Blue Origin might make sense as a buyer of last resort, because Bezos needs ULA both as a customer of BE-4 and as a launch provider for Amazon’s satellite constellation. But I agree, this doesn’t happen unless there’s a lot of uncertainty around New Glenn, or unless ULA brings some expertise or infrastructure that Blue Origin lacks.
I don’t see Amazon buying it. Amazon does not need to become a launch provider. That’s why Bezos started Blue Origin.
Someome will buy it, though, even if the government has to front the cash. ULA is too important to the military to let it go under or seriously downsize or something.
A pretty good postmortem of the failed Astra flight from last year:
I applaud their transparency. While some of it could be considered “obvious” (they really didn’t think to verify that fully attached vacuum flow wouldn’t change their thermal limits?), rockets have so many things that can go wrong that even obvious things slip through the cracks (as SpaceX knows well from the Falcon 1 days).
Anyway, the writeup is accessible to a layman and is worth reading if you like failure analysis type stuff.
The Crew-6 astronauts have now been delivered safely to the ISS. That means SpaceX has completed their Commercial Crew contract before Boeing has launched their first operational mission.
Since then, NASA has awarded SpaceX with 8 additional crew missions, but this completes the original batch.
But Boeing is worth paying a higher contract price, because of all that institutional knowledge and technical excellence that SpaceX just doesn’t have…
It makes me feel slightly better that they’re still probably losing money on that contract. But only slightly.
Wouldn’t the contract require safe return too?
Technically. But they’re coming back one way or another, so…
I don’t know. Major Tom didn’t come back, did he? Anyway, I would assume that the contract has some language preferring that the crew doesn’t return as cinders, but maybe they forgot that part.
Are you rooting for Space X or Boeing?
I really want Boeing to fly, since I think it’s in everyone’s interest to have two providers to sending crew to orbit. SpaceX could still have a failure, and currently the backup plan is Russia, which I really don’t want to depend on ever again (both because of Ukraine and because their reliability is in the gutter right now).
Boeing deserves a great deal of criticism for turning from an engineering-centric company into one devoted to short-sighted profitability concerns. I would really like to see them behave otherwise.
So I’m rooting for Boeing to turn themselves around, and for SpaceX to continue their impressive development progress. But I don’t have great confidence in the former. I’m expecting one of the other players to become a viable competitor instead.
I do think Sierra Nevada got dealt a bad hand, and that the other Commercial Crew slot should have gone to them instead.
I want to see Dream Chaser carry astronauts to the ISS.
It’s not impossible. They did win a cargo supply contract to the ISS. So it could happen someday that they get the funding for a crew version as well, or use the revenue to pursue it on their own (for tourism, etc.). But I expect it’ll be a while before that’s plausible.
It lands like a @#$%! aircraft. It has a shroud on launch so that tiles aren’t damaged.
What could go wrong?
I don’t think it needs the shroud to protect the tiles. Unlike the Shuttle, there’s nothing ahead of it to fall off and impact them. More likely, it’s required to preserve the aerodynamics of the carrier vehicle. It probably could fly without it if they really went through an ambitious qualification process.
The X-37 (which actually is a Boeing success story) flies this way and lands on a runway. So it’s not unheard of.
Space is hard:
I was watching the launch; they had an animation of the ground track that looked really strange, as it had a very sharp dog-leg. Some launches indeed perform dog-leg maneuvers, but this looked significantly sharper than most, like maybe there was a navigation or guidance fault of some kind. Could be the rocket failed even before main-engine cutoff.
Relativity Space tried to launch today:
They scrubbed at the last minute, though. Not sure when they’ll try again.
Their risk tolerance for this flight seems to be on the high side–from the article:
In recognition that this is purely a test flight, Relativity has put no customer payloads on the flight. And the mission has a lighthearted name, “Good Luck, Have Fun,” that acknowledges there is a bit of a hold-my-beer aspect to this test flight.
But still, it’s good to see them scrub instead of pushing forward with go fever. I’m not sure this will get them through the first flight curse, but I certainly wish them luck.
Was it the wind? The video I saw looked awfully windy for a rocket launch.
Something about an out of bounds temperature reading on the upper stage methane tank. Not clear if it was a sensor glitch or something real. Nothing to do with winds, as best I can tell.
I guess it’ll be a few days before the next attempt:
That’s a little surprising. Needing a few days for propellant “conditioning” seems incompatible with a high launch cadence. I’m not sure why they can’t just drain the tanks and quickly get the prop back to the right temperature.
Always with the launch windows.