glenn and some New Glenn strategy overall. But before I do that, I want to say a very huge thank you to everyone out there that

supports Managing Cutoff over at patreon.com slash Miko. There are 221 of you supporting the show every single week, and I could not do it without your support. This episode of Managing Cutoff was produced by 35 executive producers. Chris, Pat, Matt, George, Brad, Ryan, Jameson, Nadeem, Peter, Donald, Lee, Jasper, Chris, Warren, Bob, Russell, John, Moritz, Tyler, Joel, Jan, David, Grant, Mike, David, Mintz, Eunice, and eight anonymous executive producers. Thank you so much for producing this episode of Managing Cutoff. And thank you to everyone else over at patreon.com

slash Miko for your support. Don't forget, $3 a month or more, you get access to the headline show. You got a little special RSS feed. You drop that right wherever you're listening to me right now. And every single Friday or Saturday, Sundays, I'm a day late. You get a special little show just for you where I run through the headlines of the week. And if you have that show, you might have already heard some of what I've talked about there with Harris and Blue Origin. But hopefully this is still worthwhile for you. So head over there if you want to support the show or jump in with headlines. And thank you so much for your support. Last thing I want to break down is some of these new visuals that we're seeing from New Glenn.

So they've updated the visualizations of these. If you look at your podcast player right now, I will have a photo there of the new configuration of New Glenn. And in fact, the chapters before, you will see a photo there of the new configuration of New Glenn. And in fact, the chapters before, you will see a cutaway of the fairing with the satellites inside, and you see the two BE-4s in the upper stage. So let me run you through what some of these photos show. First of all, we see a new, longer second stage with the double BE-3U. They've switched away from that BE-4 upper stage. They've switched away from that three-stage variant to condense down to this two-stage configuration of Nuclen.

Seven BE-4s on the first stage, two BE-3Us on the upper stage, and that's it. And that gets it quite a bit of payload. The payload numbers they list here are, let's see, it's on here somewhere. There it is. Payload to LEO, 45 metric tons. Payload to geostationary transfer orbit, 13 metric tons. So those are still unchanged from the previous numbers that we've seen, which I'm a bit surprised about, but I wouldn't be surprised if the direct to geostationary

number went up a little bit with the switch to a hydrogen upper stage across the board. with the switch to a hydrogen upper stage across the board. Also in these visualizations is the first time I believe that we're seeing some sort of visualization of dual launch on New Glenn. This is very important. We had speculated based on the payload number, 13 metric tons to GTO, and the fairing size that they would try to arrange dual launch just like Ariane 5 does, where you take one satellite, you put it inside a little mini fairing inside of the big fairing. And on top of that, you put second satellite inside of the big fairing. You've got yourself a little dual launch situation. And that is the typical orientation of an Ariane 5 launch. And New Glenn is going to go after that

as well. I assume that every flight won't be dual-launched, but most of their commercial flights, I would bet, are some sort of dual-launch configuration like this. Now, importantly, the Ariane 5 dual-launch situation, because of its fairing size, right? It's a 5-meter fairing on Ariane 5, which means the inner fairing is even a little smaller than that. on Ariane 5, which means the inner fairing is even a little smaller than that. And also because of the payload capacity, Ariane 5 does about 10.5 tons to GTO, you have this difference in sizes of which satellites can ride with which satellites. So you can have a really big and heavy one up top, and then you can have a smaller, lighter satellite that sits inside of that secondary payload adapter. Because it's got to be a little less volume to fit in there. It's got to be a little lighter because the big satellite

on top is going to sit somewhere around five to six metric tons. You've only got four to five for that lower satellite. So you've got a big one and a little smaller one. With this new Glenn configuration, the inner fairing is still bigger, wider that is, than something like a Falcon 9 fairing. So you can have a full-size GeoSat, even bigger than full-size. You can still fit one of these Harris antennas inside the secondary fitting inside of the big fairing. If this is confusing, take another look at your podcast player. You'll see a little visualization of the fairing orientation here. But the only thing you need to know is that you are fitting two full-size or

bigger than full-size geosatellites inside of the New Glenn fairing for a typical launch. And 13 metric tons to GTO means you can be on the very heavy end of a GTO satellite. The heaviest one we've seen from SpaceX lately is like six and a half metric tons. So two of those will fit right on that GTO number. So perfectly so that this was almost certainly the design out the gate from New Glenn. Now having that confirmation, seeing that these plans are coming along, seeing that the visualizations, you know, what we see here seem pretty advanced as far as an architecture, we can start to draw some conclusions here about New Glenn's cost. And that's where it gets kind of interesting. You know, I think the idea with New Glenn, this is going to be a very low cost service because that's what

Blue Origin is in this for. They've got some reusability baked in. They have big plans here for Blue Origin and New Glenn itself. So we know they're going to try to be a lower cost launch provider. But right now, we've said in the past that SpaceX has their prices listed right now at like $60 million for Falcon 9, $90 million for Falcon Heavy. They have no motivation to drop those lower, even if they could, because they don't have any pressure from above them in the market. If ULA or Ariane 5 were to drop significantly in prices, then SpaceX would start eating into their margins a little bit. But right now, they don't have any reason to do that. So I think Blue Origin can come in here and really target that price point.

Notably, New Glenn is not a Falcon 9 class booster. It is a Falcon Heavy class booster. So the prices are a little bit different for, you know, when you talk about the entire launch vehicle. But what I think Blue Origin is going to do is do launch pricing per satellite. And right now, if you fly on a reused Falcon 9, you can launch a satellite to GTO for something starting around $50 million. I bet Blue Origin comes in and says, hey, you want to fly your satellite on New Glenn? $50 million and you're there. You're going to dual launch with somebody else. So the total cost there of that flight is $100 million.

You know, maybe it's 40, 45 million a pop. That puts it directly on the Falcon Heavy price point, but with bigger volume, with more mass to certain orbits. And before you write me and say, hey, it's not more mass to certain orbits, You've got to remember the Falcon Heavy GTO number is eight metric tons for $90 million. So this would be 13 for maybe 90 to $100 million. So you've got more mass to GTO for the same cost, and you get more payload space inside of that fairing. So you can start to see how the pricing here comes together because maybe the Department of Defense launches that I assume they're going to get, we might hear very, very soon. This might already be outdated by the time I post this. When they sell a launch to the Air Force or somebody like that, you know, they might sell the whole rocket because the Air Force doesn't want to ride with somebody else. And at that point, they're paying, you know, maybe they're paying $100 million,

which isn't directly competitive, but it's pretty close. It's in the ballpark of Falcon Heavy, starting out before the government-adjusted paperwork that we've seen from SpaceX. I've heard Blue Origin's a little bit more meticulous than SpaceX has been in the past, especially with dealings with some of that certification side of things. So maybe they have more of that price baked in, and they don't raise it as much for a government launch as SpaceX has. So you can start to see that this strategy, dual launch, with this price per satellite, with this payload range, with this fairing size, that puts them directly in line, if not under, a SpaceX cost. Now, this is all conjecture. I could be drastically wrong once they finally announce pricing, if they ever announce pricing

for New Glenn. But I think it's notable. They've already got, I think it's like eight contracts signed with people that want to launch their satellites on New Glenn. So they've got something compelling there. Maybe there's a discount for those first flights, but I would not be surprised to see somewhere in the $40 to $50 million per satellite range on New Glenn. somewhere in the $40 to $50 million per satellite range on New Glenn. All in all, a great day for Blue Origin, for Harris here. Really good announcement. Best thing to come out of IAC. So I think you should go read that PDF, make of it what you will, and we'll see where it goes from here. That's all I got for you today. I'm not going to say this week because I have an inkling that there might be some more news this week because I have an inkling that there might be

some more news this week and I might be back with a show, but we'll see. We'll see. I could be wrong, and if so, I will talk to you next week,

but otherwise, I hopefully will talk to you soon. Thank you so much again for your support at patreon.com slash miko. Thank you for listening, and I will talk to you pretty soon. Thank you.