Kistling a Different Tune: Commercial Space in an Alternate Key

[e of pi]

ARN Forums: Commercial Vehicles: COTS Launcher Commercial Implications: Page (1) (2)

Forgive me if this is either stupid or has already been discussed, but I'm curious about the implications of the Kistler K-1 and SpaceX Falcon 9 COTS launchers on the commercial satellite market. Given their purpose is to deliver cargo to the station cheaper than could be done on Shuttle, it seems like they might have interesting possibilities for commercial satellites in addition to their ISS work. Does anyone know how much any of the comsat market players are interested in these rockets?

Nothing yet and probably not ever.

Can you elaborate on that a bit? Is that known for sure or just speculation? I’ve just joined and still trying to figure out what’s in the threads everywhere, and was hoping I could get a longer answer.

Welcome to the site! As far as publicly known, there’s no allocated commercial payloads for either launch vehicle, though you hear the odd rumor. There’s a reason for the lack of interest Tim alludes to, though. Small payload size is a problem for both companies. Kistler was sized for low orbital comsats originally, and it’s too small in mass and volume for any of the commercial busses, though it's very interesting as far as cost-per-kilogram to the station and for many of the smaller institutional launches Delta II currently carries. SpaceX’s Falcon 9 is bigger, at the top of the Delta class, which is more interesting for NASA and others. However, the commercial geostationary market is well above that size, so either rocket would need work to make it commercially viable.

Thanks Downton. Wouldn’t Falcon 9 Heavy address the lower payload limits? Is there anything comparable RPK could do?

Kistler already has plans for the use of flight proven kick stages for smaller GTO payloads - specifically those in the 1 to 1.5 ton class. While that is smaller than what Space Exploration Technologies can do, it’s not nothing. Rocketplane Kistler could even deliver small payloads to the moon, or Mars!

SpaceX Falcon Heavy is a really neat rocket. It seems like it can at least match Ariane V and others for capability! I know there’s a few threads trying to solve the single-launch capability for Kistler by assembling multiple missions

RocketNerd, I’d read a few of those earlier today and they’re part of what had gotten me thinking about what could be done with the current vehicle and with multiple launches, either by using a bigger kick stage or transfering fuel around like some of the prop depot concepts. That also seems like it’d have an interesting interaction with the SDHLV concepts for lunar missions…

Is there a way to solve the fairing problems for Kistler? At least as I understand it, SpaceX has a fairing planned for Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy, so that’s one problem they won’t have to solve for commercial payloads (or at least one they’re already working on).

There are indeed some pretty crazy ideas on this site for how to make Kistler work for comsats--things like docking two missions. The cost models are interesting, but the operational issues are more severe. Of course, that’s not the only way to solve capacity--SpaceX aren’t the only ones with plans if you have an ear to the ground in Oklahoma!

Crazy ideas don’t get customers. Both of them need to stop worrying about clever ideas like reusability (parachutes just don’t make for cheap reuse--the SRBs show this and both RpK and SpaceX are bound to learn it to their peril) and trying to run “lean” and face facts that they can’t play the game with the big boys unless they step up to the level of traditional competitors like Roscosmos, ULA, USA, and Arianespace.

Rocketplane Kistler’s entire model is based on reusability, and using flight proven methods. The parachutes, and airbags have both been seen to work as landing methods, and they have the mass margin to pull it off on both stages. I’d furthermore like to point that RpK’s cost target is less than half of what a Delta II costs (or a Pegasus for that matter), which means that they should be able to pick up a lot (if not all) of those small institutional payloads that today have to go up on expendables. Further, the thermal protection systems for the K-1 are mostly based on the parts of the shuttle TPS that are less difficult to work with - the thermal blankets on the top of the orbiters, not the tiles on the bottom.

Rocketplane’s Kistler is built entirely by the same legacy contractors who built Shuttle, though. I can’t wait to see it go up, but we’ll have to see after it launches if those promises hold up. I’d hate to get stuck in the same story again like happened with Shuttle, except now with even less payload on the groundbreaking reusable vehicle. SpaceX at least has plans for launching without reuse being required, and enough payload to do useful things--and plans for getting more with Falcon 9 Heavy.

They also avoid any burns after stage separation. The only thing that worries me for them is landing the engines in the water, but Elon has said even if they just get the thrust structure back in salvageable, not even reusable shape, it’s a plus! The better is the enemy of good, so “good enough” is the goal--even if that looks different from how it’s “usually” been thought of.

All right, everyone, I had to trim quite a few posts here. I think we all need to put away the handbags, let’s not have this turn into another locked thread about SpaceX “vs” Kistler or OldSpace “vs” NewSpace when the question was about how we can all work together. Despite the name, we like allrockets here at AmericanRocketNews, not just Shuttles!

 

[e of pi]

The tip of the Falcon 9 first stage core caught the last light of the sun as it sank below the Texas horizon. From the tip, one could see the lights of McGregor easily, and on the horizon the barely-visible lights of Waco. None, of course, held a candle to the one SpaceX was working to light here. This wasn’t the first Falcon 9 core they had fired, but it was instrumented heavily nonetheless--this would, if all went well, be the first to fly, and that meant extra data that was needed by NASA’s evaluations and by SpaceX’s own engineers back in Hawthorne. Sensors fed trail of wires down the side of the booster, held on every few meters with blue tape, The work they were doing hadn’t sprung from nothing, however--it built on the foundations of much of what had gone before. This 9-engine test of the first flight Falcon 9 built on the previous tests of qualification tanks and stages, and the single Merlin 1 had already been proven on Falcon 1 flights--indeed, the Falcon 9 engine section was massively overbuilt to allow them to us essentially the same actuator assembly as already used for the Falcon 1.

It wasn’t even just the Falcon foundations that this test built on: the test site and many of its structures and blockhouses dated back to the WWII Bluebonnet Ordnance Plant, then leveraged the grounds and facilities designed to be far from anything worthwhile in case of an explosion into a history of other applications. The core itself now rested on one of those foundations--the massive main vertical test stand, a giant blue tripod rising almost the core’s own height above the ground, the legacy of a Beal Aerospace engineer who had at some point calculated that it was cheaper and more effective to build a test stand far enough in the air to not need to dig a flame trench or a flame bucket than to build a traditional test stand. As the core test counted down and the sun-lit portion of the booster tracked ever higher towards its tip, nearly 140 meters above the ground, the steady boiloff from the tanks cut out as the stage began to build to flight pressure. McGregor’s residents were about to once again face the results of that decision by some unknown Beal Aerospace engineer, for while Beal hadn’t gotten a core in condition to use their large tripod stand, SpaceX now had, and thus McGregor got to appreciate that mounting the engines of the stage 70 meters above the ground gave acoustic waves from test firings near-direct line of propagation to the town itself.

While single engine Merlin tests were barely audible, not even the fountain of water which created an artificial Niagara at the top of the trip wrapping around the base of the tanks could prevent the fury of the nine Merlin engines from creating a roar which could be heard almost as far as Waco. The engineers in the blockhouse waited out the final seconds, then with a rush of white rising to a roar of flame with a brief moment of green TEA-TEB flash, the core was lit. In town, at least a few residents stopped what they were doing to look once again to the southwest. Alerted to be ready by the warnings of “louder than usual” rocket tests that always preceded uses of the tripod stand, at least one quickly tapped a stopwatch on their wristwatch, counting off the runtime of two or so minutes. When the roar from the distance stopped, leaving only the towering plume of smoke illuminated into a glow by the setting sun, one went in after a camera to post a picture and the runtime to the internet. Almost before the test results and data could be packaged and sent to Hawthorne, armchair engineers of all sorts of experience levels would be trying to read tea leaves into the sounds overheard on a clear, warm summer afternoon in Texas. The first flight core was through testing. The first flight second stage was to soon follow--the planning charts had it shipping to Texas from California by the end of the year--and with that done nothing would be between them and a maiden launch except the tiresome work of putting the vehicle together and testing it.

-----------------------------------

While the sun was setting on McGregor, it was rising high into the sky over Woomera, 17 hours ahead. The weather was as inconsistent as could have been expected from an Australian spring. The morning of September 29th when they’d rolled out the first stack on the transporter-erector, it’d been barely 9 Celsius in the morning, then peaked at 25C. The 30th had been hot, though, one of the first properly hot days of spring. It’d bounced between comfortable and the cool side of warm--particularly up on steel towers above the desert, 30 Celsius wasn’t particularly comfortable. Sweat had soaked fall harnesses as they worked, checking hoses and electrical lines. All of yesterday, while SpaceX had been preparing their tests in McGregor, the temperature had only slowly bled off the heat.

Today it was chilly again, a fact appreciated by the tank technicians as their chillers worked to pull enthalpy out of the kerosene and liquid oxygen, cooling the propellants ahead of the first full wet dress rehearsal for the K-1 program. It might have been a decade late, but for the first time the Woomera launch site was active and the launch mount was taking up the load of a filling K-1 stack. Preparations had begun around 9 in the morning, as small amounts of propellants had begun to circulate through the vehicle and its engines to begin chilling them down to the bitterly cold temperatures of densified propellants needed for the K-1’s high performance Russian engines. To minimize the time allowed for the sun to warm the tanks, the propellants didn’t begin loading until just two hours before the start of the test window. Now, the tanks were full, and the vehicle and the control staff were running through the full sequence of test preparations. While the propellants flowed out of the tank farm, through feed lines, up the transporter-erector, and into the vehicle, radar systems were brought online and traversed, the communications links to flight control in Oklahoma were tested, and the launch team settled in for a dress rehearsal of every flight event short of actual ignition, a fact repeatedly confirmed, as the test director in Oklahoma City, Jean-Pierre Boisvert, would call over the communications loop, “Flight enable to inhibit,” to be confirmed by one of the Woomera avionics engineers as “Confirmed, flight enable inhibited.” The clock ticked down, sensors monitoring hundreds and even thousands of values--the flow rates through valves, the temperatures inside and outside the vehicle, the pressure of the LAP and OV kerosene and oxygen supplies, the pressurization levels of the ethanol and helium for the OV’s orbital maneuvering engines, and the state values of hundreds of variables and flags inside the complex weave making up the flight control avionics. The engines were traversed, confirming the functionality of the thrust vector control gimbals for both the LAP’s twin AJ-26-58 engines outboard and the center restartable AJ-26-59 and the OV’s vacuum-optimized AJ-26-60. All was going well as the final minute counted down.

Within the last few seconds, the wet dress rehearsal proved its value as a stress-test on the vehicle and pad systems. As the water deluge system on the pad came on, adding a shroud of spray to the small billows of cloud from the engine cryo purge, the dreaded call came over the loop: “HOLD, HOLD, HOLD!” The results were an anticlimax, as they looked much like a successful wet dress rehearsal: the tanks were cycled, the cryogenic propellants once again billowing from boil-off relief valves as operators dumped the flight pressure, the flow of sound damping water and engine cooling propellants cutting off. Boisvert, half a world away from the team in Woomera, leaned back. It’d been too much to hope for that they’d get a successful test on the first run, but getting so close before failing was in some ways as frustrating as if they had hit a hold during main propellant fill. His team began to set the propellants from the vehicle to flow back to the the main storage tanks--the capacity of the chillers and the tanks for the super-cooled propellants was the main limit on the number of times they could attempt a WDR or a flight in a single day, regardless of length of the test or launch window. Finally, any hope of a quick turnaround was halted--the problem wasn’t with the vehicle at all, but with the water deluge: a valve on the high-pressure mains feeding the deluge had failed due to the circulating cryogenic boil-off from the engines in the vicinity, and needed to be replaced. It was as close to a successful first test as he could have hoped for--the vehicle was almost ready, but the ground support systems had failed. Still, it meant a stand-down for the day. While Boisvert and the North American team stood down from the test, Woomera’s engineers and technicians, ATK contractors and RPK employees alike, continued the work to safe the vehicle to be able to service the pad. They would simply have to keep trying until they got it right. Fortunately, they had three months until the end of the year.

 

[e of pi]

Digsby Log: December 21, 2009 5:40 PM​

rwdavidoff: Hello!
mmeowl: Hi!
rwdavidoff: Hows the first day of break going?
mmeowl: Awesomely! Done with finals, nervous about grades but they won't be out for weeks
rwdavidoff: Yeah...grades.
rwdavidoff: I'm still nervous about calc.
rwdavidoff: Mom and I went out to Home Depot and got an ax yesterday, so I was taking out my nerves on that with the firewood pile all of today.
mmeowl: Nice! I should try that sometime.
rwdavidoff: Yeah, it was fun once I started to get the hang of it. I've got a nice little fire going in the fireplace.
rwdavidoff: Watching a fire waiting for a fire is pretty nice.
rwdavidoff: Not like Woomera or Oklahoma need the heat, but I'm enjoying it.
mmeowl: Heh. It's cold here too.
mmeowl: Woomera is where the rocket launch is?
rwdavidoff: Yeah. Woomera, Australia.
rwdavidoff: I was reading a bunch about it today.
mmeowl: Yeah? Any fun facts in particular?
mmeowl: Also what time is the launch? With that many time zones we'll be lucky if it isn't 3 AM
rwdavidoff: Fortunately, the orbital control team are over here. RPK's headquarters are in Oklahoma City. So they scheduled it for...an hour or so from now. T-43 minutes and counting.
rwdavidoff: The timezone's actually one of the interesting things. They're 15 and a half hours ahead of us.
mmeowl: Why would they do that.
mmeowl: That's bizarre.
rwdavidoff: I dunno. Maybe that's what happens when your clocks are all upside down?
mmeowl: LOL
rwdavidoff:
rwdavidoff: But Woomera's interesting. Historic, in a sense. The British had their missile test range out there for a long time back in the 50s and 60s.
rwdavidoff: And they even launched a few rockets to orbit.
rwdavidoff: Well, one rocket to orbit successfully.
rwdavidoff: Black Arrow's 4th flight, which took place after the program was cancelled.
rwdavidoff: They flew once to orbit, and they've never launched anything of their own since.
mmeowl: They launched it after the program was canceled? Did they not get the memo?
rwdavidoff: The stuff was already over there, and so the engineers who wanted to fly it argued it was cheaper to launch it than ship it back. You might approve of the name origin--they renamed the satellite from "Puck" to "Prospero" in that subtle British way of throwing shade.
rwdavidoff: Shakespeare allusions, eh?
mmeowl: "How do we get rid of this thing we don't want anymore? Let's THROW IT INTO SPACE."
mmeowl: Also that is an excellent Shakespeare allusion for a thing that got abandoned and then did well anyway.
rwdavidoff: Yeah. Woomera's sort of got a history of that. It was also the launch site for the early European space program rockets, before Britain bailed.
rwdavidoff: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Europa_(rocket)#Operational_history
rwdavidoff: They flew the first few Europa launches from there.
rwdavidoff: All of which failed, on the German and French parts.
rwdavidoff: So then britain decides they'll go it alone, builds Black Arrow, and then cancels that too.
rwdavidoff: France and Germany put their heads together, decide to start over from scratch, and build Ariane.
mmeowl: Let's hope this one breaks the curse then lol
rwdavidoff: And that leads to the modern ESA and Ariane 5.
rwdavidoff: Yeah, right?
rwdavidoff: It's not even stuff like that...this rocket's engines, the AJ-26-58, 59, and 60?
rwdavidoff: They're really NK-33s.
rwdavidoff: The rocket engines from the Russian moon program.
mmeowl: Mmm, tasty alphabet soup.
mmeowl: But anyway how did an American rocket wind up with Russian engines?
rwdavidoff: Another round of cancellations and hilarious coincidence, basically.
rwdavidoff: The N1, the Russian moon rocket, had the same stellar record as everything else Kistler's reusing. Four straight failures. They were going to introduce the NK-33 engines on the fifth flight, replacing the (worse) NK-15 engines that had given them so much trouble.
rwdavidoff: They'd built enough for 5 launches or something.
mmeowl: And then they didn't? Did they stick with the NK-15s or cancel the whole thing?
rwdavidoff: Cancelled it. The new program head didn't like the old program head, so he cancelled the rocket and ordered all the engines destroyed. The basically hid them in a warehouse instead and said they had.
rwdavidoff: And then after the Soviet Union fell, American engineers heard about them.
mmeowl: And I thought high school grudges got weird.
rwdavidoff: They're staged combustion, which basically means they use insanely high pressures and get much better performance than anything we've built using kerosene and LOX.
mmeowl: Cool!
rwdavidoff: Like, SpaceX's Merlin engines run on about the same engine pressure as the Saturn V's F-1s back in the 60s.
rwdavidoff: The NK-33 is about 50% higher.
mmeowl: Nice.
rwdavidoff: They use similar engines with the same cycle on their current rockets, but the Nk-33s were just kind of sitting around. Kistler, back in the mid-90s before they were bought by rocketplane, found out and designed their vehicle around them since they were cheap.
mmeowl: That's sensible. Is the rest of it new, then?
rwdavidoff: Yeah. Hang on, there's a video...
rwdavidoff:

rwdavidoff: So they took the engines, and they're sticking them in a brand new rocket.
rwdavidoff: It's a two stage reusable vehicle, like the Shuttle was going to be originally.
mmeowl: Cool. Watching the video . . .
rwdavidoff: Hopefully, we'll set to see something like this in half an hour or so.
mmeowl: The flat top is weird. Put a nose cone on, there are children watching.
rwdavidoff: I hope so!
rwdavidoff: They just confirmed propellant loading is complete. The webstream should start in another ten minutes.
rwdavidoff: The kind of cool thing about it is that the front part is swappable.
rwdavidoff: They're flying it with that first version today--the "Expandable Payload Module," the nose fairing for launching satellites.
mmeowl: What are the other options?
rwdavidoff: They'll use another pair for servicing the International Space Station, like they show afterward i nthe video.
mmeowl: Neat.
rwdavidoff: They both have a space station docking port on the front behind the nosecone. One has a pressurized module for carrying cargo, and the other has a side door and an unpressurized area for sticking stuff that goes on the outside of the station.
mmeowl: And that first one is the one they use to launch satellites?
rwdavidoff: So you pull that section off and swap it around, nad you can make one Orbital Vehicle do triple duty.
rwdavidoff: Yeah.
mmeowl: Clever.
rwdavidoff: Well, if anyone buys from them...
rwdavidoff: I hope they get some contracts soon.
mmeowl: Knock on wood.
rwdavidoff: Some of the people on ARN say it's too small or it won't be cheap enough. I guess we'll see.
rwdavidoff: The company is so old and full of 90s strangeness. Like, you were saying this one looks funny? Look at this:
rwdavidoff:

mmeowl: It looks like a bouncy castle!
rwdavidoff: Yeah, I know. It's the reason they call their first stage a "Launch Assistance Platform"--the original design was that bedstead thing carrying something that was just barely shy of a single-stage-to-orbit.
rwdavidoff: And the middle part comes off...it's like a rocket in a to-go box made of rockets.
rwdavidoff: Propulsive landing on the LAP, instead of airbags. I think they got rid of that as too complex.
mmeowl: Does that change what sort of locations/surfaces they can land on?
rwdavidoff: Well, you need a pad for rocket landing, like the old Heinlein books. You can do parachutes and airbags on the water if you really need to.
rwdavidoff: But RPK don't want to--sea water's nasty enough they'd rather not deal with it.
rwdavidoff: It's part of why they're using Woomera--it's far enough inland that even if their boostback fails, the stages will just land downrange in the desert.
mmeowl: I can see that. I also prefer not to get dropped in the ocean.
mmeowl: Of course, I wouldn't like being dropped in the desert either.
rwdavidoff: I'll make a note of that for if we ever go to the beach together, dear.
mmeowl: Hee.
rwdavidoff: Oh, hey! They're starting the stream. Here: www.kistleraerospace.com/webcast
mmeowl: Nice!
rwdavidoff: So the launch control room we're seeing here is the one in Oklahoma.
rwdavidoff: I think the tiny one they cut to now and then is the one on-site at Woomera.
rwdavidoff: Rocketplane's basically two companies mashed together, so the division of responsibility is a little strange--yeah, they're talking about that. Woomera will control the vehicle during ascent and descent, but the flight will also be monitored from OK.
rwdavidoff: Oh, hey! Better version of that video we were just watching!
mmeowl: Oh neat, good resolution! I'm glad they seem to have their act together coordinating everything; it sounds pretty annoying.
rwdavidoff: If the half hour offset is annoying for us, I can't imagine for them...
mmeowl: Yup.
mmeowl: I like that they're going into the history of the launch site; maybe a lot of the people watching already know this stuff, but I don't and it's neat.
mmeowl: Oh hey it's that prospero rocket you mentioned.
rwdavidoff: I think it's nifty too, I didn't know a huge amount about Woomera until....basically, last night.
rwdavidoff: Stayed up way too late reading wikipedia.
rwdavidoff: Yeah, and there's Europa.
mmeowl: Fun video.
rwdavidoff: Oooh! Actually K-1 on the pad. That beats history videos.
mmeowl: Ah, wikipedia. Second only to TV tropes in ability to eat your night.
rwdavidoff: Look at the vapor plumes off the vehicle.
rwdavidoff: I think that's boiling LOX?
rwdavidoff: Yeah, ARn is saying it is.
mmeowl: It always seems like such a waste, but presumably it's more efficient than preventing boil-off would be or they'd do that.
rwdavidoff: It's 95 degrees over there right now, and they supercool the LOX so they can fit more in.
rwdavidoff: It increases the density.
rwdavidoff: So with that weather (summer, it's summer over there at the launch site. And half hour offsets. Australia is strange...) it'd be pretty hard to stop any boiloff at all.
rwdavidoff: So I guess they just let it happen.
mmeowl: Yeah.
mmeowl: Though really, the difference between summer and winter is pretty minor when you're at liquid-oxygen temperatures.
rwdavidoff: Yeah...
rwdavidoff: Ohh! Polling for the autosequences...
rwdavidoff: Come on...Go, GO, GO!
rwdavidoff: Yes, all good!
rwdavidoff: T-5 minutes and counting...
mmeowl: W00t!
rwdavidoff: Man, I'm wired.
mmeowl: I love the ritual aspect of it, when they poll everybody.
rwdavidoff: I need to walk around for a minute, I'm going to go grab my jacket and go grab some more wood from outside.
mmeowl: Have fun, I'll be inside where it's warm.
rwdavidoff: I've just about burnt everything I brought in earlier, and its that are start bouncing around like a lunatic.
rwdavidoff: *it's that or
rwdavidoff: brb
rwdavidoff: Back. Waht's the clock at?
mmeowl: T minus 2:15
rwdavidoff: All right. Still waiting for handoff to internal power then.
rwdavidoff: Every time the venting kicks up and the microphones catch the hiss it's making me jumpy.
mmeowl: Yeah.
rwdavidoff: T-90 seconds...
rwdavidoff: Okay, there. Internal power.
rwdavidoff: T-45 engines, should be in startup.
rwdavidoff: Yeah, they just confirmed that. I think that's the new plume at the base?
rwdavidoff: Oh! The water deluge just kicked in.
rwdavidoff: T-15...
rwdavidoff: 10.
rwdavidoff: 9
rwdavidoff: 8
rwdavidoff: 7
rwdavidoff: 6
rwdavidoff: 5
rwdavidoff: 4
rwdavidoff: 3
rwdavidoff: 2
rwdavidoff: 1...
rwdavidoff: ...liftoff?

 

[e of pi]

AUTHOR'S NOTE: Points to @TimothyC for seeing through my blatant attempt to stoke some tension in how I split up the launch coverage. As the payload guide confirms, the K-1 counts T-0 as ignition, not liftoff, and has a somewhat long hold-down time to verify the engines are running well before release. On a first launch, I'd imagine it'd be rather alarming...

Ever since the five minute mark, the K-1’s Draper-designed avionics had been in complete control of the vehicle and even commanding the ground infrastructure. For all intents and purposes, the human monitoring of the data was only a backup--and one all too likely to respond too slowly in an emergency. Thus, Draper and RPK had worked carefully to give the vehicle as much intelligence as it could use. If the flight was successful, the next time the vehicle would really require any input from the ground was ahead of the return of the OV from orbit. For the last fifteen minutes, 3 lbm/sec of supercooled LOX had been circulating through the vehicle’s engines to cool it down, which just within the last few minutes had doubled. For the last forty-five seconds, the vehicle had been busy. The engine controllers had performed an internal-self test, verified valve positions, and checked the sensor signals. Then, it had cycled the mixture ratio valves and thrust control valves in and out of flight nominal to confirm actuator function, first with the primary and then with the backup electronic command channels. With the settings controlled, the engine had queried tank pressures and temperatures, and confirmed it was ready to start. As all three LAP engines reported up the line to the vehicle’s main avionics, the signal had come back down to each controller: go for main engine start. The tightly calibrated dance that was starting a staged-combustion engine of a near 40-year old vintage began.

The fuel prevalves opened, the turbines were pre-spun by a solid propellant cartridge, and a series of pressure-actuated valves began the flow of liquid oxygen. Half a second before flight, the waves of propellants hit the proper levels. Three massive pyroigniters started the fires of the main chamber, while a splash of hypergolic TEA-TEB lit the preburner. A wave of flame leapt through the engine, and the deflagrating gasses lept out the throat of the engine until there wasn’t room in the throat. The flow choked, and the accumulating pressures slammed it supersonic. The gas flow stabilized at the startup throttle point of 55%, while the engine controllers each monitored the arrays of valves and sensors at their electronic fingertips. As the count-down hit zero, the vehicle hung, still held down to the pad by a delicate balance of thrust, hold-downs, and gravity. Two seconds passed while thousands of hearts leapt into throats before the steely-eyed computers gave their verdict from aboard the howling stack. All three engine controllers raised an electronic thumbs-up, and the main avionics issued two commands. One was to the engine controllers--full power! As the throttles answered electronic bells for 100% thrust, the K-1’s avionics commanded the ground support computers to fire the bolts and release the rocket. It was the last order the control line would carry--just moments later, as the vehicle lifted free of the pad, the expendable flyaway umbilical to the ground detached and fell away into the fire of the engines as the rocket rose above the pad. The K-1 was free, clear, and rising. With a thrust to weight ratio of 1.21, it took a ponderous six seconds to move its own height, but the vehicle was quickly gathering way as the avionics began to steer the vehicle down the pitch and roll programs for the LAP main ascent burn.

rwdavidoff: Yes, there it goes!
mmeowl: Woah
rwdavidoff: Man, it hung there for a second. I thought my feed had died.
mmeowl: For a second I thought it turned on and just . . . didn't go up. Like the engine only came on halfway.
rwdavidoff: Past the tower, they're tipping over.
mmeowl: But there it goes!!
rwdavidoff: Okay, so power and telemetry nominal...engines nominal?
rwdavidoff: Yes, propulsion nominal. Whatever that was, it’s over now.
rwdavidoff: Come on NK-33!
mmeowl: Look at that. The plume is so funky--all stretched out by the three engines in a line. It looks like Sauron...
rwdavidoff: Yeah that really does look like an eyeball.
mmeowl: At least from this angle. I guess from 90 degrees around it would look different.
mmeowl: How long until it's supposed to stage?
rwdavidoff: 2 minutes, 19 seconds.
rwdavidoff: Should pass through max-Q any moment now...
rwdavidoff: And it did!
rwdavidoff: Another minute, that's all...come on...
mmeowl: The plume looks bigger now; is that because it's high enough that there's less air pressure holding it together?
rwdavidoff: Yeah.
rwdavidoff: It's part of why they have to stage, the engines on the LAP aren't built for the higher altitudes.
rwdavidoff: Another fifteen seconds or so...dang, the plume's getting really wide.
rwdavidoff: The camera view down the rocket is interesting. Look at how red the outback looks.
rwdavidoff: Just...nothing down there.
rwdavidoff: Truly the middle of nowhere.
rwdavidoff: I think this is mounted on the LAP? I don't see the flare, so it's not mounted on the OV.
mmeowl: I wonder if they'll switch to another camera for the second stage.
rwdavidoff: Here comes staging!
mmeowl: Then we'll have two separate rockets to be nervous about!
rwdavidoff: Wow, that is a complex list of events they were just explaining.
mmeowl: I honestly think "explosive bolts" is one of the coolest phrases ever.
rwdavidoff: Staged engine shutdown, staging, OV engine ignition, first stage flip, and LAP relight...
rwdavidoff: Yeah, I know, right?

As the vehicle prepared for separation, the avionics switched relays, changing the image being broadcast to the ground from the camera mounted looking aft near the top of the LAP to one of the other two on the vehicle. Both were on the OV, one tucked inside the payload module, facing forward from the aft bulkhead of the payload bay, and this one, facing aft inside the confined compartment inside the flare, where the bell of the vacuum-optimized AJ-26-60 engine dominated the scene, dimly lit by a light on the camera. Mounted to the engine, that engine controller was stepping through the same sequence which the LAP engines had followed just two minutes earlier--indeed the two engine types were so identical that they were almost completely interchangeable, except for the oversized radiatively-cooled nozzle extension.

The backside of the flare was a maze of propellant tanks and avionics boxes. Intermixed were yet more engines. Flanking the camera on the frutum's sloping sides were two of the orbital vehicle's cold-gas thruster pods, each with three tiny nozzles, two for roll and one facing aft for pitch and yaw control. Another pair faced the other way from just a few centimeters below--the LAP’s own jets, facing up into the frustum for these last few moments before separation. Just in view on the other side of the frustum were two medium-sized bells--the exhausts of the LOX/ethanol maneuver engines which made the K-1’s OV not just a rocket stage, but a spacecraft. Mounted inside the flare’s frustum, the camera had the best view possible of the critical propulsion and control systems of the OV to beam back to ground-based receivers not just for the webcast but for engineering analysis, while being securely tucked away from the fires of entry.

As the thrust of the LAP cut away suddenly, hoses and insulation in the compartment jostled and leapt, then suddenly a bright light whited out the scene until the camera could compensate, the bright light of the earth entering as the bolts released the LAP and it was kicked clear of the OV and its precious engines by the pressure built up in the interstage. As the bells cleared, dozens of RPK employees caught a measured breath of relief, augmented as the engine belched smoke for a moment and then the flames of proper start and full throttle. Astern, the LAP fell away, already beginning to twist into the flip for its boostback. Behind it, the camera caught the brilliant blue glow of the Earth’s atmosphere, and the gorgeously vivid colors of the Australian Outback--inhospitable, terribly hot, but gorgeous seen from this far away.

mmeowl: ...Oh! New camera. Is this inside the second stage?
rwdavidoff: Looks like it!
mmeowl: I love the top-down angle on the plume.
mmeowl: Wow, the first stage gets left behind really fast.
rwdavidoff: No kidding! Wow, you can see it flipping over.
rwdavidoff: I'm looking at what we can see here in the flare. I think that's the OMS engines just visible on the other side of the main engine bell, the ones they use for orbital maneuvers.
rwdavidoff: And then the thruster clusters around the inside.
rwdavidoff: Ohh! You can see the LAP engine firing!
mmeowl: Cool. Are they likely to use either of those before the stream ends?
mmeowl: Nifty!
rwdavidoff: I don't know how much they're showing today.
rwdavidoff: Oh, I guess I'm wrong, you can see the thrusters jetting.
rwdavidoff: Roll control for the flight, I guess?
rwdavidoff: Fun. I'm not sure how long the first stage burn is going to be, I'll be glad when they confirm it's on a proper course back to Woomera.
rwdavidoff: That's got to be nerve-wracking. "The rocket stage is coming almost directly at us, but in exactly the right amount of 'almost'. "
mmeowl: Yeah, I actually feel more nervous about that than about the satellites.
mmeowl: Not like I'm worried it's going to land on the control building in particular--there are a lot of places for it to go and only one of them is the control building.
mmeowl: Just that it'll land in the wrong place, or too hard, or get really confused and land in the Pacific or something.
rwdavidoff: I am too. Not much to go wrong once stage two is firing. Just have to watch the upper stage version of the engine keep glowing and burning.
rwdavidoff: Wow, look at the curvature on the Earth. We were on the ground five minutes ago!
rwdavidoff: Heh, the webcast announcer mentioned that. A nice little plug for their suborbital tourism business.
mmeowl: Heh. If I ever win the lottery that I don't play . . .
rwdavidoff: They must be jealous Virgin Galactic beat them to rolling out their spaceplane.
rwdavidoff: First stage atmospheric entry coming up. I wonder if we'll get a camera view back?
mmeowl: I mean...that camera we were watching is still mounted to it ,right?
rwdavidoff: OV's just trucking along. I wish they'd give us a different camera angle, all the excitement's going on down near the ground…
rwdavidoff: OV should burn out any minute now…7.5 kms, we’re basically orbital.
rwdavidoff: And cutoff!
rwdavidoff: Now just have to see if they get the LAP back and ready to fly! Doesn’t look like we’re getting a picture. Entry coming up…
mmeowl: Sounds like the drogue chutes are out!
rwdavidoff: Yeah! Wish they’d show that, not just the OV sitting there.
rwdavidoff: Wait, are the OMS engines firing?
mmeowl: Well it doesn’t look like the mains
rwdavidoff: No, but that’s definitely the OMS engines. “Cleanup burn.” Funky. I think Shuttle does...something like that? Still! There, they just said good orbit! I’ll take it.
mmeowl: Nominal for best word.
rwdavidoff: Nominal nominated?
rwdavidoff: Oh! And ground tracking camera! Look at it twitching under the drogues.
rwdavidoff: Breathing fast, but I think they’ve got it…
mmeowl: I bet they do, I bet it works
rwdavidoff: They’ve tested this all...
rwdavidoff: Now just the mains...
rwdavidoff: Maybe?
mmeowl: Yes!
rwdavidoff: Yeah! There they are! Wow…
mmeowl: They kick in really fast, woah.
rwdavidoff: Wow, look at it slow down...
rwdavidoff: I wonder if they can make it to the ground okay even without the airbags? They can't end up going that fast. Shuttle SRbs use parachutes too, and they just splashdown.
mmeowl: Well, landing on the water is probably more forgiving?
mmeowl: Than landing on the ground, I mean.
rwdavidoff: True. Looks like it’s getting bigger. I think that’s not all zoom, right?
mmeowl: I think so. Makes you wish you were watching in person, though.
rwdavidoff: No kidding! Here it comes . . .
rwdavidoff: Come on, zoom INNNN.
rwdavidoff: Looks like the airbags are deploying!
mmeowl: Yeah, I can see them too!
rwdavidoff: Looks kind of silly, hanging off the side like that.
rwdavidoff: If it works, it works, though...
rwdavidoff: We'll know soon.
mmeowl: I keep thinking they're going to pop like balloons.
rwdavidoff: Me too...
mmeowl: Touchdown!

Left off the cameras, the LAP had been busy since separating. There wasn’t time to waste. Almost from the instant it had separated, its Draper avionics had been at work. First, it had to compute the required time to start the boostback burn and the right moment to shut it off to leave it on track for the launch site, then the time until entry. After a frantic minute or two, though, things had quieted down. The stage was in freefall, steady in entry attitude--engine nozzles and base thermal protection facing into the airstream, held in place by the intermittent bursts from the cold gas attitude jets at the top of the stage. Bottom-first, it rose towards the increased apogee created by boostback. The curvature of the Earth yawned below it, visible to the rocket-mounted camera which had carried the feed from launch. The view was only the camera’s to enjoy and record--it was no longer being broadcast to the ground, waiting to be retrieved from the camera’s onboard storage. If the stage survived, it would make amazing marketing footage for both RPK’s orbital and suborbital vehicles. Unlike its sister the OV or its cousin the Rocketplane XP, though, the K-1 LAP wasn’t quite a spaceship. It skimmed to 97 kilometers, missing the Karman line by bare kilometers, before beginning to gather velocity back towards the ground below.

The camera, pointed aft along the stage to capture ascent, was oriented wrong to capture the critical events of entry. The drogue’s deployment was just a jerk of the stage as the chutes yanked open and fought the airstream. The mains were more of the same, accompanied by a reassuring decrease in the rate of approach of the yawning earth below. For a long minute, it seemed as though the stage was hardly moving, the camera picture changing only barely as the stage drifted tail-first towards the ground. Finally, however, the ground began to come up, suddenly growing close remarkably fast. Just as a human pilot might have beginning to be alarmed, the deployment of the bridle and the attitude control thrusters began to tip the stage onto its side for final descent. The placement of the rocket camera had been hotly debated by the K-1 team. Some had wanted it on the top side, to better image the parachutes and bridle during this critical phase. Others had successfully argued for using it to directly image the deployment of the four airbags on the underside. While the camera’s field of view down the rocket would barely capture the parachutes, even drifting side-on towards the ground, the airbags were perfectly centered, the data on their deployment being collected for analysis after flight.

With the camera facing down between the airbags, the ground came up, closer every moment. Dots grew into the the minor terrain and rocks left in the carefully cleared square kilometers of desert Kistler and ATK technicians had spent months pulling every boulder and tree out of--a square of desert as carefully manicured as a croquet lawn. With little left on the ground, there was no scale until, suddenly, the stage’s shadow flashed into the view, mere seconds before the entire stage hit the ground. The airbags didn’t pop--they released air as they had been designed to, spreading the shock as they lowered the stage to the ground. The camera jolted, while ground cameras carried the good news to the controllers. With touchdown verified, the LAP avionics completed their last tasks to begin safing the vehicle for the trucks that would arrive soon to retrieve it. The airbags released their remaining pressure with a hiss and the tanks began to vent the remaining propellant pressure in tight clouds of vapor, like the stage was letting out its own sigh of relief.

rwdavidoff: IMPACT!
rwdavidoff: Looks like it's intact?
rwdavidoff: I didn't see any Earth shattering kaBOOM anyway.
mmeowl: It looks good! I hope it didn't get battered too much inside.
rwdavidoff: Me too. We'll get to find out.
mmeowl: The real test is will they fly it again.
mmeowl: OV is in space, too.
rwdavidoff: Not a bad 7 minutes, all told.
rwdavidoff: It turns out it's a spaceship.
mmeowl: The announcer sounds really happy.
rwdavidoff: I would be too!
mmeowl: Heck, I am happy and I'm not even involved.
mmeowl: Spaceships are awesome.
rwdavidoff: Yep!
rwdavidoff: I guess they're cutting the feed here. I guess that makes sense, but I wanted to see the nosecone deployment. Not for an hour, though.
mmeowl: It would be cool if they grabbed isolated bits of footage of later cool things happening and posted them.
rwdavidoff: Yeah, I hope they do.
rwdavidoff: Let me go throw another few logs on the fire, and then want to read some 1/0?
rwdavidoff: I'm really looking forward to seeing you after Christmas. It's nice talking, but it's been a while since Thanksgiving.
rwdavidoff: https://xkcd.com/352/
mmeowl: Yeah, I miss you too. Sure, 1/0 is good.
mmeowl: And having someone to talk about it with in real time only improves it.
mmeowl: I think I'm actually more excited for your visit than I am for actual Christmas.
rwdavidoff: Me too. I love you, geeky.
mmeowl: I love you too.

 

[e of pi]

It seemed like the entire town of Woomera had braved the heat to come watch the launch from bleachers moved over from the school and laid out near the combination integration building and control center. At least a hundred and people had crowded together, watching the K-1 lift off from the pad a few kilometers away and fly away into the stratosphere, holding hands over their eyes or placing binoculars to their face to help follow it and fight the glare from the noon sun. The school had even made a field trip out, the primary and high schoolers mixing with the festival atmosphere common from any children blessed with a Monday excuse to be out of classes. Much of the town had taken an early lunch break and come out to watch the first rocket to fly from Woomera in half a lifetime. Not everyone was a local though--in truth, only fifty or sixty, just half the town population of 150. The rest were RpK personnel, ATK contractors, NASA observers, international press, and Australian service members and Thales Australia contractors from the nearby test range. There were even a handful of dedicated tourists, a combination which had brought the ELDO Hotel to near capacity for the first time in years. The launch events, broadcast from speakers mounted on the side of the building, had brought cheers and shouts, contributing to the festival atmosphere. This launch meant a lot to the town, particularly as the first of many--this would hopefully be no fizzle like Black Arrow and Europa.

Once the LAP had fallen over the horizon to the landing area, drifting gently under parachutes, and the RpK announcers called the nominal orbit of the OV, the crowd began to break up. The school children boarded their bus, and villagers and base staff began to pack up as well. Other broke out grills, getting ready for an impromptu party. The roar of diesel engines sprouted, as RpK technicians and ATK contractors warmed up the big straddle truck which would be used to retrieve the LAP. Already, a few utes were bouncing along the access road to the landing ellipse, carrying technicians to begin the safing process while the truck made its way more slowly. They carried one of the major improvements in K-1 operations since the vehicle had originally been designed in 1999: a GPS tracker located on the stage which had begun sending its location as soon as the stage registered touchdown. The landing ellipse covered a circular area nearly two kilometer in diameter, and RpK wanted to waste no time in finding the stage in the area. They hoped to have the stage safed, the parachutes cut away for repacking, and the stage brought back to the barn by the end of the day. If all went well, the OV would be back tomorrow, and it was better to have the LAP already safely secured before the OV touched down and put them behind.

For its part, the K-1 Orbital Vehicle had left the coast of Australia behind as it finished its OMS-1 burn. Now, five minutes later, it was already over the Marshall Islands, the last ground it would see below it until it passed over the French Frigate Shoals of the Hawaiian chain in another ten minutes. If the K-1’s avionics had been human, they might have taken a moment to reflect on the path that had finally brought it here. Almost a decade after the original Kistler Aerospace team had tried to bring their rocket to Woomera and after several false starts--the challenge by SpaceX to the Space Launch Initiative contract which had lead to the original Kistler’s bankruptcy, the acquisition by Rocketplane which had brought the ability to exit bankruptcy and bid on NASA’s COTS contract, and the critical investments by ATK which had helped paper over the cracks and reassure enough investors to secure funding for everything up to the flight today. It had been a massive bet, a series of tragically close calls, but the K-1 rocket had finally seen space. A human astronaut would have found it hard not to give thanks for their luck, for the view of the Earth spread below, or simply to take a moment to think about the crazy paths of life.

The rocket wasn’t human, though. It was only digital, a Motorola PowerPC architecture. Its radiation-hardened 200 MHz processors had little time free for such reflections on the nature of life. Moreover, it had a major challenge ahead of itself, and as Robert Frost might have said, orbits to go before it slept. The K-1 Orbital Vehicle was no simple upper stage, suited to just get to the right orbit, separate a payload, and safe itself. It was a true spacecraft, with attitude control thrusters, an ethanol/LOX Orbital Maneuvering System, and the recovery systems to bring it home--and it had a tightly controlled window for how long it could stay in space, where it needed to land, and how much propellant it had to get there. It wasn’t even a simple matter of flight optimization--the rocket also had to ensure it didn’t have an excess of OMS propellant aboard which could cause it to be too heavy as it descended into the atmosphere. The PowerPC chips went to work executing the Draper-designed, RpK-polished algorithms which would steer it through the series of five burns which would bring it to payload deployment and back home to the ground safely.

The first was already behind it, the cleanup burn with the OMS which had resolved any uncertainty in how the decades-old engines might perform in vacuum. The use of the OMS burn, a single-engine burn a minute after the AJ-26-60 engine had seen MECO, meant that the stage could essentially burn to depletion, leaving minimal residuals of the un-needed kerosene and main stage liquid oxygen aboard, while still tracking to a precisely calculated initial trajectory. The initial orbit shape was a strange one compared to most rockets--it had essentially set its apogee to the initial parking altitude of 500 kilometers, then nosed over and burnt purely prograde to add velocity until the perigee cleared Earth’s atmosphere. As soon as the bare essentials of orbit were satisfied, the main engine had done its work. The second burn would finish the job of circularizing at the target orbit.

The stage played a waiting game, biding its time and working ahead on the tightly calculated autonomous guidance problems until its first apogee over Minnesota. Under the watchful eye of radar dishes outside the company’s headquarters in Oklahoma City, the K-1 OV fired its OMS again, circularizing on target for the deployment of today's demonstration payloads, both simulated and real. It didn’t really need the watching--though the ground could watch via radar, its only communications for telemetry down and override commands up if needed came over NASA’s TDRS satellite network, bouncing down from geostationary orbit whether the satellite was in line of a ground station or not. It was insufficient for the video footage which the stage had initially beamed home, but it was enough for the stage’s four minders in the control center at Woomera and their backup team of six working under the eyes of the rest of the team at the ceremonial launch control at Oklahoma City. The orbiter fired just one engine on the burn, reserving the other for backup--the K-1’s conservative design meant it had redundancies everywhere the weight could be justified, and the OMS was critical to mission success and a safe return home.

The stage and ground confirmed the second burn’s results: perfectly on target. Another twenty minutes passed before the stage proceeded to payload deployment--more than an hour since launch. The hatch opened up and flipped clear of the payload bay, giving the camera recording onboard inside the payload module a view of space as a “boresight” from its mounting spot on the aft end of the payload module. The stage reoriented, pointing itself sideways along the orbital track to give some clearance between the payload and itself as they went along their way. The K-1 was carrying three payloads on this mission. Two were inert. One would remain attached--a chunk of gold alloy to be cast into ceremonial coins after the recovery of the mission, bound for those who had contributed to the launch. The second was also a fake payload, though it at least would be cast loose of the vessel. A steel frame and sheet metal structure contained a tank of nearly three tons of water, sitting on top of the payload dispenser. The forward telescoping portion of the Expanded Payload Module retracted aft and the elevator inside the payload module shifted forward, pushing the watery simulated payload to the rim of the bay. Under the camera’s watchful eye, the deployment system pushed the “satellite” free and away as the signal came from the avionics on redundant pathways. After another half orbit, once the K-1 OV had a chance to move clear, the simulator was just smart enough to use a nitrogen thruster system to orient itself retrograde, then vent the rest of its nitrogen through the water tank like an overgrown bottle rocket. The sublimating cloud would provide a visible signal to be tracked by Australians of the deployment system’s precision, and the venting “propellants” would both lower the simulator’s perigee and the remaining structure and tanks light enough to quickly deorbit.

The third and final payloads--and the only real satellites being deployed on the maiden launch--weren’t in the bay at all, but instead mounted among the avionics boxes, tanks, and thruster systems inside the aft flare. A PPOD dispenser, carrying three cubesats, was mounted just inside the view of the flare’s camera. After a few minutes were allowed for the mass simulator forward to drift away, the three satellites were kicked loose, the small boxes covered in foil and surface-mounted solar panels tumbling away above the Earth. One was a project by students at Oklahoma State University, lead by a masters student in engineering who was a former RpK summer intern, the chance for a launch donated by RpK to their home state in a gesture of goodwill. Similar goodwill drove the second of the three satellites in the standard 3U dispenser, this one built by students at the University of Adelaide. The third was from cadets with the US Air Force Academy and would do minor science experiments for the weeks before the tiny satellite fell into the atmosphere. If the simulator’s venting and the OV’s return to Earth went well, within a week or so these three spacecraft, totalling less than five kilos, would be the only record of the mission’s success on orbit. As the tumbling trio of cube floated away from the OV, grad students and cadets worked over their arrangements for contacting their tiny satellites trying to beat the odds of cubesats which saw many fail without every signalling home.

That was the end of the easy activities, the primary mission. The old military pilot joke was that the trip out was for Uncle Sam, and the trip home was for yourself. The RpK team joked that the burns until payload separation were for the customer, and then the burns afterward were for themselves. These were the three burns which left the avionics the largest optimization challenge. In atmosphere, the OV flew like a brick. Even worse than the Space Shuttle, the K-1 OV had a cross range of barely 100 kilometers. In order to ensure the safe return to the tiny landing ellipse, the stage would have to make its fifth burn, the retro burn, precisely in the right place. To get it to the right place with the right amount of propellant remaining, the stage had two burns in its arsenal--the phasing burns. By burning to raise or lower one side of its circular orbit, the stage could adjust to the second its orbital period, and thus its ground track over Woomera 22 hours away. The main burn would happen two hours after launch, the second would serve as a cleanup of the phasing just a few orbits before entry. The stage’s task was to determine the right amount to raise or lower the orbit to ensure it used up the right amount of propellant. The 32-bit, 1990s grade radiation-hardened Motorola chips thought long and hard, looked at the internal guidance solution, compared the position to the projections and to tracking, and judged the right solution. It lined itself up with bursts from the attitude jets and waited for its calculated moment. The OMS flared to life.

Monitoring the phasing burn was among the last activities that RpK’s team in Oklahoma City would take before handing off to their relief. Jean-Pierre Boisvert nursed a cup of lukewarm coffee as they waited for TDRS to update telemetry and bring the news if the stage was coming home or not. In the lead-up to the launch, he’d lead the simulation teams through ground override responses any number of failures, each more unlikely than the rest. In a nominal mission, the control teams at Woomera and Oklahoma City were so much window dressing for a vehicle that literally flew itself. In an off-nominal mission, they’d have to be ready to leap into action to come to the aid of a wounded, confused spacecraft to recover the mission, get the payload away, and bring home a corporate asset with a value measured in the tens of millions. He took a sip of the coffee and winced. Soon enough, they’d know if they needed to do any of that, or if the scenarios he’d brainstormed over reams of printouts with his engineers and over beers with his old RCAF buddy William Anderchuk when his company’s oil business brought him to town were just so much waste of time. The moment the OV had signalled it calculated for the burn came and went, and the telemetry flashed its updates. The controllers on two sides of the planet leaned forward in unison, fingers flying across keyboards to update their own projections and to query details of the spacecraft’s health. The team was disciplined and professional--Jean-Pierre was proud of that. They called off by the numbers as he polled down the list, no wasted time as the men and women he’d trained snapped back their answers. He’d learned to read them, though, and he knew the answers they’d give from the set of their shoulders as they leaned over their consoles.

“Power?”

“Go flight.”

“Propulsion?”

“Nominal! No residuals.”

“Guidance?”

“Go flight! Good burn, we’re right on target. Might not need OMS-4, phasing accuracy looks within acceptable limits. Updating ground retro estimate, OV analysis in progress.”

The team sat back, all smiles, the relaxation and confidence their shoulders had shown filling the room. The hardest part of the flying home was already behind them. Their baby had done its job, and was coming home. Now, they could go home themselves and rest, to wait for the landing tomorrow. The Woomera team would take over monitoring while they worked on finishing getting the LAP onto the truck and back to the barn, with a relief overnight, and then they’d pick back up as primary here in Oklahoma City in the morning. Jean-Pierre smiled behind his coffee mug. A hell of a thing, he thought to himself. A hell of a team.

 

[e of pi]

If Motorola PowerPC chips could be bored, the K-1’s avionics would be. For more than half a day, there had been little to do but let the phasing burn’s result progressively shift the landing site over Woomera. However, finally, the moments for return were approaching. The control system was busily measuring position and orbital drift, calculating the possibilities for an OMS-4 burn to clean up phasing for the final three orbits. As it stood, the estimated burns were low enough that the stage was planning to skip the burn entirely. That meant little really to do, but considering the question kept the avionics busy as it streaked over the west coast of the United States. Ahead, the horizon was aglow--the first indications of the brilliant spectacle of an orbital sunrise. For a human pilot, it might have been a distraction, even on the ninth viewing. For the K-1 OV, though, the sight of the sun breaking over the horizon as a glowing ball and striking the blue blanket of the atmosphere aglow was more notable for the sudden uptick in the temperatures being monitored by various temperature gauges placed aboard the OV, part of the collection of dozens of sensors gathering data about the cruise flight as a part of the data collection for NASA’s certification of the mission--step one not only of the K-1 being qualified for COTS flights to the space station, but for the K-1 as a whole to be certified for NASA’s most critical missions. As the light caught the stage, flooding past the opened hatch and into the payload module to white out the forward facing camera for a moment of glare, the K-1 continued to slide along its orbital track, sliding north and east above the western United States. Compared to the challenges of flying ascent and the upcoming problems of aerodynamic flight, this was a breeze.

Five hundred kilometers below, Jean-Pierre squinted into the twilight west of his house. Looking down, he compared the time on his watch and the sky to a printout from the office, then looked up again. He held a hand up, blocking off the edge of the light from his neighbor’s christmas display, which had just come on with its timer. He frowned at the stars, checking. “Not moving, not moving, that’s too bright--gotta be a plane.” He checked his watch again, while the terminator swept across orbit hundreds up miles up and the sky slowly bled from black to navy blue in the east. 6:35 AM, 6:36 AM...he frowned at the sheet, and the circled handwritten note he’d added before turning in the night before. “0635 to 0637, +2” He took a last look, trying to reposition his hand and block out the blinking lights on his neighbor’s elm. Above, a new star appeared midway across the sky, dim and flickering as it traced an arc eastward. Jean-Pierre’s mouth opened into a stupid grin for a moment, then he fumbled for the binoculars sitting on the rail of his deck. He put them to his face, and there it was--definitely not a plane, definitely not a star. The K-1 OV swept across the sky for a few long moments, before he lost it behind the roof of his other neighbor’s house. Jean-Pierre’s grin could have fought the coming sunrise as he went back inside to grab a cup of coffee from the grumbling coffeemaker, then head in for the call to stations at headquarters. The OV had five more orbits to go, and his team needed to be ready to take over from the overnight team--starting with the flight director. That meant he needed to grab the coffee and get into the office in a hurry to get the updates from Woomera while his team got ready.

Hours later, Jean-Pierre was back at his console, talking over the controller loop with the operations manager at Woomera about the first look over the LAP after they found it the night before and got it lifted and brought back to the hangar. The images taken by the retrieval team looked, on first glance, like a crash site--the airbags covered in dust, with a fine dusting on the base of the stage, the parachutes draped away and flapping gently in the wind. Access panels gaped open, showing the inside of the vehicle’s interstage and engine compartment. The looks were deceptive, though--the panels had been pulled away by the ground crew to confirm safing the stage, remove the airbags and parachute risers, retrieve the onboard storage media for the telemetry and cameras, and expose the lifting points for the straddle truck. Under the bright lights of the hangar in a second set of pictures taken a few hours later--and a few hours ago--the LAP already looked better. With the landing systems removed and the stage set back on its servicing stand, it already looked nearly ready to fly again. Just close up the panels, and it would look exactly like it had before the stack was integrated a few weeks ago. That, too was deceptive, but the harder and more detailed work of making sure the LAP would be ready to fly again would have to be put aside until the OV was back on the ground. The most important thing Woomera had said this morning was that once the LAP had been set back on its cradle, the straddle truck had been topped off with fuel and the rigging checked--it was ready to go again. Jean-Pierre checked the list of event timers up on the main display--Rev 13 in progress, tracking over the pacific orbit. They’d been on-target enough to be able to forgo their fourth OMS burn, with minimal corrections needed for the phasing. Another half orbit to the OMS-5 retro, and another hour past that until they were on the ground. It’d been a busy but relaxed day, rewarding after the pressure of launch day, but the team’s energy could be felt in the room as they waited for entry.

On orbit, the K-1 was still master of its own fate. Though it reported every moment of telemetry to the ground, its onboard systems had control of the vehicle, as they had from the moment it had left the pad. Now, it would get its final exam results as it faced the trials of entry, descent, and landing. It was far from the first vehicle to face the task, starting with Vostok and Mercury, but it was one of the stranger ones in role and shape--something new to be proved. The OV carefully aligned itself using the ACS thrusters, preparing for the moment when it fired its engines for descent. Unlike previous burns, this one saw both OMS engines ignite at the same time--while there was a contingency to burn the other engine longer should one fail to light, there was minimal time margin to do so by firing the engines sequentially. As the burn completed, the careful calculations on previous burns paid their dividends--the remaining OMS propellant was precisely within landing margins. The next perigee would bring the OV skimming into the denser portions of the atmosphere and right on course for Woomera.

The OV’s task quickly went from killing the coast time to finding time for all the required calculations as the final half-orbit quickly ticked away. The heat shield hatch had already been closed and verified locked before the retro burn, but the attitude had to be adjusted to be nose-forward again, pitched 11 degrees for a lifting entry. The ACS jets got their workout holding the vehicle stable in that attitude as the atmosphere began to wash over the vehicle, air molecules bouncing off like billiard balls in the rarefied air, then accumulated into conventional flows. The vehicle rocked and shook under the flow, the bangs of the ACS becoming nearly constant as it fought to hold a stable course. The heat built up, the SIRCA tiles on the nose and aft flare shedding energy away from the vehicle as the outer surface temperatures climbed above 2000 degrees Fahrenheit. The peak moment of heating came and went as the ACS fought for control of the lifting entry, noted with raised voices in the control rooms in Woomera and Oklahoma City, but only in a relaxation of flight limits for the avionics as they steered the OV down. The Shuttle was long claimed to be like flying a brick, but the K-1 OV was an even worse flyer--the OV had a lift to drag ratio of just 0.15. Shuttle’s performance was 8 times higher, and even the Apollo Command Module with its 0.368 looked like a fighter jet’s performance by comparison. It made the task of the avionics even more critical--the vehicle was flying a slow banked roll, using lift and drag to adjust its downrange distance and cross-range travel, waiting for the right moment to reverse the bank. Until that moment, the OV would have more options, but once committed, the ability to adjust from a bad landing estimate would drop dramatically. It would have some residual maneuverability, but it would likely land off-target. For the first time since launch, the OV needed input from the ground--the local wind conditions above Woomera, taken from a series of weather balloons, which would help it calculate its drift under parachutes, to put itself in the right place before their deployment.

Not yet. Wait for it. Wait for it...now! The OV rolled hard, 2.5 degrees per second per second of roll acceleration reaching the rate limit of 10 degrees per second in 4 seconds. The full swing from 60 degrees positive bank to 60 degrees negative bank took roughly twelve seconds, but as the attitude stabilized and the OV uplinked the new course to TDRS, a human pilot might have nodded in satisfaction. The new final bank course was right down the middle of the nominal Woomera approach. The worst of the velocity had already been bled off--thirty seconds after bank reversal, the stage was traveling at only Mach 2.5 now, just 10% of its entry velocity of Mach 23. The thickening atmosphere made for increasing trouble for the ACS control authority, so the first stage of the OV’s parachute deployment was the firing of a 23 foot diameter hemisflo stabilizer parachute, which would help hold the stage on course. The stage was still more than 17 kilometers out and traveling nearly horizontally at 23 kilometers altitude, but the stabilizer drogue quickly ate away at the airspeed. From 80,000 ft, the stage rode down gravity’s rainbow like a lawn dart into the Woomera desert, aiming for a landing area just 1.8 kilometers in diameter. The avionics ticked off three minutes, one 1 Hz guidance update at a time, before the altitude, position, and velocity crossed the threshold for the drogues. By then, the stage was already subsonic, moving at barely 140 m/s and beginning a sharply angled descent from just over 8 kilometers above the landing site. The descent began to slow dramatically--it would now take 12 minutes to fall the remaining height. At 15,000 ft, the stage cut loose the drogues and kicked out the mains, with a velocity of just 60 m/s, which quickly slowed to barely 6 m/s. The velocity was now once again more horizontal than vertically as the wind carried the stage. Like the LAP, the OV deployed its four landing airbags, then lowered itself on the parachute risers into a side-on position. A puff of dust in the desert marked its touchdown point. As Woomera checked GPS and verified with the onboard telemetry, the landing site analysis checked out. The stage was intact and healthy, 900 meters north east of the center of the landing target--just barely inside the edge of the cleared circle. A hard set of gusts had blown in during atmospheric entry after the wind update had been uplinked, carrying the stage an extra few hundred meters downrange after the mains had already been deployed. Still, even with the issue, the stage had made it into the targeted area, if barely, and it was intact. Jean-Pierre and the staff at Oklahoma City erupted into cheers or sighs of relief as the Woomera team leapt into action to recover the second vehicle in two days. The K-1 had done its job: go to space, and return safely to the ground. The only question was the one it shared with the Space Shuttle before it: how long before it could fly again, and could it achieve what its potential customer payloads required? Jean-Pierre’s team had done their job, but that answer would have to come from the team in Woomera, and the marketing and contract team up in the executive suites in Oklahoma City.

 

[e of pi]

“A Happy Holiday and an Exciting New Year”: Rocketplane Kistler Management Reflects on Exciting Year
--by Arnold Holmes (American Rocket News, December 24, 2009
​

Rocketplane Kistler Vice President of Business Development and Strategic Planning, Debra Facktor Lepore, was ebullient in an exclusive interview this week with American Rocket News reporter Arnold Holmes, reflecting on the company’s achievements of 2009 and looking forward to the successes of 2010, as well as her personal return to the company.

“It’s been, I’d say, a year of fulfilling promises,” Lepore said. “When I joined [Kistler Aerospace] in 1997, we were talking about the promise of the K-1 vehicle, the first flight use of the NK-33 engines, flying for NASA and communications satellite customers, and full and rapid reuse of a second generation vehicle.” She laughed and continued. “Well, it’s taken us a bit longer than promised, but it’s really my pleasure to be back with Rocketplane Kistler now to see all that happen for us, not to mention so much more we’re excited about this year and in months and years to come. Being in the control room in Oklahoma City with the whole team gathered around after a decade...that was an incredible launch to watch.”

Indeed, though the past year has seen the company take major strides forward in all of its diverse areas of focus, the K-1 launcher has undoubtedly been the marque representative of their successes in 2009. After more than a decade of often troublesome development, the K-1 rocket finally saw its first flight vehicle delivered to RpK’s newly-commissioned launch site in Woomera, Australia this fall, and the Aerojet 26 engines carried it to space on December 21st, just days ago--and more importantly, its parachutes have carried it back. Still, though the mission was exciting, Lepore said she had little worry of failure.

“We’ve always thought of the key element of the K-1 as its conservative design,” she said. “We had an engine that was proven, if unflown, and we worked to build the best vehicle we could for the mission around that with the widest of margins. That’s required by the approach of reuse--you can’t get too aggressive if you want to be able to fully, rapidly, and consistently reuse and recover the vehicle, no matter what happens. The system has to be robust, both in its design and in how it reacts to issues,” Lepore commented on the launch. She laughed and added,“Really, that’s the philosophy of both our orbital and suborbital programs. We want the excitement of a launch, but with a vehicle that’s reliable enough and proven enough by repeated flights, that there’s no concern at all when a customer hands us their ticket for a Rocketplane flight or books a launch to orbit aboard the K-1.”

Customers seem to agree. NASA has already begun in-depth evaluation of the data recorded during the maiden flight to begin certifying the vehicle for operational flights to the International Space Station under the Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) contract next year, and RpK just yesterday announced that they have won their first commercial launch contract for the K-1, to fly eighteen OG-2 satellites for communications provider OrbComm aboard the K-1 vehicle in 2013 and 2014.

“It was a natural fit and we’re pleased to welcome OrbComm aboard,” Lepore said about the contract. “This is the mission the K-1 was built for: launching small communications satellites to low Earth orbit. We were able to offer OrbComm an attractive price given the system we’re using, and we anticipate we’ll be able to do the same for other customers as we prove our vehicle over the next year. That begins with going to station in the coming months with our remaining NASA demonstrations, but our plans definitely do not end there.”

Testing of the K-1 for orbital deliveries will continue in the coming months. RpK and NASA have scheduled the first of their COTS demonstrations for March, according to Flight Planning Integration Panel (FPIP) charts available on AmericanRocketNews Stage Two. While the Risk Reduction demonstration was flown with the Expandable Payload Module aboard the Orbital Vehicle, the COTS Demo 1 and Demo 2 missions will demonstrate the two payload modules which will be used for space station logistics support. In February, the K-1 is scheduled to fly COTS Demo 1, the K-1’s first flight to the space station. The COTS Demo 1 flight will feature the Pressurized Cargo Module, which features a Common Berthing Mechanism behind the nose heat shield, allowing access to a pressurized volume inside the module, as well as additional attitude control thrusters to give the Orbital Vehicle full translational control for berthing support. Should the COTS Demo 1 mission be successful, the COTS Demo 2 flight is currently scheduled to fly with the Unpressurized Cargo Module in May to demonstrate the ability to continue launching--and returning--external cargo from station. While like the PCM the UCM features a CBM hatch behind the nose heat shield and carries additional thrusters, the cargo is instead placed in a payload bay behind the forward bulkhead which is accessed through a clamshell door on the spacecraft’s dorsal surface.

“Both RpK and the ISS program leadership are very excited about what the K-1 can offer station,” Lepore said. “Next year, we’ll be demonstrating the ability to launch all the kinds of small payloads which until now have been carried by the Space Shuttle, from external experiments like Express Logistics racks and critical operational equipment like Alpha Rotary Joints to crew support systems and full payload racks. We look forward to working with NASA on utilizing that capability, and they’re excited both by the potential we offer in terms of flight rate and in terms of cost per mission.”

The price and frequency of the K-1’s flights will be a critical factor being observed by spaceflight industry insiders and fans alike. The K-1 is designed to be flown as often as every nine days and maintains a list price of $19 million for customer launches. However, Kistler and NASA have indicated initially they intend to operate substantially less frequently while they observe the vehicle’s initial performance and maintenance requirements, and the precise cost of payload being offered under the COTS contract remains closely held. It remains to be seen how the vehicle will compare with their competition, the Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) Dragon capsule, flying aboard their Falcon 9 rocket in the new year. Elon Musk’s new rocket is in advanced stages of testing, and offers substantially more performance for customers at prices approaching Kistler’s base price. Station logistics may be a key differentiator for RpK, as the payload of the Dragon capsule to the space station is actually lower than the K-1 OV’s capability despite the higher performance and cost-per-flight of Falcon 9, nor can their capsule carry International Standard Payload Racks [ISPRs] as the K-1 PCM can. When asked if she had any comments on their performance relative to their competition in orbital launch or suborbital tourism, Lepore demurred.

“We don’t really see SpaceX as a competitor, nor Virgin Galactic. We’re all allies in the same challenge, to see space access revolutionized in cost effectiveness. That’s what allows space to be a part of everyone’s life and the legacy of all humanity--whether it’s Elon’s team or ours that reduces the cost of access to orbit is less important than that we do it. The same attitude exists on the suborbital side of the house--we think Rocketplane will be a good ship and we look forward to seeing it fly, but we’re taking our time to get it right and we look forward to the future for suborbital flight of passengers and experiments whether aboard our vehicle or Virgin’s. We’re confident that we have good solutions, so we’re not really worried about who flies first.”

Rocketplane Kistler’s strategy of not focusing on the competition appears to be working for their orbital business--the K-1 has already beaten Falcon 9 to flight, and may beat it to station. Additionally, while SpaceX’s Elon Musk has spoken in the past about his desire to see Falcon transformed into a fully reusable vehicle, the K-1 is already intending to fly its next mission with almost the same hardware with which they flew their first mission. However, while they lead in the orbital field, RpK may be trailing in the suborbital realm--Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic has already test-flown their WhiteKnightTwo carrier aircraft, and they have rolled out their first SpaceShipTwo vehicle to begin test flights this year. By contrast, Rocketplane has yet to complete assembly of their first Rocketplane XP airframe, and may not be ready to begin flights until late in the year. Whoever flies first, it should be an exciting year for the company. For those following Rocketplane Kistler’s activities, Leope says there is much to look forward to.

“It was a very busy 2009 for us, but if anything it’s going to be a busier 2010,” Lepore said. “On the execution side, we have to begin to deliver on COTS, complete our first reuse and transition the K-1 to routine operations, we plan to begin assembly on the second flight set of LAP and OV, and we’re looking forward to rolling out the Rocketplane XP this spring. But we also always have to be looking forward to the future beyond 2010 and how 2010 works to get us there. In the strategic planning realm, we have several major commercial contracts for both sides of the company we’re working on that are very exciting opportunities, and we’re also starting to look at where our vehicle development goes as we transition our current development projects into operations.”

Asked if she can provide any hints on that front, Lepore offered and enigmatic smile and said we’ll just have to see where things go in the coming year, in a statement that summed up much of her thoughts:

“I’m afraid all I can say is this: watch us fly and stay tuned for bigger things.”

-------

Author’s Note: I found out about Debra Facktor Lepore in the course of listening to old Space Show episodes while researching this timeline--if you’d like to hear any real interviews with her, I’d recommend her appearances on that show. IOTL, she never returned to Kistler after leaving to go run AirLaunch with Gary Hudson, and now is a Vice President at Ball Aerospace and their General Manager for Strategic Operations & Commercial Aerospace. However, she still to this day talks about the value of public-private partnerships like the Kistler SLI and RpK COTS which she had some hand in arranging, and given her early role with the company I think it’s possible she could be lured back to help see the vehicle fly and shape the future strategy.

 

[e of pi]

An observer of Rocketplane Kistler over January 2010 might have mused on the truth that in engineering, it’s often the large, visible things that go the fastest and the small details which go the slowest. The K-1 Risk Reduction Demonstration mission had been flown and both stages returned to Woomera within 25 hours. By the time RpK stood down for the holidays 48 hours after launch, both stages were back in the “barn” at Woomera. Stages which had lain half-completed on assembly stands in Michoud for a decade would have to endure the weeks of holiday vacation as their acolytes took their well-earned rest before they could begin to be made ready to fly once more. The pace of activity picked up as technicians and engineers returned from vacations, but even so it was the large visible progress which went quickly. The LAP had already been lifted by the overhead cranes onto a dolly and moved into its multi-level inspection and checkout stand, but the preparations for holiday vacations had seen the minimum of work on the OV. Little more had happened other than pulling the OV into the building, lowering it from the straddle truck onto its dolly, and then shutting the lights off and locking the hangar doors behind the crew. While most of the crew stood down to the work of drinking in celebration, visiting family, and engaging in feasting and good cheer, a skeleton crew of mostly younger and unmarried individuals took on the task of beginning to download and process the telemetry stored on the vehicles during 24 hours of flight.

Now, two weeks later the hangar bustled once more. The technicians were back, augmented by yet more of the LAP and OV assembly team brought in from Michoud and ATK by special arrangement. The OV and its dolly was pulled by a small forklift near the the garage doors leading from the main integration and checkout area into the payload processing area. With the stages positioned, the crew took more than an hour to work through the detailed task simply listed on the turnaround checklist as “PM Demate and Flip”. All the steps of the process had to be carefully seen to--the dolly’s special forward mounting points brought up to support the payload module separately from the OV, the PM released from the OV’s mating hardware and gently rolled a few critical inches clear, then the overhead crane from the payload processing area brought out into the main hangar to grab the payload module and lift it off the dolly. With the half-ton load of the PM hanging from the crane, the crew gingerly pulled the OV and dolly clear, then gently brought up tension on parts of the rigging to flip the PM flat and lower it away onto a second dolly. With the dolly in place, the PM was rolled into the airlock of the payload clean rooms.

While the vehicle was broken down in just days to all its major components, the smaller detail work would take days and weeks as hardware forked off in dozens of directions. Every conference room at Woomera was monopolized as a war room for one team or another. The Mission Telemetry Review took over one of the two upstairs conference rooms, while the COTS Demo One Turnaround Planning Team took over the other, one team looking back, the other looking forward. The two payload control rooms on the first floor of the office area were divided between the payload management teams. The Payload Module team were forced to share room 4 for the tasks of post-flight inspecting the Expandable Payload Module and preparing the Pressurized Cargo Module to fly to the space station while Room 5 (slightly closer to the main floor) was taken over as the center for the additional staff inspecting and turning around the OV. The LAP team, augmented for the first turnaround by support staff from Michoud, set up their offices in an area constructed from temporary cubicle walls in an unused corner of the main integration floor, where the workstands not yet needed to help check out LAP 2 and OV 2 had yet to be assembled--indeed, the workstands themselves were still in Michoud, waiting for the integration of LAP 2 and OV 2 to begin.

Officially, the delay was to help ensure that the maximum number of lessons could be learned from the initial K-1 flights before beginning the second flight set of vehicles. In reality, it had come from a hard allocation of funding between the now-flying K-1--which had all the hardware it needed to support the all-important paying COTS missions--and the yet-to-fly Rocketplane, which still needed every dollar it could get to help usher the AR-36 engine to flight-ready state and prepare the first space frame for air breathing test flights in the summer. In this decision, the Rocketplane management had overridden the continuing members of the Kistler management team and some of the minority shareholders, most notably ATK, in this. The K-1 team leadership felt as if they were being penalized for their success, while ATK for their part was displeased to see money from the COTS contract progress payments and the OrbComm OG-2 contract first down payments being directed not to paying ATK to begin the next set of K-1 vehicles but instead to the Rocketplane which RpK was producing entirely in-house for the much less assured suborbital tourist market.

In Woomera, the topic brought grumbling, but the team was busy enough that the grumbling was more restrained than the matching discussions in boardrooms in Oklahoma City, Ontario, and Salt Lake City. There wasn’t time for strategy in the integration hangars, only tactics. The Pressurized Payload Module’s arrival to the space station’s Keep-Out Sphere for berthing demonstrations on COTS Demo 1 had a date penciled into the ISS schedule and carefully husbanded, one just three months away. The movement of hardware and the day-to-day flow of staff from vehicle to vehicle consumed hours a day as managers bent over procedure manuals, collected in binders being re-written by the hour, and updated Gantt charts blown up to wall-size and checked off with markers, magnets, and tape. Wiring harnesses were extracted and checked, valves inspected, borescopes peered into ducts and turbopumps, and countless other inspections of hundreds of other systems. While these quick-hit tasks worked their way from end to end of the vehicle, other tasks were more extensive and carried out in parallel like shaking dust out of parachutes and airbags and beginning to re-pack them to be secured once again in their deployment canisters. The pad staff walked down the propellant farms and the transporter and erector were inspected, the fly-away umbilicals replaced from flight and the hold-downs checked to ensure they would function again.

Once again, however, the most critical tasks were the ones making the slowest visible progress. Half a dozen technicians hired away from the United Space Alliance carried out the same techniques they had learned for the elegant wings of the Space Shuttle in checking the thermal blankets and tiles protecting the barrel-like sides of the stubby OV. Tile by tile, they checked over each inch of her flare and nose shields, the minor damage found photographed and elaborately documented. Over weeks of work, just one blanket and six tiles were actually replaced, more out of an excess of caution and a desire to test procedures than true need. Even as other hardware began to come back together to be readied for flight, the task of inspecting the TPS continued. Day by day, more than fifty engineers and technicians labored, fighting to report the most dull possible success to Oklahoma City: all system processing on track, vehicles preparing for flight and tracking to nominal schedules. All processes continuing to track February 21st vehicle availability as planned, with the margin ahead of the planned March 7th rollout for COTS Demo 1 yet to be used. Hundreds and thousands of man hours, boiled down to a report that they hadn’t failed yet.

While Kistler labored under the Australian desert heat and RpK management defended their funding allocation decisions, however, even more fiery debates were about to erupt in Washington. February 1, 2010 saw the results of the Obama Administration’s analysis of the Augustine report reach Capital Hill.

 

[e of pi]

An ugly winter drizzle spat fitfully at the lounge window in the dark, catching distant reflections off the lights from the soccer fields at the bottom of the hill as the wind whipped it around. It was overly dramatic for what was, in fact, only a little water, but it was miserable nonetheless. It seemed in keeping with my mood, and had helped dampen the spirits of everyone else enough to force freshmen revelers into their beds unusually early for a Saturday night. By 1 AM, the floor was dark and lonely, lit only by the fire exit signs since the lights had gone down, and my laptop’s glow made for inconsistent shadows in corners of the lounge outside my dorm room door which I’d claimed after hours as my own personal living room. In better weeks, I’d held down a couch with a book for hours between classes, but tonight I’d found myself staring at the drop ceiling above my bed, unable to sleep. An hour after midnight, I’d finally given up and gone out to set up my laptop where it wouldn’t wake my roommate. There was, at least, a launch tonight--even if the Obama budget cancelled everything to do with human spaceflight and what I’d come to hope might be “my” moon shot, it couldn’t cancel this.

On screen, the NASA tv webstream counted down in glorious 720p HD, Endeavour and the stack for STS-130 was sitting on the pad--in the long shots from the VAB, a lone light in the darkness of a Florida swamp. What might be NASA’s last Space Shuttle night launch was counting down in the early morning hours of February 7, 2010--or, by college reckoning, late night of February 6, since the college day officially rolled over when you slept or ate breakfast, whichever ended up happening first. If I wanted to be any use at all before noon on a Sunday, I needed to be in bed soon. However, it was hard to shut my mind down--the rain felt like a mirror of roiling young adult emotions. The long built-in holds of a Shuttle count as the clock ticked over into the new day gave time for those to settle, and eventually I began to skim once more through the mission documents on AmericanRocketNews’ Stage Two--a present from my father for my birthday the year before. It’d been exciting at the time, but now it was like a lifeline--the details on Cupola and Node 3 the only reminder of promise, that the ISS would still exist whether the moon program lived or died. Eventually, I ended up skimming to the news and policy threads, re-reading the analysis, and then to the dry budgetary documents themselves: hundreds of pages of summaries which still felt on every re-read like the wind of an axe a hair's’ breadth from my post-college dreams of working on rocket hardware. The time ticked past, checking in every few minutes to see what the announcer was saying or why they weren’t saying anything as the holds stretched out. The weather was awful in Florida too, apparently. Like me, Endeavour was looking for its hole in the clouds, and it didn’t find one. Finally, they scrubbed for the night and eventually, an hour later, I managed to find my way to sleep. Tomorrow was another attempt, and maybe it would bring better news and brighter skies.

 

[e of pi]

rwdavidoff[6:11 PM]Good evening.

truth_is_life[6:12 PM]
Good evening! How are you doing?

rwdavidoff[6:12 PM]
I'm....all right, I guess.
Tired, and still a bit overwhelmed by everything.
Couldn't sleep last night, and ended up staying up to 3 AM trying to watch Endeavour launch Before they scrubbed.
Trying to remind myself we're still doing ISS--Cupola seems really cool.
I'm just still bummed over the new budget documents.
I just don't know what to think. Have you read them yet?

truth_is_life[6:15 PM]
Some, yeah. Mostly the executive summaries. I thought that they looked kind of interesting, myself.

rwdavidoff[6:17 PM]
There's just so much floating around. You've got a lot of people saying it's the end of the world, and I get it. I mean, DIRECT has been saying for years now that Ares V was a bad rocket, and Ares I was worse.
Augustine agreed. But now there's just...nothing.

rwdavidoff[6:18 PM]
But Phil Plait's saying it's not all bad.
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/b...nt-obamas-nasa-budget-unveiled/#.XF-4bjNKhPY\

truth_is_life[6:18 PM]
It doesn’t really look like nothing to me?

rwdavidoff[6:18 PM]
Well, there's no HLV. You can't do the moon with no HLV. That's the thing I keep coming back to.
I was _really_ looking forward to working on Constellation when I graduate.

truth_is_life[6:19 PM]
Are you sure you can’t do the Moon with no HLV? Didn’t the Constellation report talk about how you could do it?

rwdavidoff[6:19 PM]
I think I've mentioned a few times my great-Uncle worked on the first moon shot, and I was going to be part of the second.

truth_is_life[6:19 PM]
I think it was just to dismiss it, but ISTR that they did construct a scenario for how you could do it...

rwdavidoff[6:20 PM]
It's a _lot_ of launches. You need depots, and tugs, and a lot of that. And they're killing Orion too, so there's also no capsule to take you there. Unless you're buying Elon's lines about Dragon being lunar rated.

truth_is_life[6:21 PM]
Well, if NASA’s paying for it to be...

rwdavidoff[6:21 PM]
I guess, but it's a lot of work to just get back to where we are. We could be doing SDHLV _now_ you know? A lot of this development and science spending is awesome, and I'm really pleased to see that the plan isn't to just splash ISS, but...it seems like we'll be losing a lot of time.
Depot demonstrations and new engine testing and ISRu demos and all that don't get boots on the surface.

truth_is_life[6:23 PM]
Sure, but see what Phil says in that article you linked: “We need to be able to figure out how to get there and be there, and that takes more than just big rockets. We need a good plan, and I’m not really sure what we had up until this point is that plan.”
What I think of is Antarctica.
You know, Antarctica’s a really harsh environment that you have to lug everything into from the rest of the world, right?
Kind of like outer space.

rwdavidoff[6:24 PM]
I'd heard, yeah.

truth_is_life[6:25 PM]
And back in the day it was so expensive and difficult to do anything there that there were only little pinprick visits from time to time.
Nothing permanent.
But technology developed and costs fell and eventually it got cheap enough that the United States has hundreds of people in Antarctica all the time, even during winter.
And loads and loads of countries have their own bases and outposts, even little ones like Argentina and Chile.
And it’s totally uncontroversial. No one has to beg for money for the Antarctic program.
So if you can bring the costs down--and this budget is at least _trying_ to do that--then it’s not a matter of the “moon program” any more.
Besides, it’s not like it’s giving up on exploration altogether, it’s mostly just shifting money to robots.

rwdavidoff[6:29 PM]
Pardon?
I think I missed that bit.
Space Science didn't talk about any new program starts.

truth_is_life[6:30 PM]
I mean, if you go look over the budget there are budget increases for most of NASA’s science lines, which are robots.
ESMD doing precursor missions to the Moon, Mars, and other places like the near-Earth asteroids.
Bumps to Earth science, planetary science, you name it.
I mean, okay, you know how I always bring up how the Apollo missions were so much more productive than the Luna missions...
But if you can’t _get_ Apollo, and that’s what Augustine was saying, then Luna’s better than nothing.

rwdavidoff[6:32 PM]
I guess I was just hoping we wouldn't have to choose.
And it seems like a lot of the space congresspeople are pitching fits.
Like healthcare wasn't bad enough.
I am excited about the exploration demonstrations, actually putting ISRU to the test, a depot test, all that.

truth_is_life[6:43 PM]
Yeah, though you have to remember that presidents propose, they don’t dispose.
There was a book about that, let me see...
Ah! Roger Launius, _Spaceflight and the Myth of Presidential Leadership_!

rwdavidoff[6:46 PM]
Looking it up. I'm assuming the title means that he's saying they matter less than people think?

truth_is_life[6:46 PM]
Yeah, that’s the gist.
The thing is that Presidents are powerful but not, ultimately, in charge of the disbursement of resources.
They also don’t _care_ as much as individual Congresspeople.
I mean, Alabama wants space dollars more than Obama wants not to give them space dollars, you know?

rwdavidoff[6:50 PM]
I suppose.
I'm not really sure what that's going to mean, though.
I dunno. I think I'm just going to hope Endeavour gets off all right tonight and I can sleep better, and then we see how it all shakes out.

truth_is_life[6:52 PM]
Yeah, that’s probably for the best.
And hey!
This budget wants a lot of cool stuff with commercial, right?
Isn’t it also great to see reuse going places?

rwdavidoff[6:54 PM]
It is! I'm looking forward to seeing K-1 refly in a month or so.
And we'll get to see what all this reuse stuff Elon keeps talking about wanting to do is once they get flying.

truth_is_life[6:55 PM]
Yeah, and how about these other companies the budget calls out?
Blue Origin, Paragon Space?

rwdavidoff[6:56 PM]
I don't really know much about them.
I’ve been trying to learn--that astronaut seemed really excited about commercial when she visited campus last month, but there’s a lot of them.
Paragon sounds nifty, and Blue seems like they've got a lot of money, so hopefully they can make some quick progress.
I am hoping to see Virgin and RpK fly this year.

truth_is_life[6:58 PM]
Yeah, that’ll be cool.

rwdavidoff[6:58 PM]
That's some real science fiction stuff.

truth_is_life[6:59 PM]
Yeah, seeing everyday...well, okay, pretty rich...people flying into space, that’s a big deal.

rwdavidoff[7:02 PM]
It is. Anyway, I really should stop moping and try and finish this statics homework.
Or get a nap.
Especially if I'm staying up tonight to watch the launch attempt.
See you around?

truth_is_life[7:04 PM]
Yeah, talk later!

NOTE: My thanks to @Workable Goblin for his help in preparing this post.

 

[e of pi]

The STS-130 mission was a perfect example of Space Shuttle assembly missions to the International Space Station. Over ten days at the station, the crew berthed the Node 3 module Tranquility to the port side of Node 1, reconfigured the Cupola module to its permanent nadir-facing position on Node 3 from its axial launch position, transferred the PMA-3 module from a temporary position on Node 2 Harmony to a new position at the axial (port) end of Node 3, and conducted three spacewalks to outfit Node 3 and the Cupola into their flight configuration. On Flight Day 10, the Cupola windows had been opened for the first time, granting a new and wider view of the world than had ever been available before through its seven windows, including a 36” main port looking directly down at the Earth below.

However, Endeavour’s 24th spaceflight was also officially to be her second to last--and as currently planned, the last mission of the entire Space Shuttle program. The Earth below might look peaceful, but as mission commander George Zamka and pilot Terry Virts guided Endeavour down over the coast of Washington en route to a landing at KSC, they swept over a country which was in the midst of a furious debate over the future of spaceflight beyond the end of the Shuttle. As many outside the White House had expected, but as had apparently come as a shock to Obama’s staff, the proposal to kill Constellation in the cradle and end development on a Shuttle-derived heavy lifter and the new Orion crew capsule entirely had not only come as an affront to spaceflight fans. It had also met with stark opposition by the powerful interests of the companies involved with those programs. Boeing, whose headquarters Endeavour flashed over at speeds above Mach 20, faced the end of their program for the development of the Ares V core stage, and the sudden absence of a replacement. It represented the loss of tens of billions in development funds and thousands of jobs in Alabama, New Orleans, and Florida. Lobbyists clustered, planning strategies to coordinate messaging over thwarting Obama’s plans to end Constellation--or at least to ensure that the replacement program would include some kind of Shuttle-derived heavy lifter.

The Shuttle itself flashed over these discussions in seconds, continuing on over northern Utah, passing the major operational center for yet another of America’s giants in spaceflight lobbying: ATK. Around ATK headquarters in Eden Park, Minnesota, reactions were somewhat mixed: the Obama plans called for a massive increase in funding for commercial supply of the International Space Station, a role their investment in RpK left them well-positioned to take advantage of, and which promised to end a continuing deadlock with RpK leadership over the contracts to begin integration for the second LAP and second and third OVs. The K-1 might also be positioned for a bid on the billions of dollars the Obama budget called to spend on the development of a commercial crew vehicle. However, a few hundred million here and there from the K-1 program could hardly replace the steady diet of Space Shuttle and Constellation pork for their flagship solid rocket program. And yet...the checks for Ares V and Ares I five-segment booster development (always the most lucrative portion of a program) had largely already been cashed. If a new HLV didn’t include these boosters, it might not be the end of the world as long as their development was completed.

Indeed, if such a new heavy lifter were to call for the use of reusability as demonstrated by RpK, ATK’s contracts and Michoud to manage assembly the K-1 and to conduct much of launch and turnaround operations at RpK’s Woomera launch site meant they were positioned to be the world leaders in integration and operation of reusable vehicles. If such a vehicle went forward, it might be possible for ATK to wrestle the contract for not just the boosters, but the prime contract for the entire vehicle--a prize worth several times the value of simply building five-segment boosters after development. The timing was wrong, however. No suitable engine yet existed for such a monster, and the K-1 was still beginning its early flights. The thought started off small, but began to spread inside the company’s Minnesota headquarters: perhaps there might be more value in Obama’s plans to wait on HLV development than their knee-jerk reaction had indicated, for ATK as a company, and thus certainly for the country as a whole. White-hot rhetoric began to cool as the thoughts circulated, and new calls went out to congressional and senate offices in Utah, Alabama, and Florida.

While lobbyists considered changes in direction below, Endeavour swept through her own graceful banking turns, bleeding off energy with the atmosphere flaring off her wingtips. Control surfaces and thrusters worked in harmony, all reacting to Zamka and Virts’ steady hand on the stick. This was the moments her design was born for. The delicate balance of air and heat had consumed hundreds of thousands of hours of computer time over the decades, and though the ballet might only occur a few more times, Endeavour’s pilot and computers knew all the steps. At hypersonic speeds tens of kilometers above Oklahoma City, the Space Shuttle Endeavour danced, leaving her characteristic sonic booms behind in her flaming wake as she swept on to Florida.

While she continued on to land, however, the team at RpK in Oklahoma City were planning for her replacement. As of that morning, the final closeouts for the K-1 COTS Demo 1 flight were beginning. Jean-Pierre Boisvert’s flight control team were in the simulator, working through the procedures to guide their spacecraft on to berth to the same node, if not the same port, which Endeavour ahd so recently freed up. Other engineers worked through weight and balance checklists with NASA teams in Houston as they planned the loadout for the low-risk cargos of opportunity which would be loaded into the Pressurized Payload Module to be unloaded if the K-1 succeeded in making its berthing to Station. The planned launch date had slipped from March 1st to March 3rd, but that still meant the launch of the next generation of reusable rocket to the space station was less than a week and a half away.

The K-1 was Endeavour’s successor in many ways. The K-1 was technological cousin using many of her systems or a child drawing on shuttle heritage for a fully reusable vehicle of the type Shuttle’s designers had dreamt to build. However,the K-1 lacked Shuttle’s grace in the air. While Endeavour’s sleek form danced with the air, the K-1 simply shoved it aside in frustration. The Shuttle, though long described as like flying a brick by pilots, at least had significant lift. Her massive wings, carried to orbit at the cost of so much payload, let her slip through the air with the relative agility she was once again putting to use to manage her return. The K-1 did not slip, cut, or knife through the air, not by a longshot. On return, the OV’s protective mantle of tiles and blankets wrapped its barrel-like form in the bare minimum required to sustain heat. The Space Shuttle was like flying a brick, but at least it flew. The OV’s return had all the grace of a brick thrown into a pond. The K-1 had even less respect for the air on ascent. Unlike the STS system’s careful ogives and booster noses, the K-1 offered the airstream the same blunt heat shield as on descent, shoving the airstream aside like a linebacker with the power of her AJ-26 main engines. And yet, if the mission proved successful in the coming weeks, the K-1’s two stages could go on to offer the Space Station the vehicle the Shuttle designers had always envisioned. Time would tell if she could weather the storm, not just of entry, but of politics.

While K-1 planners focused on their upcoming missions, Endeavour continued her return to Florida, knifing through the sky over Mississippi and Alabama. Below, at Huntsville, program managers and employees nervously considered what the end of Ares might mean for the center. There was little immediate hope in the 2010 budget, and the center’s employees and their representatives in Congress were beginning to marshall their efforts to fight for a reprieve for Ares. Orion, in the end, they could take or leave, but the heavy lifter and development efforts centered at Huntsville had to continue--there was too much on the line for anything else to happen. In Decatur, employees of ULA cursed that none of their proposals for COTS had been selected, offering no chance for their rockets to benefit from the money thrown to commercial cargo. Perhaps commercial crew, but that was the issue under the most fire from their comrades in industry at Marshall. In Florida itself, however, the issue was less grim. Contractors at United Space Alliance, Kennedy Space Center, and the Cape nervously eyes their continued employment too. However, the reality depended less on the vehicle--launching Shuttle, SDHLV, commercial, or other launchers could amount to much the same as long as the workforce was kept busy. As a songsmith might have put it “If the rockets go up, who cares where they come from?” Launching alone was important, whatever the program which was required to ensure a continuing flight rate, though continued crew programs would be nice for the additional employment requirements--or at least, that was the case being in calls made from phone numbers with 952 area codes. Endeavour was above it all, though, swinging into the landing pattern for the Space Shuttle Landing Facility and finally skidding off the last of her energy into heat in her brakes. Like the Space Shuttle program, Endeavour was rolling to a halt.

 

[e of pi]

Sixty five days after its maiden launch, the RpK and ATK Woomera teams were gearing up to fly again. It had been just over fifty days since most of the team had returned from holiday vacations, but ever since the K-1 operations staff had been working every day, some nights, and the occasional weekend to see the rocket ready to prove the great unknown of the K-1 system: its complete and rapid reuse. There was little room for error. Unlike other companies, the K-1 team had no margin for “learning incidents,’ at least not any which resulted in a loss of vehicle, and the entire corporate strategy depended on rapidly beginning their two dozen missions to serve the International Space Station. With the much-bemoaned diversion of COTS progress funding awards to help hold schedule on Rocketplane integration back stateside, the Woomera team’s continued success would have to come from their own success--further funding for K-1 vehicles and future projects would be funded by successful K-1 missions to station. For that to begin, their COTS Demo flights had to succeed.

Events stateside had another effect--the world of spaceflight had changed a lot in fifty days. It was long enough for a president to propose a budget which would make commercial vehicles like the K-1 a crown jewel of American spaceflight, inspiring new zeal in vultures circling for any lapse or show of weakness by RpK or their commercial competitors at SpaceX. At a college in Ohio, fifty days was long enough for a freshman student to meet with an astronaut who told them to look into commercial, to suffer a personal crises, and to begin to question if--and how--their dreams might still be achieved. While the Kistler operations staff had labored in the confines of the hangar facilities at Woomera, the attention from the world had turned the pressure up to eleven.

Inside the hangar, the small tasks wrapped up and accumulated into large ones. The Pressurized Cargo Module loading commenced on the 15th. Like tangrams or Tetris blocks, carefully selected racks and cargo bags were loaded through the “back” hatch of the module. Walking on work platforms to the hatch cut into the aft end of the module, moving between the forward thrusters in bunny suits and booties, technicians loaded carefully documented materials into the confines of the K-1’s hold. This was in many ways a dry run. The racks loaded held no critical equipment, no GLACIER freezers or new experiments, and the bags of water and provisions loaded into the remainder of the module were surplus to station needs. Freshly topped off by Endeavour the week before, the supplies were useful, but not critical. Two smaller but unique payloads were last to be loaded, just before the hatch was bolted closed to form the aft bulkhead of the pressure vessel. One had flown in with an RpK executive and a bodyguard, while the latter had been picked up by a pair of interns at a local store to fit the flight plan. The former was heavy enough to require two technicians to help maneuver it into its slot in the carefully planned Tetris board that was the small cargo volume, while the other was lifted one-handed and passed over the threshold to be tied down. The skin-flint payload planning meant only the latter was intended for the crew themselves, while the former were to be returned to the ground.

The mission’s preparations went off like putting away a set of Russian nesting dolls. With the internal cargo loading complete, technicians could focus on the module’s exterior. The thrusters were tested and verified, the CBM boresight cameras were installed and checked, and the Kistler Proximity Operations Detection System (K-PODS) was powered on and verified working, both its Kurs radar and TriDAR LIDAR system. The the PCM was moved out into the main integration hangar, leaving the inner sanctum of the booties-only cleanrooms for the shirtsleeves-and-steel-toes realm of the main hangar where the untried forward payload module could be mounted to the OV propulsion unit and integrated into a single orbital spacecraft with the connections of power and data cables. The scale of the hardware being integrated escalated rapidly, from the loading of cargo bags massing a few kilograms to the OV and PCM massing tons. Finally on February 24th, the OV and LAP were aligned on the main integration rails and brought together. Technicians swarmed with torque wrenches and wire harnesses, binding the two vehicles together into one flight ready stack over the next day. Just 65 days from the maiden flight of the system, almost the entire same stack was ready to go--this time, to prove the vehicle’s suitability for the tremendous role commercial would have to play in the President’s commercial vision.

The risk reduction flight had proven the K-1 could fly, but this mission would bring new challenges. To reach the station’s orbit, the K-1 needed to fly at just the right moment, down to seconds of precision. Any delays would mean waiting a day or more, waiting for precession to carry the ground track of the station back over the launch site to the proper location. Moreover, while for simple orbital delivery missions for satellites the K-1 could literally fly itself, receiving no uploaded commands after launch until a wind report prior to entry, the complexities of an approach to the space station would put real responsibility in the hands of Jean-Pierre’s controllers in Oklahoma City. Like a human pilot, the vehicle’s avionics could still be trusted to carry out individual maneuvers, but the planning and optimization of the trajectory to chase down the station, bring the vehicle to rendezvous, and carry out the final approach while still leaving margin for departure and deorbit would require humans--and the more powerful ground-based computers--in the loop.

As the launch date--March 6th, 2010, 11:52:32 UTC--drew near, Woomera’s population exploded as it had before the maiden flight. The ELDO Hotel bar began to fill in the evenings as the old blockhouses became crowded, both by those involved in the launch and those just there to watch. Sightseers, some native Australians, some from as far away as the US or Europe, began to converge on the tiny Australian town, while representatives of NASA’s oversight and operations teams for station and COTS arrived in button-down shirts and polos. During the day, serious discussions flowed around the vehicle as it rolled out to the pad and the crews carried out the wet dress rehearsals and hardware-in-the-loop simulations required. The data rolled in, feeding the ongoing Flight Readiness Review as item after item was checked off as good for flight. As the launch day closed in, dozens of criteria for safe approach to the station’s keep-out sphere (KOS) still remained open, but many could not be settled until the K-1 and its PCM were in space. At night, the hotel bar and the town’s bowling alley offered a minimal distraction from the next day’s preparations, enough to inspire more than one LAN game or minor hijinx. The ELDO bar’s refrigerator, already home to a “Thales Australia” sticker, acquired a Rocketplane Kistler decal and a copy of the NASA meatball as the last days counted down to launch. Woomera, the once and future spaceport, was officially back on the map.

 

[e of pi]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

[e of pi]

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

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

 

[e of pi]

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

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

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

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

 

[e of pi]

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

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

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

PressToLaunch: 4 km, entering approach ellipse

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

2 km, webcast starting in a few minutes

Come on K-1! Go RpK!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

All polling go for capture. SSRMS at 5m

End effector view, 2m left.

Looks like it’s really close now!

Half a meter to go.

Capture! Crew reports good grab.

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

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

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

 

[e of pi]

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...

 

[e of pi]

ARN Forums: STAGE TWO!: Commercial Vehicles: Rocketplane and Kistler Updates: Page ....(30)...

There was some discussion at the bowling alley last night that they might be flying the team here a couple more payload modules next week. Can anyone help me locate the permits so I know when to go down to the strip? I haven’t gotten new images of the AN-225 in a while, and the Woomera web is being its usual helpful self…

I was looking for it this morning and there was a request in, but it looks like it just got updated as cancelled--not rejected, retracted. They’ve got a new one in for the Beluga.

Why would the switch planes?

It’s bigger.

Huh?

To elaborate a bit, the An-225 can carry things up to 4.4 meters in diameter. The Beluga would only be of value for things larger than that. Which is interesting--anything that fits on top or inside of a K-1 is smaller than 4.2m. Which is interesting! They didn’t magic up the second LAP or something while I wasn’t looking, did they? Anyone at Michoud know anything about that?

While I keep hearing NewSpace can work miracles, I’m pretty sure they can’t magic spacecraft out of nowhere. I’ll check. They were talking about shipping over the ISS unpressurized cargo module, but that shouldn’t need a Beluga.

EDIT: HAH! It’s even funnier than that. They’re still shipping the upressurized cargo module over, but I’m not sure why they’re bothering because apparently they’re shipping LAP-1 back! I know they weren’t planning that for a while, so apparently they found something in the turnaround inspections that means it needs a tuneup back at Michoud. Two flights and they broke it! So much for New Space miracles and rapid reuse...

At this time, all I can say is that we are shipping LAP-1 back stateside once the Beluga delivers the UCM, but it’s not due to damage.

 

[e of pi]

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.

 

[e of pi]

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.