Welcome to issue 3.40 of the Rocket Report! There have been fewer announcements in the area of launch this week, but that does not mean we have a shortage of this report. This includes interesting developments on the international front, from the closure of a Russian space tourism country to some rather serious ethical issues regarding the development of a space port in Brazil.
As always, we welcome you to submit readers, and if you do not want to miss a problem, sign in with the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report contains information on small, medium and heavy-duty rockets, as well as a quick look at the next three launches on the calendar.
ABL Space is a big contract. Under the block-purchase agreement between ABL Space Systems and Lockheed, the aviation giant will buy up to 26 launches by 2026 and as many as 32 additional launches by 2029. If the conditions are met, it will reach 58 launches over the next eight years for ABL Space. Not bad for a company that has yet to launch another rocket.
Working on a debut launch … “This agreement offers significant value to ABL,” Harry O’Hanley, co-founder and CEO of the company, told Ars. “As far as our business is concerned, the contract provides an ongoing source of one of the biggest players in the civil and defense space industry to anchor our manifesto through the years to come.” Before ABL Space can get this contract right, it must of course show that it can reach a trajectory. It is currently focusing on the third quarter of this year for the first launch of the RS1 vehicle. (submitted by Redngrish)
China plans not one, but two commercial spacecraft. The coastal cities of Ningbo and Wenchang plan to build new commercial spacecraft to meet the growing demand for launch in China. According to SpaceNews, the port city of Ningbo in the eastern province of Zhejiang has invested a total investment of $ 3 billion to establish a spaceport at Xiangshan. It can launch up to 100 missions per year.
Oral rockets … Wenchang, the Chinese coastal launch center developed for large, new generation Long March 5 and Long March 7 rockets, also supports the construction of an “integrated and open” launch center to meet the commercial launch demand. China currently has domestic launch sites at Jiuquan in the northwest, Taiyuan in the north and Xichang in the southwest of the country, as well as the new Wenchang Coastal Center on the southern island of Hainan. These moves come as several Chinese companies launch and test their commercial rockets. (submitted by Ken the Bin)
BWXT receives NASA nuclear reactor grant. The Virginia-based nuclear technology company said NASA had awarded a $ 9.4 million one-year contract to manufacture fuel cores, design materials and manufacturing processes for fuel plants. It is part of the technology development needed for a nuclear-powered rocket engine in space.
Just a very small start … NASA sees nuclear power as a faster way for people to reach destinations like Mars, with lower fuel needs. The award comes after a recent report commissioned by NASA found that if the agency wants to send humans to Mars (and do so repeatedly and in a sustainable way), the propulsion of nuclear space is on the way. According to the report, much more important grants than are needed to bring nuclear power online in the 2030s. (submitted by Ken the Bin)
Russian space tourism company closes. A Russian company that planned to send tourists from the first private food fashion dream in the countryside has scrapped the project and will close permanently, reports The Moscow Times. Cosmokurs’ operations will cease due to ‘insurmountable difficulties’ in coordinating the local authorities on the cosmodrome project, as well as the company’s inability to obtain the necessary regulatory documents from the Ministry of Defense “for the design of a tourist rocket abroad.
Space tourism is difficult … CEO Pavel Pushkin founded the private space industry in 2014 after being inspired by the early success of companies such as SpaceX and Blue Origin. The Russian state space agency, Roscosmos, has previously approved Kosmokurs’ ambitious plan to send tourists into space from 2025 from a private spacecraft in the Nizhny Novgorod region. It’s a warning story with at least two lessons. First, there is just not much of a commercial space support network in Russia. And secondly, it’s extremely difficult and expensive to get into space tourism. (submitted by Ken the Bin)
Falcon 9 rocket drops debris on Washington farm. The atmospheric re-entry and disintegration of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket top stage created a fiery display in the sky above the Northwest Pacific at the end of March, but not all of the shooting stars burned down along the way. At least one large piece of the rocket – an approximately 1.5-foot-long composite encapsulated pressure vessel – fell on private property in southwest Grant County, in central Washington State.
I got your rocket … Kyle Foreman, a sheriff’s spokesman, told GeekWire that the owner had left a message in which he reported the clutter. “The sheriff’s office checked it on Monday and SpaceX staff came on Tuesday to pick it up,” Foreman said. SpaceX has yet to explain exactly what was wrong with the second phase of the Falcon 9 rocket, so that it could not orbit the sea in a controlled manner. Fortunately, no one was injured on the ground. (submitted by Ken the Bin)
Brazilian launch site raises controversy. The Brazilian government is committed to further developing the Alcântara launch center on the North Atlantic coast, near the equator. However, the region also houses Afro-Brazilian settlers from settlements first established by escaped slaves. These settlements are known as Quilombola communities. The Washington Post recently took a deep dive into the controversy and investigated the eviction of these communities on local residents. The newspaper found that the expansion of the spaceport could displace nearly 2,100 people from the Quilombola communities.
Brazil’s polarizing dilemma … Marcos Pontes, head of the Brazilian Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation, said there were no plans to relocate families “at the moment”. And when the time comes to remove people, he predicted, they will go willingly. “They’re going to see development work, real development,” he said. “All the resistance, which will gradually disappear.” This seems unlikely. The clash is the distillation of one of Brazil’s most urgent and polarizing dramas, the publication reads. Which is more important: the development of a vast country with unrealized potential and a backward economy? Or the protection of some of its most vulnerable communities?
SpaceX abandons efforts to “capture” payload screens. Over the past few years, SpaceX has been experimenting with two ships with large nets, Me. Head and Me Tree, to capture Falcon 9 payload screens returning from space under a parafoil. However, as noted on the SpaceXfleet.com website, these efforts have not proved as reliable as SpaceX engineers probably suggested. “Catch” was also dangerous for the repair ships themselves.
Still looking for optimization … As a result, SpaceX switched to ‘wet recovery’ of the hoods in which the Dragon recovery is sent GO Search and GO Navigator snatch the two halves quickly from the ocean to the splash. But the vehicles are increasingly needed for Dragon missions, which is why the SpaceX fleet is changing. Both Me. Head and Me Tree has undergone a dismantling process and SpaceX has a much larger ship, the Shelia Bordelon, to pull disc halves out of the sea with its 50-crane. It also seems to be a turning point measure. (submitted by Ken the Bin)
Starlink to drive increase in Vandenberg cadence. After a tranquility from America’s primary rocket base on the West Coast, SpaceX will soon resume a regular cadence of missions from Vandenberg Air Force Base to deploy Starlink Internet satellites in polar orbits, Spaceflight Now reports. With the launches of Vandenberg, SpaceX’s ever-growing Starlink network can fill the coverage gaps and provide internet connectivity across the poles.
SpaceX has launched a dozen Falcon 9s from Vandenberg … Gwynne Shotwell, SpaceX’s president and chief operating officer, said on Tuesday that the company plans to launch more Starlink satellites into orbit this summer. Officials said SpaceX could rise to a cadence to launch one Starlink mission a month from the California launch base, which overlooks the Pacific Ocean about 225 kilometers northwest of Los Angeles. (submitted by EllPeaTea and Ken the Bin)
United Launch Alliance bets on top stages. ULA chief Tory Bruno said at the America’s Future Series Space Innovation Summit on Wednesday that the next big thing for his company is long-term top-tier phases, and he believes the technology has a bright future. “We think it’s really just about space transportation and the things that the upper stages can do,” Bruno told SpaceNews. The company’s new Vulcan rocket will be powered by the Centaur V top stage, which has 40 percent more endurance and 2.5 times more energy than the ULA top stage.
Just the tip of the iceberg . The Centaur V is an impressive top-notch stage, but it is nonetheless a step back in the ambitions of the Advanced Cryogenic Evolved Stage, or ACES, which the company first envisioned with Vulcan. The innovative ACES concept used the use of fuel decoction to operate the stage, produce power and keep its fuel tanks under pressure. ULA says the Centaur V top stage has ‘fingerprints’ of research done on ACES. (submitted by Ken the Bin)
SpaceX builds its own Starship ground equipment. Based on photos and videos taken in Boca Chica, Texas, SpaceX began building large storage tanks for ground support equipment for its Starship launch site. What is striking about these tanks is that they are manufactured with similar processes and materials as the barrels that make up Starship vehicles.
The benefits of cheap steel … The importance of these tanks, reports Teslarati, is that it is another step to reduce the cost of launch. To build that kind of propellant farm, SpaceX will have to support Mars missions, SpaceX will probably have to buy a few dozen new storage tanks at a few million dollars apiece. Instead, “SpaceX effectively adopts identical rocket parts, slightly adjusts a handful of those parts, and transforms what could have been a rocket into a propellant storage tank.” (submitted by Ken the Bin)
Next three launches
April 9: Soyuz | Soyuz MS-18 crew mission | Baikonur, Kazakhstan | 07:42 UTC
April 18: GSLV | The GISAT 1 Geo-Image Satellite | Satish Dhawan Space Center, India | TBD
April 22: Valk 9 | Crew-2 mission on Crew Dragon | Kennedy Space Center, Florida | 10:11 UTC
