ULA launch and discussion thread

[tater]

Coverage starts about an hour before launch. I will be on the road at that point heading to CO I think.

 

[tater]

 

[tater]

Weather a few hours from now looks sorta marginal. That's the nature of summer in FL, though.

[tater]

I'm hearing scrub

[Beccab]

Just now, tater said:

I'm hearing scrub

Those damn SpaceX snipers

[tater]

CST issue, not weather.

[tater]

 

[BuranAce]

25 minutes ago, tater said:

 

 

[tater]

 

[Beccab]

Rogozin joining the "Where are Tory's engines Jeff?" train, now that was unexpected

[DDE]

19 hours ago, Beccab said:

Rogozin joining the "Where are Tory's engines Jeff?" train, now that was unexpected

Going by the stuff in "our" thread, there's now personal beef between those two guys.

[Beccab]

https://www.bizjournals.com/denver/news/2021/08/23/ula-blue-origin-be-4-vulcan-rocket-bezos-bruno.html

Article is paywalled, so here is the text copypasted:
 

Quote

Aug 23, 2021, 4:08pm EDT

Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin will be later than expected delivering the first set of flight rocket engines to United Launch Alliance, pushing the company’s debut of its Vulcan rocket well into 2022.

The engine delivery is weeks later than the late 2021 timeline that Centennial-based ULA had publicly predicted as recently as the start of August.

“I will not get them before the end of the year,” said Tory Bruno, CEO of ULA, in an exclusive Denver Business Journal interview ahead of this week's Space Symposium industry gathering in Colorado Springs. “It will be shortly into the beginning of the 2022 calendar year, and anywhere in there will support me being able to build up a rocket and have that Vulcan waiting on my customer, Astrobotic.”

The first flight of ULA’s methane-fueled Vulcan rocket is scheduled to launch Pittsburgh-based Astrobotic Technology Inc.’s Peregrine moon lander. That NASA-backed mission had been targeting a late 2021 liftoff, but slowness in Astrobotic’s spacecraft development made it seem more likely to slip into 2022.

Now that's a given, and the later launch adds pressure to ULA's schedule for other missions for the U.S. military.

ULA is awaiting Blue Origin to deliver BE-4 engines nearly two years behind the timeline laid out when ULA and Blue Origin finalized their engine supply contract in 2018.

ULA is buying BE-4 engines from Blue Origin, two of which will power the first stage of each Vulcan, a rocket ULA has been developing since 2015 to replace the company’s Atlas V and Deltas IV Heavy space launch vehicles. Vulcan is designed to handle the same missions and payloads that ULA’s two current rocket types fly, but to do so at a cheaper price that’s competitive against the reusable Falcon 9 rockets flown by Elon Musk’s SpaceX.

The U.S. Space Force has contracted ULA to provide 60% of the military’s satellite and other space payload launches through 2027 in a contract based on Vulcan pricing.

ULA is expected to launch its first U.S. military payload on Vulcan in a little over 12 months.

Congress has also set a deadline of 2022 to end launches of ULA’s Atlas V rockets for U.S. national security missions, because it uses Russian-made RD-180 booster engines. Blue Origin makes the BE-4s in Alabama. ULA needs two successful Vulcan launches to prove the new rocket before the U.S. military allows it to carry national security payloads.

Bruno said ULA still expects to meet that schedule even with the delayed delivery of the first BE-4 engines, Bruno said.

“It absolutely supports getting two missions off for certification before that first flight of Vulcan for national security — provided, of course, that my payloads are available,” he said.

ULA clinched contracts to use Vulcan’s first two missions for civilian payloads. The first will be Astrobotic’s lander, and the second is scheduled to be the first launch of the Dream Chaser spaceplane being built in Louisville by Sierra Space. Dream Chaser is contracted by NASA to fly six cargo missions to the International Space Station.

Both Astrobotic and Sierra Space, a division of Sparks, Nevada-based Sierra Nevada Corp., have had to push back their launch dates due to delays in getting their spacecraft ready.

The companies are confident of meeting their launch timelines this year, according to updates provided to ULA, Bruno said. That’s despite being hampered by delays caused by the Covid-19 pandemic and other issues.

Blue Origin’s engine delays are adding to the schedule pressure. ULA had planned a “pretty big buffer” of extra time beyond what Blue Origin initially promised for delivery of the first flight BE-4s, but ULA still had to adapt its Vulcan development processes due to the engine’s delays, Bruno said.

Now, ULA is running out of wiggle room.

“We’ve actually be been able to accommodate this, but I’ll be straight with you, the dates we’ve set up for them now— we really don’t have the ability to make any big moves after this,” Bruno said. “I need them to diligently work through the plans we have and get done on time.”

He is on the phone with Blue Origin weekly about the engine’s progress, Bruno said. If anything big came up, it could impact ULA’s ability to keep its national security missions on schedule. The company has already had to change those plans once.

ULA this spring told Space Force that it will use an Atlas V rocket for a spring 2022 satellite launch, not a Vulcan as had been expected when it was contracted. Another military launch in the fall of 2022 is now expected to be the first Vulcan national security flight.

ULA is using a pair of spent BE-4 test engines on a version of the Vulcan rocket going through launch-pad tests now at Cape Canaveral Space Force Base, in Florida. The company expects to test fuel loading in the dummy rocket in September.

The first flight set of BE-4s are being built now while Kent, Washington-based Blue Origin tests other versions of the BE-4 engines to “pre-qualify” the engine as ready for ULA.

Once those first flight engines are delivered in early 2022, ULA expects to assemble the first Vulcan and ready it for the Astrobotic lander launch from Cape Canaveral while final BE-4 qualification testing is being completed using a different set of the engines, Bruno said.

ULA plans to test-fire the first flight BE-4s on the launchpad with the fully assembled Vulcan held down, making that the final qualification test — something ULA typically doesn’t do. ULA would pause the launch if issues came up in the remaining BE-4 testing, Bruno said.

“We’re not going to rush them. We want to do it right,” he said.

A lot of attention is being paid to the BE-4 delays.

Musk has tweeted at Bruno needling him about Blue Origin’s lateness, and that was before the revelation of the latest missed delivery date. Bruno is frequently asked about the engines, he said, and about whether he now considers choosing the BE-4 for Vulcan a mistake.

Though they’re running late, the engines remain the best choice for Vulcan, Bruno said. After thousands of seconds of test-firing time, the BE-4s have been shown to perform better than expected in thrust and efficiency of fuel use, promising powerful and efficient liftoff for the rocket, he explained.

The BE-4 also provides the affordability ULA needed to field a cost-competitive new launcher, Bruno said. Even with the delays, Blue Origin will have BE-4s delivered before any of the alternative engines that ULA considered could have been ready, he said.

All the big question marks about Blue Origin’s design of the BE-4 — the biggest methane fuel engine aver built — have been answered for well over a year, he said.

“We really like the engines,” Bruno said. “The engines are performing well, and the design has stabilized, and it’s now really a matter of getting through the test program and fabricating the flight engines … It’s the endgame now.”

ULA is a joint venture of Boeing Co. and Lockheed Martin Corp.

It employs about 2,500 people, about half of them locally at its headquarters in the south metro area. The rest work at ULA assembly plants in Decatur, Alabama, and Harlingen, Texas, and at government launch sites in Florida and California.

I suggest reading the whole of it, but most relevant bits:

- article is mistaken in saying Vulcan will launch DoD payloads in 2022, when it changed the initial military payload it had (USSF-51) to Atlas the Vulcan NSSL launch slipped to 2023
- This is the first time Tory admits BE-4 will be delayed to 2022 publicly (and he appears quite frustrated about it too), before ULA always shielded behind "launch slip is due to payload readiness, not engines"
- BO is so late with the BE-4 that were they delayed again, mayor problems would likely occur

[tater]

 

[RyanRising]

2 hours ago, tater said:

 

So he’s contradicting himself here?

[Beccab]

https://backchannel.substack.com/p/notes-from-the-underground-information

Hacker/leaker leaks alleged ULA internal emails (intent seemingly is to weaponize unions against spacex)

 

Another relevant part of the leak not included in the article:

https://m.imgur.com/a/DvVTUjD

 

Authenticity is obviously unknown, but the people involved are real and arguments fit with what we know about the hearing between NASA, ULA and Congress about spacex that happened last June, especially the "chinese interference" part. I won't link the original leak thread shown in the article, but it's available as well

[DDE]

1 hour ago, Beccab said:

Authenticity is obviously unknown, but the people involved are real and arguments fit with what we know about the hearing between NASA, ULA and Congress about spacex that happened last June, especially the "chinese interference" part. I won't link the original leak thread shown in the article, but it's available as well

Ah, the pungent odor of someone cooking a political solution to a commercial problem.

Edited August 25, 2021 by DDE

[tater]

5 hours ago, RyanRising said:

So he’s contradicting himself here?

I forgot the quote in the bizjournal article where he said he'd not get them.

Maybe BO saw that and told him they'd deliver this year?

Edited August 25, 2021 by tater

[Beccab]

Leaked emails in details (divided into groups):

- Elon Musk's War on Regulators

- Elon Musk Bad for Democracy

- NASA's Giant Leap Backwards Towards Moon Landing

- FW: In wide-ranging interview, Bill Nelson lays out his vision for NASA

- Fix NASA's "Let's just award everything to SX" problem

 

Currently the odds appear to be in favour of these being real emails leaked, as the phone numbers in other emails leaked there (they are not in the emails linked above) were verified to be the real ones, even in case of personal phone numbers

Michael Sheetz from CNBC has said to be reaching out ULA to verify the autenticity of these

Edited August 25, 2021 by Beccab

[Beccab]

https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/08/in-leaked-email-ula-official-calls-nasa-leadership-incompetent/

[tater]

A leap backwards in harvesting pork, maybe. I saw that yesterday on NSF and decided it:

1. was not really verified.

2. even if it was, the authors are motivated, and clueless.

<shrug>

[mikegarrison]

I only looked at a couple of the links, but it's hardly a "leaked email" to see that somebody forwarded a copy of a Wall Street Journal article to other people.

Anyway, I pointed out at the time that it was extremely tone-deaf for Musk/SpaceX to be complaining about FAA safety regulations at a time when the FAA has been under heavy scrutiny for (allegedly) not regulating carefully enough.

I notice that somebody there must have realized that, because they seem to have stopped publicly complaining about FAA safety regulators.

Edited August 25, 2021 by mikegarrison

[tater]

 

 

 

[DDE]

4 hours ago, Beccab said:

- Elon Musk Bad for Democracy

They didn't bother to, or didn't know how to, put margins onto the table pasted from Excel

Spoiler

I therefore assess the leak as likely to be genuine /s

[Beccab]

7 minutes ago, DDE said:

I therefore assess the leak as likely to be genuine /s

Why the /s, I find it accurate

[JoeSchmuckatelli]

Companies routinely give to both parties - and yet more often than not - greater amounts to the party in power, the politically powerful and the - local guy' regardless of party (unless she refuses to play ball). 

 

Not so much evidence of corruption as much as 'how things are done'