Kistling a Different Tune: Commercial Space in an Alternate Key

[overninethousands]

No disagreement here. With perfect hindsight, we know about three very heavy trends in the satellite market in the 2010's

1 - Cubesats by the hundreds
2 - Internet broadband satellites by the thousands (OneWeb, Greg Wyler)
3 - GTO / GEO big comsats : Boeing electric propulsion system makes them lighter

Kistler is pretty good for 1- and 2-.

For 3- as you say it is probably a lost cause, depends from Boeing electric propulsion system. Not sure it can cut comsat weight to 1500 kg or go the LEO-GTO-GEO entire trip.

I also wondered about the return of satellite constellations since 2014. For mobile phones they had been buried by GSM in 2001. Looks like Greg Wyler brought back for broadband Internet, via his O3b company. And then he went on to create OneWeb.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greg_Wyler
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O3b_Networks
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OneWeb_satellite_constellation

 

[Dathi THorfinnsson]

But this still isn't going to allow them to compete in the geostationary launch market. Geostationary comsats are big (as in, 3000+ kg in most cases), and they kind of need to be big to be useful. The K-1 can send a maximum of 1500 kg to GTO (worse for a super-synchronous trajectory), which isn't enough to compete with Arianespace and, (hopefully) later, SpaceX for the big commercial launches. They're going to need to design a whole new vehicle to try and address that market, and designing new vehicles takes time. No, I've said it before and I'll say it again: K-1's big success here, in the near term, is not going to be in eating Arianespace/SpaceX's market (CRS contracts notwithstanding). It's going to be in eating PSLV's market. That kind of small, light payload is exactly what the K-1 was designed to launch. Let's not go looking for markets for K-1 to compete in when they've already got one.

Except that pure electric sats would be due pretty soon in OTL. Having them be a bit earlier ittl and saving a bucketload of cash on launch costs could be VERY attractive.

 

[IncongruousGoat]

For 3- as you say it is probably a lost cause, depends from Boeing electric propulsion system. Not sure it can cut comsat weight to 1500 kg or go the LEO-GTO-GEO entire trip.

It can either cut weight, or make the trip from LEO, but not both. Flying from LEO to GEO on electric propulsion is a pretty bad proposition, as far as delta-V is concerned. Even a perfectly efficient Hohmann transfer from the Cape costs ~4 km/s, and while you can cut this down with a super-synchronous or bi-elliptic transfer, none of these trajectories are possible with electric propulsion. About the best you can manage is a spiral, which is really bad from an efficiency standpoint. Even launching direct, insertion into GEO still takes months, which means it's only attractive for those who can afford a long wait between launch and start of service. Cutting down on mass makes more sense, but then, in the case of the K-1, you start running into payload volume issues.

Except that pure electric sats would be due pretty soon in OTL. Having them be a bit earlier ittl and saving a bucketload of cash on launch costs could be VERY attractive.

In the same sense that SpaceX will have booster recovery worked out soon. The first all-electric sat launch IOTL happened in March 2015 (specifically, with the launch of ABS-3A and Eutelsat 115 West B), and while I can sorta see either one or both of those coming faster, it's not going to be that much faster. At a certain point, you start running into hard limits on how fast the engineering can be done given the available capital and resources. Plus, electric propulsion isn't a magic bullet. It has plenty of downsides - it's just that, in today's launch market, the upsides outweigh the downsides for some (some, definitely not all) companies.

Again, Kistler aren't going to be competing in the GTO/GEO market in the near future. Just because they're the focus of this TL doesn't mean they have to eat every single sector of the launch market.

 

[RanulfC]

That was Kisler solution to the issue. Not reusable, obviously.

http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2002iaf..confE.950L

But this still isn't going to allow them to compete in the geostationary launch market. Geostationary comsats are big (as in, 3000+ kg in most cases), and they kind of need to be big to be useful. The K-1 can send a maximum of 1500 kg to GTO (worse for a super-synchronous trajectory), which isn't enough to compete with Arianespace and, (hopefully) later, SpaceX for the big commercial launches. They're going to need to design a whole new vehicle to try and address that market, and designing new vehicles takes time. No, I've said it before and I'll say it again: K-1's big success here, in the near term, is not going to be in eating Arianespace/SpaceX's market (CRS contracts notwithstanding). It's going to be in eating PSLV's market. That kind of small, light payload is exactly what the K-1 was designed to launch. Let's not go looking for markets for K-1 to compete in when they've already got one.

Yes what they really need is an in-space tug that can haul into GEO the payload they haul into LEO. Nothing that cuts into their payload margin because it's marginal as it is. As a combination it's a real game changer because GEO satellites were looking to get smaller by the late 90s as technology advanced. In some ways they did but not as much as could be since the extra payload capacity was already there in the available launchers. But satellite resupply and repair was seriously a consideration a few years down the road and it would make a lot of sense. In theory the K1 can support such a space tug probably better than any other launcher so it would make a lot of sense but from what we're seeing I'm guessing that may not appear as logical as it would with the players involved.

Randy

 

[RanulfC]

No disagreement here. With perfect hindsight, we know about three very heavy trends in the satellite market in the 2010's

1 - Cubesats by the hundreds
2 - Internet broadband satellites by the thousands (OneWeb, Greg Wyler)
3 - GTO / GEO big comsats : Boeing electric propulsion system makes them lighter

Kistler is pretty good for 1- and 2-.

For 3- as you say it is probably a lost cause, depends from Boeing electric propulsion system. Not sure it can cut comsat weight to 1500 kg or go the LEO-GTO-GEO entire trip.

I also wondered about the return of satellite constellations since 2014. For mobile phones they had been buried by GSM in 2001. Looks like Greg Wyler brought back for broadband Internet, via his O3b company. And then he went on to create OneWeb.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greg_Wyler
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O3b_Networks
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OneWeb_satellite_constellation

The K1 was actually aimed at the LEO constellation market which is why it was designed the way it was. The problem was most of those early constellation plans fell through which burned the market for a couple decades.

Randy

 

[e of pi]

As you've all done a good job of identifying, there's two major issues that RpK has with the K-1, both stemming from its design to serving LEO comsats:

(1) The payload mass capability is on the small side, both for LEO and definitely for GTO. The expendable third stage gives it some capacity for GTO or beyond, but it's still basically in the ~1000-1500 kg GTO capability of the Delta II class which the rocket was designed to fill. Much as Antares has discovered IOTL, there's not a massive market commercially for that size of payload to GTO, though K-1 at least is much cheaper than Antares. Still, it's too small. ISS LEO operations gets around this by avoiding the parasitic mass of a separate cargo spacecraft's thrusters and systems

(2) The payload fairing is too small to fit any commercially available comsat bus in the size range commercial customers actually want to launch, making multi-launch or tug-based schemes hard.

The question is finding if there's ways to address either or both of these issues, and what those mean. Obviously getting to just build a bigger upper stage and first stage from a clean sheet makes it easy to solve it, but that's really only likely if ATK gets their wish, there's no SDHLV, and sometime around 2012 or 2013 NASA decides to make a K-1 based heavy or medium-heavy LV. The really sharply addressed question is if there's a solution to these problems--needing something more like the volume of a traditional fairing without spiking launch costs, and needing a larger launch mass capability without a clean-sheet design--which RpK or investors like ATK can actually find the money to execute (r bother investing the money in, in ATK's case). Hmmm...

...Anyone have any thoughts? I have mine, but I'm curious what you'd think. Gives me words to put into forum poster's mouth ITTL.

 

[Workable Goblin]

My admittedly pessimistic guess is that they settle into a niche providing a mix of multi-satellite smallsat flights, as suggested by IncongruousGoat, ISS resupply missions, like Antares, and missions that would have flown on Delta II to Pegasus-class vehicles IOTL due to the hopefully relatively low cost of the K-1, without being able to or perhaps wanting to break into the GEO market. K-1 is probably a bit too big to entirely kill the very small launcher segment of, for instance, RocketLab, but it's close.

 

[IncongruousGoat]

...Anyone have any thoughts? I have mine, but I'm curious what you'd think. Gives me words to put into forum poster's mouth ITTL.

Well, one thing they could do is build a hydrolox upper stage for the K-1. It would almost certainly be disposable (hydrolox's awful handling characteristics and abysmal propellant density make reuse a tricky proposition), but even so it has the potential to be price-competitive with Arianespace at least, since partial reuse still beats no reuse. However, I don't think this is a terribly likely outcome. Designing a clean-sheet hydrolox upper stage won't exactly be cheap for RpK or Orbital ATK, but the only off-the-shelf option that might work is Centaur, and Centaur as it existed in 2010 (and still exists IOTL) is stupid expensive to manufacture. Either way, it runs into the cost issue, and I don't think the geostationary market is big enough for RpK/Orbital ATK to be able to recoup the development costs in a reasonable time frame. Also, there's a chance (given their OldSpace heritage) that they (especially Orbital ATK) would straight up refuse to conduct further R&D on company funds.

I'm of the opinion that it just isn't worth it for RpK to try and tackle the geostationary launch market. They've already got a market to service in LEO/SSO, and if they can get the stupid planes side of their business running they're poised to make a lot of money in the space tourism business - which, honestly, is the part of it that I'm really interested in seeing, since it's not something we've gotten yet OTL. That, and potential changes away from the pork-barrel idiocy of SLS.

 

[overninethousands]

Well, one thing they could do is build a hydrolox upper stage for the K-1. It would almost certainly be disposable (hydrolox's awful handling characteristics and abysmal propellant density make reuse a tricky proposition), but even so it has the potential to be price-competitive with Arianespace at least, since partial reuse still beats no reuse. However, I don't think this is a terribly likely outcome. Designing a clean-sheet hydrolox upper stage won't exactly be cheap for RpK or Orbital ATK, but the only off-the-shelf option that might work is Centaur, and Centaur as it existed in 2010 (and still exists IOTL) is stupid expensive to manufacture. Either way, it runs into the cost issue, and I don't think the geostationary market is big enough for RpK/Orbital ATK to be able to recoup the development costs in a reasonable time frame. Also, there's a chance (given their OldSpace heritage) that they (especially Orbital ATK) would straight up refuse to conduct further R&D on company funds.

I'm of the opinion that it just isn't worth it for RpK to try and tackle the geostationary launch market. They've already got a market to service in LEO/SSO, and if they can get the stupid planes side of their business running they're poised to make a lot of money in the space tourism business - which, honestly, is the part of it that I'm really interested in seeing, since it's not something we've gotten yet OTL. That, and potential changes away from the pork-barrel idiocy of SLS.

And guess who developed a LH2 engine in the 2011-2015 era ? XCOR, for ULA.They even scrapped their X-prize plane, the Lynx, for the engine - in a desperate survival move that did not helped in the end, and bankrupt they went, in 2016.

The neat thing is that XCOR Lynx and Rocketplane XP were a little similar, although Lynx had no turbofans nor Learjet legacy, sure - it was smaller. But merging the two projects may help.

Incidentally, Dan Delong is a bright guy (think Gary Hudson, the two know each others very well) with all kind of interesting ideas; He was part of Roton, XCOR. Delong would be a godsend to the XP project, really.

 

[e of pi]

The light of the setting sun caught the K-1 rocket sitting again on its launch mount at Woomera, the lights on around the pad support areas augmenting the light of the setting sun as technicians made their final surveys, walking down the rainbirds and umbilicals. Just 75 days after its maiden flight, RpK’s first orbital vehicle was ready to go again. The night launch was forced by the restrictions of orbital mechanics--while the risk reduction flight had only cared about demonstrating ascent to an orbit and control of the flight from that point, this mission would be more complex. To make rendezvous with the International Space Station, the K-1 needed to launch at just the right moment as the station’s ground track carried it overhead. The maiden flight had demonstrated a capability seventeen years in the making, but now the team had to do it again with precision down to the second. Like a hunter with a spear-thrower like the woomera which gave the facility its name, the team stalked their quarry from afar, preparing everything to the critical moment of launch.

The K-1 vehicle was no elegant spear like some rockets, no dart-tipped shaft declaring its aim for the heavens in every line. It was two cylinders stacked atop each other, cradled in a bundle of wires and hoses. To the untrained eye, it was little more spaceworthy than the insulated LOX tanks at the pad tank farm nearby. Nor did it tower over the technicians as it rolled to the pad horizontally on its mobile transporter, escorted by workers anxiously eyeing the concrete ahead of the vehicle and the transporter itself for any sign of trouble. There was little of the contrast of when some of those technicians had made similar walks with the Space Shuttle on the back of a crawler-transporter at Kennedy Space Center halfway around the world, the awesome yet somewhat hilarious sight of a vehicle which seemed to scrape the heavens above towering over the work crews walking it step by step to the pad like parents escorting a toddler to school. The K-1 was no giant, it was by every metric the very model of a medium launch vehicle.

In spite of this, the task ahead of it tonight as dusk settled over Woomera was large, and even a medium launcher was a great thing by human scales. The crews had rigorously checked every system in the course of the last two and a half months, ensuring the vehicle was ready bottom to top for this night. As night fell and floodlights caught the rocket finally erected for launch, the rocket loomed into the black, ten stories tall and larger in diameter than a jumbo jet. Its unusual proportions and forms for a rocket were driven by solid engineering reasoning. Its diameter was driven by the line of three-abreast NK-33 engines, now bearing AJ-26 serial numbers, which would lift once more off the pad. They had been checked, critical systems which could be easily accessed like the valves and seals inspected and consumables like the solid start cartridges replaced where necessary. The vibrations and pressures recorded by onboard sensors during the maiden launch were analyzed rigorously in Woomera, the United States, and the Ukraine, and the propulsion system pronounced once again ready for flight. The LAP engines were imposing, the line of bells visible at the top of the flame trench looking off the base work platforms each larger than a man.

The propulsion module stretched the first four meters above the rocket’s base heat shield, the dull beige of the base material seasoned by the heat of entry and the recirculation of the vehicle’s own flames with streaks of soot, some half-cleaned during the inspection process. The streaks showed how the fires had flowed across the shielding, particularly the area spots 90 degrees off the line of the engines, where the high-pressure flames of the rocket had been able to creep up towards the vehicle itself as air pressure fell and the exhaust expanded, not been pushed away as they were where engines were mounted in line. The checks had confirmed the marks were cosmetic, but it was something to monitor on future flights. Behind the shield’s protection and flexible skirts around the bells were sheltered the engines themselves, their pumps and ducts safely hidden with only their nozzles protruding. The bay was large enough to accommodate multiple technicians inside once vertical, even though they had to wind their way carefully around the engine gimbals, the thrust structure, engine controllers, and the tangle of piping and wires ranging from propellant feed lines the size of an arm to hydraulic lines the size of fingers, and wires trailing seemingly everywhere in bundles. It had all had to be checked, but little had been found that needed work beyond precaution of the heat of entry and bumps of parachutes and the touchdown on descent. Compared to the test of orbit, the LAP’s job was easy.

Looking up from the grating floor inside the propulsion module a technician could see the bottom of the vehicle’s primary propellant tanks. The large diameter of the stage meant these tanks were little more than domes, not even spherical. Even combined they were barely more than half the Launch Assistance Platform’s overall height. The lower tank was already being prepared to be filled with kerosene, the smaller of the two main propellants to be loaded by volume and mass. The wide diameter of the stage meant the required volume was too low to even manage just being domes. Instead, it was a toroid shape, with the insulated cutout in the tank’s center filled by smaller tanks, serving as headers to ensure consistent flow and minimize slosh of the propellants needed for the LAP to boost back to launch site. The LOX tank above this assembly at least managed to take the full width of the stage, and was sprayed with insulation to ensure the sub-cooled gas didn’t boil off too rapidly or form icy condensation on critical systems and sensors inside the intertank as the contents leached heat from the intertank’s carefully conditioned air.

Above the tanks stretched the interstage containing the enormous vacuum nozzle of the Orbital Vehicle’s AJ-26-60/NK-43 engine, as tall as the entire propulsion section of the LAP and a full quarter the height of the vehicle. The chamber it formed in this “medium sized” rocket had isogrid walls a full story and a half tall before the roof formed by the OV’s tapering flare even began to close in. Inside along with the OV’s nozzle bell were the forward thrusters and their propellant and pressurant bottles, the avionics for the stage, and the airbags and parachutes for descent and landing. A breakaway data cable tied the LAP into the OV’s avionics and systems inside the flare forming the arched ceiling two stories above. The OV at least looked the part of a proper rocket stage on its own, ignoring its skirt and thermal protection blankets, with propellant tanks with proper domes and barrels. It was normal for a second stage to have a length not much greater than its width, excepting the usual massive bell of a vacuum-optimized engine, while it was rare for a first stage to be as short and stumpy as the LAP with its truncated domes and unusual width. The unusually short dimensions of the LAP were another part of what left it heavy, even if it had been without the battleship-like margins included in its design to ensure regular reuse wouldn’t wear it out. All that was truly unusual about the OV was that the payload compartment it carried was securely bolted to its nose, and that it was sheathed not just in paint and coatings but in blankets on its side and tiles on the flare, which was retained throughout the mission to protect the aft avionics and engine from the heat of entry. Just below that mounting for the payload compartment, which made up a mere final story at the top of the rocket, were the pressurants and propellants for the forward attitude jets which combined with the jets below the skirt nearly four stories below to give the OV the maneuverability it would need for docking. Inside the payload compartment pressurized volume was the cargo and ballast for this demo mission to the station, paving the way to carry all the tons which might come after, including the two special payloads loaded just before closeout and installation. It was a small chamber compared to the rocket below, barely the size of a van, but it was enough to be worth the $30 million contracted value of a delivery mission. Above the ceiling formed by the payload compartment’s forward bulkhead was the common berthing mechanism, the star trackers and radars for navigating to the station and proximity operations, and finally the forward heat shield, the blunt fist of a nose cone which would bull its way through the atmosphere on the way to space but protectively push it away from the heat shield on the way back down.

Even “medium sized,’ the vehicle to get all this assembled technology to where its performance could be demonstrated was large by a human scale, as were the expectations resting on it tonight as night fell. As the hours counted down and propellants began to flow in--kerosene and subcooled oxygen into the main and header tanks on the LAP and the main tanks on the OV, ethanol and conventional LOX into the OMS tanks inside the OV’s flare, pressurant gasses topping off, air conditioning to various internal bays, and the myriad of power and data cables to tie the rocket tightly into ground control until, minutes before launch, the avionics of the K-1 would take it over and steer it on its way to space and back. Pressures built in tanks and in viewing rooms around the world--Woomera control, OKC control, Shuttle and Space Station control in Houston. As the terminator of sunrise swept over the Atlantic on its way to the East coast, there were other watchers tuned into webcasts in offices, homes, and dorm rooms across the United States and Europe. Some were merely space fans, others industry professionals monitoring or cheering on a potential competitor. Others, in bespoke wood-paneled offices in Washington and executive suites around the country, were the politicians and lobbyists who would decide if “medium-sized” commercial vehicles like these could be trusted as the main force to replace the massive Space Shuttles and the even more massive Shuttle-Derived heavy Lifters in the vision of American spaceflight. Time wound down to hour, the minute, and the second selected days earlier for the K-1 COTS Demo 1 mission...the cues were given, the question was if the K-1 could hit its split-second mark and fly again as scheduled into the night.

Rain birds started their mist, the mist turned ethereal by the pad lighting. Time compressed. 10........9..…..8....7....6....5...4...3..2..main engine start! The flame duct filled with flame and the ground shook in sympathy with a massive explosion of sound. Thousands of watchers couldn’t resist taking a breath and holding it....

 

[e of pi]

Sunrise was a strange sight for a college student. Night owl tendencies, magnified by demands of studying and homework, meant it was more common to be awake at two in the morning than sunrise, especially when you crafted a class schedule around this fact. Being awake at six in the morning, particularly on a Saturday morning, was something that took special and specific planning for special occasions. Watching the first COTS launch out of Woomera was one such instance, and fortunately schedules had aligned--today was the first day of spring break, so there wasn’t homework to complicate the situation. With my roommate home for the weekend, I’d been able to force myself to pass out just after my last class Friday night, and set alarms to help wake me up early enough that the dining halls weren’t even open yet. For two hours, I’d followed the NASA stream, then switched over to the Rocketplane Kistler one as the first hints of sunrise worked their way across the sky. It made for a sense of unreality--the rocket on the pad in the dark of night and a dawn I usually never saw working its way into the window, not to mention the complications of time zone offsets for Woomera’s strange half-hour offset from UTC. Complicating things more was the poor stream quality from Woomera, making it even harder to figure out what appearing on-screen was real and what was the illusion of shapes caught in the clouds created by subcooled LOX and kerosene by the lights of the pad. Finally, the clock ticked down, and the orange fire of the K-1’s exhaust lit the night.

For heart-stopping seconds, the rocket clung to the pad, the burning lights almost overwhelming the cameras. Finally, though, it lifted off, and the fires of the engines climbed into the night, the rocket above hidden by the darkness and the contrasts. The experience of watching the previous launch gave little help in interpreting the video--with the rocket almost invisible behind its own flame, every shake of the camera seemed like a sign of impending doom. The flame flicked, obscured for a moment behind a cloud as the rocket knifed into the sky, and my heart stopped for the seconds it took for the next readout of “propulsion nominal” and “trajectory nominal”. The onboard imagery was more familiar, closer to the pictures I’d pored over after the last flight, and the timing was right--the shutoff of the LAP, the switch to the camera inside the confines of the OV’s flare, and then the LAP falling away behind as the OV’s engine started up. Behind, the darkness below helped highlight the brief moments where the start of the LAP’s boostback burn began before the flight of the OV carried the LAP behind the OV’s flare. Seven minutes of exhilaration mixed with worry to carry the OV to space, and then the first OMS burn corrected its trajectory onto the start of its chase of the space station. Another few minutes elapsed while the LAP’s guidance carried it back into the darkness, creeping down under drogues and then under mains and appearing like a ghost in the night above the landing ellipse in the pixelated webstream footage at the last moments before touching down safely. An hour after liftoff, the post-launch press conference confirmed the launch was a success--nine years after the Space Launch Initiative contracts, the K-1 was headed to the International Space Station. For someone who’d laid their career hopes out around the Constellation missions now on the chopping block, it was a sorely needed piece of good news--a new reusable vehicle joining Shuttle in servicing the space station. Grinning sleepily, I grabbed my Kindle and headed down for the VWK dining hall--one good thing about being awake this early was actually being in time for breakfast.

 

[TimothyC]

With the FY2020 budget at least rhyming with the FY2011 Budget, it is interesting to think about where we might be if there wasn't a decade and 14+ billion spent on SLS.

 

[IncongruousGoat]

With the FY2020 budget at least rhyming with the FY2011 Budget, it is interesting to think about where we might be if there wasn't a decade and 14+ billion spent on SLS.

But it does beg the question of where else the money would be spent. NASA are still going to want a heavy-lift vehicle, after all. I suppose they could just throw it at Kistler and SpaceX (and maybe also Orbital ATK and ULA), but that would require a pretty drastic shift in NASA's procurement policies. There is the slimmest of precedents, with the COTS program, and Congress could mandate that it be done that way, but doing that would derail the all-mighty Shuttle pork train so that seems unlikely unless large swathes of Congress start paying attention to the issue.

Then again, my timeline-ology tells me that it's probably going to go that way, because a TL with a commercial Constellation replacement is much more interesting than one where we just get SLS again.

 

[stevphfeniey]

I was told to come here and give feedback so here I am!

It’s nice to see that SpaceX isn’t the only rodeo in town when it comes to commercial spaceflight. Actually come to think of it I’m looking out for how SpaceX decides to go about their reusability program given Falcon 9 is still expendable at this point. K-1 seems to have demonstrated their system of parachutes and brute force reentry works, and works well. That coupled with reusable station logistics around the time of the Augustine Report makes the brain tingle with excitement for NASA’s next moves, and their implications for private spaceflight.

Earlier you mentioned K-1’s (and really any all kerolox launchers, reusable or not) limitations beyond LEO. With the 2011 NASA budget proposal calling for the development of a depot based architecture I’m also looking out for ULA’s moves with regards to ACES. ULA getting that program moving and flying would give all those poor engineers in Alabama and Louisiana something new to work on. You know, in case something bad happens like the Shuttle pork train derailing a little Dick Shelby can throw a fit all he wants, but cheap station logistics and the harsh realities of recession-era belt tightening might make his arguments a little less forceful.

On the writing itself the structure of everything is very interesting. One part history textbook, one part forum archive and one part autobiography keeps things moving, but importantly is not really distracting as these things can be. It helps bring these massive shifts in the dynamics of spaceflight to a more human scale. I noticed they becoming less and less frequent as the story has progressed, and we talked about this I think, but for myself I think you should keep doing it. If for no other reason than to stretch your legs as a writer

Keep up the good work! I’ll go back to lurking now

 

[e of pi]

The K-1 orbital vehicle was a remarkably smart spacecraft. In theory, it could fly itself from liftoff to landing with no involvement at all from the ground. Though it’s landing accuracy would be bad without a final wind update during entry, it could solve the complex analytical problems of circularization, phasing, and retro burns with all their constraints: not using too much propellant on any burn to prevent it from carrying out the rest of the mission, but using enough that it had only a precisely controlled amount of ethanol/LOX OMS propellants still onboard when it entered the upper atmosphere--not just calculating the most efficient way to fly its mission and return to the launch site within the specified time window, but the way which if necessary wasted the right amount of propellant. In theory, the mission control team in Oklahoma City could watch the launch preparations, turn off the stream at the cutoff of the OV’s AJ-26-60 main engine, and knock off for the week until the stages were all back on the ground and the customer satellites were deployed. In theory. Of course, in theory things always should go the same in theory as in practice, but in practice they often follow a more Murphy-esque turn. That was why Jean-Pierre and the other flight directors assembled their team to monitor the K-1 during its orbital missions around the clock, a watchful eye over the OV’s shoulder to make sure nothing went wrong, even in the simplest missions.

The challenges posed for flying any mission, particularly a demonstration of an untested vehicle, to one of the most expensive structures ever built by humans while traveling at speeds exceeding fifteen thousand miles per hour posed challenges that the Draper-designed guidance algorithms aboard the K-1 weren’t fully equipped to handle. The station was a harder target to chase down than the precision needed to hit a target orbit, as it required the phasing accuracy for rendezvous, not simply circularizing in the right altitude and inclination. Moreover, there would be no carefully calculated closed-form wasting of propellant, at least not yet. The burns needed at mission’s end for phasing and entry couldn’t be precisely calculated in advance of a nominal two week stay on station, nor could propellant be budgeted with the required accuracy for the various demonstrations of function required before violating the carefully studied yet purely theoretical boundary that marked the station’s Keep Out Sphere. For now, every kilogram of propellant aboard had to be husbanded as margin against requirements to repeat any failed demonstrations, buying any second chances needed with every second of burn time saved.

It was too much to expect for a Motorola PowerPC chip to keep track of it all, so the OKC control teams were taking a more active hand in guiding the craft, watching over TDRS as the vehicle cruised through space. They put their craft through its paces, demonstrating firing the forward and aft thrusters in various combinations as a single system to precisely control the stage’s motion--not just the attitude changes of a normal satellite deployment but the full translational control for precision in proximity operations with the station. The tests were also somewhat zen: not only did the spacecraft have to demonstrate its ability to maneuver and navigate, but also its ability to not move: the precision free-drift required to float motionless relative to the station prior to being grabbed by the arm, and the abort abilities to automatically halt an approach when commanded by the ground or by the crew aboard station.

By the fourth day of flight, both NASA and Jean-Pierre’s team in Oklahoma City had thrown everything they could at the spacecraft shy of approaching the station. The K-1 had passed all the tests with flying colors, and it was approved to proceed to proximity operation. The OKC control teams sent up the commands to lay in a burn which would bring the K-1 OV across the invisible line which marked the approach ellipse, coming within the four kilometer by two kilometer ellipse which marked the edge of station control. The process of closing from there and the final approach tests would take several hours, a slow motion ballet which would be followed anxiously by spaceflight fans and policy planners and particularly by those who were both at once.

 

[CrazyGeorge]

Always great.

 

[Polish Eagle]

But it does beg the question of where else the money would be spent. NASA are still going to want a heavy-lift vehicle, after all. I suppose they could just throw it at Kistler and SpaceX (and maybe also Orbital ATK and ULA), but that would require a pretty drastic shift in NASA's procurement policies. There is the slimmest of precedents, with the COTS program, and Congress could mandate that it be done that way, but doing that would derail the all-mighty Shuttle pork train so that seems unlikely unless large swathes of Congress start paying attention to the issue.

Then again, my timeline-ology tells me that it's probably going to go that way, because a TL with a commercial Constellation replacement is much more interesting than one where we just get SLS again.

The previous page had ATK managers begin speculating about how their reusable booster experience could come in handy for an HLV designed down the line. I'm thinking something superficially resembling SLS, but with flyback boosters, might become ATK's favored proposal. Alternatively, I wonder if you couldn't use the 8.4-meter tooling at Michoud with RP-1 fuel, and build a flyback core stage.

But since that would be 2017 or so at the earliest, and there's a decade between the most recent update and then, I suspect the focus will be elsewhere, on in-space hardware demonstration--depots and tugs. The Google Lunar X-Prize is also a possibility--with a low-cost launcher available much sooner, more of them might get in gear. Maybe some solar sail experiments that, IOTL, have to piggy-back on larger boosters.

Otherwise, I'm liking the most recent updates--that first person narrative is an interesting change of pace from most TLs here.

I wonder what impact this will have on the Russians--they can't so flippantly joke about trampolines now, and K-1 (or a derivative) can also start to chip away at Atlas's market (would X-37B fit onto the K-1? Even if not, could some of its experiments (whatever they are) be packaged onto the K-1 orbital vehicle instead?).

 

[TimothyC]

I wonder what impact this will have on the Russians--they can't so flippantly joke about trampolines now,

Well, they can (and will) point out that it needed a mighty Soviet Russian engine to make reuse work.

and K-1 (or a derivative) can also start to chip away at Atlas's market (would X-37B fit onto the K-1? Even if not, could some of its experiments (whatever they are) be packaged onto the K-1 orbital vehicle instead?).

The X-37 can't fit into the payload volume, and I imagine that RpK would rather not tie up a K-1 OV for weeks/months that the USAF might want to fly the mission. That said, they could use it to fly payloads once the Nevada site gets built.

 

[IncongruousGoat]

The Google Lunar X-Prize is also a possibility--with a low-cost launcher available much sooner, more of them might get in gear.

Maybe, but probably not. The K-1 is cheap, but it's not that cheap, and it's not the only budget player on the market, what with PSLV and various sundry small Long March rockets. Oh, and Falcon 9, I suppose (what with Beresheet launching via rideshare on Falcon 9).

...and K-1 (or a derivative) can also start to chip away at Atlas's market (would X-37B fit onto the K-1? Even if not, could some of its experiments (whatever they are) be packaged onto the K-1 orbital vehicle instead?).

But the K-1 can't tackle Atlas's market. At all. The payload capacity to LEO and GTO, as well as the payload bay size, are too small to handle pretty much all the DoD/NROL and NASA payloads that make up Atlas's launch manifest. Ditto with Delta IV, except more so. What K-1 can do is eat up (part of) Delta II's market, but since Delta II was slated to die anyways at the hands of SpaceX, this doesn't really change things. It would have to be a derivative vehicle, and one that's optimized for high-energy trajectories at that, and by the time Kistler can get a new vehicle flying they'll be competing with SpaceX as well as ULA for those launches.

 

[e of pi]

The process of bringing a vehicle to a rest at the International Space Station was never fast, and the maiden flight of a new vehicle was no time to get aggressive. While he briefed his team at the Oklahoma City control center (MCC-OKC), Jean-Pierre had stressed that challenge. In the history of the station, only five types of vehicles had ever served it, and three of hose--Progress, Soyuz, and Shuttle--had extensive flight heritage to fall back on. He emphasized that in his book, it’d be marked as a success for the day if they simply got to the 200m Keep-Out Sphere (KOS). Others outside of RpK and NASA waited with higher expectations. The live stream for the event started just before midnight, almost three hours in advance of the planned berthing attempt, but even before it began progress reports were already being tweeted out and posted to forums. I’d taken advantage of being on spring break to make plans to do little all night except read, refresh ARN’s forums, and follow along on the NASA TV stream. As the timer to the webcast ticked down, I watched the discussion flow past a few pages of my Kindle book at a time.

ARN Forums: Rocketplane Kistler: RPK-D1 Berthing Attempt 1 Update: Page (1)...

I wish people would stop misconstruing me. I’m just saying that this isn’t anything as new as they’re making out. They want this to be a big deal that they’re a “private company”, but does the fact that they don’t have shareholders really make them that different? It’s still all the usual suspects involved--LockMart built their tanks, ATK did all their assembly here at Michoud and does a lot of their operations. RpK’s going to be operating the K-1 for station, but is that really any different than NASA buying a launch of Shuttle from United Space Alliance? They’re just splitting the management costs differently! “New era in spaceflight,” really. Give me a break…

PressToLaunch: 4 km, entering approach ellipse

Excalibur, I think you’re deliberately erasing the difference. It’s not about who their shareholders are and whether they’re a government owned contractor or not, it’s that the model really is different. NASA may be their main customer right now, but they’re not the only one who’re going to be buying a launch from them--look at OrbComm. The K-1 would be just as great a vehicle to support any private station like Bigelow as it is to support ISS, and unlike with USA they wouldn’t need to get NASA’s permission and support to fly it. That is a major difference--USA was specifically formed to handle Shuttle operations for NASA and couldn’t handle flying the vehicle without the support JSC and other NASA centers provide. RpK is more like how launch services have traditionally been handled, but now including orbital vehicle operations as well--they can serve NASA, but they can also serve customers without NASA support. That’s a real difference.

2 km, webcast starting in a few minutes

Come on K-1! Go RpK!

It might be real, but it’s meaningless unless they actually get more customers, otherwise it’s just NASA bailing them out of bankruptcy on an ongoing basis or exactly the kind of subsidy you were saying ULA and USA need to stay around. Look at SpaceHab, and look where they are today--you can’t, they’re gone. Just because you can put a payload on the station or a can in the Shuttle cargo bay doesn’t mean you’ll get any other business, and it means you’re just as dependent on NASA as all these articles about RpK seem to want to make “OldSpace” out to be. The fanboys need to take a break, both whenever they talk up RpK and for Elon’s bunch too. And will Bigelow or others really get the funding to launch their own stations for K-1 to serve? You’ll excuse me if I doubt it. It’s taken Kistler two or three miracles to get this far, and that only with ATK’s help. Where’s Bigelow’s OldSpace angel investor? I thought not...he’ll be forced to see reality soon enough.

Folks, we’re going to be coming up on the webcast soon and this is the updates thread. Can you put away the handbags and start a splinter thread for this discussion before we need to take official mod notice of it?

Chuckling, I went back to my book. Soon enough, the webcast started up, and then the game of trying to monitor chat, the stream, and my book all at once got even more complicated. My mom had work in the morning, so I was trying to find a balance on the stream volume that’d let me catch the intermittent snatches of comm loop chatter without being loud when the commenters spoke up. What ended up happening was zoning out into my book for the most part as the footage from the station mostly just showed the Earth below with the promise that the spacecraft was out there in the void approaching somewhere. Every few minutes, a bit of loop chatter would crackle in or the public affairs officer would add something, and I’d look up startled and have to read back the ARN forum posts to see what I’d missed.

Often, this ended up with me just staring at the feed from the station, watching the world go by underneath. Soon after the webcast started, the K-1 made its ADV-3 burn, moving it in from a range of just over a kilometer. Soon after, the crew called “tally ho”--the first sight of the ship from the station it approached. It was still invisible against the clouds and sea below on the daylight passes, but as orbital dawn and dusk flashed past, the cameras intermittently captured the speck of light in the distance. With the ability for light from the spacecraft to reach the station’s cameras, the far more sophisticated detectors built into the Kurs radar and TriDAR lidar systems making up the Kistler proximity operations and docking system began to register the station. However, it wasn’t entirely trouble-free.

800m, still working the K-PODS disagreement. It sounds like TriDAR and Kurs are both working, but disagreeing on position relative to station? Something about solar radiation?

PAO is explaining--reflections off the station arrays might be interfering with TriDAR. They’re proceeding in with Kurs as the primary system, TriDAR is in monitor only for this demo. Showing the benefits of the Shuttle testing and the Kurs flight heritage.

In the slow-motion ballet of approaching ISS, there was time to work through these issues--indeed, it was the point of the demo. Hanging 800 meters from the space station was a distance a human could easily comprehend--a few city blocks, or the length from my dorm room to my class buildings, a distance even I could cover in seven to ten minutes. Compared to the staggering distances and speeds traveled to reach it, the fact that it would take another two hours to finish crossing this distance seemed faintly ridiculous. For the teams involved, however, every additional meter of closure was hard won.

It sounds like they’re still not liking the TriDAR data calibration, so they’re taking it out of the loop and moving in on Kurs only. Kurs is looking dead on. Still heading in from 250m, the crew is ready to command the retreat when they reach 230m to test that. The PAO is talking about the command arrangements--talking about the new Robotics Workstation they’re going to install in the Cupola next month, but right now it’s not ready. Noguchi is in the Cupola to take pictures, but they’re commanding from the current RWS in Node 2 today. It’ll be nice in the future to have a view out the window at the approaching spacecraft while they work on it!

Here’s a really good view of the Node 2 command station on the stream, crew still only just barely able to see the vehicle on the camera feeds.

Retreat command sent! Spacecraft replied, and it’s backing off.

Closest approach was 224m, it sounds like--expected delay in command processing. Backing off to 250m and holding.

The K-1 hung off the edge of the station’s Keep Out Sphere, waiting patiently while the ground control teams processed the data. Minutes slipped past as the loop quieted down, the PAO occasionally working to fill the time, and I turned back to my book. Minutes turned into pages and then into chapters as the hour passed, the house quieting down and lights outside my room fading to just the streetlights. A trip downstairs for a refill on water and ice startled the dogs, one already awake and alert looking for the deer that haunted our flowers in the wee hours, the other asleep until the refrigerator door closing woke her up. I apologized with a head scratch peace offering, and headed back upstairs. It was almost forty-five minutes after the retreat test before they resumed the approach, satisfied with the data as the slow process proceeded with every care. The next hold point was 30m, an approach of 220m which would take half an hour.

The change this time was notable, and my book lay forgotten as I watched the stream, enraptured for minutes on end. In the stream’s external camera views, the K-1 had been visible intermittently throughout the approach and retreat tests, the flared “skirt” and engine bell distinguishable when the cream colored TPS wasn’t hiding it against the cloud cover below. Now, suddenly, the K-1 resolved up out of orbital night as a massive form. The K-1’s upper stage was small, by the scales of rocket bodies, but it was massive by the scale of ISS visiting vehicles. The four Progress and Soyuz currently on station were barely a third its size. As the stage hung at 30m, it felt more like the Space Shuttle in scale than any of the rest of the ISS servicing fleet--indeed it was half the Shuttle’s length.

As the ground crew waited for the permission to cross the last few dozen meters to the capture point, the stage drifted motionless, seemingly close enough to touch. Suddenly, the K-1 was a real, tangible vehicle--almost moreso than in the pre-launch photographs, which had all tried to capture the larger bulk of the full rocket. It felt enormous, and the PAO pointed out it was indeed the size of a bus--though the pressurized compartment in the nose was only the size of a generous walk-in closet. Watching at home, I could make out the clear line where the new thermal blankets on the sidewall of the ISS Pressurized Cargo Module met the previously-flown ones on the side of the rocket body of the OV as a crisp line between a toasted cream and sharp white. Though the aft thrusters were hidden in the shelter of the flare, the forward thruster bank could be seen just in front of the line, mounted as part of the PCM. Behind the opened forward heat shield hatch, the berthing port was flanked by the approach radar and the flashing formation light. As others and I looked at stills from the stream to try and pick out and label each newly visible detail, the K-1 waited out one last half-orbit of darkness. As orbital dawn broke, bringing good comms and proper lighting for the final maneuvers, all the tests were complete and the go was given for the big ship to come into its berth. At last, with a pulse of thrusters visibly jetting into the night, the rocket as big as any of the main station modules eased into position until it came to a halt, nearly blotting out the camera view. At the astronauts’ command, the robotic arm reached out for the grapple fixture.

All polling go for capture. SSRMS at 5m

End effector view, 2m left.

Looks like it’s really close now!

Half a meter to go.

Capture! Crew reports good grab.

Ha! “Houston, please inform OKC we found something of theirs floating by, but we grabbed it for them.”

MCC-OKC and MCC-H both reporting good capture, confirming SSRMS end effector latches all showing locked.

As the webcast continued, I looked up at the clock, debating staying up for the final berthing. It’d be another 40 minutes, taking things all the way past three in the morning. I should be asleep but I was almost through with my book anyway. It wasn’t like I’d be any more likely to end up falling asleep if I turned off the webcast anyway, so I just put leaned back in my chair, put my feet up on my bed, and kept watching the stream while the astronauts swung the module around, eased it into place, and drove home the bolts. The K-1, at long last, had arrived at ISS.