Commercial/Private Space Industry Projects: News and Updates

kvs wrote:Now we see the real prices for transport to and from space.    Reality has a habit of asserting itself sooner or later.

Yep, and the extrapolation of this is clearly that the "SpaceX Miracle" is nothing of the sort.  Musks success at securing billions of dollars of subsidies from the clueless US taxpayer is NOT reducing aggegate costs to orbit for the industry as a whole.  Overall launch cadence hasn't increased, and costs to orbit are still astronomical (pun intended).

The private space "miracle" will end up as a counterpart to the busted "shale oil" flop.  Nothing but Enron-style deception and fakery. No more efficient or cost-effective than publically funded space, but much less accountable and with zero effective transparency.  

Hole wrote:Great news for Russia. Roskosmos is much cheaper. Some western companies will come back to launch their stuff with russian rockets.

Maybe, but if Russia proves too successful the West will simply sabotage their launch industry by denying permission to transport Western-origin components to Russia (or China) for launch - they will invoke some BS like "national security" concerns like they did with Hwawei, or double down on Navalny-related shitfuckery to impose sanctions. They have done it before and will do it again if it suits them.  Fucking reptiles and arrogant greedy sociopathic cultural-chauvenists...  they simply cannot be trusted.

SN11 explodes in flight.... loving it

Blue Origins releases a graphic that canes Musks nonsensical "Starship".  



Why anyone is so fecking stoopid as to take "Starship" at face value is just baffling.

FFS, the Saturn V could only just get the Apollo stack into lunar orbit, and could only get the CM back on terra firma, yet Musk is going to fly a huge silo to the moon, land it, take off again, and return the entire vehicle to Earth in a condition to refuel and do it again??????

 x infinity and beyond

And there are still people talking shit about Rogozin.

The Russian space corporation "Success Rockets" will launch a suborbital rocket in November. 

The private Russian space corporation Success Rockets will launch a NEBO 25 suborbital rocket from a test site in the Astrakhan Region in November as part of The bear wakes up mission. This was reported to TASS by the press service of the corporation.

"The NEBO 25 suborbital rocket will be launched in November this year by the private Russian space corporation Success Rockets from the test site in the Astrakhan region. The goal of the upcoming launch is to set a new national record for flight altitude among private companies" – the press service noted.

Success Rockets explained that the mission's task is to overcome an altitude of 20 km, receive telemetry information throughout the flight, collect and record all the necessary indicators on board the rocket and make a safe landing. The NEBO 25 rocket is a single-stage solid-fuel rocket. Its length is 3.5 m, caliber-110 mm, starting weight-65 kg. The rocket has been developed since August 2020.

"The rocket will be equipped with a jet engine with a full pulse of 50 kN/sec. The engine will run for eight seconds. The rocket will have to accelerate to twice the speed of sound (2 M) and overcome an altitude of 20 km. Two search telemetry modules will be installed on the rocket from the telemetry equipment. The task of this equipment is primarily to transmit the coordinates of the rocket's location for its further search" – the press service quoted the words of the founder and CEO of Success Rockets Oleg Mansurov.

The press service clarified that earlier Success Rockets conducted fire tests of the engine and launched a prototype of a suborbital rocket. "To date, the rocket engine developed by the corporation is the most powerful among private companies in Russia" – the press service stressed.

Success Rockets reported that the company's first suborbital mission was called The bear wakes up, which refers to the image of a bear, which is often associated with Russia in the world. The emblems and chevrons of the first Success Rockets mission were developed jointly with the British Higher School of Design.


About Success Rockets. 

According to the CEO of Success Rockets Mansurov, the corporation's mission is to make space affordable and profitable. "To do this, we need to provide conditions for frequent launches of small satellites, so that flights into space are regular. Our ultralight missiles solve exactly this task" – the press service quotes him as saying.

In October 2020, Success Rockets told TASS that it plans to offer its ultralight launch vehicles to potential customers for satellite launches. The maximum cost of one launch, depending on the type of missiles, will be $2.8 million.

The corporation plans to produce platforms for creating satellites for various purposes. The SKIBR-CUB platform will be designed to create CubeSat satellites (ultra-small devices) that can be used for scientific and educational purposes, as well as for optical remote sensing of the Earth with a resolution of up to five meters and providing the Internet of Things.

Source: 

Space Adventures no longer plans to send tourists into space on the Crew Dragon ship

The combination of price, timeline and experience was not optimal when the mission was offered to potential clients, and the contract with SpaceX expired

In other words, the price was too high considering the short time in orbit and the lousy conditions (cooped up in a can for 4 days with a malfunctioning toilet).  Roskosmos has a space station to rendezvous with and something for their orbital tourists to actually see and experience.  Even millionaires aren't interested in spending a fortune to replicate what the Gemini astronauts did in the 60s.  

Who would have guessed that SpaceX couldn't deliver on its inflated promises?  

source

The launch of the Soyuz MS-20 spacecraft to the ISS with two space tourists is scheduled for December 8, with the flight lasting 12 days

https://tass.com/science/1363745

Things are not happy in the Exceptionalist Musk Utopia...  

https://spaceexplored.com/2021/11/29/spacex-raptor-crisis/

Just so much good stuff in this article, even if its chock full of retarded fan-boism & belated efforts to dispell the sense of doom... at last it's becoming obvious that SpaceX is built on shakey ground and that far form a "100 billion dollar company" it is the aerospace industries version of Enron!!  You just can't make this shit up....  

In an email sent to SpaceX employees, obtained by Space Explored, Elon Musk addressed the ‘crisis’ of Starship Raptor engine production and said the company could face a ‘genuine risk of bankruptcy’ if the company is unable to achieve a Starship flight rate of once every two weeks next year.

Full email from Elon to SpaceX employees
Unfortunately, the Raptor production crisis is much worse than it had seemed a few weeks ago. As we have dug into the issues following the exiting of prior senior management, they have unfortunately turned out to be far more severe than was reported. There is no way to sugarcoat this.

I was going to take this weekend off, as my first weekend off in a long time, but instead, I will be on the Raptor line all night and through the weekend.

Unless you have critical family matters or cannot physically return to Hawthorne, we will need all hands on deck to recover from what is, quite frankly, a disaster.

The consequences for SpaceX if we can not get enough reliable Raptors made is that we then can’t fly Starship, which means we then can’t fly Starlink Satellite V2 (Falcon has neither the volume nor the mass to orbit needed for satellite V2). Satellite V1, by itself, is financially weak, while V2 is strong.

In addition, we are spooling up terminal production to several million units per year, which will consume massive capital, assuming that satellite V2 will be on orbit to handle the bandwidth demand. These terminals will be useless otherwise.

What it comes down to, is that we face a genuine risk of bankruptcy if we can’t achieve a Starship flight rate of at least once every two weeks next year.

Thanks,

Elon

Thats it, these fakers are now officially cooked.  There is ZERO chance that they will be launching orbital missions of Starshit every two weeks....

Bye bye Musk.  Its been fun laughing at you! It will even more fun watching the ensuing collapse and the howls of the inconsolable true-believers who willingly chose to abandon rational thought and to openly embrass his Kult of Personality and partake of life-threatening quantities of the US Exceptionalist Private-Enterprise Kool-Aid.

Maybe Musk will try to do what Clinton did... blame Russians

Starship was always a massive gamble.

The Falcon 9 FT is already about as large as the heaviest rockets in mainline use today like the Proton-M, Ariane 5, and Long March 5.
That is even without considering things like the Falcon 9 Heavy. Few payloads use this rocket. Perhaps it needs a launch or two a year.

Larger rockets have historically not been cost competitive since there is just no demand for them. For that reason the Saturn V rocket was dismissed from service, as was Energia. While the N1 rocket failed in its development because it just cost too much. One of the major reasons for the N1 rocket failing was that they never got the total reliability of the system to be good enough. It had 30 complex staged combustion first stage engines with all the plumbing associated with that. It had massive vibration and oscillation issues which were never solved properly. The Starship is supposed to have 33 first stage engines. These are also complicated staged combustion engines. If the vehicle is expendable they need to be able to mass produce those engines, which are quite expensive, making their business proposition of using this as a platform to launch huge low orbit satellite constellations a bit sketchy. If the rocket is expendable and they want to make a launch every two weeks, well, just do the math. 52 weeks a year. That is 858 engines a year just for the first stage alone. Compare that with something like Ariane 5. It has a single liquid first stage engine and it launches like half a dozen times a year. It is also a much simpler and cheaper gas generator engine.

I think they should have scaled down their program and tried to make a replacement for Falcon 9 FT and Heavy with this more recent technology. Once that technology got reliable enough then maybe you could consider making the large rocket. This huge frankenrocket and the huge orbital constellation program was a step way too far. Even worse if you believe that email they already spent a huge amount expanding satellite manufacturing capacity assuming the rocket would work and be reusable. That is just a huge amount of money that just went out of the window if that is right. He might have just bankrupted the company.

Even if every single piece of this worked correctly the assumption the huge constellation would pay itself off was always remote at best. Even Iridium only survives thanks to US government subsidies and it only has 82 satellites in orbit. Iridium has already went bankrupt more than once. OneWeb is going the same way. Starlink already has 1646 satellites in orbit.

F9H was a waste of time, a SHLV(-ish) rocket without an actual payload.  Launching 2x geostationary commsats in a single launch just doesn't cut it.  I won't be surprised if F9H doesn't launch again.

The problem with Starshit is that the whole concept is just nonsense. A landing method that absolutely relies on starting 3 engines at low altitude and flawlessly performing a flip onto its tail just in time to perform a powered vertical landing?????  One mistake or an engine failure and every last person onboard is DEAD.

NASA would never build a contraption like this, and not because they are too "conservative" or "burdened" with an "inflexible" or "inefficient" work culture, but simply because they are professionals with vast institutional experience, and who won't bend metal for badly conceived projects.  NASA isn't building the SLS booster cuz they think that Starshit will succeed.  The smart people in NASA (and the professionals in US rocket manufacturers) all know that Starshit is a non-starter, and that any US lunar or deep space capability will be 100% dependent upon SLS and Orion.

Musk is a con-man, a hollow suit, a wind-bag full of his own importance and who knows how to blow smoke up the arses of the dumb herd cud-chewers so that they sit and stare at him with dewy-eyed adoration and feed his overwhelming ego. The history books will have very little to say about the man, other than the momentous hoax he perpetuated on an unthinking idol-seeking Murkan public.

F9 FT is a great rocket and is the market leader at the moment.
So I would not say SpaceX has not done anything. Between that and the Dragon capsule I think they did ok.

Musk is overhyped I agree. The guy who designed the Merlin engine was Tom Mueller. He supposedly also started the design for the Raptor engine. Tom Mueller was an engineer with huge experience building rocket engines at TRW. TRW built several highly advanced rocket engines for the US military. Several of which never entered service but supposedly passed bench tests. I guess he got tired of his projects never flying in actual rockets and that is why he went to SpaceX. But he has retired a couple years back. I suspect that is when the problems started.

Anyway, the idea of rapid turnaround for rocket engines is something which has often been bandied around but never actually has been proven in practice other than in simplified suborbital prototypes like in the DC-X. Investing on satellites assuming you could get something like that to work without having a working vehicle was premature to say the least. Kerosene has always proven nasty for reuse, I assume that is why they went with Methane, but even Methane might not be clean enough.

Don't worry about Elon. He has been selling his Tesla stock at the height of the electric car bubble. He will be obscenely rich regardless of what happens with SpaceX.

He has also managed to make a lot more with less capital than Jeff Bezos with Blue Origin. Blue Origin was actually founded before SpaceX and they haven't done much of note. Unless you think that giant POGO stick of a rocket is relevant to actual spaceflight.

SpaceX is viable as a business. Even if for whatever reason the company went bankrupt, after it was restructured they could probably happily live off Falcon 9 launches for a couple decades at least.

Big_Gazza wrote:... There is ZERO chance that they will be launching orbital missions of Starshit every two weeks....

Anyone and their grandma would have told them that any reusable non-horizontal launch system would not be going anywhere near those launch rates

Soyuz spacecraft carrying TASS reporter cosmonaut, Japanese tourists placed into orbit

https://tass.com/science/1372485

MOSCOW, December 16. /TASS/. Roscosmos Chief Dmitry Rogozin instructed the Energia Space Rocket Corporation to work out a plan of building up the production of Soyuz MS manned spacecraft, the Roscosmos press office reported on Thursday.

"I instruct the Energia Space Rocket Corporation to submit a specific plan of action to the state corporation Roscosmos on boosting the production capacities to manufacture up to four manned spaceships a year," the Roscosmos chief said.

These measures are required to develop space tourism, the press office specified. For his part, the Roscosmos chief stressed that space tourism was yielding revenues that were channeled into the space industry modernization.

https://tass.com/science/1376471

Pentagon is finally coming clean that Musks "Starship" is in reality a military program  

Pentagon report details plans for assault Starships

The US military wants to use Elon Musk’s spaceships to deploy a “quick reaction force”

Landing a rescue force at a US embassy in Africa threatened by a Benghazi-style siege is just one of the potential military uses for Elon Musk’s Starship vessels, according to an internal military report made public on Monday. The document pertains to the 2020 cooperative agreement between SpaceX and the US Transportation Command (TRANSCOM), but remains a wish list as the Starships are nowhere near ready for actual operations.

That TRANSCOM had partnered with SpaceX back in October 2020 was public knowledge, as the US military actually announced it at the time. Officially, the Defense Department wanted the capability to move the equivalent of a C-17 payload – just under 80 tons, or a single M1 Abrams tank – “anywhere on the globe in less than an hour.”

As it turns out, the Pentagon had additional ambitions, according to the “midterm report” on the program obtained by the Intercept through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request and published on Monday.

A fleet of military Starships could provide “an alternative method for logistics delivery” in the Pacific, or deliver “a collection of shelters, vehicles, construction equipment and other gear” anywhere in the globe on short notice, so the US Air Force could stand up an airbase.

The third imagined scenario, titled “Embassy Support,” envisions “rapid theater direct delivery capability” from the US to an embassy in Africa, potentially involving a “quick reaction force.” The mere demonstration of such ability “could deter non-state actors from aggressive acts toward the US,” the military said.

While the report itself does not make such a comparison, the scenario overlaps quite a bit with the attack on the US compound in Benghazi, Libya – where an ambassador and three security contractors were killed on September 11, 2012 as they waited for a rescue force that never came.

While SpaceX has not commented on the story, TRANSCOM spokesperson John Ross told the Intercept the military believes a rocket-deployed rapid reaction force would be “possible within the next 5-10 years.”

The Starship is still in its experimental phase. The first-ever successful landing of a prototype only took place in May 2021, after a series of tests that ended in fiery explosions. In addition to technical challenges, Musk is also dealing with the federal bureaucracy and the process of getting permits for launching tests from the SpaceX facility in southern Texas.

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) gave SpaceX preliminary environmental approval last week, but to get the full approval license the company will need to prepare “a historical context report … of the Mexican War” and fulfill 74 other demands, according to National Geographic. Even then, the FAA license would cover only ten launches a year. Moreover, the authorities are concerned SpaceX lacks “a strong safety culture,” according to a FAA report leaked in June 2021

source

I won't boast that I called it correctly, because IMHO it was so fcking obious that even Blind Pew could have forcast this.  I wonder if the Muskian groupies will finally admit that their idol has been bullshitting them with nonsense stories about flying this sub-orbital transport to and from Moon or even Mars...  

Demands for the planets dwindling Copium supplies now come under yet more pressure

Like I said about this long ago, I'm sure that gigantic decelerating superheated cylindrical object on descending trajectory would not be noticeable by radars or thermals and would totally not be targeted by every single aircraft and missile system on the subcontinent...

You could use the Starship to deliver an assault force. Assuming it worked ok. But good luck getting that Starship to go back.
You would be basically be dropping those troops with no backup deep inside enemy lines and no way back. Guess how well that would work.

No, the big thing with this is massive satellite constellations for reconnaissance, communications, and perhaps SDI on steroids.
Expect a rehash of "Brilliant Pebbles" quicksmart.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brilliant_Pebbles

In theatres April 20.

Today was a landmark day for Russian Space development

The Rassvet-1 sattelite has begun transmitting internet services for low orbit global internet

Rassvet-1 is a competitor to the Starlink program

https://t.me/new_militarycolumnist/113214

Excellent development

Check out Byuro 1440 website, it is a civilian market for internet satellites, and probably optical sats as well will be developed ,

As they say, Russians harness slowly, but ride fast

Or slowly, then suddenly

Here Is rassvet-1 solar panel and battery array

More information for some of us geeks lol It's an awesome story

On June 27, the Soyuz-2.1b carrier rocket was launched from the Vostochny cosmodrome, carrying three space missions of the Rassvet-1 communications apparatus developed and manufactured by Bureau 1440. On July 4, the satellites were successfully launched into orbit. Today, July 21, a historic event took place - the first traffic was received from Rassvet-1 satellites at a speed of 10 mb/sec.

Rassvet-1 is a Russian satellite internet project similar to Elon Musk's Starlink. The overseas product is actively used by the forces of the Kyiv regime to ensure constant communication between units at any point. The appearance of the Russian "Dawn" in this context is a truly epoch-making event. So far, the satellites are operating in test mode and will be deorbited upon completion of the tests. Another launch is also expected in the near future.

#source
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So totally expected.

The US version of the N-1 is coming along nicely.