Orbital to Maintain Schedule and Cygnus to Use Another Launcher
Orbital to Consolidate Cygnus Launch Manifest and Outsource at Least One Launch, SpaceRef Business
“Moving quickly to inform its International Space Station (ISS) resupply contract partner NASA, Orbital Sciences Corporation today announced that not only would it complete its resupply contract by the end of 2016, it would consolidate its launch manifest and do it with four launches instead of five.”
Orbital Announces Go-Forward Plan for NASA’s Commercial Resupply Services Program and the Company’s Antares Launch Vehicle
“Orbital Sciences Corporation (NYSE: ORB), one of the world’s leading space technology companies, today announced comprehensive plans to fulfill its contract commitments under NASA’s Commercial Resupply Services (CRS) program as well as to accelerate an upgrade of the Antares medium-class launcher’s main propulsion system. Under the new approach and in line with Orbital’s existing CRS contract, all remaining cargo will be delivered to the International Space Station (ISS) by the end of 2016. There will be no cost increase to NASA and only minor adjustments will be needed to the cargo manifest in the near term.”
Well, OSC keeps talking about wanting to use RD-180’s, so maybe they will just launch Cygnus on Atlas V?
Or maybe a Zenit?
If I were to bet, it would be on the Atlas 401…
Consider the lead time for an A5 core. Then consider that ULA will have to use one of their earmarked engines.
(chuckles)
Just like the SNC/DC was engineered (I was told by a co-worker’s spouse who was working on DC) to be able to ride a Falcon9, I suspect that the Cygnus can ride an F9 as well.
Hopefully SpaceX will not have a disaster… unless it’s a planned disaster to make their launch abort test a SPECTACULAR event.
The smart money would seem to be on the Falcon 9.
After all, Falcon 9 has already delivered the Orbital built SES-8 satellite all the way to GTO, and that Orbital payload was heavier than Cygnus.
I’m still torn on which way they may go.
On the pro side the Falcon 9.1 should be more than capable of lofting the enhanced Cygnus to orbit, and it has a fairly successful record so far. As far as I’ve been able to determine it would likely be the cheapest option, perhaps even a fair bit cheaper then using their own Antares.
On con side launching on their primary CRS competitors booster could be seen as a de-justification for the Antares rocket, and eliminates redundancy in launch systems until the new updated version of Antares is ready. While it might be more expensive I could see those factors, along with the extensive record of successful launches from ULA(and the very high confidence that comes with that) being a possible reason they might choose something from ULA instead of F9.
The real problem with gravitating (smirks) towards SpaceX is that you no longer have much in the way of lift diversity.
Look, where I work, we got nailed by a fiber cut TWICE and our SLA payouts totalled, between the cuts, over a million dollars. We had vendor diversity… we thought. We discovered, during the first outage, that one of the carriers outsourced some key links to the OTHER vendor.
I also read Schneier’s security blog… and one thing is that such a “single path” (Atlas V is so much more expensive and availability of engines fraught with peril) that anyone sane will not consider it a competitor, so, like a lot of systems, this lift constraint can lead to a brittle failure. Resilience requires competition.
Economic efficiencies tend to favor monopolies… which aren’t going to have adequate “spare capacity” because they don’t want to spend monies on inconsequentials.
We’ve seen brittle failures before, of course; Katrina didn’t destroy New Orleans, the single-point-of-failure infrastructure (pumping STATION, outflow CANAL, etc) failed in such a way, that, without compartmentalization within the city, huge swathes got flooded… which really made the rest of the problems there a nightmare.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, there’s some resilience due to the existence of Atlas V, but, c’mon, how available will it be when there’s a short-fall in engine availability?
With a working Antares– especially if it is not dependent upon rocket motors that are over forty years old or otherwise dependent upon a supply chain that is subject to politics– there is a lot more diversity in lift choices and less of an economy of scarcity.
Sure, SpaceX can make a sh!tload of money… and I don’t begrudge them that, even if they do decide to charge all the market will bear (somehow I don’t see Musk deciding to gouge but it all depends upon how much he– and his board– can resist the urge) but any kind of major failure requiring re-engineering any portion of the Falcon 9 will be an unmitigated disaster.
We have major structural problems in the lift business.
If Atlas and Delta are replaced by a new Atlas withthe BE-4 engine we might see competitive diversity in launch services. ULA’s price will be lower if rhey have competition. Musk will keep prices low because he does not have to answer to stockholders and sees more profit in attracting new customers.
I’ve wondered about that myself. He could have been priced at 90% of competitor prices rather than offering the current deep discounts. At that price point the same folks would have purchased his rocket and he would have far more money towards Mars.
both the DC and the CST-100 were originally booster-neutral (there’s some cool artwork from several years ago of the CST on top of an Atlas, Delta, Falcon 9, and a Liberty rocket http://americaspace.com/wp-… ) but both decided on the Atlas V in the end. i think the DC was just massive enough that it would have had to use a Falcon Heavy rocket to launch it to the orbital inclination of the ISS.
That aside, yes, both the Cygnus and the extended Cygnus can easily fit within the aerodynamic fairing of the Falcon 9
Is this basically because they won’t be able to finish their investigation of the accident (and possibly prepare for further delay if needed depending on the cause) before they really need to fly more Cygnus crafts to ISS? I’m not familiar with the time requirements of the contract.
(f) Excusable delays. The Contractor shall be liable for default unless nonperformance is caused by an occurrence beyond the reasonable control of the Contractor and without its fault or negligence such as, acts of God or the public enemy, acts of the Government in either its sovereign or contractual capacity, fires, floods, epidemics, quarantine restrictions, strikes, unusually severe weather, and delays of common carriers. The Contractor shall notify the Contracting Officer in writing as soon as it is reasonably possible after the commencement of any excusable delay, setting forth the full particulars in connection therewith, shall remedy such occurrence with all reasonable dispatch, and shall promptly give written notice to the Contracting Officer of the cessation of such occurrence.
The original contract was for December 23, 2008 through December 31, 2015. NASA extended that for both launch services until end of year 2016.
Thanks! They’re on the hook.
That is decisive and unexpected. Aerojet is not going to be happy.
Ultimately, I believe that importing the NK-33 engines was penny wise, but pound foolish for Aerojet-Rockedyne.
They’ve been toying with the idea of finishing the development of a domestically produced big new LOX/kerosene engine for a very long time. Yet here we are in 2014 with both ULA and Orbital Sciences both relying on Russian LOX/kerosene engines with a questionable long term availability. Yet Aerojet-Rocketdyne is still waiting for a few billion dollars from the US Government to finish development over several years time. Unfortunately, they will have completely missed their opportunity to jump back into the LOX/kerosene engine market if US produced “new space” LOX/kerosene rocket engines continue to prove successful.
In particular, the SpaceX Merlin 1-D LOX/kerosene engine has proven to be sufficiently reliable and easy to produce. Blue Origin’s engine development program has not been as visible to the public, so it’s hard to say how their program is going, but with the Air Force showing interest in them, Aerojet-Rocketdyne should be quite nervous.
It’s interesting to compare the how Russia is always developing new liquid engines to how we are able to easily develop new solid motors. ATK can just take a STAR or Orion and just modify it easily: size, thruster, total impulse, etc. Russia always has liquid engines in development, so they can similarly modify a design for a new application or take parts of an old design and create something new in the blink of an eye. For reasons (entirely military) that were not made with space launch in mind, But big solids have gotten better with time (steel cases turned to carbon composite, PBAN has turned ro HTPB, etc.)
I think it would be a much easier for Aerojet Rocketdyne to start a general propulsion test program for tens/hundreds of millions that would develop engines but NOT go all the way to qualification. Then you can have a constand program of testing and improving and when an Antares or Atlas V needs a new engine, you take the closest one off the shelf, modify it and qualify it for that particular application. Force all the testing to be done at Stennis and then you can have several different states on board.
sorry guys, but rocketdyne has no money and relies on the guys that want to launch or nasa for funding. RS68 was developed when Boeing owned rocketdyne. J2X was developed when UTC owned rocketdyne, but rocketdyne was restricted from replacing the RL10 because it was a money maker. But UTC didnt see a need for more engine designs for their use and did not want to help competition, so they heavily laid off designers. aerojet bought the remains of rocketdyne, but the sacramento management isnt open to letting them support the competition, they want to negotiate engine designs they have no experience with in over 40 years. the solution is to spin off rocketdyne and fund it like JPL so it can design what is needed, not limited to supporting one company. they would have to move fast, experience is stil leaving in droves before the next layoff.
Coverage elsewhere leads me to believe that Orbital’s profit margin on these missions was already tight before the loss of Antares. Given that costs must be a major consideration, I suspect that the company would prefer the Falcon over the more-expensive Atlas.
How would that fit with the notion that folks have been posting about here that NASA wants two separate systems for redundancy in the event of exactly this sort of situation?
Irrelevant. Only 2 cygnuses would be launched (potentially) on a falcon as a temporary measure. Antares is expected to be operational again using a RD-193 first stage by 2016.
I would say that there ARE two separate systems: F9 and Antares. Antares had a failure, so you shift your payloads to F9 while the failure review board meets. Once the review is over, Antares returns to flight and you have 2 working sytems again. That’s the way these things are SUPPOSED to work (read the heavy emphasis, but we all know that sometimes politics gets in the way).
The notion of redundancy means that one carrier carries on whilst the other makes repairs. That is exactly what is happening here.
However, Atlas has more give in terms of production capacity and potentially available launch slots than Falcon.
Sounds like a serious plan. I didn’t see a lot of ambiguity in it. They seem confident and prepared. Of course a risk management plan is part of any successful NASA proposal, but the level of confidence and detail and the speed with which this plan was rolled out leads me to wonder if they haven’t been afraid this might happen all along. Maybe internally they haven’t been as confident of these engines as they have appeared to the outside? Just a thought…
The limited supply of NK-33 engines meant that Orbital would have to get a new rocket engine at some point. I’m sure they’ve been thinking about that problem for a while, but now does seem like a good time to expedite that process.
Agreed, but that would be more of a transition than a contingency plan. I’m not naturally paranoid, but this has the feel of some advance planning. It doesn’t seem all that ad hoc. On the other hand, maybe they just did a very good job in their risk management proposal and they’re just executing what was in place.
well, Orbital has known for several years now that the supply of AJ-26 engines is limited and the prospects of new NK-33 engines being made is poor. they would either have had to finance the construction of new engines or decide on some other replacement. this will have been in the works for some time, its just that now there’s some time pressure to get things moving in that direction.
Apparently, OSC have said they have three alternate launchers lined up – Two US and one European (but not Ariane-5). So, I’m thinking it’s a choice between Atlas-V-401, Falcon-9 or Soyuz-SB.
[edit]
I’ve been told elsewhere that the 401 can carry a lot more than I thought.
It usually takes 2 years for an order to ULA to launch. Orbital says someone can launch next April. Someone will have to take a delay. SpaceX with there turnaround time is about the only one that could do it. These 3 AJ-26 failures look to be the same. They could not make a test to find the engines that were going to fail.
I mentioned this immediately after the launch failure that Orbital could sub-contract to SpaceX and still walk away with $100M in profit. That is using Frank Culbertson’s statement that the Antares/Cygnus cost > $200M and SpaceX saying it costs $90M for a NASA cargo Dragon. And that would be not using a Cygnus at all. Of course the big sticking point is that SpaceX would have to agree to it. Which if it came to this, why wouldn’t SpaceX just petition NASA to up their contract directly.
I’m going with ULA or ESA/Soyuz. They may be able to get a sweet deal on Atlas since the US government is overpaying so much for them in the AF contract.
there appears to be an extra Delta II vehicle with no payload in a warehouse somewhere. add a few solids and the upgraded Cygnus and you have another american option that isnt SpaceX.
Your choice of fairings are 2.9m or 2 different 3.0m fairings. The diameter of the Cygnus is 3.07m.
only three Delta II configurations are available – the 7320-10, 7420-10
and 7920-10 – and launches are only available from SLC-2W at Vandenberg Air Force Base. Sounds like the fairings are not big enough. USAF has a contract that that they could ask for a launch in 40 days.
So metal cracks in the LOX system. The metal can not take the cold cycles it seems. They will compare the cycles on the ones that failed and the ones that did not. Maybe they will find a way by looking at the Soyuz NK-33. Did they just luck out? Orbital said they would use them if they find a way to stop the failures. They thought they had it figured out after the 1st explosion, then after the second. How many launches would it take before the latest theory fails? They may have a procedure wrong. Does NASA send up another? Changing engines is safer.
The NK-33 used in the Soyuz light had the seals and the engine manifold replaced. Aerojet engineers were at the Russian test fires.
Wow. Thanks.
Well, just got back from vacation and ready to put in my 2 cents.
I will bet those 2 cents that at least one ride will be a standard soyuz.
You can tell by the bet size my level of certainty.