Rocket Report: Virgin soars, Falcon Heavy cores on the go, Astra failure

Welcome to Edition 1.29 of the Rocket Report! This week, we send our hearty congratulations to Virgin Galactic, which reached an important milestone Thursday with its first flight above 80km. We also have some good news on the commercial crew front, with multiple flights looking promising for 2019.

As always, we welcome reader submissions, and if you don’t want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.

Virgin flies into space (probably). With Mark “Forger” Stucky and C.J Sturckow piloting the vehicle, the VSS Unity vehicle was dropped from its White Knight Two carrier aircraft on Thursday before burning its rocket motor. During that 60-second burn, it reached a velocity of Mach 2.9 and soared to an altitude of 82.68km. These were records for the company, which may begin flying space tourists in 2019.

So, is this space? … This is now a very relevant question. There seems to be some movement in the aerospace community to dial back the boundary between Earth’s atmosphere and “space” from 100km to 80km, but this seems like a far-from-settled matter. Regardless, Virgin clearly believes that it has now achieved spaceflight. We congratulate them on their achievement. (submitted by Ken Kubiak, Ken the Bin, and Unrulycow)

Small-launch industry eyes a big 2019. A year ago—even several months ago—some of the dozens of ventures developing small launch vehicles were expecting to perform their first orbital launches by the end of this year, The Space Review notes. Now, with a few weeks left in 2018, companies such as Virgin Orbit and Vector have acknowledged slips into next year.

A reckoning coming soon? … “There’s a lot of noise in the system right now,” Dan Hart, president and CEO of Virgin Orbit, said at the World Satellite Business Week conference in September in Paris. He expects a shakeout coming soon with multiple smallsat launch providers aiming for orbit soon. “I think we’ll see that happening over the next year to 18 months,” Hart said. All of this makes next year one to watch for the smallsat launch industry, both for launches and company failures. (submitted by Ken the Bin)

Rocket Lab’s fourth launch delayed. Bad weather late Wednesday forced the private spaceflight company Rocket Lab to postpone the launch of more than a dozen small satellites, including 10 for a NASA education program, Space.com reports. This is the Electron booster’s fourth launch and the first time NASA has procured a launch vehicle completely dedicated to CubeSats.

Weekend launch likely … Friday’s weather forecast was also poor, so Rocket Lab rescheduled the launch to Sunday, local time, from its spaceport in New Zealand. (For EST, the window now runs from 11pm on December 15 to 3am on December 16). This is an important mission for the company, because flying two Electron rockets in about a month’s time would represent a big step forward in its launch cadence.

An Astra launch in November failed. The stealth startup company Astra launched a rocket in late November that suffered a multiple-engine failure, according to an FAA official, SpaceNews reports. “We saw that in Alaska a week ago today,” FAA Acting Administrator Dan Elwell said on December 6. “Even though all five engines failed, all debris landed in the spaceport boundary, and there were no injuries or property damage to the uninvolved public.”

No further details … Elwell didn’t provide additional details about the event and left before he could answer further questions. The suborbital flight of Astra’s “Rocket 2” from Launch Pad 2 at Pacific Spaceport Complex on Kodiak Island, Alaska, was intended to test the rocket’s first stage. Little is known about Astra’s commercial ambitions, other than that the company is competing to become a player in the smallsat rocket development race. (submitted by John Vullo and Ken the Bin)

India studying re-using spent rocket stages. The chair of the India Space Research Organization, Kailasavadivoo Sivan, said the country is looking at repurposing the upper stage of its Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle. “We are working on a new technology where we will give life to this ‘dead’ last stage of PSLV, also called PS4 stage, for six months after its launch,” he told The Times of India. “This rocket stage will double up as a satellite. This will be the most cost-effective way to perform experiments in space as we don’t have to launch a separate rocket for the purpose.”

A novel idea … The upper stage could be kept alive with batteries and/or a solar panel, Sivan said. Students or scientists could use this capacity for experiments in space. The country is also looking at using this concept for the larger GSLV rocket. This is an interesting idea, and we’re eager to see whether it works.

Students seek to build “world’s cheapest rocket”. An eight-person team of engineering and computer science students at Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, New Jersey, has begun working on building a rocket capable of traveling to an altitude of 100km above the Earth. The students are seeking to raise $100,000 for research and development and $100,000 for materials, Patch reports.

Not sure such records are kept … The team is moving forward with the construction and testing of a 15-foot carbon fiber and aluminum rocket and intends to launch an eight-kilogram payload on a suborbital trajectory. We’re not aware of any existing “low-cost” records, but like other student efforts around the country, it’s great to see interest in rocketry and STEM from younger people.

Commercial crew getting closer. Both SpaceX and Boeing appear to be getting closer to flying. One source tells Ars that confidence inside NASA is growing about the likelihood that the company’s first demonstration mission, Demo-1, will fly in January (it is now officially set for January 17). Meanwhile, NASA says the first stage of the Atlas V rocket that will launch Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner spacecraft on the company’s uncrewed Orbital Flight Test has arrived in Cape Canaveral, Florida.

It’s been a long wait … But after years of waiting, commercial crew really does feel like it’s getting close to happening. After these uncrewed missions, we probably will have about a six-month wait before the crewed flight tests themselves. This coming year could be huge for spaceflight. (submitted by Ken the Bin)

China launches to the far side of the Moon. On Saturday morning (local time in China), a Long March 3B rocket sent a four-ton lander and a 140kg rover into space, and then this Chang’e-4 spacecraft performed a trans-lunar injection to send it flying toward the Moon. The spacecraft reached lunar orbit on Wednesday. There are a lot of reasons why this was a big deal for the Asian country.

Landing in a few weeks … China has not said when it will attempt to land on the far side of the Moon, but observers speculate the attempt will likely occur the first three days of January. Before this landing takes place, Chang’e-4 will have to link up with the Queqiao relay spacecraft, which will have line-of-sight communications with both the lander, which is expected to set down in the South Pole-Aitken Basin, as well as Earth.

How final is the Block 5 rocket? SpaceX founder Elon Musk has said several times that the Block 5 variant will be the final major change to the Falcon 9 booster. However, after the recent failure to land a first stage in Florida, the company is now expected to add backup pumps and other systems to increase redundancy to landing mechanisms.

Iterative changes, most likely … These would fall under iterative changes rather than major changes. However, as the company seeks to fly the Falcon 9 rocket an unprecedented number of times, it undoubtedly will find out new things about the launch system as each first stage makes multiple flights. Given how successful the Falcon 9 rocket has been, we wouldn’t rule out more changes to optimize it in the future. We think SpaceX will be flying it for a long time. (submitted by josephseddon)

Two of three cores built for next Falcon Heavy flight. At least two of the three cores for the next flight of the Falcon Heavy rocket have left SpaceX’s factory in Hawthorne, California. These side boosters have distinctive nosecones that have been spotted and posted on social media. The status of the more complex center core for the next flight is not known, Teslarati reports.

First quarter, 2019 launch? … This Falcon Heavy flight will probably have all new Block 5 cores. The next mission for the big rocket, the launch of Arabsat-6A, is likely to occur no earlier than mid-February. However, given the unknown status of the center core, it is hard to have too much confidence in any launch date at this time. (submitted by Ken the Bin)

Vulcan will launch national security payload in 2022. In an extended interview with Ars, United Launch Alliance Chief Executive Tory Bruno said, “Our certification flights will be in 2021 for the LSA awards that were just made. And we intend to fly an actual customer on that flight—commercial customers—and we’re talking to them now. And then we’ll be certified a few months later and ready to fly national security space missions.”

He likes his hats with mustard … Bruno also addressed a number of other topics in the interview, including how upgrading the Centaur upper stage is key to the Vulcan Heavy’s performance, why Blue Origin’s BE-4 stage was the right choice, and ULA’s at-times contentious relationship with SpaceX.

Delta IV Heavy has a last-second scrub. An attempt to launch a classified National Reconnaissance Office spy satellite atop a heavy-lift Delta 4 rocket at Vandenberg Air Force Base northwest of Los Angeles was aborted at the T-minus 7.5-second mark Saturday evening. That’s when a problem was detected by computers orchestrating the terminal countdown, CBS News reports.

Quickly safed, but still scary … A flight controller called out “hold, hold, hold” as the countdown came to a halt. Flames from the hydrogen igniters rose from the base of the rocket as they continued to burn for a few moments, a somewhat scary sight given the 1.6-million-pound rocket was loaded with 465,000 gallons of liquid hydrogen and oxygen propellants, per CBS’ Bill Harwood. ULA says it will attempt this launch again on December 18 at 5:57pm PST.

Next three launches

Dec. 16: Electron | ELaNa-19 mission | Mahia Peninsula, New Zealand | 04:00 UTC

Dec. 18: Falcon 9 | GPS III-01 for Air Force | Cape Canaveral, FL, | 14:11 UTC

Dec. 18: Soyuz | Composante Spatiale Optique military satellite | Kourou, French Guiana | 16:37 UTC

https://arstechnica.com/?p=1428277