Cygnus Spacecraft Under Construction
Photo: Integration and Testing of Cygnus Service Modules
“Integration and testing of Cygnus spacecraft service modules continues at our Dulles, VA Satellite Manufacturing Facility (SMF). The service module on the left in the photo below will be used for the Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) demonstration flight to the International Space Station (ISS) later this year. The service module on the right will carry out the first of eight cargo resupply missions under Orbital’s Commercial Resupply Services (CRS) contract with NASA, also scheduled for later this year. A third Cygnus service module (not shown) is also undergoing integration in a separate clean room facility in the facility.”
Folks:
…which will be discarded after each mission along with the pressurized modules these service modules are attached to. Way to go Orbital but it’s a holding pattern at best, not sustainable and not economical. Cygnus will give Orbital ‘skin in the game’ for now and (hopefully) enough profit to design, develop and build a real spacecraft next time around.
I know Orbital can do better than this.
tinker
Tinker,
I hate to be a pessimist, but I think maybe you’re being too much of an optimist where Orbital is concerned, because I’m far from confident that they can at this point “design, develop and build a real spacecraft”. I think they’re on autopilot, pursuing an architecture that they believe in, but hasn’t been revised in a very long time.
Steve
Thanks Keith.Maybe you will hear the runup soon.I was wondering why no one was showing that nice picture of the engines attached.They follow Atlas,but not Antares.I wonder why no one is complaining about Cygnus being docked on the first mission like they do about Dragon on the second mission?The whole system is foreign,except the second stage.It is a solid.They will have to get good steering to get to the right drop off point.No restarts.What they do is that they know the performance of the second stage.They will shut down the first stage at the point needed,not run all the fuel out.After burnout of the Castor,Cugnus will have enough from the trusters to get too ISS.They will use the HTV system.I have not heard ISS PAO say anything or saw anybody setting up the Cygnus system,like they have Dragon.They imply that Cygnus will use the Dragon system.Nice to look over their shoulder at the tests.Reminds me of the BITS test I use to do on the F-4.
Cygnus fills the role of that of the Russian Progress. It (re)uses pressurized cargo containers based on the Shuttle Italian-built Multi-Purpose Logistics Module made by Thales Alena. It can also alternatively use unpressurized cargo containers based on Shuttle’s ExPRESS Logistics Carrier
Cygnus, like Progress, is basically a tug. Progress has delivered a new module to the ISS to replace PIRS. HTV and ATV are also structured this way.
Dragon is not – its really intended for Dragon Rider. It’s an all up new spacecraft, where Cygnus is a tour de force collection of portions of past proven spacecraft. Consider them complementary approaches – SpaceX is all about vertical top down systems betting on volume and reuse so needing to retire enormous amounts of risk over a dozen or so flights – that gamble is breathtaking in aerospace. Many have said it’s insane.
Orbital’s approach is to risk as little as possible, and to bet on the slowest flight rate. They are trying to reduce the financial “over hang” as is extremely important for a publicly traded firm – they can’t play the SpaceX game nor should they. Many fear that that are risking too much ironically. Remember you get punished by Wall Street – which is why SpaceX might not be in such a hurry to go public.
Orbital also uses significant offshore outsourcing to control costs. So largely what you see is foreign built with a Orbital COTS launch, unlike SpaceX. Costs to gradually ramp flight rate makes sense this way.
So what more could you get out of Orbital’s approach? Think gradual extension into new capabilities. You might be able to extend the on orbit life of Cygnus for BEO capabilities. You could even use solar arrays and do SEP with it. Many things.
When Orbital did Pegasus, they never approached the flight rate of their business case. No small launcher ever has. Medium launchers have. One must be careful about economics here.
Musk knows this – see his “why LV’s suck” tweet. However, to be fair, no one has economically reused (RSRB’s don’t count) a booster yet. We are not yet at the halfway point where the industry pivots to re-usability. The moment you see a intact stage that makes it below 30,000 ft altitude and transonic, you’ll suddenly see a panic in certain corporate offices.
I have seen a picture of the Soyuz second stage in the Altai region,coming down close to a house intact.I would post it with the + Image ,but it is probably copyrighted.
Yes, you can have “freak” occurrences of stage survival (predictable thru chaos theory), but I’ve more frequently observed the same Soyuz stage burning up (usually over europe). These occurrences remind us that stages can be recoverable – what I’m talking about is reliable controlled recovery, which largely occurs through stably negotiating the entry interface.
Here’s the problem in a nutshell – the necessary capability to provide enough control authority at hypersonic speeds to dominate chaotic flows/separations/impulses/transients, such that it doesn’t result in too great a parasitic weight penalty.
Russia calls the strap ons,stage 0.As seen in Space Tourists,all 4 came down in good shape.Stage 1 core came down streaming fuel,with a sonic boom.They showed others on the ground.They land flat,not on the ends.No bounce marks.Only about a foot was deformed.The contrail was from fuel coming out.They may be blasting open to empty them.From estimating the weight,surface area and damage,I would say they hit at 50mph.I say it does it every time.Although they did say there was reports of pieces coming through peoples roofs.There also was an interview with some women describing a small piece catching the grass on fire.You may be correct.A camera on board or a long range ground camera might give an idea of what’s happening.It seems to come down near these people a lot.It would be very easy to lower by parachute.They may have stronger construction than F9.It uses a rolled tank and may be the reason that they have not recovered it.I suggested pressurizing the tank like Centaur.They should be able to go pick it up with no parachutes.From what I see it is not freak.2 burns up as it is in orbit.
I was referring to Stage 1/2 – there have been some freak cases. Stage 0 (strap on’s) stage lower. Much lower/slower than EELV/Falcon 9. A good question to ask is why Soyuz strap-ons don’t get recovered?
Falcon 9 / EELV currently don’t survive the boundary layer transition – that’s the limiting issue. The next issue is economics – cost effective recovery / payload reduction – which is the issue with stage 0’s – they don’t possess certain systems.
And for reuse, you can’t accept in some cases a micron deformation. Remember, now you need to prove / qualify a stage for reuse. How can you do so without manufacturing a new one?
The issues are largely stability at the interface. Pressure isn’t enough – its the bending moments that shred it. With better flight dynamic controls one can avoid the tumble and extreme bending moments.
They’ve caught the NASA acronym disease. It is not built in a factory; it’s built in an SMF. Give me a break!
I’m pleased to see Orbital telling us about things that are actually happening, instead of just future events. I’ve been waiting to see what they’re doing because I’m a strong advocate of reusable design (as opposed to just reusable hardware and/or software). The key is in selecting the right design elements to reuse, and on that count I’m not yet convinced that Orbital has a valid game plan. I guess time will tell.
Steve
None of them are reusable – yet. The presumption that they couldn’t / wouldn’t isn’t yet one I’d make. It would be fair to say – that they shouldn’t right now.
A more immediate issue is cost and sourcing – can they compete in the ever more crowded medium launch market? Given that engines, tanks, pressurized cargo module aren’t of US origin.
As to a second SpaceX, think that Blue Origin or DreamChaser might qualify more on the reusable side. And Boeing is more capable than SpaceX to make a recoverable crew capsule in the CST-100 given resources, background, heritage, and skills.
SpaceX is so far doing it. Keep in mind the others though, and their unique distinctions.
“A more immediate issue is cost and sourcing”
no one of consequence,
While your statement above I think seems to reflect the general philosophy in the industry, I can’t really subscribe to it. It reminds me of the time studies done in past decades — everybody concentrated on efficiency and ignored effectiveness. To my mind, cost and sourcing are not the top-level determining factors, but rather the ability of a design or methodology to satisfy the requirements of the application. In short, there’s no point in optimizing the way you do things until after you’ve proved that you’re trying to do the right things. Or to state it another way, there’s little point in being efficient until you know that what you’re doing is effective (I’m lumping sourcing under efficiency to save typing).
Steve
Hi Steve,
Please keep in mind that Orbital is a new “old boy” – they were successful under very difficult conditions of the past. They can’t just address the requirements of the application indifferent to how to get there. They are not necessarily a “new space” company – sort of in between.
Partly how I think Orbital has been successful in the past, is by choosing what not to do more than what to do. Many of the best examples of Atlas/ Titan/ Thor was in gradual refinement – they attempted to judge what to get away with and not stretch too far.
If you want to be a successful publicly traded company, where your shares have a reliable PE, where your EPS in the context of reasonable EBITDA allows your investor to believe you’re a consistent performer – you cleave to incrementalism.
Now, they already have some strikes against them – repeat failures with recent launches. They are not likely to go out on a limb here for fear of too much risk. They are also not having an easy time at Wallops bringing their first liquid fueled pad services online.
Their COTS approach made more sense to the industry you don’t subscribe to. The one Putin was addressing with his era of reliability with Soyuz.
To my mind, cost and sourcing are not the top-level determining factors,
but rather the ability of a design or methodology to satisfy the
requirements of the application
Likely how an Orbital’s methodology works is to use cost and sourcing to begin to decide what not to do first. And they see this as their key strength. They see that as satisfying the requirements off the bat.
What I think you’re getting at, is that with a reusable platform, that’s a superior means to satisfy the requirement – which is unclear yet as it is unproven. And, you don’t know if they have follow-on plans to compete that address this that they haven’t spoke of.
They understand “rocket back”. They understand recovery of assets and costing.
What if they are right, and get the majority of COTS follow-on service contracts to supply ISS, and due to simplicity keep filling the pipeline ahead of SpaceX with next to fly? I think there’s a real chance of this, because the latecomer to SpaceX seems to be the ability to fly multiple times per year.
SpaceX might see COTS as a means to an end – Dragon Rider – just like Falcon 1 was a means to an end with Falcon 9. So they might never really compete with Orbital, but instead leave the business open for Orbital, where COTS is the end for Cygnus.
Where they could enter HSF, get a revenue stream, … and not bet the farm on the mad dance that is American HSF right now. It’s not as exciting as Musk, but to an investor (or policy maker) it is very understandable.
no one of consequence,
I hear what you’re saying. My concerns with respect to Orbital lie with the fact that they are not really designing very much, but rather they are taking other companies’ off-the-shelf major components and integrating them into a launch system/spacecraft — the Lego game. Which is fine from a risk management point of view as long as other people are making the components that you need. But the moment that any one component is not available — on an existing product or a new product — you’re out of the game, and probably out of business, because I don’t think they have demonstrated the ability to design major system components themselves; not for a long time; and LV and spacecraft components are not generally plug-and-play, so you can’t just substitute from somebody else’s catalog.
When looked at that way, they’ve actually taken the high-risk path, so I very much hope that their approach does not become the COTS SOP. I would consider it unlikely that I am the only one to see the Orbital approach as high risk — where a single event could shut them down and they would lose all of their time and money invested, as would their customer(s).
As I said before, I believe strongly in reusable design, based on proven performance, which is a very different thing from reusing hardware, which is the Orbital approach as I see it. Even if they get the Cygnus system up and running well, they are counting on all of Lego “bricks” being available, and be available when Orbital needs them. But all it takes is one missing brick, regardless of the reason it is missing (technical, political, marketing, whatever) and then schedules go out the window and costs go up, up, up.
Orbital may manage to stay in the game and make enough money from COTS to justify participating, but I think they will always be an also-ran, and not winner of the majority of the COTS follow-on service. Space-X and Boeing have both shown the ability to react to changes and adapt to new requirements, whereas Orbital, as far as I can tell, have been plodding along with the same game plan from the outset, confident that their product, when it finally arrives, will be what the application requires.
I would be really disappointed if the COTS “winner” were to repeat the Soyuz scenario, wherein the capabilities of the hardware shape the programs that are undertaken, rather than hardware being designed to meet the requirements of desired programs.
Steve
Steve,
Since I can’t reply to you, I’ll reply to myself.
You misunderstand sourcing with such components, which is understandable because it’s peculiar with aerospace componentry.
First off, the lowest cost of such components is determined in design by materials and processes (sometimes later newer processes can slightly reduce this). Once you have the tooling, the cost and availability is largely a function of the numbers you’ll consume in a decade.
My skepticism for J-2X for example is its unique materials, processes, components … and that in a decade you’ll fly fewer than 30.
In Antares case, Soyuz-1.1 (and others) will fly NK-33/AJ-26 that much alone. The tanks are very close to Zenit, flown 76 times and with 5 launches planned.
Cygnus is a Star bus derivative that has flown 24 times and more planned. The pressurized containers are the only thing fairly rarified, and it is likely that should another ISS module be needed, that’s where it will be fabricated as well for concerns similar to yours.
Should Cygnus work out, it would fly 3-4 times a year. I think it more likely that they will become SOP than SpaceX at this point, because of what they, ULA/Boeing, and SpaceX have been saying.
So aerospace componentry becomes a touchy sourcing issue based on frequency of use as an expectation of volume.
Now, how does reuse affect this? Musk’s “suck” factor is about two things – extremes of design cost and frequency of use. The SSME idea was to have a extreme design that was highly reused(never achieved), where we’d learn to lower costs like with block II changes that reduce the hit on reuse(not good enough). The SpaceX approach is a low design cost (achieved) and higher frequency of use (not achieved). The good thing about the SpaceX choice is that they are already competitive as an expendable, so unlike Shuttle don’t have to get to high frequency of use to get the economics to work.
I do think that at some point, Falcon’s indigenous source is going to be a big issue. It has been underplayed because of other vendors issues.
As to risk, here’s how they see it- they first wish to get missions going to ISS, get up frequency, then (like how Soyuz was modernized) factor in new components /capabilities. Like also a liquid second stage.
Where to fault them is on the vertical nature of componentry – being expensive by design. Where a lot of choices in Merlin I aren’t. So even if from a cheap source they still are too expensive or too infrequently flown against SpaceX – which bites when SpaceX gets around to finally flying frequently.