Main Engine Cut Off - T+98: Gateway Logistics Services

Episode Date: October 26, 2018

NASA released a request for information this week about cargo services to the Gateway—big news for the future of NASA and the Gateway. I break down the technical and non-technical bits of that announcement, as well as some updates on Space Force and the Soyuz situation. This episode of Main Engine Cut Off is brought to you by 34 executive producers—Kris, Pat, Matt, Jorge, Brad, Ryan, Jamison, Nadim, Peter, Donald, Lee, Jasper, Chris, Warren, Bob, Russell, John, Moritz, Joel, Jan, David, Grant, Mike, David, Mints, Joonas, and eight anonymous—and 189 other supporters on Patreon. DOD “Moving Out” on Space Force As Space Council Approves Six Recommendations to President - SpacePolicyOnline.com Bridenstine confident in Soyuz return to flight despite quality concerns - SpaceNews.com NASA Seeks Information for Gateway Cargo Delivery Services Gateway Logistics Services - Federal Business Opportunities: Opportunities Gateway Logistics Services - Main Engine Cut Off Eric Berger on Twitter: “Congress hasn’t made up its mind yet about the Deep Space Gateway—an interesting contrast to NASA, which speaks of it as a fait accompli. Blurb from Politico’s space newsletter this morning…” Starposts 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

Gateway Logistics Services. That's what we're going to be talking about today. An interesting, interesting announcement from NASA. This is Managing Cutoff. I'm Anthony Colangelo. I want to start, though, with a couple of quick hitters, things that I haven't talked too much about on the podcast and felt like, you know, maybe I should do more of these little short segments to update you on some current goings on. So first thing I wanted to mention was Space Force. The National Space

Council met this week. National Space Council meetings are kind of funny because if you're somebody who listens to this podcast every week, who reads spacenews.com all the time, who stays up, you know, reading all of the current news stories about space, you are never going to be surprised by what you hear in a National Space Council meeting. Because by and large, it is a ratification of sorts of the current trend in the political landscape of space. It's more of a statement about here is what we think, here is where we're going, here is what you've already heard if you're somebody following it closely. And a lot of times the things that are floated out there, the old trial balloon method is

put something out in the media, see how the reaction is to it, and then, you know, go forward with that. That's kind of how the National Space Council operates, where you probably have heard people on the National Space Council talk about these issues in some other forum before they get there. So even though they're not surprising, that doesn't mean they aren't important. You know, this is a room filled with the heads of government, the heads of government agencies, people on the cabinet, the vice presidents leading this thing, the NASA administrators there, the secretary of the Air Force is there, the heads of the National Reconnaissance Office and other

pieces of the DOD are there, heads of commercial companies are there, private companies, public companies. This is a pretty sizable event to have all these people in one room and have a very strong statement of this is where we're heading. How much it plays into the future of any given decision that they talk about is yet to be determined. The Space Force thing in general, which is what this meeting was about, the National Space Council, there's going to be a whole congressional side of things before that's really an actual thing. But the National Space Council has put forward six recommendations for the Space Force. They are very minutiae riddled, so you can read them if you want. Marsha Smith over at Space Policy Online has a great rundown

of those recommendations. So if you want, check out the link in the show notes for that. But overall, you know, by and large, I think I talked about this on a recent Q&A episode, which by the way, next week, there will be the October Q&A episode. So send me your questions or topics. I'll talk about that later. I am very much pro Space Force. There's about a million questions about how Space Force will come about and what it actually entails, how effective it will be, but I am very pro-Space Force in general. So it's good to see this moving forward. This is going to pick up pace-wise pretty soon because they want to see money for Space Force in the fiscal year 2020 budget. We've just entered fiscal year 2019. So that means we're going to see the initial budget

guidance from the White House, I think in February or so, that gets announced for the next fiscal year. And then we'll be hearing all summer about actual budget deliberations. So if Space Force is going to be a thing, we're going to be seeing budgetary figures for it fairly soon. Now, this is obviously a tumultuous time for US politics. We are days away from a midterm election that has catastrophic potential for all policy things that are in flow right now because it's going to be a major upheaval of the environment. Whether or not there's major flips in the House or Senate, just the mere fact that there are midterm elections are a huge disturbance to the process.

So this isn't going to get a lot of attention the end of this year, but I would expect by late winter, early spring, you're going to be seeing a lot of Space Force movement if it's something that is going to be coming to fruition. If Congress is really, really against it, maybe it gets stifled. But if it's going to be a thing, you will probably know by late winter, early spring. So we'll keep an eye on it. But I wanted to mention up front that this is moving forward and we're going to be hearing about this a few months down the line. And I think everybody out there knows that I am pro-Space Force. So that's good. And maybe we'll talk more in depth about it as we get some of these details

firmed up. I've stayed away from talking about it because there are just so many variables at play, so many ways that it could go, that I don't feel like it's worth talking about every little detail that comes out. And we'll dissect what is going to come about when we have an actual vision for what it will be. And we're starting to get that now with these National Space Council recommendations. But a lot of that is going to be determined by Congress. One other quick story I wanted to talk about and comment on a little bit is the Soyuz situation right now. So we are a couple of weeks out from this MS-10 abort, where the Soyuz rocket failed. And this week we had a successful return to flight of sorts for Soyuz.

This was a Soyuz-21B that was flying a Russian military satellite. The first and second stages of the Soyuz-21B and the Soyuz-FG, which is the variant that flies humans, those are common. that flies humans. Those are common. So this flight was, you know, proving out that the first and second stages of Soyuz are not critically failed on a fleet wide kind of situation. You know, this is the best case scenario of this kind of failure is that it was a one off that was unique to the handling of that rocket, the production of that rocket, but wasn't something that was a fleet wide production issue. You that rocket, but wasn't something that was a fleet-wide production issue. I guess it was a couple months or years ago, I guess a couple years ago now, with the Proton vehicle, we saw a fleet-wide issue where the engines for Proton

had issues at the materials level. And that caused an entire stand-down of Proton launches for about a year because they had to look back at every single engine that had been produced for proton. If this was that kind of situation for Soyuz, we would be in much, much bigger trouble. But the fact that this seems like a one-off kind of incident, you know, we've got two more Soyuz launches before the crude launch comes up. So there's still two more launches to prove out the fact that Soyuz is historically reliable. So this is really good news overall. And it sounds a lot like the crew will be launching in December, heading back up the ISS and the ISS program will move on unscathed, largely unscathed. There's a lot of upheaval in terms of scheduling because the things that Nick Hague and Ovechkin,

Ovechkin, Ovechkin, I just merged him and the hockey player, Ovechkin. So that's fun. They were scheduled to do a lot of things like spacewalks to see who drilled the hole in the other Soyuz. They were going to do a lot of scientific work on the station, a lot of payload work on the station. So there's massive upheaval to the station's scheduling. But in the long view of the ISS program, relatively unscathed if this other crew can get launched into the ISS in December. In general, I think this is a good example of a healthy flow where the abort system worked. A rocket did fail, but the abort system worked. If it is shown to be a one-off failure and not something that is an issue at the production level of every single rocket,

we can get back to flying pretty quick. And I think that's the sign of a healthy launch system in general, that you've got the crew safe, the rocket was... You're obviously going to investigate it. You want to know why that issue came about. But if it was a one-off and something that doesn't affect every single vehicle that you have in the fleet, keep flying. That's what we do with airplanes these days. You have an incident where you get grounded for a couple of days, you figure out, make sure that the other ones aren't affected by it. But Southwest is still flying planes, even though a couple of their engines have blown up over the last year or two. And you just make sure that

it's not happening to every vehicle. You keep flying and things are good overall. So I think this is a good example of that. And I would hope, you know, in the unfortunate instance in which this happens with an American launcher, with, you know, the upcoming commercial crew launches, if it's similarly best of the worst case scenarios, I would hope that we see a similar flow. I don't think that's the case because our political system, our system in general is just different. It operates differently. So that's where we're at with Soyuz. I think it's promising and not the worst, worst case scenario that we could have had. So that is a good sign for ISS in general. All right, before we dive into the Gateway Logistics Services, I want to say a very, very big thank you to all of you supporting

Main Engine Cutoff over at patreon.com slash MECiko. There are 223 of you there supporting this podcast every single week. This episode of main engine cutoff is produced by 34 executive producers, Chris, Pat, Matt, George, Brad, Ryan, Jameson, Nadim, Peter, Donald, Lee, Jasper, Chris, Warren, Bob, Russell, John Moritz, Joel, Jan, David, Grant, Mike, David, Mintz, Eunice, and eight anonymous executive producers. Thank you so much for making this episode possible. I could not do it without your help and everybody else over at patreon.com slash Miko. And don't forget, $3 a month or more, you get access to headlines every single week. I do a little show on Fridays where I run through the headlines of the week, the big

stories, the small stories, give you my take on everything, keep you up to date on Space News. It's a great way to stay up to date without having to follow every single thread on Twitter or on RSS feeds or whatever else. I do that work for you. So head over there if you want to see that, patreon.com slash Miko. And thank you so much for your support. All right, let's get into this Gateway Logistics Services story. This is one of the big stories from NASA this year, I think. And not necessarily because this particular instance is particularly big, but because of the direction I think it shows overall.

So I want to dive into the technical details here, but I also want to talk about that philosophical level of things, as I am wont to do. The general idea here is that NASA released a request for information from U.S. companies for cargo services to the Gateway. They typically release an RFI, request for information, in the run-up to a release for an RFP, request for proposals. You get information from companies that helps inform the RFP round that you put out there, and eventually this would turn into some sort of official program, a la commercial cargo, commercial crew, all of the things that are the commercially focused side of NASA acquisitions. So the guidelines they have here is that they want a logistics module capable of carrying pressurized and unpressurized cargo out to the Gateway. This initial capability would be at least three cargo delivery missions. The first mission would potentially deliver, they say, a robotic arm provided by an international

partner, guess who, to the Gateway in 2024 would be the first logistics delivery. They also say the first two logistics modules would likely be launched on commercial rockets, but after Gateway Assembly, NASA's Space Launch System will be available as well. Once docked to the Gateway, the logistics module will be used for storage and trash, and then they have three specific requirements here.

Must be included guidance and navigation, power generation, and propulsion to enable docking to the gateway all by itself must be built to international docking standard and must be capable of self-disposal within three years of space operations. That's kind of a weird one to me. It's worded weirdly. Does that mean the mission is going to be three years long that they would dock in 2024 and leave in 2027? Or does that mean they just, it's kind of a, you don't have to go home, but you can't stay here situation where it's like, you know, just within three years, clean up your trash? I don't know what that means. That's a huge question mark for me.

And I think colors a lot of the rest of this with when you think about the actual hardware, you know, does it have to stay there for three years and then leave? Or does it just have to be, you know, can it drop stuff off, pick up some trash and head out and dispose of itself? I'm not sure what that means there. It's worded very vaguely, and I have a lot of questions around that particular element. Most importantly here is this line in the detailed notice that was posted by NASA. line in the detailed notice that was posted by NASA. It is expected that the initial requirement will be for three missions, with a single mission expected to deliver up to five metric tons of pressurized cargo and 2.6 metric tons of unpressurized cargo. It is hard to overstate

just how much cargo that is on a single mission. Right now, if you think about commercial cargo, Dragon can technically take six metric tons to the ISS in any mix of pressurized and unpressurized. But in general, Dragon becomes volume limited for pressurized cargo pretty quickly. So it tends to come in around three metric tons up to ISS, sometimes even less than that. can take three and a half metric tons of pressurized cargo. They don't have any room for unpressurized, and their volume of Cygnus is quite a bit bigger than the internal volume of Dragon. NASA is asking for information here about 7.6 metric tons to lunar orbit. This isn't 7.6 metric tons to ISS. This is 7.6 metric tons to lunar orbit. That is a huge vehicle. That is an ATV class vehicle, the automated transfer vehicle that ESA flew to the ISS a couple of times. It's a huge vehicle. The launch mass of ATV is about 20 tons, can deliver about eight metric tons to the ISS. And it's enormous. It could fit in a five meter fairing, but it needs to be a long one because

it's about 10 meters long. So it wouldn't even fit in a Falcon 9 or Falcon Heavy fairing. It would need something longer, like an Ariane 5 fairing, an Atlas 5, Delta 4 Heavy, New Glenn. That's ATV. They want that kind of size of a vehicle to lunar orbit. And it has to be able to dispose of itself from lunar orbit. I don't know if that means eject itself into a disposal, a dead orbit in Earth orbit, solar orbit. I don't really know what the requirements are there. But it has to include all that propulsion with significantly more delta V than it needs to do an ISS mission, and about eight metric tons of cargo, and go to lunar orbit. So I have a lot of thoughts about this, about how NASA arrived at these requirements, about what these requirements mean. I'm going to

try to collect them here, organize them in some way, and maybe we can learn a little bit about the future of the Gateway project. So number one, it's interesting to note that commercial cargo style program is on the table for sure here. Something that I was particularly hoping to see in the Gateway, if the Gateway was going to be a thing, I was hoping to see this kind of project. But the requirements are pretty unique. It's not an easy thing to extend any of the commercial cargo operators right now to this sort of capability. Maybe you'd need to scale up Cygnus pretty significantly, but you'd have to add some unpressurized space as well. Dragon is basically maxed out for these requirements and doesn't have the propulsion it needs to do what NASA is looking for here. So this, in most cases,

is a new vehicle development entirely. I think some of the information they're looking for is how these companies could extend what they're working on now to get to this kind of capability. is how these companies could extend what they're working on now to get to this kind of capability. So hey, can you make a bigger version of Cygnus that can do these things? Or hey, SpaceX, Blue Origin, you got anything up your sleeves that we don't know about? So when you compare commercial cargo, so I guess what I'm getting at is when you think about commercial cargo and extend that to the gateway, there are enough unique capabilities that you need to be able to do for a profile like the gateway that you very quickly get into new vehicle development. It's not such a simple extraction from commercial cargo

in LEO to commercial cargo in lunar space. Maybe some of the things that you're working on now can play into that, but largely it's going to be a significant extension of current vehicles or new vehicle development entirely. So when you think of that, there's going to be companies that approach this as SpaceX has done with commercial cargo and crew, which is, you know, how can I contribute to this program in a way that drives my own goals forward? So SpaceX was able to develop Falcon 9, turn that into a pretty big business. You know, they had plans to develop Dragon into something called Dragon Lab that they would fly these like one-off science lab missions with Dragon. That never really developed. Maybe they're going to

turn Dragon 2 into crew transportation up to commercial space stations. So that might be a future line of business. And they at some point had plans to fly Dragon around the moon to Mars. So they kind of are always in that line of thinking where it's like, where can we find the common ground between our goals and this program? And can we use this program to drive our own goals forward? So there's going to be certain companies that take that approach. SpaceX certainly would try to do that with BFR. Timeline-wise, this is directly relevant to BFR. But I don't know that the NASA requirements really fit that. There's a lot of gray area language in this request for information, specifically that self-disposal within three years of operation. I don't know that a BFS could keep methane and liquid oxygen around for three years. I'm not quite sure that NASA would be okay with a second BFS backing that thing up into this gateway to refuel, and all of a sudden you've got 200-ton spacecraft next to your four-module gateway. That seems a little bad. Optics-wise, I don't think they would really enjoy that. I don't know if anything that involves

refueling is on the table, which if that's not the case, BFR is right out. I would think Blue Origin wouldn't really have something that could do this because they're hydrogen-based for most of their upper stage stuff. I'm thinking this would be some sort of storable propellant or some sort of electric propulsion. So I'm not sure if SpaceX and Blue Origin are even really going to be interested in this program, given these requirements. If these requirements are cleaned up a little bit in a way that is more relevant to their mission, then I think they would be. But you know, I think the odds on favor right now is some sort of enhanced Cygnus, a larger, both in volume and mass Cygnus, that maybe has

electric propulsion of some sort. But again, you're at this point where this is a huge spacecraft. So what are you going to launch on? As I said, an ATV would not fit in Falcon Heavy fairings. Launch-wise, Falcon Heavy can't do 20 metric tons directly to a lunar intercept, but it could do some sort of significantly high elliptical orbit that would then take the electric propulsion of the spacecraft itself to push it out to lunar orbit. It takes a little while to get there, but you're economically getting there. New Glenn would kind of be in the same situation.

Really, almost any vehicle would be in the same situation to put 20 metric tons out towards the moon. One thing I wonder is how much payload could a cargo version of the NanoRacks, SSL, ULA, Altius outpost idea, how much could that take to lunar orbit? This is the idea of repurposing an upper stage to be part habitat, part upper stage. They've been pushing this idea a little further to turn these things into space stations. They are at this point getting to, you know, it's a modified upper stage. But how much could something like that take out to lunar orbit on top of a Vulcan with maybe some sort of control module like a Cygnus on top that maybe has enough propulsion to do the self-disposal within three years. That could be something

that's very interesting. So vehicle-wise, it's going to be really curious to see who responds. There's a lot of ways to go. The requirements are a little bit gray. And I guess if I was going to put money down given these requirements here, I would bet on some sort of enhanced Cygnus being the odds-on favorite, and my wild card would be some sort of NanoRacks-led initiative that is similar to the Outpost program right now. makes a BFS, SpaceX BFS, or something from Blue Origin more relevant. It's something that doesn't need to be either electric propulsion or storable propellant. I think that is a very likely contender. But otherwise, I think it's a company that says, all right, well, let's put together a good proposal for this program in the way that Boeing and Lockheed and Northrop Grumman tend to do, that would kind of be my default thinking for a mission like this. So technically, that's kind of where things are at. Like I said, they're going to take this information, probably build it into some sort of RFP, and we might see that go out next year or

something like that. These responses for information are due pretty quickly. I think the response date was like November 3rd or something like that. So, you know, just about a week turnaround. Sorry, November 2nd. So this was published on the 23rd, response on the 22nd. So on the 2nd, sorry. So this is like 10 days of a turnaround here for information. So, you know, they could turn this around and have an RFP out next year. That would kind of be my base thinking there. But philosophically, I think this is a very important step because it shows that the commercial cargo idea, the people that like the commercial cargo model within NASA are winning. You know, all of the stuff about the Gateway, though there is some political concern about the Gateway at this point. I saw an interesting tweet from Eric Berger this morning

with a blurb from Politico's Space Newsletter that showed a couple of people from Congress having some not so supportive comments about the Gateway. I don't know if that's just tied to the ISS concern that nobody wants to defund the ISS to about the gateway. I don't know if that's just tied to the ISS concern that nobody wants to defund the ISS to fund the gateway. I sort of think that's what the case is. But whatever the case, within NASA, the acquisition style of the gateway has been a significant departure from what we've seen the last couple of years. The power and propulsion element for the gateway, that base element, is going to be acquired by having a company fly a module, and NASA would acquire it once it was tested and on orbit. That is a different model of acquisition than NASA has

done recently. And then for the habitation side of things, they have that whole Next Step program going where they have got six companies doing ground tests of different habitation styles. And I assume that that would have a similar sort of acquisition flow where we'll buy that once it's on orbit. And then for cargo logistics services, they are pushing again in this commercial cargo direction. in the commercial cargo direction, the last thing to fall would be some sort of commercial crew program to extend what the crew things are doing now out to lunar space. But it's important to note that that segment of NASA, the people that see the value in those commercial cargo style programs, are winning these debates internally. And there is some sort of internal pressure from NASA to push in that direction. I think SLS Orion are still kind of the old steady of the old model,

but more and more we're seeing a new model of thinking win out internally in NASA, and it comes out typically in documents like this. So quibble over technical details of this RFI if you want, but don't lose sight of the fact that this faction within nasa is winning more often than not now all that said seeing a program like this move along knowing how much gateway logistic services would cost it just keeps bumming me out that we're not going directly to a surface station. Because this is a significant investment, and I think into the future we would get a lot more use out of landers right now than Gateway Logistics Service vehicles.

At some point in the future, we're going to need vehicles like this to shuttle cargo between Earth orbit and lunar orbit. But I really wish we would be pushing for that surface station first. And I would be significantly more excited to see an RFI go out for eight metric tons of cargo down to the lunar surface than I would for an ATV-style vehicle to lunar orbit. So I can't lose sight of that either. You know, every time I see one of these things, I get pretty excited because I'm more hopeful in the Gateway than I am ISS right now.

But I just continually want this to be a surface-focused program rather than a program focused on an extremely high orbit of the moon. So that's about all I got on the Gateway Logistics Services now, but this is something that will continue to be a topic here because the Gateway always is talked about, commercial cargo is always talked about, the convergence of the two is going to be talked about even more. So I'm hopeful for that.

That's a good sign. Overall, I think it's a good sign for the direction of NASA in general before I get out of here I wanted to remind you that the Q&A episode is coming up next week so if you've got questions or topics you want to hear from me from that I haven't covered on the show or something you're wondering send me your questions either to email anthonyantmanagingcutoff.com or on twitter at wehavemiko. But for now, that is it. Thank you again so much for your support at patreon.com slash miko. Thanks for listening, and I'll talk to you next week.