Kistling a Different Tune: Commercial Space in an Alternate Key
March 12, 2010: Kistler COTS Demo 1 (RPK-D) Hatch Opening & Berthed Operations
Spending an expedition aboard the International Space Station was like living in a rental cabin built out of busses, to which people occasionally came by and expected you to attach and detach rental vans. The Expedition 22 crew had less than a month to begin outfitting the space aboard Node 3 Tranquility and enjoy the new windows on the world offered by the cupola before they had to be pulled away to complete preparations for the K-1 arrival. As the crew awoke on March 11, 2010, they could look forward out the windows of the cupola and have their view of the horizon obscured by the vehicle they had worked into the night to see berthed. The K-1 was massive seen this way, the second largest to ever serve the station, behind only Shuttle. However, in terms of capacity it couldn’t hold a candle to the Shuttle. The K-1 OV might be the size of a tractor-trailer, but the relationships of the components were reversed. While a truck’s cab provided the motive power to haul around the cargo inside its large trailer, the OV which served to launch and carry the payload module was the size of a semi trailer, while the payload module on the front was the size of a truck’s cab.
Indeed, the K-1 berthed to the station massed less than the first Japanese HTV which had used the port six months before in September 2009, though it was more than twice the length. Just as the massive tanks and NK-43 engine of the OV needed to act as a second stage as well as an orbital spacecraft took up much of the volume of the vehicle, they also made up more of its mass than the equivalent tanks and engines which the HTV needed to maneuver to berthing after launch. Both the HTV and the European ATV carried several times the K-1’s cargo load, which was only slightly larger than the Russian Progress vehicles it dwarfed physically. Still, the new vehicle’s arrival was exciting, and the cargo was cheap. The payload aboard a K-1 vehicle could be carried to the station for lower cost than any other ship serving the station--almost an order of magnitude lower cost per kilogram than any non-Russian cargo freighter serving the station.
The morning brought the chores which would lead up to opening the hatch, a steady checklist carried out in the vestibule between the station and its supply ship. With the CBM hatch opened, the crew connected the systems to tie the K-1 into the station’s power and life support systems, then watched through the window in the vehicle’s own PCM and waited as sophisticated sensors and the Mark One eyeball alike surveyed the interior of the newly arrived cargo vehicle. The astronauts were eager to crack open their haul, making for an atmosphere like christmas morning. Indeed, the festive atmosphere was similar enough that--like a scolding mother--mission control had to authorize station commander Jeff Williams to confiscate the candy of any astronaut seen entering Node 2 or the PCM after hatch opening without proper protective gear.
Finally, though, everyone was in their places and all the boxes had been checked. The K-1 PCM’s big CBM hatch slid smoothly out of the way along its rails into the interior of the module. From the camera streaming video groundside inside Node 2, there was a sudden clear view all the way to the aft bulkhead of the PCM. The large “Rocketplane Kistler” logo on the back wall was partly obscured by the demonstration cargo bags strapped securely into place around the sides of the spacecraft, but there was enough clear space to see that it was flanked by the American and Australian flags. Soon after, Williams and Creamer made their way in, protected with breathing hoods and carrying cameras and chemical air test kits to survey the interior. As they worked to begin the process of checking out the interior of the PCM after its trip to orbit and then to the station, they were instructed by the ground to grab a particular bag, one of the two which had been loaded just before the module was sealed, and it came flying easily out of the module to be grabbed by Noguchi, who was supporting the work in the K-1 from the other side of the hatch in Node 2.
The bag’s opening brought a round of applause and smiles for the camera on the station as the contents were displayed--a mix of special gifts for the crew from the RpK team in Woomera and memorabilia. Like most long-duration missions, fresh food and candy were in constant short supply aboard station, and many supply ships carried up some supply of goodies. This time, the crew supply bag contained a generous supply of Tim Tams and other Australian candy. The Australian pride carried over into other aspects of the memorabilia. As well as a photograph of the K-1 teams in Oklahoma, Michoud, and Woomera, the bag contained a small Australian flag sticker to be added to the collection of flags strung aboard the station--the local Australians in the flight preparation team staking their claim to Woomera and Australia’s new place as a supporter of the ISS program. Indeed, some at Woomera had begun trying to nickname the LAP and the OV as “Kangaroo” and “Wallaby”--two marsupials that hopped up and came down again, carrying precious cargo in a pouch, though the names had not fully stuck even within the site staff, much less the team at OKC and NASA.
The final items were a small commemorative medallion for each of the crew, struck from the gold alloy which had been flown aboard the first risk reduction flight and now flying a second time, like the ship carrying it. On the obverse, it bore a copy of the Risk Reduction Demo’s patch, showing the K-1 lifting off to an arcing trail in the Australian sky, while on the reverse it bore a copy of the patch for the very RPK-D demo which had carried the medallion to space which paired an image of the full K-1 stack, with its distinctive profile, with an image of the OV approaching a silhouette of the station. The five keepsakes for the crew weren’t the only ones carried aboard the flight--the ingot carried aboard the risk reduction flight had been struck into hundreds of the medallions, which filled the second bag which had been loaded just before closeout. These were intended to return to Earth as ballast, then distributed to RpK management, staff, investors, and NASA COTS team members. One in particular sparked discussion even as the K-1 was on orbit. This last was addressed vindictively to its recipient as a commemoration of an eight year old contract dispute which still left many members of the Kistler team seething. Even as the dispute’s loss was finally avenged, they had not yet decided whether or not to send to its designated recipient--as the letter inside with the medallion put it, a keepsake for their friends in Hawthorne flown aboard the first American reusable commercial spacecraft. It might yet fly, return, and then go in a drawer or be distributed to another person in the commemorative spirit for which the medallions were intended, instead as a renewal of a long-lost argument. After all, in the new battle of commercial versus “traditional” NASA contracting, they and their old enemy were now on the same side of the lines.
The supply of goodies was finite, and their presence was secondary to the main task at hand. Putting aside the candy, flags, photos, and keepsakes, the crew once again dived into the task of inventorying the cargo aboard the cramped PCM cabin. Soon, they began to unload the first of the bulk cargo--the all-important socks and new clothes which every child had to endure along with their christmas goodies. In just over a week, the K-1 would be unloaded of its demonstration cargos and reloaded with station downmass, ranging from non-critical samples to garbage bags. For the Expedition 22 crew, who would be returning to Earth shortly themselves, the arrival of the new reusable vehicle was a capstone of their flight. For those members like Noguchi who would stay aboard as part of Expedition 23, they might yet see a second flight of this vehicle--the second demonstration mission to station carrying the unpressurized cargo module was schedule to sneak in under the wire before their departure in early June. Time, and the results of their work now, would tell.
The biggest impact of the missions’ successes so far didn’t come in the small celebrations on orbit, at Woomera, in Houston, or in Oklahoma City, nor with Australia’s sudden embrace of the spacecraft which had made the country its base, but in the nation which built and operated it. American budget planners at NASA, OMB, and in key congressional offices were busy trying to chart a path between the President’s harsh course-correction for the agency and the demands of critical space-state congressional powerhouses like Senators Nelson, Shelby, and Hatch. The flight of the K-1 to station was an important element of convincing key power brokers that the President’s vision of eliminating NASA development of LEO spacecraft and heavy launch capacity to focus on commercial providers and multiple launch architectures, while the staffs of those power brokers worked to see how the needs of their constituents in Alabama, Florida, and Utah could still be met even if the ground they stood on might shift. If the sea was changing, it might be better to go with the flow rather than hold back the tide, but before any wishy-washy promises could turn into any sort of real compromise, a course had to be charted between the Scylla of programmatic vision and the Charybdis of political horse-trading and pork budgets. In support of this, NASA and RpK teams were already discussing inserting a new flight on the K-1’s manifest, one of a decidedly terrestrial nature...
Indeed, the K-1 berthed to the station massed less than the first Japanese HTV which had used the port six months before in September 2009, though it was more than twice the length. Just as the massive tanks and NK-43 engine of the OV needed to act as a second stage as well as an orbital spacecraft took up much of the volume of the vehicle, they also made up more of its mass than the equivalent tanks and engines which the HTV needed to maneuver to berthing after launch. Both the HTV and the European ATV carried several times the K-1’s cargo load, which was only slightly larger than the Russian Progress vehicles it dwarfed physically. Still, the new vehicle’s arrival was exciting, and the cargo was cheap. The payload aboard a K-1 vehicle could be carried to the station for lower cost than any other ship serving the station--almost an order of magnitude lower cost per kilogram than any non-Russian cargo freighter serving the station.
The morning brought the chores which would lead up to opening the hatch, a steady checklist carried out in the vestibule between the station and its supply ship. With the CBM hatch opened, the crew connected the systems to tie the K-1 into the station’s power and life support systems, then watched through the window in the vehicle’s own PCM and waited as sophisticated sensors and the Mark One eyeball alike surveyed the interior of the newly arrived cargo vehicle. The astronauts were eager to crack open their haul, making for an atmosphere like christmas morning. Indeed, the festive atmosphere was similar enough that--like a scolding mother--mission control had to authorize station commander Jeff Williams to confiscate the candy of any astronaut seen entering Node 2 or the PCM after hatch opening without proper protective gear.
Finally, though, everyone was in their places and all the boxes had been checked. The K-1 PCM’s big CBM hatch slid smoothly out of the way along its rails into the interior of the module. From the camera streaming video groundside inside Node 2, there was a sudden clear view all the way to the aft bulkhead of the PCM. The large “Rocketplane Kistler” logo on the back wall was partly obscured by the demonstration cargo bags strapped securely into place around the sides of the spacecraft, but there was enough clear space to see that it was flanked by the American and Australian flags. Soon after, Williams and Creamer made their way in, protected with breathing hoods and carrying cameras and chemical air test kits to survey the interior. As they worked to begin the process of checking out the interior of the PCM after its trip to orbit and then to the station, they were instructed by the ground to grab a particular bag, one of the two which had been loaded just before the module was sealed, and it came flying easily out of the module to be grabbed by Noguchi, who was supporting the work in the K-1 from the other side of the hatch in Node 2.
The bag’s opening brought a round of applause and smiles for the camera on the station as the contents were displayed--a mix of special gifts for the crew from the RpK team in Woomera and memorabilia. Like most long-duration missions, fresh food and candy were in constant short supply aboard station, and many supply ships carried up some supply of goodies. This time, the crew supply bag contained a generous supply of Tim Tams and other Australian candy. The Australian pride carried over into other aspects of the memorabilia. As well as a photograph of the K-1 teams in Oklahoma, Michoud, and Woomera, the bag contained a small Australian flag sticker to be added to the collection of flags strung aboard the station--the local Australians in the flight preparation team staking their claim to Woomera and Australia’s new place as a supporter of the ISS program. Indeed, some at Woomera had begun trying to nickname the LAP and the OV as “Kangaroo” and “Wallaby”--two marsupials that hopped up and came down again, carrying precious cargo in a pouch, though the names had not fully stuck even within the site staff, much less the team at OKC and NASA.
The final items were a small commemorative medallion for each of the crew, struck from the gold alloy which had been flown aboard the first risk reduction flight and now flying a second time, like the ship carrying it. On the obverse, it bore a copy of the Risk Reduction Demo’s patch, showing the K-1 lifting off to an arcing trail in the Australian sky, while on the reverse it bore a copy of the patch for the very RPK-D demo which had carried the medallion to space which paired an image of the full K-1 stack, with its distinctive profile, with an image of the OV approaching a silhouette of the station. The five keepsakes for the crew weren’t the only ones carried aboard the flight--the ingot carried aboard the risk reduction flight had been struck into hundreds of the medallions, which filled the second bag which had been loaded just before closeout. These were intended to return to Earth as ballast, then distributed to RpK management, staff, investors, and NASA COTS team members. One in particular sparked discussion even as the K-1 was on orbit. This last was addressed vindictively to its recipient as a commemoration of an eight year old contract dispute which still left many members of the Kistler team seething. Even as the dispute’s loss was finally avenged, they had not yet decided whether or not to send to its designated recipient--as the letter inside with the medallion put it, a keepsake for their friends in Hawthorne flown aboard the first American reusable commercial spacecraft. It might yet fly, return, and then go in a drawer or be distributed to another person in the commemorative spirit for which the medallions were intended, instead as a renewal of a long-lost argument. After all, in the new battle of commercial versus “traditional” NASA contracting, they and their old enemy were now on the same side of the lines.
The supply of goodies was finite, and their presence was secondary to the main task at hand. Putting aside the candy, flags, photos, and keepsakes, the crew once again dived into the task of inventorying the cargo aboard the cramped PCM cabin. Soon, they began to unload the first of the bulk cargo--the all-important socks and new clothes which every child had to endure along with their christmas goodies. In just over a week, the K-1 would be unloaded of its demonstration cargos and reloaded with station downmass, ranging from non-critical samples to garbage bags. For the Expedition 22 crew, who would be returning to Earth shortly themselves, the arrival of the new reusable vehicle was a capstone of their flight. For those members like Noguchi who would stay aboard as part of Expedition 23, they might yet see a second flight of this vehicle--the second demonstration mission to station carrying the unpressurized cargo module was schedule to sneak in under the wire before their departure in early June. Time, and the results of their work now, would tell.
The biggest impact of the missions’ successes so far didn’t come in the small celebrations on orbit, at Woomera, in Houston, or in Oklahoma City, nor with Australia’s sudden embrace of the spacecraft which had made the country its base, but in the nation which built and operated it. American budget planners at NASA, OMB, and in key congressional offices were busy trying to chart a path between the President’s harsh course-correction for the agency and the demands of critical space-state congressional powerhouses like Senators Nelson, Shelby, and Hatch. The flight of the K-1 to station was an important element of convincing key power brokers that the President’s vision of eliminating NASA development of LEO spacecraft and heavy launch capacity to focus on commercial providers and multiple launch architectures, while the staffs of those power brokers worked to see how the needs of their constituents in Alabama, Florida, and Utah could still be met even if the ground they stood on might shift. If the sea was changing, it might be better to go with the flow rather than hold back the tide, but before any wishy-washy promises could turn into any sort of real compromise, a course had to be charted between the Scylla of programmatic vision and the Charybdis of political horse-trading and pork budgets. In support of this, NASA and RpK teams were already discussing inserting a new flight on the K-1’s manifest, one of a decidedly terrestrial nature...
Which contract dispute was this, specifically? Eight years before the ITTL date would have been right around when SpaceX was founded. I know they've had a history of suing other companies for a variety of reasons, but I wasn't aware that this litigiousness went back quite that far.
It's related to the original Kistler and their >$200m SLI contract to provide data about RLV operations and cargo to the ISS back in 2001 and 2004, and a SpaceX legal challenge to the same. It's rather complicated, but basically Kistler was having trouble throughout the early 200s finding money to finish their vehicle. NASA gave them a COTS-style contract under SLI which assured them money if they delivered flight data, sort of an early COTS-style. (the idea is the assured payoff helps gain investor confidence.) The contract was renewed in 2004 without a bid and for an increased amount of money, because obviously no one else was going to have an RLV of similar capacity to the K-1 around. Musk and SpaceX sued, alleging that the bid process didn't allow anyone else to propose their own LV. Within months, the GAO ruled SpaceX's protest was justified and NASA was ordered to negate the award. Kistler was already bouncing around bankruptcy, and with NASA's life-ring pulled out from under them, they basically had no solid path forward. They did their best to raise money and came out of bankruptcy in 2005 in the lead-up to COTS, but they couldn't raise money from investors already burnt by the first bankruptcy, and they had to merge with Rocketplane to find venture capital to make their COTS bid.
Kistler wasn't really in the financial position to finish building the vehicle even before the challenge, being cash-poor due to VCs still off-balance from the dot-com implosion, the rise of fiber optic crippling the market for the LEO comsats K-1 was supposed to launch, and other factors, but not being able to secure the NASA business certainly didn't help them recover before the original 2003 bankruptcy and put them on track for the end of "Kistler Aerospace". Musk's challenge was more of the straw that broke the camel's back than the major factor, but it was the one with a face and I'd imagine there were some hard feelings there.
March 17-19, 2010: ARN Stage Two Forums Regarding K-1 Hardware Shipments
”PressToLaunch (03/16/10)” said:
”ArnoldH (03/17/10)” said:
”e of pi (03/17/10)” said:
”Tim (03/17/10)” said:
”e of pi (03/17/10)” said:
”ArnoldH (03/18/10)” said:
”Excalibur99 (03/18/10)” said:
”GF3 03/19/2010” said:
March 22, 2010: Space Ship Two First Captive Carry Flight
As the sun beat down on the desert airstrip, jet engines rumbled to life while technicians and crew completed final checks. Ladders were pulled away, and all that was left was a spacecraft clutched tightly to a carrier plane in the mojave sun. The gleaming shape of the White Knight was a strange shape, twin fuselages and four engines, with two tail booms bracketing the carried payload. Today, for the first time, it took to the air with the payload it was designed and built to carry--a third almost identical fuselage filled the gap, centered under the wing. It had its own wing and tail fins, but for this flight it would not use them. White Knight’s pilots ran through the familiar procedures for hauling the ungainly plane into the sky. Throttles forward and the engines throttled up, and their howl became a scream, then filled in beneath with a roar. The plane and its spacecraft payload rumbled down the runway, trailed by a chase truck. The simple mechanical gauges on its old-school controls came alive to the force of air pressure as it passed 40 knots, but it took many more feet of runway before its almost impossibly narrow wings gathered the lift and speed to haul it into the air. From the side and front on the ground, SpaceShipTwo fit right into the combined vehicle, but from below aboard the chase planes, its delta wings marked it as a separate vehicle, ready soon to fall away and fly free. Not today, though--for this first flight it was just payload, without even a crew aboard. For two hours and forty-five minutes, the pilots hauled their plane and its cargo through the sky, first gingerly testing flight characteristics with the spacecraft attached, then pushing the envelope further, higher, and faster. Step by step, on this flight and others, they would push Space Ship Two’s capabilities in captive carry flights. Soon, it would be ready to test solo, first with glides, and then with a rocket engine for a flight to space. The Scaled Composites and Virgin Galactic test team were proud and were confident. As the White Knight circled to land, they knew they were in a race, but they had done this before with a rocket to suborbital space, and the simple design and mechanical controls of their system would surely help them accelerate their testing.
In a small airport just northwest of Oklahoma City, another space ship was taking shape. Rocketplane XP wasn’t yet ready for flight, not even for rollout, and wouldn’t be for months despite the money being funnelled from the orbital K-1 project to the annoyance of some shareholders. It was no smooth and sleek form of glossy white, like White Knight and Space Ship Two, or at least not yet. Base primer coats covered some parts, while others were still the bare black of carbon composites. The pylons which would hold its twin jet engines, giving it the ability to take to the air with no carrier plane, were still bare, trailing carefully labeled cable bundles and hydraulic lines. Just today a technician had been carefully working on the starboard pylon, installing the fuel lines allowing the craft’s kerosene tank to be tapped to power that engine. Tomorrow, he would do the same for the port engine. The build team leader’s phone buzzed, and he looked up from a discussion bent over a set of drawings with one of the technicians. It was a text from a California number, nothing but a photo of a white form silhouetted against a cloudless blue sky. He frowned, but shook his head. They knew their craft was likely behind on the way to a first flight, and this just proved it, but the engineers working to finish Rocketplane and the advanced avionics and propulsion which would power it believed even if their system was second to fly--even if it was second to reach space--its design made it second to none for operations and safety. It didn’t make it less frustrating as the team turned back to work.
In a small airport just northwest of Oklahoma City, another space ship was taking shape. Rocketplane XP wasn’t yet ready for flight, not even for rollout, and wouldn’t be for months despite the money being funnelled from the orbital K-1 project to the annoyance of some shareholders. It was no smooth and sleek form of glossy white, like White Knight and Space Ship Two, or at least not yet. Base primer coats covered some parts, while others were still the bare black of carbon composites. The pylons which would hold its twin jet engines, giving it the ability to take to the air with no carrier plane, were still bare, trailing carefully labeled cable bundles and hydraulic lines. Just today a technician had been carefully working on the starboard pylon, installing the fuel lines allowing the craft’s kerosene tank to be tapped to power that engine. Tomorrow, he would do the same for the port engine. The build team leader’s phone buzzed, and he looked up from a discussion bent over a set of drawings with one of the technicians. It was a text from a California number, nothing but a photo of a white form silhouetted against a cloudless blue sky. He frowned, but shook his head. They knew their craft was likely behind on the way to a first flight, and this just proved it, but the engineers working to finish Rocketplane and the advanced avionics and propulsion which would power it believed even if their system was second to fly--even if it was second to reach space--its design made it second to none for operations and safety. It didn’t make it less frustrating as the team turned back to work.
More competition in suborbital space tourism is always good. Though whether or not this causes anyone to get to market faster than they have OTL remains to be seen. Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic both move at a snail's (or turtle's) pace, but I'm not sure Rocketplane is going to be any faster given that they're funding themselves by taking money from the all-important K-1 project. To be fair, though, their system seems simpler than what Virgin have built and what Blue Origin will eventually, 5 years down the line, build.
March 23, 2010: LAP and Beluga at Woomera
As the sun beat down on the desert airstrip, jet engines rumbled to life as the giant ungainly airplane taxied clear of the hangar where it had been loaded. The Beluga’s engines whined as it taxied to the end of RAAF Woomera’s main runway, waiting its clearance to take to the sky. While it did, the crew aboard finished their final checks. The flight engineer checked his gauges, then looked up at the ceiling above, which made up part of the cargo floor. This jaunt to Woomera and flight to the United States was a strange trip for a French flight crew who rarely left Europe. They had made this trip twice before, once each to carry the LAP and OV out to Woomera in the first place, as the two massive spacecraft could only fly solo even in a bay as cavernous as the one which made up the Beluga’s bulbous shape. That had been a delivery flight, but now the LAP was headed back stateside--the first flight of several the Beluga and its crew had been chartered for. It would take many legs, given the Beluga’s anemic range with cargo aboard, but they’d be familiar enough with the route, its stops, abort fields, and weather by the end of the charter. They weren’t just hired to fly the LAP home, but to make six total trips between Australia and the US, carrying both the LAP and OV to the States, then return them back to Woomera starting in the third week of April. The pilots shrugged it off--it was interesting flying, and good money. Clearly, it was worth it to RPK to haul their spacecraft most of the way around the world and back. The plane rumbled down the runway with a spacecraft as its cargo and lumbered into the air, and set its course. Final destination: KXMR.
Early April, 2010: OV Unberthing and Return to Earth
Originally, the K-1 demo had been set to spend a full month berthed to the International Space Station. In spaceflight as in so many other realms though, few plans survived fully intact through their entire execution. The launch of STS-131, and an MPLM full of scientific and station support payloads, had been anticipated as something which might drive changes to the mission. To accommodate the Shuttle’s tail and clear room for the MPLM to be removed from the cargo bay, the K-1’s bulk had been placed at Node 2’s zenith port. Similarly, the arrival and much shorter stay of the Space Shuttle would monopolize crew time, so plans had been made to focus crew efforts on the K-1 prior to the STS-131 arrival (or, should the launch of RPK-D been delayed, following Discovery’s departure). With the K-1’s launch and berthing proceeding relatively trouble-free, the unloading of the low-criticality supplies such as surplus crew meals which had been carried up and the loading of the garbage which would constitute the down-mass demonstration for the mission were already complete by the start of April.
According to STS-131’s original mission plans, the crew were to capture high-resolution imagery of the K-1 berthed to Node 2 zenith during their fly-around of the station prior to docking. The imagery of the K-1 OV had been specifically requested by RpK, who had plans for it as marketing and promotional material documenting their first flight to the station, and both NASA and RpK public relations representatives had salivated over the “passing of a torch” between the Space Shuttle and the first flight to the station by a new reusable vehicle. However, NASA’s PR team had found bigger fish to fry. NASA had found reasons which lead them to want the K-1--both the LAP and the OV--present in Florida in mid-April. There were operational concerns with unberthing the K-1 OV while the Space Shuttle was present, at least on the first mission. Even if the STS-131 mission launched on time, the OV would thus be “stuck” in space until it departed, leaving only a few days to get to Florida for the planned events.
This desire had already seen the LAP on its way inside the Beluga to head to the Cape. However, the question of the OV’s itinerary had been extensively discussed. It would take at least a few days after landing at Woomera to get the OV ready to ship, cutting loose the parachutes and removing propellants from the OV before transporting it overland to RAAF Woomera’s hangars to be loaded into the Beluga, which would then take several more days to move it Stateside. Thus, if the K-1 was going to be on-station for its photo-op with the Shuttle, it couldn’t make its date in Florida. In desperation, several more off-the-wall options were considered, including landing the OV stateside to begin with. However, the best prospect to meet schedule was ruled out--despite the convenience of simply parachuting the K-1 into Cape Canaveral in the nick of time like a movie star, the OV’s parachute landing system and relatively large landing dispersion meant there was nowhere within the cramped boundaries of the Cape which could provide the required 1.8 kilometer-diameter landing ellipse free of obstructions on short notice. Other options for landing the K-1 somewhere in the US to minimize the airlift needs were considered, but discarded--while Edwards Air Force Base was effectively ready to receive the K-1 without modifications to the facilities, it would require changes to the K-1’s software to be made in short order, and hardware would have to be airlifted from Woomera to Edwards in order to deservice the OV after flight and prepare it for loading into the Beluga. The same was true of the RpK facilities at Burns Flats, which couldn’t even offer the level of facilities available at Edwards, though it had already been considered as an alternate landing site for the K-1. NASA and RpK mission planners and PR teams worked to square the circle but came to hard realities: the K-1 OV simply couldn’t attend both events--they had to pick between the “passing of the torch” and imagery of K-1 at the station taken by the Shuttle and the schedule of events planned for the Cape. After weighing the plans, the latter was assigned higher priority, and the K-1 OV’s time on station was cut short, with promises to the RpK team that NASA would do their best to arrange for future imagery of a Shuttle and K-1 on-station at the same time if possible.
The K-1 OV was dutifully prepared for departure and unberthed from the station on April 5th, the same day as Discovery’s launch, and once more floated free heading for home with a successful flight behind it. Though Jean Pierre’s team had monitored it carefully, the trick of plotting a course from the station’s orbit to a landing at Woomera using precisely the right amount of propellant to land with dry tanks was one that the K-1’s avionics could handle almost in its sleep. By the time Discovery docked to the station on April 7th, the initial phases of preparing the OV for shipment were wrapping up, and the Beluga had arrived back from its delivery of the LAp to the Cape. By the time the crew of STS-131 and Expedition 22 set to work to unload the MPLM on the 10th of April, the K-1 was arriving at the Cape. There were precious few days to prepare it for an important presentation, then both it and the LAP would have to ship once more back to Woomera to begin to prepare for their next flight to the station. This had been planned for June, but of course plans in spaceflight were hardly immune from changes. It would depend on the situation when the K-1 LAP and OV were able to return to Woomera and begin preparations for their next flight.
According to STS-131’s original mission plans, the crew were to capture high-resolution imagery of the K-1 berthed to Node 2 zenith during their fly-around of the station prior to docking. The imagery of the K-1 OV had been specifically requested by RpK, who had plans for it as marketing and promotional material documenting their first flight to the station, and both NASA and RpK public relations representatives had salivated over the “passing of a torch” between the Space Shuttle and the first flight to the station by a new reusable vehicle. However, NASA’s PR team had found bigger fish to fry. NASA had found reasons which lead them to want the K-1--both the LAP and the OV--present in Florida in mid-April. There were operational concerns with unberthing the K-1 OV while the Space Shuttle was present, at least on the first mission. Even if the STS-131 mission launched on time, the OV would thus be “stuck” in space until it departed, leaving only a few days to get to Florida for the planned events.
This desire had already seen the LAP on its way inside the Beluga to head to the Cape. However, the question of the OV’s itinerary had been extensively discussed. It would take at least a few days after landing at Woomera to get the OV ready to ship, cutting loose the parachutes and removing propellants from the OV before transporting it overland to RAAF Woomera’s hangars to be loaded into the Beluga, which would then take several more days to move it Stateside. Thus, if the K-1 was going to be on-station for its photo-op with the Shuttle, it couldn’t make its date in Florida. In desperation, several more off-the-wall options were considered, including landing the OV stateside to begin with. However, the best prospect to meet schedule was ruled out--despite the convenience of simply parachuting the K-1 into Cape Canaveral in the nick of time like a movie star, the OV’s parachute landing system and relatively large landing dispersion meant there was nowhere within the cramped boundaries of the Cape which could provide the required 1.8 kilometer-diameter landing ellipse free of obstructions on short notice. Other options for landing the K-1 somewhere in the US to minimize the airlift needs were considered, but discarded--while Edwards Air Force Base was effectively ready to receive the K-1 without modifications to the facilities, it would require changes to the K-1’s software to be made in short order, and hardware would have to be airlifted from Woomera to Edwards in order to deservice the OV after flight and prepare it for loading into the Beluga. The same was true of the RpK facilities at Burns Flats, which couldn’t even offer the level of facilities available at Edwards, though it had already been considered as an alternate landing site for the K-1. NASA and RpK mission planners and PR teams worked to square the circle but came to hard realities: the K-1 OV simply couldn’t attend both events--they had to pick between the “passing of the torch” and imagery of K-1 at the station taken by the Shuttle and the schedule of events planned for the Cape. After weighing the plans, the latter was assigned higher priority, and the K-1 OV’s time on station was cut short, with promises to the RpK team that NASA would do their best to arrange for future imagery of a Shuttle and K-1 on-station at the same time if possible.
The K-1 OV was dutifully prepared for departure and unberthed from the station on April 5th, the same day as Discovery’s launch, and once more floated free heading for home with a successful flight behind it. Though Jean Pierre’s team had monitored it carefully, the trick of plotting a course from the station’s orbit to a landing at Woomera using precisely the right amount of propellant to land with dry tanks was one that the K-1’s avionics could handle almost in its sleep. By the time Discovery docked to the station on April 7th, the initial phases of preparing the OV for shipment were wrapping up, and the Beluga had arrived back from its delivery of the LAp to the Cape. By the time the crew of STS-131 and Expedition 22 set to work to unload the MPLM on the 10th of April, the K-1 was arriving at the Cape. There were precious few days to prepare it for an important presentation, then both it and the LAP would have to ship once more back to Woomera to begin to prepare for their next flight to the station. This had been planned for June, but of course plans in spaceflight were hardly immune from changes. It would depend on the situation when the K-1 LAP and OV were able to return to Woomera and begin preparations for their next flight.
So the K-1 will be at the Cape in mid-April, which is historically when President Obama made is not-well-received speech. Having a nearly-operational (the unpressurized demo flight hasn't been flown yet) cargo vehicle behind him certainly puts the prospect of commercial vehicles replacing the shuttle in a different light (Falcon 9 still hasn't flown a boilerplate mission yet).
April 15, 2010: Obama KSC Visit
The weather for April 15th could not have been better. The atmosphere seemed determined to match the efforts which had been spent by mere mortals to prepare for the visit of the President of the United States to Kennedy Space Center, offering up a perfectly blue sky and weather almost perfectly comfortable. Only the odd patch of cumulus spotted the sky, enhancing the scenic backdrops as Air Force One landed at the Cape and the President and his entourage wandered through the arranged sights. The VAB, where the Space Shuttle Atlantis had been lifted and mated to the External Tank only days before in preparation for the STS-132 mission, drew the usual awe at the scale of the equipment contained within and the skill and care of the crews working there. However, for all that operations of the shuttle preparation crews as usual were proceeding smoothly and with regularity, there was little time left for them to practice their trades--a fact not far from the minds either of the workers in the VAB as the President was walked around the building, nor of Senator Bill Nelson or other representatives of the Florida Congressional delegation trailing along in the procession and pausing to pose for photographs. There were precious few Shuttle flights left, and they and their constituents needed more than vague promises--they needed assurances of a future.
The staff at the VAB couldn’t help feeling that the President didn’t value them much, especially given how much more time the President spent outside the main KSC facilities, touring the flown K-1 stages, displayed outside at the Skid Strip, and the Falcon 9 rocket being readied for its first launch in the upcoming months. The President’s plan, they worried, saw no future in their jobs--only in these new vehicles. Their costs might have been low, but so were their capabilities and their flight histories. Bill Nelson’s presence in the tours caught more than a few eyes. Press pool photographers eagerly captured shots of SpaceX’s Elon Musk leading the president, with his coat slung in a carefully calculated impression of casualness over his shoulder, around the confines of LC 41, where the maiden Falcon 9 rocket awaited. However, the canny noted , Nelson talking to SpaceX executives about the licensing processes for preparing the LC 41 site for operations and some of the crew who had left positions with USA, ULA, Sea Launch, or NASA itself to go work for Musk’s startup. While George French and other RpK worthies walked the President around the displays of the K-1 stages near the skid strip, Nelson talked with some of the engineers about the issues they had found in trying to land the K-1 OV from orbit at KSC in the unsuccessful quest to avoid having to land in Australia and then fly around the Earth by aircraft, and offered to have his office look into surveys to see how Florida might solve the problems in the future.
The nine Merlin 1D engines in their squared off arrangement at the base of the Falcon 9 and the line of NK-33s down the center of the tubby K-1 LAP expressed clear power, the power behind their hosts’ reach to orbit. The power Nelson offered to his hosts--the rocket companies, and the President--was less apparent, but no less important. However, all engines had to be primed for them to support a successful launch with their powers, and Bill Nelson was no different. Even with what he’d seen and heard today, he hadn’t yet seen enough in the President’s vision to offset the damage that no heavy lifter and no crew launch from Kennedy Space Center for the better part of a decade might bring--both in his district, and to the space program as a whole. However, as the President took to the stage, Nelson found himself more thoughtful of what a compromise might look like around the President’s ideas than he had expected to be when the plans were originally crossing his staffer’s desks a little over two and a half months before.
The sight of the newest reusable vehicle in the world, presented for their inspection as a trophy or tribute, might have also been on the thoughts of KSC staffers as they were ushered into the audience for the President’s speech. His words echoed out over the hangar. He began with the usual platitudes about the history of the space program, and how it had inspired many who had come and stood in gatherings like these before him. However, he also stood there as the person who came promising changes and cuts to what had been some of the most important programs people in the room were looking forward--the staff and visitors on the floor as well as the senators and representatives standing on the podium with him--and he faced this audience’s concerns head on with straightforward and clear-cut language, defending his positions even as he acknowledged what they might mean for people watching him that day.
"...So let me start by being extremely clear: I am 100 percent committed to the mission of NASA and its future. (Applause.) Because broadening our capabilities in space will continue to serve our society in ways that we can scarcely imagine. Because exploration will once more inspire wonder in a new generation -- sparking passions and launching careers. And because, ultimately, if we fail to press forward in the pursuit of discovery, we are ceding our future and we are ceding that essential element of the American character.”
“I know there have been a number of questions raised about my administration’s plan for space exploration, especially in this part of Florida where so many rely on NASA as a source of income as well as a source of pride and community. And these questions come at a time of transition, as the space shuttle nears its scheduled retirement after almost 30 years of service. And understandably, this adds to the worries of folks concerned not only about their own futures but about the future of the space program to which they’ve devoted their lives.“
“But I also know that underlying these concerns is a deeper worry, one that precedes not only this plan but this administration. It stems from the sense that people in Washington -- driven sometimes less by vision than by politics -- have for years neglected NASA’s mission and undermined the work of the professionals who fulfill it. We’ve seen that in the NASA budget, which has risen and fallen with the political winds.“
“But we can also see it in other ways: in the reluctance of those who hold office to set clear, achievable objectives; to provide the resources to meet those objectives; and to justify not just these plans but the larger purpose of space exploration in the 21st century.”
"All that has to change. And with the strategy I’m outlining today, it will. We start by increasing NASA’s budget by $6 billion over the next five years, even.." The president paused briefly over the applause, as the audience had expected him to finish the thought there, then continued over the clapping. "I want people to understand the context of this. This is happening even as we have instituted a freeze on discretionary spending and sought to make cuts elsewhere in the budget…”
Faces looked on. They had applauded the budget raise--of course they had--but the question remained of what that money would be spent on--and this was perhaps more truth than they were used to getting from politicians come to make grand speeches on the backs of the history of the space program. If not neglected, what new plans could be offered to depend on that financing, if indeed the President put his efforts into working with the Congress to make it happen? Obama continued to lay out his plans:
“...We will extend the life of the International Space Station likely by more than five years, while actually using it for its intended purpose: conducting advanced research that can help improve the daily lives of people here on Earth, as well as testing and improving upon our capabilities in space. This includes technologies like more efficient life support systems that will help reduce the cost of future missions. And in order to reach the space station, we will work with a growing array of private companies competing to make getting to space easier and more affordable.”
The statement brought applause, but the President continued, knowing he wasn’t speaking just to the audience in this room, but those back in Congress and around the nation, who had watched the first K-1 launches and the preparations of the Falcon 9 rocket with skepticism, or even with concern. He and his speechwriters knew that in spite of the applause, some of those opposed to that plan were right here in the room with him, might indeed be sharing the stage.
“Now, I recognize that some have said it is unfeasible or unwise to work with the private sector in this way. I disagree. The truth is, NASA has always relied on private industry to help design and build the vehicles that carry astronauts to space, from the Mercury capsule that carried John Glenn into orbit nearly 50 years ago, to the space shuttle Discovery currently orbiting overhead. By buying the services of space transportation -- rather than the vehicles themselves -- we can continue to ensure rigorous safety standards are met. But we will also accelerate the pace of innovations as companies -- from young startups to established leaders -- compete to design and build and launch new means of carrying people and materials out of our atmosphere.”
“In addition, as part of this effort, we will build on the good work already done on the Orion crew capsule. I’ve directed Charlie Bolden to immediately begin developing a rescue vehicle using this technology, so we are not forced to rely on foreign providers if it becomes necessary to quickly bring our people home from the International Space Station. And this Orion effort will be part of the technological foundation for advanced spacecraft to be used in future deep space missions. In fact, Orion will be readied for flight right here in this room.”
“Next, we will invest more than $3 billion to conduct research on an advanced “heavy lift rocket” -- a vehicle to efficiently send into orbit the crew capsules, propulsion systems, and large quantities of supplies needed to reach deep space. In developing this new vehicle, we will not only look at revising or modifying older models; we want to look at new designs, new materials, new technologies that will transform not just where we can go but what we can do when we get there. And we will finalize a rocket design no later than 2015 and then begin to build it.” The president continued, speaking over the applause that statement brought. “And I want everybody to understand: That’s at least two years earlier than previously planned -- and that’s conservative, given that the previous program was behind schedule and over budget.“
“At the same time, after decades of neglect, we will increase investment -- right away -- in other groundbreaking technologies that will allow astronauts to reach space sooner and more often, to travel farther and faster for less cost, and to live and work in space for longer periods of time more safely. That means tackling major scientific and technological challenges. How do we shield astronauts from radiation on longer missions? How do we harness resources on distant worlds? How do we supply spacecraft with energy needed for these far-reaching journeys? These are questions that we can answer and will answer. And these are the questions whose answers no doubt will reap untold benefits right here on Earth.“
“So the point is what we’re looking for is not just to continue on the same path -- we want to leap into the future; we want major breakthroughs; a transformative agenda for NASA.”
Applause--some polite, some more enthusiastic--echoed around the room. However, the most important audience was the senators, congressmen, and their staff members watching the speech or reading transcripts of it later. The White House’s initial 2010 plan--as arguably smart as it had been, had been presented in a way that made it a poison pill. Now, the President was offering important changes: a path forward to spare Orion and a new heavy lift vehicle program ,if not Ares V or Ares I. The President was demonstrating his willingness to compromise, to offer some of what Congress wanted to hear, but still insisting on some of the core elements of the plan--new technology development, increased use of commercial vehicles like the K-1 or the Falcon 9, and a delay to any immediate efforts to build a new heavy lift vehicle depending on the forty year old technologies of the past when so much might soon be changing about the future. Given the political winds in the capital, it would likely be fall before anything would come of a compromise, but it would now be up to Senators like Bill Nelson and Richard Shelby to decide how much of this vision might make it into the policy that crossed their desks. The President had proposed a vision, but now Congress would have their chance to shape how--if at all-that vision was authorized. Bill Nelson left the room that day pondering the vehicles he’d seen, the conversations he’d had, and the speech he’d heard. As a leader in the President’s party in the Senate, a spaceflight participant himself, and a leader in spaceflight policy, there had been wide speculation that if any compromise was to come out of Congress, its creation would have to be largely lead from his office.
Notes: All the speech text is historical, from the actual speech Obama gave that day. The contrasts with Constellation (and with Artemis today) are remarkable and striking. With more proof of the benefits of private spaceflight in hand, and sitting out for display around Kennedy Space Center, will things turn out differently? We'll have to see...
The staff at the VAB couldn’t help feeling that the President didn’t value them much, especially given how much more time the President spent outside the main KSC facilities, touring the flown K-1 stages, displayed outside at the Skid Strip, and the Falcon 9 rocket being readied for its first launch in the upcoming months. The President’s plan, they worried, saw no future in their jobs--only in these new vehicles. Their costs might have been low, but so were their capabilities and their flight histories. Bill Nelson’s presence in the tours caught more than a few eyes. Press pool photographers eagerly captured shots of SpaceX’s Elon Musk leading the president, with his coat slung in a carefully calculated impression of casualness over his shoulder, around the confines of LC 41, where the maiden Falcon 9 rocket awaited. However, the canny noted , Nelson talking to SpaceX executives about the licensing processes for preparing the LC 41 site for operations and some of the crew who had left positions with USA, ULA, Sea Launch, or NASA itself to go work for Musk’s startup. While George French and other RpK worthies walked the President around the displays of the K-1 stages near the skid strip, Nelson talked with some of the engineers about the issues they had found in trying to land the K-1 OV from orbit at KSC in the unsuccessful quest to avoid having to land in Australia and then fly around the Earth by aircraft, and offered to have his office look into surveys to see how Florida might solve the problems in the future.
The nine Merlin 1D engines in their squared off arrangement at the base of the Falcon 9 and the line of NK-33s down the center of the tubby K-1 LAP expressed clear power, the power behind their hosts’ reach to orbit. The power Nelson offered to his hosts--the rocket companies, and the President--was less apparent, but no less important. However, all engines had to be primed for them to support a successful launch with their powers, and Bill Nelson was no different. Even with what he’d seen and heard today, he hadn’t yet seen enough in the President’s vision to offset the damage that no heavy lifter and no crew launch from Kennedy Space Center for the better part of a decade might bring--both in his district, and to the space program as a whole. However, as the President took to the stage, Nelson found himself more thoughtful of what a compromise might look like around the President’s ideas than he had expected to be when the plans were originally crossing his staffer’s desks a little over two and a half months before.
The sight of the newest reusable vehicle in the world, presented for their inspection as a trophy or tribute, might have also been on the thoughts of KSC staffers as they were ushered into the audience for the President’s speech. His words echoed out over the hangar. He began with the usual platitudes about the history of the space program, and how it had inspired many who had come and stood in gatherings like these before him. However, he also stood there as the person who came promising changes and cuts to what had been some of the most important programs people in the room were looking forward--the staff and visitors on the floor as well as the senators and representatives standing on the podium with him--and he faced this audience’s concerns head on with straightforward and clear-cut language, defending his positions even as he acknowledged what they might mean for people watching him that day.
"...So let me start by being extremely clear: I am 100 percent committed to the mission of NASA and its future. (Applause.) Because broadening our capabilities in space will continue to serve our society in ways that we can scarcely imagine. Because exploration will once more inspire wonder in a new generation -- sparking passions and launching careers. And because, ultimately, if we fail to press forward in the pursuit of discovery, we are ceding our future and we are ceding that essential element of the American character.”
“I know there have been a number of questions raised about my administration’s plan for space exploration, especially in this part of Florida where so many rely on NASA as a source of income as well as a source of pride and community. And these questions come at a time of transition, as the space shuttle nears its scheduled retirement after almost 30 years of service. And understandably, this adds to the worries of folks concerned not only about their own futures but about the future of the space program to which they’ve devoted their lives.“
“But I also know that underlying these concerns is a deeper worry, one that precedes not only this plan but this administration. It stems from the sense that people in Washington -- driven sometimes less by vision than by politics -- have for years neglected NASA’s mission and undermined the work of the professionals who fulfill it. We’ve seen that in the NASA budget, which has risen and fallen with the political winds.“
“But we can also see it in other ways: in the reluctance of those who hold office to set clear, achievable objectives; to provide the resources to meet those objectives; and to justify not just these plans but the larger purpose of space exploration in the 21st century.”
"All that has to change. And with the strategy I’m outlining today, it will. We start by increasing NASA’s budget by $6 billion over the next five years, even.." The president paused briefly over the applause, as the audience had expected him to finish the thought there, then continued over the clapping. "I want people to understand the context of this. This is happening even as we have instituted a freeze on discretionary spending and sought to make cuts elsewhere in the budget…”
Faces looked on. They had applauded the budget raise--of course they had--but the question remained of what that money would be spent on--and this was perhaps more truth than they were used to getting from politicians come to make grand speeches on the backs of the history of the space program. If not neglected, what new plans could be offered to depend on that financing, if indeed the President put his efforts into working with the Congress to make it happen? Obama continued to lay out his plans:
“...We will extend the life of the International Space Station likely by more than five years, while actually using it for its intended purpose: conducting advanced research that can help improve the daily lives of people here on Earth, as well as testing and improving upon our capabilities in space. This includes technologies like more efficient life support systems that will help reduce the cost of future missions. And in order to reach the space station, we will work with a growing array of private companies competing to make getting to space easier and more affordable.”
The statement brought applause, but the President continued, knowing he wasn’t speaking just to the audience in this room, but those back in Congress and around the nation, who had watched the first K-1 launches and the preparations of the Falcon 9 rocket with skepticism, or even with concern. He and his speechwriters knew that in spite of the applause, some of those opposed to that plan were right here in the room with him, might indeed be sharing the stage.
“Now, I recognize that some have said it is unfeasible or unwise to work with the private sector in this way. I disagree. The truth is, NASA has always relied on private industry to help design and build the vehicles that carry astronauts to space, from the Mercury capsule that carried John Glenn into orbit nearly 50 years ago, to the space shuttle Discovery currently orbiting overhead. By buying the services of space transportation -- rather than the vehicles themselves -- we can continue to ensure rigorous safety standards are met. But we will also accelerate the pace of innovations as companies -- from young startups to established leaders -- compete to design and build and launch new means of carrying people and materials out of our atmosphere.”
“In addition, as part of this effort, we will build on the good work already done on the Orion crew capsule. I’ve directed Charlie Bolden to immediately begin developing a rescue vehicle using this technology, so we are not forced to rely on foreign providers if it becomes necessary to quickly bring our people home from the International Space Station. And this Orion effort will be part of the technological foundation for advanced spacecraft to be used in future deep space missions. In fact, Orion will be readied for flight right here in this room.”
“Next, we will invest more than $3 billion to conduct research on an advanced “heavy lift rocket” -- a vehicle to efficiently send into orbit the crew capsules, propulsion systems, and large quantities of supplies needed to reach deep space. In developing this new vehicle, we will not only look at revising or modifying older models; we want to look at new designs, new materials, new technologies that will transform not just where we can go but what we can do when we get there. And we will finalize a rocket design no later than 2015 and then begin to build it.” The president continued, speaking over the applause that statement brought. “And I want everybody to understand: That’s at least two years earlier than previously planned -- and that’s conservative, given that the previous program was behind schedule and over budget.“
“At the same time, after decades of neglect, we will increase investment -- right away -- in other groundbreaking technologies that will allow astronauts to reach space sooner and more often, to travel farther and faster for less cost, and to live and work in space for longer periods of time more safely. That means tackling major scientific and technological challenges. How do we shield astronauts from radiation on longer missions? How do we harness resources on distant worlds? How do we supply spacecraft with energy needed for these far-reaching journeys? These are questions that we can answer and will answer. And these are the questions whose answers no doubt will reap untold benefits right here on Earth.“
“So the point is what we’re looking for is not just to continue on the same path -- we want to leap into the future; we want major breakthroughs; a transformative agenda for NASA.”
Applause--some polite, some more enthusiastic--echoed around the room. However, the most important audience was the senators, congressmen, and their staff members watching the speech or reading transcripts of it later. The White House’s initial 2010 plan--as arguably smart as it had been, had been presented in a way that made it a poison pill. Now, the President was offering important changes: a path forward to spare Orion and a new heavy lift vehicle program ,if not Ares V or Ares I. The President was demonstrating his willingness to compromise, to offer some of what Congress wanted to hear, but still insisting on some of the core elements of the plan--new technology development, increased use of commercial vehicles like the K-1 or the Falcon 9, and a delay to any immediate efforts to build a new heavy lift vehicle depending on the forty year old technologies of the past when so much might soon be changing about the future. Given the political winds in the capital, it would likely be fall before anything would come of a compromise, but it would now be up to Senators like Bill Nelson and Richard Shelby to decide how much of this vision might make it into the policy that crossed their desks. The President had proposed a vision, but now Congress would have their chance to shape how--if at all-that vision was authorized. Bill Nelson left the room that day pondering the vehicles he’d seen, the conversations he’d had, and the speech he’d heard. As a leader in the President’s party in the Senate, a spaceflight participant himself, and a leader in spaceflight policy, there had been wide speculation that if any compromise was to come out of Congress, its creation would have to be largely lead from his office.
Notes: All the speech text is historical, from the actual speech Obama gave that day. The contrasts with Constellation (and with Artemis today) are remarkable and striking. With more proof of the benefits of private spaceflight in hand, and sitting out for display around Kennedy Space Center, will things turn out differently? We'll have to see...
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Nicely done--and I like your use of the phrase "tribute or trophy." Very Right Stuff, 'Single-Combat Warrior'-esque language.
I sometimes wonder why the popular narrative just seems to forget the NASA contractors. I distinctly remember being, even in 2011, very confused about people acting like the new policy was something revolutionary. A lot of the contractors are a bit more obscure, admittedly, but Boeing, at least, is still a household name--so why is its (and its parent companies') role in spacecraft development so easily forgotten?
I sometimes wonder why the popular narrative just seems to forget the NASA contractors. I distinctly remember being, even in 2011, very confused about people acting like the new policy was something revolutionary. A lot of the contractors are a bit more obscure, admittedly, but Boeing, at least, is still a household name--so why is its (and its parent companies') role in spacecraft development so easily forgotten?
Thank you, I liked the image of that, which is part of why I had them make the decision to have the K-1 hauled all the way to KSC for the event (which is arguable from a PR-value-per-logistics-dollar perspective). They want to have both the COTS competitors there if they can, both as part of the tribute to KSC as the home of American spaceflight, but also so they can show off the one that's actually flown to the station to the nay-sayers, especially since as OTL Obama's going to be photographed walking around in front of Falcon 9 with Elon, who even in this timeline is probably more of a lightning rod for critique of the "commercial focus," RpK having more of a safe background in the conventional contractor scene--it was a George Mueller design, after all, with Draper Labs guidance and 1970s-vintage engines! That makes it practically an Apollo-heritage project! Even if it's the one that, in fact, can't and maybe won't fly from KSC unless something changes to help it find a home. After all, RpK's planned US home wasn't Florida--it was Nevada.
I think a lot of that is owed to Elon's...special brand of bombast. Still, there was something unique about COTS compared to past competitions, and maybe even compared to CCDev as it has been executed--it was fine for one competitor to fail. The vehicle's were NASA's to purchase on delivery, but not NASA products. When Shuttle or Apollo or Mercury or Gemini went up, they might have been provided in parts by various contractors, but they always had NASA control over the top of that. SpaceX leading COTS to the finish line with a completely-SpaceX-provided solution meant every article was about how it was SpaceX delivering what NASA wanted, not the more traditional story of NASA paying someone to develop NASA's new vehicle. Note that Antares/Cygnus gets a little less of that kind of coverage...though maybe because they have far fewer other customers, and because Orbital Sciences/OrbATK/Northrop Grumman have bounced around a lot in corporate mergers. It may be interesting to see both how that plays out in this timeline, with a more conventional and slightly less bombastic company out in front, one with substantial NASA-heritage...
I was stuck on this for a while trying to figure out how much speech I wanted to include and how to get a viewpoint on the TL going forward that makes it easier to cover events, so I might switch to a slightly more conventional style for parts of it to try to get to the butterflies a bit faster, now that we've thoroughly established how things have been set up to change.
Well, at least ITTL there's already something to demonstrate the viability of commercial suppliers providing the Service - as opposed to just the parts which NASA then uses as its own - by the time this speech is made. And if I'm reading it right, an earlier willingness to compromise/offer concessions on the part of the current Administration could have butterflies down the road - though could, is the watchword here for me.
As noted, this is actually as-OTL. It's just IOTL, this was what eventually lead down the path of the MPCV resurrection of Orion and SLS coming out of the heavy lift--after all, we "knew" the best path forward and thus there wasn't a reason to wait. Here, there's a bit more reason to argue it's worth waiting a couple years to see if this whole first-stage reuse pays off, and if maybe orbital stage reuse doesn't have to be as expensive as Shuttle.
April 15-18: Followup to Obama Speech
The President’s visit to KSC came in the midst of a war of whispers in Congressional offices and executive suites, escalating to a full-on shouting match in editorial pages, comment boxes, and internet forums. Only those busy preparing their hardware for flight were fully distracted from the fray, whichever system they were supporting. In the VAB, Atlantis was being prepared for her final flight, the STS-132 mission carrying the Rassvet mini-research module. Elsewhere on KSC grounds, that meant working through the ground interfaces as the maiden Falcon 9 came to the pad for the first time and new and experienced engineers went about the business of breaking in the newly reconstructed LC-41 for this launch and any which might come after. Elsewhere and Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, that was RpK employees carefully overseeing the loading of the K-1 LAP into the Beluga transport aircraft to begin its return trip to Woomera, while the OV was moved to a temporary display site under an awning for weather protection near the KSC Visitor’s Center. With only one Beluga rented for the ferry trip home, one stage or the other had to go first, and NASA’s COTS office and RpK had decided to get every dollar of promotional value which could be wrung out of the vehicle’s shipment stateside. They had decided to save the OV and cargo pod’s shipment for second to enable more of the general public to have a chance to have their imaginations captured by the semi-sized stage which RpK, at least, was promoting as heir to the legacy of Shuttle--not the Shuttle that had flown ,but the Shuttle which had been dreamed of in the 1970s forty years before.
Outside of Florida, others were hard at work on hardware, too. The SpaceShipTwo team were hard at work preparing Enterprise for her second captive carry flight, incorporating data from a month before as they prepared for a second flight in another month. In a workshop at a small airstrip north of Oklahoma City, the Rocketplane team were hard at work on their own first airframe, working hard to catch up to their rivals. Bit by bit, Gantt charts filled in and unexpected issues were knocked out as skin panels began to cover the base structural frames around the propellant tanks and engine mounts, while avionics and interfaces began to slowly light up one-by one as hardware testing ramped up. In the main engineering offices of the company less than twenty minutes away by the main Oklahoma airport, an excitement built as the plane came together day by day, an electrifying feeling felt around the bullpen more than the far-off work on K-1 in Woomera, Florida, or Michoud, where ATK had finally persuaded RpK to begin the process of constructing the second flight set of vehicles, LAP-2 and OV-2.
The same feelings were distracting me from catching up on dozens of pages of thread progress tearing apart every new set of tea leaves of draft legislation, editorials, and congressional happenings. I spent the day the President was in Florida either behind the wheel or sleeping in my mom’s ragged old Honda minivan, towing a U-haul trailer full of college students and gear at remarkable speeds along the highways from Ohio to Witchita, Kansas. Secure in a shipping box as we barrelled along the highway was the product of much of my freshman year’s free time: Tank On Mars, the overbuilt and ragged-looking remote control aircraft which represented our school’s entry in the AIAA Design, Build, Fly competition. The long hours and high stress of getting the fuselage, wings, tails, and other systems built and tested had certainly weighed in my head as I made my own evaluations of the space news of the past months. TOM had made only a few test flights before the competition we were headed to, and none had been trouble free--on our maiden flight, the landing gear had liberated and continued rolling along the runway as the plane lifted its bulk into the dusk sky at the local model aircraft club. Only our pilot’s consummate skill and our team’s Grumman-like approach to overbuilding structures had brought it down in one piece for a belly landing on the grass beside the strip. A second flight day next weekend had hardly gone better, and now we were headed to compete against dozens of better funded, better equipped teams with a notepaper list of last-minute fixes and improvements to be made with the tools and materials we were bringing with us to the competition site. A math test, with its lovecraftian nightmares of eigenspace matrices turning vectors into integers, loomed large in my future next week...but I had almost no time to make any appropriate preparations, not even proper sleep.
The weekend of competition itself was a whirlwind of assembly and maintenance work, practicing the drill of assembling our oversized airplane in under five minutes, and admiring the work of teams better funded and provisioned than our team. What time was left was spent either on the flight line, watching our competition's flights or sprawled exhausted within the marked out box provided for our team in the Cessna hangar facility temporarily given over to the competition's use. Our plane, with its ten foot wingspan assembled, nearly filled a diagonal of the space, with our team clustered into the remaining corners, so I spent a fair time when we weren’t working circulating around the flight line and hangar instead of working on cramming my brain for an eigentest I was pretty sure was I going to eigenfail. In the process, I spotted one of the orange-shirted students from one of the local schools considered likely favorites to win, Oklahoma State University, bearing a familiar logo on their hat. The three letters I saw--RpK--were as close to a combined brand as Rocketplane Kistler had, which I was more familiar with emblazoned on the side of the K-1 or on the newer artwork circulating of their maiden Rocketplane XP aircraft.
A brief flightline-adjacent stalking session finally gave me the opportunity to attempt to “happen’ to saddle up and try to smoothly open conversation with an observation on the plane currently flying. The older student gave me a look, but replied, and I managed to only half-obviously transition the conversation to the Rocketplane hat and discover that, indeed, they had spent a semester or two interning at RpK’s engineering headquarters in Oklahoma City. My interest was more obvious than I attempted to hide, but they were some combination of amused by the interest or enjoying lording their “insider” knowledge over someone on the “outside,” and they let slip a few details. I had already known the progress on the XP, which I’d been following off and on, and more details about its construction were interesting, though not thrilling--though it was exciting to think that this student, only a few years older than me, had designed brackets and pipe fittings for secondary systems which were even now being installed on the spaceplane.
However, when I mentioned I was perhaps more interested in the orbital K-1, their interest began to wane even as mine increased. As it turned out, they’d also learned very little about it, as much of the engineering was either complete or run out of subcontractor offices, and while they offered their experience of watching the missions fly from the OKC control room, about all they could offer that was new was their reply to my comment about what a pity it was that the K-1 was so small. In some sense, I said, it was the Shuttle we’d always been promised at half or one-third scale. This brought an enigmatic smile. “That might change,” they said. It was a moment that stuck with me through two crash landings at competition that ended our hopes of finishing above the tenth percentile of teams, the drive back to campus, and the crash and burn on my exam which was the inevitable result of too much stress and too little study or sleep. Who cared, really? I passed, at least, the plane had flown if not landed, and a new age of spaceflight might be working its embryonic way to flight as I followed it into the quickly-approaching summer.
Outside of Florida, others were hard at work on hardware, too. The SpaceShipTwo team were hard at work preparing Enterprise for her second captive carry flight, incorporating data from a month before as they prepared for a second flight in another month. In a workshop at a small airstrip north of Oklahoma City, the Rocketplane team were hard at work on their own first airframe, working hard to catch up to their rivals. Bit by bit, Gantt charts filled in and unexpected issues were knocked out as skin panels began to cover the base structural frames around the propellant tanks and engine mounts, while avionics and interfaces began to slowly light up one-by one as hardware testing ramped up. In the main engineering offices of the company less than twenty minutes away by the main Oklahoma airport, an excitement built as the plane came together day by day, an electrifying feeling felt around the bullpen more than the far-off work on K-1 in Woomera, Florida, or Michoud, where ATK had finally persuaded RpK to begin the process of constructing the second flight set of vehicles, LAP-2 and OV-2.
The same feelings were distracting me from catching up on dozens of pages of thread progress tearing apart every new set of tea leaves of draft legislation, editorials, and congressional happenings. I spent the day the President was in Florida either behind the wheel or sleeping in my mom’s ragged old Honda minivan, towing a U-haul trailer full of college students and gear at remarkable speeds along the highways from Ohio to Witchita, Kansas. Secure in a shipping box as we barrelled along the highway was the product of much of my freshman year’s free time: Tank On Mars, the overbuilt and ragged-looking remote control aircraft which represented our school’s entry in the AIAA Design, Build, Fly competition. The long hours and high stress of getting the fuselage, wings, tails, and other systems built and tested had certainly weighed in my head as I made my own evaluations of the space news of the past months. TOM had made only a few test flights before the competition we were headed to, and none had been trouble free--on our maiden flight, the landing gear had liberated and continued rolling along the runway as the plane lifted its bulk into the dusk sky at the local model aircraft club. Only our pilot’s consummate skill and our team’s Grumman-like approach to overbuilding structures had brought it down in one piece for a belly landing on the grass beside the strip. A second flight day next weekend had hardly gone better, and now we were headed to compete against dozens of better funded, better equipped teams with a notepaper list of last-minute fixes and improvements to be made with the tools and materials we were bringing with us to the competition site. A math test, with its lovecraftian nightmares of eigenspace matrices turning vectors into integers, loomed large in my future next week...but I had almost no time to make any appropriate preparations, not even proper sleep.
The weekend of competition itself was a whirlwind of assembly and maintenance work, practicing the drill of assembling our oversized airplane in under five minutes, and admiring the work of teams better funded and provisioned than our team. What time was left was spent either on the flight line, watching our competition's flights or sprawled exhausted within the marked out box provided for our team in the Cessna hangar facility temporarily given over to the competition's use. Our plane, with its ten foot wingspan assembled, nearly filled a diagonal of the space, with our team clustered into the remaining corners, so I spent a fair time when we weren’t working circulating around the flight line and hangar instead of working on cramming my brain for an eigentest I was pretty sure was I going to eigenfail. In the process, I spotted one of the orange-shirted students from one of the local schools considered likely favorites to win, Oklahoma State University, bearing a familiar logo on their hat. The three letters I saw--RpK--were as close to a combined brand as Rocketplane Kistler had, which I was more familiar with emblazoned on the side of the K-1 or on the newer artwork circulating of their maiden Rocketplane XP aircraft.
A brief flightline-adjacent stalking session finally gave me the opportunity to attempt to “happen’ to saddle up and try to smoothly open conversation with an observation on the plane currently flying. The older student gave me a look, but replied, and I managed to only half-obviously transition the conversation to the Rocketplane hat and discover that, indeed, they had spent a semester or two interning at RpK’s engineering headquarters in Oklahoma City. My interest was more obvious than I attempted to hide, but they were some combination of amused by the interest or enjoying lording their “insider” knowledge over someone on the “outside,” and they let slip a few details. I had already known the progress on the XP, which I’d been following off and on, and more details about its construction were interesting, though not thrilling--though it was exciting to think that this student, only a few years older than me, had designed brackets and pipe fittings for secondary systems which were even now being installed on the spaceplane.
However, when I mentioned I was perhaps more interested in the orbital K-1, their interest began to wane even as mine increased. As it turned out, they’d also learned very little about it, as much of the engineering was either complete or run out of subcontractor offices, and while they offered their experience of watching the missions fly from the OKC control room, about all they could offer that was new was their reply to my comment about what a pity it was that the K-1 was so small. In some sense, I said, it was the Shuttle we’d always been promised at half or one-third scale. This brought an enigmatic smile. “That might change,” they said. It was a moment that stuck with me through two crash landings at competition that ended our hopes of finishing above the tenth percentile of teams, the drive back to campus, and the crash and burn on my exam which was the inevitable result of too much stress and too little study or sleep. Who cared, really? I passed, at least, the plane had flown if not landed, and a new age of spaceflight might be working its embryonic way to flight as I followed it into the quickly-approaching summer.
May 28, 2010: A slow month and preparations for an exciting June
For some, the President's speech at KSC in April had brought some hope that the 2011 NASA budget debates might break through the logjam of mixed congressional and industry messaging and find a way to common ground in time to have language incorporated into something more than a continuing resolution. However, those hopes were dashed over the next month and a half, as congressional activity slowed in the wake of the ACA's passage and debates continued, many congressional representatives taking the President's revised priorities with a "thanks, I hate it" attitude. Work proceeded in May on readying Falcon 9 for its maiden launch, digesting the data from the static fire in March as work finished to prepare for flight termination systems certification with the range. I’d watched the static fire back several months ago, and the wait had now become almost interminable. Outside the US, the K-1 returned to its home at Woomera, and technicians began the work of preparing the OV and LAP for their second flight to the International Space Station, the final COTS demo, this time with the unpressurized cargo module aboard. In Michoud, work finally began on assembling the stockpiled long-lead items for LAP-2 and OV-2 as both ships began final assembly. With both K-1 and Falcon 9 headed for flights in June, the sense of anticipation built as I settled back in at home for the summer, eagerly digesting the latest debates on AmericanRocketNews and other sites in place of the stress of the final weeks of classes. It seemed like May brought much happening, but little to see externally.
However, at the same time, work continued on the so-called “zombie programs”--programs like Ares I and Ares V whose cancellation had been recommended by Augustine and requested by NASA and the President, but whose funding now continued along with the continuing resolution. While the programs began to lose people in ones and twos to transfers or departures to pastures under lower threat, others stayed, watching anxiously to see if their work would survive, or if the contracts they were working under would be revamped into another program, like the proposed alternate lower-cost and more direct Shuttle-derived HLVs which had been floated in some parts as a “compromise” between the President’s desire to see Ares V and Ares I ended and the money better spent on development of new technologies and a future improved HLV and the entrenched interests of space state congresspersons and senators in preventing job losses not just in ones and twos by in hundreds and thousands.
The most visible events for those not following day by day the internal struggles was the ongoing success of the Space Shuttle program as it closed out its flight schedule. For once, the sometimes-troubled launcher proceeded smoothly, lifting off to the Space Station with the Rassvet Russian research module on its first launch attempt. The legacy of Atlantis ran strong through what was then planned as her final mission as the orbiter proved its reusable heritage: the left-side aft dome SRB segment flown on the mission had made its own maiden flight on Atlantis debut STS-51J mission in 1985, and of the 12 booster components along for the ride (4 motor segments, a forward module, and a nozzle and aft equipment section on each booster) hardware was represented which had flown with Atlantis on 18 of her 32 missions. It was a demonstration of the reusability of the Shuttle system, if not its cost-effective reuse, but the very pick-and-mix nature of the hardware used on each of those 32 missions which mean that such a value could be achieved almost more by random chance than with any kind of planning pointed at the segmentation and heavy overhaul required by Shuttle’s SRBs. It would remain to be seen if the reusability proposed by the new competition--the K-1’s propulsive RTLS and parachute landings and the Falcon 9’s parachutes and ocean splashdowns--could truly exceed what had come before. As for Shuttle itself, it was its own kind of zombie program. Every successful mission was another milestone on a short path to the history books.
The debates surrounding the implications of the zombie Ares rockets and the end of the Shuttle were intense--some saw a chance that a program like that pushed for by DIRECT might yet fly, as a cheap and fast replacement program to preserve the Shuttle workforce without the expenses of new tooling, the 5-segment solid rocket boosters, and extensive money wasted on delays. However, others pushed alternative plans, arguing that the low-cost development of Falcon and the commercially-developed fully reusable K-1 indicated that the time for Shuttle hardware had passed--if anything new was to be built, better to ensure it was the best it could be, the latest and greatest. The former I had informally dubbed “HLV now” in my head, while the second was “HLV Soon”--though the expense and delays involved lead many of the former group to argue the latter might simply result in “HLV Never”. The two factions warred throughout the forums and web, arguing philosophy, budgets, and the interpretations of Congressional tea leaves. What did it mean that Nelson’s compromise bill had called for a 70 to 150-ton heavy lifter based on Ares I and Ares V contracting, one which might match DIRECT values if the units were read as US conventional short tons but might exceed what DIRECT could promise if read as long tons or metric tons? How did that compare to a similar request in the House bill, but which had named no performance goals and also stated a goal for commonality with contracting for any commercial crew vehicle development? What did it mean that Nelson had been much less aggressive in pushing his original bill text in the past several weeks? Speculation on these matters and others ran rampant.
As Atlantis gilded her way back to a runway in Flroida, tensions which had simmered over the relatively slow times of April and May began to come to a boil. By a quirk of range and space station scheduling, both of the commercial poster children were slotted to fly in June within a week of each other. The result, as both companies arranged their public relations schedules around these launches, was a whirlwind of events as two companies aimed to make their claim as the leader in commercial spaceflight, producing a frothing boil of speculatory threads. The thread which I tended to check most often was one I had created myself, based on my experience at competition talking to the former RpK intern. It was my first time posting a thread of my own on the forum, and I was nervous I might get ripped to shreds for daring to ask. Fortunately that had mostly failed to happen...
However, at the same time, work continued on the so-called “zombie programs”--programs like Ares I and Ares V whose cancellation had been recommended by Augustine and requested by NASA and the President, but whose funding now continued along with the continuing resolution. While the programs began to lose people in ones and twos to transfers or departures to pastures under lower threat, others stayed, watching anxiously to see if their work would survive, or if the contracts they were working under would be revamped into another program, like the proposed alternate lower-cost and more direct Shuttle-derived HLVs which had been floated in some parts as a “compromise” between the President’s desire to see Ares V and Ares I ended and the money better spent on development of new technologies and a future improved HLV and the entrenched interests of space state congresspersons and senators in preventing job losses not just in ones and twos by in hundreds and thousands.
The most visible events for those not following day by day the internal struggles was the ongoing success of the Space Shuttle program as it closed out its flight schedule. For once, the sometimes-troubled launcher proceeded smoothly, lifting off to the Space Station with the Rassvet Russian research module on its first launch attempt. The legacy of Atlantis ran strong through what was then planned as her final mission as the orbiter proved its reusable heritage: the left-side aft dome SRB segment flown on the mission had made its own maiden flight on Atlantis debut STS-51J mission in 1985, and of the 12 booster components along for the ride (4 motor segments, a forward module, and a nozzle and aft equipment section on each booster) hardware was represented which had flown with Atlantis on 18 of her 32 missions. It was a demonstration of the reusability of the Shuttle system, if not its cost-effective reuse, but the very pick-and-mix nature of the hardware used on each of those 32 missions which mean that such a value could be achieved almost more by random chance than with any kind of planning pointed at the segmentation and heavy overhaul required by Shuttle’s SRBs. It would remain to be seen if the reusability proposed by the new competition--the K-1’s propulsive RTLS and parachute landings and the Falcon 9’s parachutes and ocean splashdowns--could truly exceed what had come before. As for Shuttle itself, it was its own kind of zombie program. Every successful mission was another milestone on a short path to the history books.
The debates surrounding the implications of the zombie Ares rockets and the end of the Shuttle were intense--some saw a chance that a program like that pushed for by DIRECT might yet fly, as a cheap and fast replacement program to preserve the Shuttle workforce without the expenses of new tooling, the 5-segment solid rocket boosters, and extensive money wasted on delays. However, others pushed alternative plans, arguing that the low-cost development of Falcon and the commercially-developed fully reusable K-1 indicated that the time for Shuttle hardware had passed--if anything new was to be built, better to ensure it was the best it could be, the latest and greatest. The former I had informally dubbed “HLV now” in my head, while the second was “HLV Soon”--though the expense and delays involved lead many of the former group to argue the latter might simply result in “HLV Never”. The two factions warred throughout the forums and web, arguing philosophy, budgets, and the interpretations of Congressional tea leaves. What did it mean that Nelson’s compromise bill had called for a 70 to 150-ton heavy lifter based on Ares I and Ares V contracting, one which might match DIRECT values if the units were read as US conventional short tons but might exceed what DIRECT could promise if read as long tons or metric tons? How did that compare to a similar request in the House bill, but which had named no performance goals and also stated a goal for commonality with contracting for any commercial crew vehicle development? What did it mean that Nelson had been much less aggressive in pushing his original bill text in the past several weeks? Speculation on these matters and others ran rampant.
As Atlantis gilded her way back to a runway in Flroida, tensions which had simmered over the relatively slow times of April and May began to come to a boil. By a quirk of range and space station scheduling, both of the commercial poster children were slotted to fly in June within a week of each other. The result, as both companies arranged their public relations schedules around these launches, was a whirlwind of events as two companies aimed to make their claim as the leader in commercial spaceflight, producing a frothing boil of speculatory threads. The thread which I tended to check most often was one I had created myself, based on my experience at competition talking to the former RpK intern. It was my first time posting a thread of my own on the forum, and I was nervous I might get ripped to shreds for daring to ask. Fortunately that had mostly failed to happen...
”e of pi (05/26/10 02:21:19 PM)” said:
”Tim (05/26/10 05:04:22 PM)” said:
”RocketNerd1701 (05/26/10 08:37:20 PM)“ said:
”Tim (05/26/10 09:02:54 PM)” said:
”e of pi (05/26/10 11:17:53 PM)” said:
”Downton (05/27/10 09:26:10 AM)” said:
”UniversalSteve (05/27/10 12:32:15 PM)” said:
banderchuk (05/27/10 02:21:12 PM) said:
”excalibur99 (05/27/10 03:01:15 PM)” said:
”Downton (05/27/10 04:20:57)” said:
”ArnieH (05/27/10 05:14:21 PM)” said:
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Yeah, probably. Please take a special No Prize for preventing space probes from crashing into Mars. I think I was thinking of the long ton to metric ton conversion which does actually run the way I described where the metric value is smaller--the point of law over which was "supposed" to be intended is a bit obscure for me at this remove. It makes it even more perverse to be rooting to read the law in imperial units instead of "proper" metric values...
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