It sure sounds like United Launch Alliance is up for sale. Tory Bruno, the rocket builder’s CEO, said this week that anyone who purchased ULA would reap the rewards of the company’s “transformation” over the last few years, a course change primarily driven by geopolitics and the competitive threat of SpaceX.

While Bruno did not disclose details of any negotiations about a potential sale of ULA, he told Bloomberg News this week that the launch operator is primed for a buyer. Boeing and Lockheed Martin each have a 50 percent stake in the Colorado-based rocket company.

“If I were buying a space business, I’d go look at ULA,” Bruno said. “It’s already had all the hard work done through the transformation. You’re not buying a Victorian with bad plumbing. It’s all been done. You’re coming in at the end of the remodel, so you can focus on your future.”

If ULA has undergone a remodel, it will be tested in the next few months. On Tuesday, ULA announced the first test flight of its new Vulcan rocket is scheduled for December 24. This is the rocket ULA needs to narrow the gap with SpaceX’s launch prices. ULA’s owners started a multibillion-dollar program to develop the Vulcan rocket in 2014, billing it as a replacement for the company’s legacy Atlas and Delta rockets.

ULA has also made tentative steps to test technologies needed to reuse the Vulcan rocket’s main engines, made by Blue Origin. The Vulcan rocket will still cost more than SpaceX’s Falcon 9, but ULA says it will be less expensive than the Atlas V and Delta IV. Importantly, the Vulcan rocket will also end ULA’s reliance on Russian-built engines that fly on the Atlas V, meaning the US military will stop launching satellites using technology from an adversary.

It’s complicated

Ars first reported the possibility of a ULA sale in March. At that time, sources said the deal was expected to be closed by the end of this year. It’s unclear whether delays in the first Vulcan rocket launch, seen as a critical moment for ULA’s future, might have impacted this timeline.

Bruno’s statement was the first time ULA has seemed to confirm it is up for sale.

ULA was established in 2006 through a merger of Boeing’s Delta rocket program and Lockheed Martin’s Atlas launcher family. Since then, ULA has been a profitable enterprise for both aerospace giants, thanks to a steady diet of lucrative sole-source military launch contracts and an approximately $1 billion annual subsidy from the US Department of Defense to maintain “launch readiness.”

With SpaceX now certified to launch US military satellites, the days of sole-source contracting are over, and the Defense Department says it is committed to competition in the launch market. The Pentagon has phased out the subsidy, which it said was needed to ensure ULA’s workforce and infrastructure were available to assure access to space for military payloads.

In his comments to Bloomberg, Bruno said ULA’s ownership structure is “complicated” and has limited the company’s agility. One example of this is when ULA’s board, comprised of Boeing and Lockheed Martin executives, initially only approved funding for the Vulcan rocket in three-month increments.

While SpaceX dominates the commercial launch market, ULA remains the US military’s preferred launch provider. The Pentagon selected ULA in 2020 to launch 60 percent of its large national security space missions through 2027 and tapped SpaceX to launch 40 percent. The military is now in another multi-year launch procurement, and ULA and SpaceX again appear to have the advantage.

United Launch Alliance has also been buoyed by Amazon’s purchase of 47 launches for the Kuiper broadband constellation. These missions will carry into orbit the lion’s share of Amazon’s planned 3,236 Internet satellites to compete with SpaceX’s Starlink network.

Amazon is helping fund a big expansion in ULA launch capability to support the Kuiper constellation. Officials say this $2 billion investment will double ULA’s launch capacity, allowing it to launch as many as 25 Vulcan rockets per year.

Who’s buying?

Sources have said ULA and its corporate owners have already talked with prospective buyers. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the sources said a sticking point has been finding a buyer who will agree to pay the owners something close to the roughly $5 billion valuation they have placed on ULA.

Lockheed Martin, already a part-owner of United Launch Alliance, appears to be the leading candidate to take full control of the rocket company. Boeing is looking to recover from sustained financial losses, while Lockheed Martin is on firmer footing, forecasting more than $8.4 billion in profits for this year. Let’s not forget that Lockheed Martin developed the Atlas V rocket, the more successful of ULA’s two legacy launch vehicle families in terms of price and launch cadence.

Amazon is another possibility. Purchasing ULA would give Amazon ownership of all the critical segments of the supply chain needed to deploy the Kuiper broadband network, akin to SpaceX’s control of the Starlink constellation. Amazon is already building its own satellites for Kuiper, and if it bought ULA, it could launch them itself. This is surely an attractive proposition for Amazon that could lead to lower costs and schedule priority on the Vulcan launch manifest.

Jeff Bezos’s space company, Blue Origin, might also be in the running. Blue Origin supplies BE-4 engines for ULA’s Vulcan rocket, but is also developing its own heavy-lift rocket, the New Glenn, and has a strategic road map that differs from that of ULA, with a greater emphasis on booster reusability.

Two other ULA suppliers, Northrop Grumman and L3Harris, could also be interested. There’s also a possibility that a private equity firm could swoop in and buy the company to gain a foothold in the space industry.

https://arstechnica.com/?p=1978909

Forty-six years in deep space have taken their toll on NASA’s twin Voyager spacecraft. Their antiquated computers sometimes do puzzling things, their thrusters are wearing out, and their fuel lines are becoming clogged. Around half of their science instruments no longer return data, and their power levels are declining.

Still, the lean team of engineers and scientists working on the Voyager program at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory are taking steps to eke out every bit of life from the only two spacecraft flying in interstellar space, the vast volume of dilute gas outside the influence of the Sun’s solar wind.

“These are measures that we’re trying to take to extend the life of the mission,” said Suzanne Dodd, Voyager project manager at JPL, in an interview with Ars.

Voyager’s instruments are studying cosmic ways, the magnetic field, and the plasma environment in interstellar space. They’re not taking pictures anymore. Both probes have traveled beyond the heliopause, where the flow of particles emanating from the Sun runs into the interstellar medium.

“These two spacecraft are still operating, still returning uniquely valuable science data, and every extra day we get data back is a blessing,” Dodd said.

But spacecraft engineers love redundancy, but they no longer have the luxury of backups on the Voyagers. That means, in any particular section of the spacecraft, a failure of a single part could bring the mission to a halt.

“Everything on both spacecraft is single-string,” Dodd said. “There are not any backup capabilities left. In some cases, we powered off stuff to save power, just to keep the instruments on.”

Problem-solving from more than 12 billion miles away

Over the weekend, ground controllers at JPL planned to uplink a software patch to Voyager 2. It’s a test before the ground team sends the same patch to Voyager 1 to resolve a problem with one of its onboard computers. This problem first cropped up in 2022, when engineers noticed the computer responsible for orienting the Voyager 1 spacecraft was sending down garbled status reports despite otherwise operating normally. It turns out the computer somehow entered an incorrect mode, according to NASA.

Managers wanted to try out the patch on Voyager 2 before transmitting it to Voyager 1, which is flying farther from Earth, deeper into interstellar space. That makes observations of the environment around Voyager 1 more valuable to scientists.

At the same time, engineers have devised a new to operate the thrusters on both Voyager spacecraft. These small rocket engines—fired autonomously—are necessary to keep the main antenna on each probe pointed at Earth. There’s a buildup of propellant residue in the narrow lines that feed hydrazine fuel to the thrusters. NASA says the buildup is “becoming significant” in some of the lines, so engineers beamed up fresh commands to the spacecraft in the last few weeks to allow the probes to rotate slightly further in each direction before firing the thrusters.

This will result in the spacecraft performing fewer, longer firings, each of which adds to the residue in the fuel lines. The downside of this change is that science data transmitted back to Earth could occasionally be lost, but over time, the ground team concluded the plan would allow the Voyagers to return more data over time, NASA said.

With these steps, engineers expect the propellant inlet tubes won’t become completely blocked for at least five more years, and “possibly much longer,” NASA said. There are other things engineers could try to further extend the lifetime of the thrusters.

“This far into the mission, the engineering team is being faced with a lot of challenges for which we just don’t have a playbook,” said Linda Spilker, Voyager project scientist at JPL, in a statement. “But they continue to come up with creative solutions.”

https://arstechnica.com/?p=1977686

In 2018, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi committed his nation to develop its own capability to send astronauts into orbit, an achievement that would make India the fourth country with an independent human spaceflight program. On Saturday, that ambition moved a step closer to reality with a successful test of the human-rated spacecraft’s launch abort system.

This is the set of rocket motors and parachutes that would be used to propel the spacecraft away from a failing launch vehicle, a dramatic maneuver that would save the lives of everyone on board. By all accounts, Indian officials were thrilled with the outcome of the test flight.

“We have started the journey of Gaganyaan with this maiden launch of the test vehicle abort sequence, and this will be repeated multiple times under different conditions,” said Sreedhara Somanath, chairman of the Indian Space Research Organization. “Also, we’ll have an unmanned Gaganyaan vehicle (orbital) mission soon, at the beginning of the next year.”

An unpressurized model of the Gaganyaan spacecraft, mimicking the shape and mass of the real capsule, took off from the Satish Dhawan Space Center on India’s east coast at 12:30 am EDT (04:30 UTC) Saturday on top of a single-stage, liquid-fueled rocket. The booster accelerated the capsule to a speed of Mach 1.2, a little more than the speed of sound, and then an automated command triggered a simulated launch abort.

The escape maneuver was timed for roughly the moment the rocket passed through the most extreme aerodynamic forces of the flight. This is the most demanding time for a launch abort. Burning solid propellant, a high-altitude escape motor ignited for a few seconds to push the 10,000-pound (4.5-metric ton) capsule away from the top of its booster. The capsule and its launch abort system coasted up to about 55,000 feet (16.9 kilometers), then the capsule separated and released a series of parachutes, finally deploying three large main chutes to slow for splashdown around six miles (10 kilometers) off the coast.

An Indian Navy vessel in the Bay of Bengal retrieved the capsule to return it to ISRO engineers for inspections. No one was aboard the Gaganyaan capsule for Saturday’s test flight, which was similar in purpose to abort tests of SpaceX’s Crew Dragon spacecraft and NASA’s Orion capsule.

Modi, in a post on the social media platform X, wrote that “this launch takes us one step closer to realizing India’s first human spaceflight program, Gaganyaan.”

Under Modi’s nationalist premiership, Indian space exploration has made strides forward, including a string of successful launches, missions to the Moon and Mars, and the full deployment of its own regional satellite navigation system begun under a prior administration. An independent Indian human spaceflight program would vault India into an exclusive club alongside the United States, China, and Russia, and there’s room for debate over whether India might soon catapult ahead of Russia in spaceflight.

Safety first

“As far as the Gaganyaan program is concerned, this is the first major milestone,” said R. Hutton, mission director for the Gaganyaan program, in remarks after Saturday’s test flight. “In Gaganyaan, the most important (factor) is the safety of the crew.”

Saturday’s mission—designated TV-D1 as the first demonstration flight of India’s new “test vehicle”—is the first of four atmospheric launch abort tests Indian officials say will fully exercise the capability of the crew escape system at different phases of the launch. The new “test vehicle” that launched the abort test Saturday is derived from a hydrazine-fueled booster used on another Indian rocket.

Indian engineers did not attempt to recover the booster Saturday, but officials said the single-stage rocket could become a technological testbed for other programs, including vertical takeoff and vertical landing, a precursor for future reusable launch vehicles.

“The Gaganyaan vehicle, although it is fully robust and reliable, we can’t take anything to chance, and therefore if any malfunction happens, there has to be a system in the launch vehicle which is called the crew escape, which will take the crew module away safely and land,” Hutton said Saturday. “This is exactly what has been demonstrated today in this first mission of the test vehicle.”

ISRO completed a successful pad abort test in 2018, where the escape system boosted a capsule into the sky from a fixed start on the ground, simulating an abort on the launch pad.

The Indian government has allocated about $1.1 billion for Gaganyaan, which means “celestial vehicle” in Sanskrit. Indian engineers worked on the preliminary design of a human-rated spacecraft for several years before Modi’s announcement in 2018 that a new Indian-made space capsule would carry an Indian astronaut into orbit by 2022.

India did not make that schedule. Officials have blamed the delays on the COVID pandemic and the technical complexities involved in developing a crew spacecraft. Somanath, who leads India’s space agency, said ISRO is on track to launch an unpiloted Gaganyaan mission into low-Earth orbit early next year for an end-to-end test, from launch through re-entry and splashdown.

The unpiloted orbital mission will have to be “repeated at least two times, maybe more,” Somanath said at an Indian conference in June. “All of this is success-based. If anything goes wrong here, it requires correction and further launches. So I’m not putting a date for the launch of the (first) human mission. It’s not important at this moment. Our focus is to do what is needed to reach this point.”

https://arstechnica.com/?p=1977979

Earlier this week, SpaceX launched for the 75th time this year, continuing a flight cadence that should see the company come close to 100 missions by the end of December.

SpaceX plans to kick its launch rate into a higher gear in 2024. This will be largely driven by launches of upgraded Starlink satellites with the ability to connect directly with consumer cell phones, a service SpaceX calls “Starlink Direct to Cell,” a company official told Ars this week.

The goal next year is 12 launches per month, for a total of 144 Falcon rocket flights. Like this year, most of those missions will be primarily devoted to launching Starlink broadband satellites. So far in 2023, more than 60 percent of SpaceX’s launches have delivered the company’s own Starlink satellites into orbit.

“With our 2 million users, (we) need that constellation refreshed,” the SpaceX official told Ars on background. “We’re also going to look at direct to cell communications with Starlink, and that’s a key feature that gets added next year with those 144 flights.”

Here are some numbers. Last year, SpaceX launched 61 missions. In 2021, the number was 31. In the last 12 months, SpaceX has launched 88 Falcon rockets, plus one test flight of the company’s much larger Starship rocket.

SpaceX’s success in recovering and reusing Falcon 9 boosters and payload fairings has been vital to making this possible. SpaceX has gone past the original goal of launching each Falcon 9 booster 10 times before a major overhaul, first to 15 flights, and then recently certifying boosters for up to 20 missions. Technicians can swap out parts like engines, fins, landing legs, and valves that malfunction in flight or show signs of wear.

With so many launches planned next year, 20 flights is probably not a stopping point. “We might go a little higher,” the SpaceX official said.

Engineers have shortened the time needed to reconfigure SpaceX’s busiest launch pad in Florida to less than four days. SpaceX has also improved the turnaround time at its launch pad in California.

Supply chain management isn’t as eye-popping as landing rockets on a floating platform in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, but it’s still important. SpaceX is ordering more components from suppliers in bulk and is asking its subcontractors to perform more quality inspections in the factory rather than SpaceX doing them after the parts are delivered.

https://arstechnica.com/?p=1977473

During the height of the Cold War, the United States and Soviet Union engaged in a struggle across many fronts—economically, politically, diplomatically, and more. As part of this they were competing for hearts and minds of nations caught between the two superpowers.

The Space Race in the 1960s was all about geopolitics. By accomplishing feats in space, Americans and Soviets were showing off the supremacy of their culture and scientific communities. Ultimately, landing NASA astronauts on the Moon offered the terrestrial world a huge statement on why the American way was better.

When the geopolitical imperative for this ran out, so did the money.

Human spaceflight is extraordinarily expensive. It is no coincidence that the only major human spaceflight initiative begun by NASA during the last 40 years that has survived is the International Space Station. It directly served a spaceflight purpose, sure—scientific research in microgravity, studying human health for long-duration space missions, and more. But critically, it helped foster ties between the United States and Russia considered important at the time.

Programs to send humans beyond low-Earth orbit are even more expensive, costing $10 billion a year or more. The reason why NASA’s Artemis program for lunar exploration has a very good chance to succeed where other programs since Apollo have failed—the Space Exploration Initiative and Constellation Program to name two—is because deep-space exploration is finally coming back into rhythm with geopolitical goals.

To put this bluntly, sending humans to the Moon now almost completely aligns with the strategic interests of the United States and its allies.

Rise of the Artemis Accords

Some geopolitical observers have already begun to characterize the global competition between the United States and China as a second Cold War, and even if this is not entirely similar to the original Cold War, there is a major economic, political, and diplomatic competition underway.

At the same time we are seeing a second space race, again back to the Moon, that offers some clarity on who is aligning with the United States and who with China.

One of the brilliant things that former NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine did, in concert with associate administrator Mike Gold and Scott Pace at the National Space Council, was to firmly embed the Artemis program to return humans to the Moon within an international framework. Yes, NASA was going back to the Moon. But we were going back with allies at our side and a large coalition of nations. Advancing US space capabilities meant advancing the US geopolitical interests. Artemis was fundamentally different from Apollo because it would foster collaboration with private industry and international partners.

In 2020, Gold and Bridenstine unveiled the Artemis Accords. “We want to use the excitement around Artemis to incentivize partners to adopt these principles that we believe will lead to a more peaceful, transparent, safe, and secure future in space—not only for NASA and the international partners we’re working with, but the entire world,” Gold told Ars at the time.

These accords are a non-binding set of principles that establish basic norms, such as operating transparently and releasing scientific data in space exploration. But more broadly, the 29 signatories to the Artemis Accords have indicated they want to partner with the United States as it goes back into deep space, to the Moon, and possibly beyond. Among the most notable participants, from a geopolitical standpoint, is India, which signed on this summer.

The strategic overtones of the return to the Moon were emphasized on Friday when China announced the newest partner for its project to build a lunar research station on the south pole of the Moon: Pakistan.

Significance of taking sides

To back up, China’s “International Lunar Research Station” is the country’s answer to the Artemis program. Just as NASA intends to land astronauts at the south pole of the Moon later this decade, China, too, aims to establish a lunar base there for research and exploration purposes. Why the interest in the south pole? Because that’s where scientists believe there may be large deposits of water ice. So there is literally a race between the United States and China to the Moon, as happened six decades ago.

Russia was the first country to sign a “memorandum of understanding” with China, and since then, South Africa and Venezuela have also signed on to the lunar station concept. It’s a smaller coalition than the Artemis Accords, but the geopolitical lines are pretty clear.

Pakistan is a notable addition because of its historic rivalry with India—this may push India to align itself even further with NASA and the Artemis program. That would be a good thing for both countries, as India has a growing and ambitious space program.

Pakistan’s alignment with China is also emblematic of the increasingly frayed relationship between Pakistan and the United States. This was revealed by leaked documents earlier this year that suggested Pakistan would favor closer ties to China even if it meant further degrading its relations with the United States.

All of this means that Artemis is aligned with the strategic interests of the United States in a way that deep-space exploration has not been for six decades. The Apollo quest for the Moon unlocked large budgets and a national imperative for exploration success. Similar winds are now at the back of the Artemis program, which bodes well for future budget and space policy battles that are sure to come with delays and cost overruns.

https://arstechnica.com/?p=1977401

Welcome to Edition 6.16 of the Rocket Report! Lots of news here today about big rockets, including a push by SpaceX to speed up launch licensing by the Federal Aviation Administration. The full-court press in Washington, DC, comes as the company says its Starship rocket is ready for a second flight test but still awaiting final regulatory approval. The earliest the launch could now occur is during the first half of November.

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 Galactic to fly sixth mission in six months. The California-based suborbital space tourism company announced this week that its “Galactic 05” mission will take flight as early as November 2. Such a flight would continue Virgin Galactic’s impressive monthly cadence of flying its VSS Unity spacecraft this year. This flight will carry researchers who will use the interior of the space plane as a lab for research.

Some notable passengers … I’m especially excited about Galactic 05 because two of the passengers are acquaintances. Alan Stern is the planetary scientist who led the New Horizons mission to Pluto and is seeking to perform suborbital astronomical observations. Earlier this year, he told me it was significantly cheaper to fly experiments on VSS Unity than it is for NASA to buy a sounding rocket. Another researcher on the flight, Kellie Gerardi, is someone I’ve gotten to know over the last decade through her advocacy of commercial space. She was kind enough to write a blurb for my book on the origins of SpaceX, Liftoff. Safe travels to both!

Small launch companies struggle with Falcon 9 prices. Industry executives say SpaceX’s dominant position in the launch market is making it difficult for small rockets to compete, Space News reports. In a panel at the Satellite Innovation conference on Tuesday, executives said Falcon 9 Transporter missions have had a “hugely chilling” impact on the small launch industry that struggles to compete on price. “They definitely control and have a dominant position in the market,” said Curt Blake, former chief executive of launch services company Spaceflight, who now leads the commercial space group at law firm Wilson Sonsini, of SpaceX. “I think the real question is pricing, and what is their cost, and why so low, so dramatically low?”

Cornering the market? … SpaceX started offering rideshare launch opportunities for smallsats as low as $5,000 per kilogram. The company has since raised those prices to $5,500 per kilogram and plans annual increases in future years. However, in most cases, those prices are far below what dedicated small launch vehicles offer. “I don’t think they had to go that low to have a commanding share of the market,” Blake said, estimating SpaceX could have gained significant business at prices of $10,000 to $12,000 per kilogram. “That had to have a hugely chilling effect on any other money flowing into startup launch companies. (submitted by Ken the Bin)

Industry unites for extension of learning period. There are three US companies now capable of flying people into space—SpaceX, Blue Origin, and Virgin Galactic—and representatives from those three companies told lawmakers Wednesday that the industry is not yet mature enough for a new set of federal safety regulations for their customers. A nearly 20-year moratorium on federal regulations regarding the safety of passengers on commercial human spaceflight missions is set to expire on January 1, Ars reports. In a report submitted to Congress on September 29, the FAA said it believes the United States is ready for the sunset of the moratorium.

More time requested … “The FAA will work together with industry and other US government agencies to establish a new safety framework for space transportation providing for the safety of the crew, government astronauts, and spaceflight participants,” FAA officials wrote in the report. But officials from SpaceX, Blue Origin, and Virgin Galactic, the three companies active in the commercial human spaceflight arena, were in lockstep during a Senate hearing. All agreed the moratorium on human spaceflight regulations should be extended. It was scheduled to lapse at the beginning of October, but Congress added a three-month extension to a stopgap spending bill signed into law to prevent a government shutdown.

https://arstechnica.com/?p=1976485

Varda Space Industries says it has reached an agreement with a private range operator in Australia for spacecraft landings as early as next year after the US government declined to grant approval for the reentry of Varda’s first experimental mission carrying pharmaceuticals manufactured in orbit.

After years of applications, reviews, and discussion, the Federal Aviation Administration and the US Air Force would not clear Varda’s spacecraft to land at a military test range in the Utah desert last month. An Air Force spokesperson told Ars it did not grant approval for the landing “due to the overall safety, risk, and impact analysis.”

Likewise, the FAA denied Varda’s application for a commercial reentry license in early September. Varda’s first small satellite mission launched The company’s leaders say they are still working with the FAA and the Air Force in hopes of getting the spacecraft back to Earth in Utah in the coming months, but now they’re looking at other options for future missions.

Varda eventually plans to launch regularly scheduled missions into low-Earth orbit to host pharmaceutical research experiments and manufacture drugs and other products in a microgravity environment. Fueled by venture capital funding, the California-based startup is launching an initial batch of four test missions to wring out the technologies required to make this vision a reality. Varda reported in June that it successfully grew crystals of ritonavir, a drug commonly used to treat HIV, inside its spacecraft a few weeks after launch.

One of the key technologies that needs to be tested is the reentry vehicle, a nearly 200-pound capsule approximately 3 feet (1 meter) wide that is mounted to the side of a satellite made by Rocket Lab. The reentry capsule will separate from the satellite shortly before plunging through the atmosphere, then release a parachute to slow for landing.

Delian Asparouhov, Varda’s chairman, president, and co-founder, said the company always planned to have multiple landing sites. Varda prioritized the search for another landing range after it failed to obtain US government approval for the landing of the first mission.

“It’s always been in the plan, but we definitely accelerated this,” Asparouhov said.

Landing site diversity

The agreement between Varda and Southern Launch, a company based in Adelaide, Australia, would allow Varda’s second mission, scheduled to launch in mid-2024, to reenter and land at the remote Koonibba Test Range.

“We plan, with the Koonibba Test Range, to conduct a reentry operation as soon as our second orbital mission, which the launch and reentry would be in mid-2024,” Asparouhov told Ars. “To be clear, this isn’t to say that we won’t be reentering in the United States on some regular basis as well.”

Asparouhov said it’s good to have options for reentry, similar to how launch companies use different launch pads and spaceports. The military’s Utah Test and Training Range is primarily used for military testing and exercises, although it has hosted a handful of NASA spacecraft landings, most recently the OSIRIS-REx asteroid sample return mission.

“In the United States, there are no dedicated ranges with their core mission, or even a secondary mission, being to support commercial space reentry over land,” Asparouhov said. “Everything that’s done today is either done in the ocean or at a military range, where this is explicitly not their core focus. We find it really exciting to be coordinating with Australia, partially because we see it as relatively emblematic of Western allies coordinating these types of national security missions in aerospace and defense.”

The Koonibba Test Range is located in South Australia, about 350 miles (550 kilometers) northwest of Adelaide. It covers about 9,000 square miles (more than 23,000 square kilometers) of uninhabited land. Southern Launch says the range has hosted several suborbital rocket launches in recent years.

“In-space manufacturing is the next evolution of humanity’s industrial capacity, and elements produced in orbit have the potential to change the course of history. We are excited to be partnering with Varda Space Industries to bring this emerging industry to Australia through the Koonibba Test Range,” Lloyd Damp, CEO of Southern Launch, said in a statement.

Southern Launch said it will support Varda’s plans for “high cadence reentry operations” at the Australia range.

https://arstechnica.com/?p=1977278

In a remarkably frank discussion this week, several senior SpaceX officials spoke with Ars Technica on background about how working with the Federal Aviation Administration has slowed down the company’s progress not just on development of the Starship program, but on innovations with the Falcon 9 and Dragon programs as well.

The SpaceX officials said they want to be clear that the FAA is doing a reasonably good job with the resources it has, and that everyone supports the mission of safe spaceflight. However, they said, the FAA needs significantly more people working in its licensing department and should be encouraged to prioritize missions of national importance.

In recent months, according to SpaceX, its programs have had to compete with one another for reviews at the FAA. This has significantly slowed down the Starship program and put development of a Human Landing System for NASA’s Artemis program at risk. Inefficient regulation, the officials said, is decreasing American competitiveness as space programs in China and elsewhere around the world rise.

The discussion with Ars was convened by SpaceX in advance of a hearing on Wednesday before the US Subcommittee on Space and Science, at which William Gerstenmaier, vice president of Build and Flight Reliability at SpaceX, will be one of the people testifying. SpaceX hopes that Congress will provide guidance to the FAA on how to operate more efficiently.

“Maybe the committee can give them the big picture goals of what they want to accomplish for the US, and then maybe the FAA can be a little more innovative in how they interpret some of the rules and regulations,” a SpaceX official said. “Their mission is to enable safe spaceflight. We cannot give up on the safety side, but could there be a little bit more emphasis on the enable side?”

Staffing concerns

SpaceX is on pace to launch about 90 rockets this year, primarily Falcon 9 boosters from Florida. Next year, the company aims to increase that rate by about 50 percent. That is on top of new entrants such as United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan rocket, Blue Origin’s New Glenn, and other smaller rockets coming online. Then there is the increased flight rate by Virgin Galactic, the return to flight by Blue Origin’s New Shepard suborbital tourism rocket, and the potential for high-altitude balloon flights.

“We see a trainwreck coming,” said one of the SpaceX officials, citing all of this work that the FAA needs to perform.

“Next year could be a pretty dynamic time with lots of providers in spaceflight,” another SpaceX official said. “Our concern is even today Falcon and Dragon are sometimes competing for FAA resources with Starship, and the FAA can’t handle those three activities together. So let alone what’s coming next year, or maybe even later this year, we just don’t think the FAA is staffed ready to support that.”

During the hearing on Wednesday, Gerstenmaier will recommend that the FAA double the staff in the licensing division of its Office of Commercial Space Transportation, which is known as AST. In addition, the FAA should be given “accelerated hiring authority” to draw from the best pool of candidates.

The company also believes that license applicants should be able to opt-in to help fund independent third-party technical support to assist the FAA surge in the near term while the agency goes through the hiring process.

https://arstechnica.com/?p=1976438

Because it lacks the funding to modernize its most historic launch pad, Russia now instead plans to turn “Gagarin’s Start” into a museum.

The pad is known as Gagarin’s Start because it hosted the world’s first human spaceflight in 1961, when the Vostok 1 mission carrying Yuri Gagarin blasted into orbit. Between 1961 and 2019, this workhorse pad accommodated a remarkable 520 launches, more than any other site in the world.

Most recently, during the last two decades, the Soyuz-FG rocket launched cargo and crew missions from Gagarin’s Start, which is located on the Kazakhstan steppe near the small city of Baikonur. The final launch from the site took place in September 2019, with the Soyuz MS-15 mission carrying Russian cosmonaut Oleg Skripochka, NASA astronaut Jessica Meir, and United Arab Emirates astronaut Hazza Al Mansouri to the International Space Station.

After this launch, the pad was supposed to have been modernized to accommodate the slightly larger Soyuz 2 rocket. However, as things so often have happened in Russia’s space program, this modernization work has been put on hold due to a lack of funding. In the meantime, the Soyuz 2 has launched from other pads, including crewed missions from the nearby ‘Site 31’ at Baikonur.

UAE to the rescue?

For a time after the launch of Al Mansouri it appeared as though the UAE might step forward as an investor in the Baikonur facility. There already is a fairly complex operating agreement in Kazakhstan, as the sprawling Baikonur facility was created during the heyday of the Soviet Union. Currently, Russia has a lease on the facility until 2050 with the nation of Kazakhstan.

In November 2021 the UAE announced it had reached a “trilateral agreement” with Russia and Kazakhstan to modernize Gagarin’s Start to promote peaceful space exploration.

“Joint plans to work together to attract investment and modernize the historic Baikonur Cosmodrome demonstrate the potential for global cooperation that advances mutual interests in spaceflight, scientific progress, technological innovation, and sustainable economic growth,” Sarah bint Yousif Al Amiri, chairwoman of the UAE Space Agency, said at the time.

However this agreement was never acted upon, probably because Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine only a few months later. After the onset of the war, a number of partners with Russia in space, including in Europe and Asia, backed away from their cooperation on launches and other projects.

So now it’s a museum

Russia and Kazakhstan have been searching for other potential investors in the project during the last two years but apparently have found no takers. So last month, according to the Russian state news service TASS, a commission of Russian and Kazakh officials decided to instead convert Gagarin’s Start into a museum complex to preserve its historic heritage.

Roscosmos said Kazakh officials will lead the project to create the museum, as the site is the state property of Kazakhstan. It is hoped by Kazakh officials that the addition of the museum will increase the viability of Baikonur as a tourism site. Already, when visiting Baikonur for a launch, there are several historic sites to see, including the cottage where Gagarin stayed the night before his launch and a model of the Buran spacecraft.

In addition to a lack of funding for a launch site refurbishment, there are probably other reasons why Roscosmos no longer feels compelled to revamp Gagarin’s Start for space launches. The Soyuz 2 rocket already can launch from spaceports in the northern and eastern parts of Russia, at Plesetsk and Vostochny, respectively. And Russia is more interested in investing in those facilities since they are not leased from Kazakhstan.

Additionally, there is far less commercial demand for the Soyuz 2 rocket after the Ukraine War. In the weeks after the invasion, the then-head of Roscosmos, Dmitry Rogozin, held OneWeb satellites that were to launch on a Soyuz rocket hostage after Western nations condemned Russia’s actions. Rogozin made several preposterous demands, including that the United Kingdom must withdraw its investment in OneWeb.

This understandably has dampened Western interest in Russian launch services.

https://arstechnica.com/?p=1976209

In recent years NASA has acknowledged that its large Space Launch System rocket is unaffordable and has sought to bring its costs down to a more reasonable level. The most recent estimate is that it costs $2.2 billion to build a single SLS rocket, and this does not include add-ons such as ground systems, integration, a payload, and more.

Broadly speaking, NASA’s cost-reduction plan is to transfer responsibility for production of the rocket to a new company co-owned by Boeing and Northrop Grumman, which are key contractors for the rocket. This company, “Deep Space Transport,” would then build the rockets and sell them to NASA. The space agency has said that this services-based model could reduce the cost of the rocket by as much as 50 percent.

However, in a damning new report, NASA’s inspector general, Paul Martin, says that is not going to happen. Rather, Martin writes, the cost of building the rocket is actually likely to increase.

“Our analysis shows a single SLS Block 1B will cost at least $2.5 billion to produce—not including Systems Engineering and Integration costs—and NASA’s aspirational goal to achieve a cost savings of 50 percent is highly unrealistic,” Martin wrote in an audit of the agency’s plans, which was published on Thursday.

Extremely high costs

The main problem with the SLS rocket is not its performance—the vehicle’s debut during the Artemis I mission in late 2022 was virtually flawless—but rather its extremely high cost. Independent reviews of the vehicle, which Congress mandated that NASA build more than a decade ago, have found that NASA is unlikely to have a sustainable deep space exploration program built around such an expensive heavy-lift rocket.

Digging into Martin’s report, it’s not difficult to see why. The SLS rocket is powered by four main engines derived from the Space Shuttle program. The cost of these four engines is $582.7 million, or $146 million per engine. This means that a single engine on NASA’s rocket costs roughly the same amount that the space agency paid for an entire mission on the Falcon Heavy rocket—$178 million for the Europa Clipper spacecraft.

Seriously, stop and think about that.

“Given the enormous costs of the Artemis campaign, it is crucial that NASA achieve some significant measure of its affordability goals,” Martin wrote in the new report. “Failure to do so will significantly hinder the sustainability of NASA’s deep space human exploration efforts.”

https://arstechnica.com/?p=1975835