The launch calendar hasn’t changed much this week. Which is good, because it means that the planned launches haven’t been cancelled or delayed. But it also means that a couple of small launches that were hovering in TBD-land have still not been nailed to an actual date.
July 22, Falcon 9, Telstar 19V
Communications satellite targeting the Americas. Launch from SpaceX’s usual slot at SLC 40, Kennedy Space Center, Florida. Launch is targeted for a pre-dawn window. This launch was delayed from June.
July 25, Ariane 5, Galileo
Another spray of Galileo satellites—ESA’s navigation satellites that are more-or-less equivalent to the US’ GPS or Russia’s Glonass, but without the military control. This group of satellites goes up on an Ariane from Arianespace’s launch facility at Kourou, French Guiana. This launch was delayed from June.
July 25, Falcon 9, Iridium Next
Another dozen of Iridium’s next generation low-altitude communications satellites that are aimed more at phone / broadband than broadcast. This time SpaceX is launching from the West Coast at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, and this may be the first flight where they do a booster landing back at Vandenberg. It’s scheduled for a morning launch.
There’s still the potential for another July launch, as Rocket Lab’s next Electron launch, which was bumped from June 23 to July 6, before being halted, is now on something of an “any day now” schedule.
One item that didn’t appear on last week’s launch schedule — the ninth launch of Blue Origin’s New Shepard suborbital spacecraft. But even without an official date on our calendar, they launched anyway — and it went perfectly, leading to expectations that the first space tourists may fly on their craft before 2018 is out. Which could make Blue Origin the first private company to send people into space.
Last week we took a look at the space race that’s capturing all the headlines — Boeing vs. SpaceX in the competition to get crews to the international Space Station using either an Atlas V topped with Boeing’s StarLiner or a Falcon 9 packing a Dragon Crew.
But there’s another space race going on, and it’s a fascinating repeat of some space history in miniature. It’s rocket vs space plane. It’s an old aerospace hand vs a start-up mentality. Oh, and it’s also a pair of billionaires racing to sell quarter of a million dollar tickets so the well-heeled can graze the edge of space.
Technically, Burt Rutan’s company Scaled Composites hit the mark for private spaceflight back in 2004, when the SpaceShipOne flew three times into space to win the X-Prize. But those were essentially high altitude test flights, and the tiny craft had experienced test pilots at the helm for some, quite tricky (and dangerous) flights.
Rutan’s designs could return to space again this year if Virgin Galactic gets their latest version of SpaceShipTwo aloft a few more times. The last flight was in May , when VSS Unity came close to mach 2 on an arc that topped out at 115,000 feet (21 miles). That’s still well short of the 62 miles required to hit the “Kármán line,” which is the semi-official marker for “space.” But Virgin seems to be upping the pace for their flights, with successful powered flights in January, April, and May, each of them edging up the performance.
In his comments at the end of the last Unity flight, Virgin CEO Richard Branson stated that the company was “2 or 3 flights away” from pushing their craft over the magic line. Which would certainly seem to make it possible that Virgin will have at least a pilot and a co-pilot past the magic number sometime this year. Right now, they’re on schedule to begin tourists flights in 2019.
Just across the sand hills in West Texas, Blue Origin is beating a different trail to space. Where Virgin is going space plane, Blue Origin has a solidly traditional rocket — though with the newfangled edge of a booster that returns safely back to a pad after launch.
This week, Blue Origin launched their New Shepard craft for the ninth time. New Shepard has been clearing the Kármán line since 2016, and the last several flights have gone off without a hitch. In fact, Blue Origin’s approach has been one of meticulous, careful steps, making every one of their flights extremely drama free.
All of that may seem to give the Blue Origin team a big edge in this space race in the southwest. Except that the New Shepard has never carried a person. For the last three flights, it has hauled along an instrumented test dummy (named “Manikin Skywalker”) and results indicate that the stresses exerted by the system are well within those that can be tolerated by humans, but that’s not the same as actually sticking a person on-board.
But they are definitely, definitely getting close. Last week’s flight included a test of the high altitude escape system. With the capsule blasting away from the booster at 10Gs, it wouldn’t be exactly the best way to get a good reputation with space tourists, but it did show that even the emergency system seems to function well, and to do its job in a way that would be people-saving. Blue Origin also mocked a low-altitude failure back in 2012 and demonstrated the success of their escape system for that situation. Still … Blue Origin has seemed capable of sticking people on board for more than a year. In fact, they said in 2016 that they would have passengers in 2017. But they didn’t.
The flight last week was the ninth flight by New Shepard, but not all the same New Shepard. This is actually the third craft in the series. And it appears that Blue Origin is waiting for the next iteration of their craft — Blue Shepard Number Four — before they put a live person on-board. That next edition is due sometime in the next couple of months. It’s not clear how long after that it will be before Blue Origin is finally willing to put someone in their spacious, “biggest windows in space,” capsule.
And as Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic race for the not-quite-historic tourist dollar, there is a chance that either or both of them could actually put people into space ahead of Boeing or SpaceX. Both of those big rocket firms are running behind on their Commercial Crew systems, and neither may get a crew aloft this year.
It’s actually looking like something of a nail-biter, for bragging rights, if nothing else. And it should make for some great watching for space fans.
Boeing’s StarLiner hits a speed bump
Though just last week it seemed that Boeing was in the lead for NASA’s Commercial Crew program, and was on track to put both and unmanned and manned craft into space sooner than SpaceX, the Washington Post reports they’ve had an issue.
The spacecraft Boeing plans to use to fly NASA astronauts to the International Space Station suffered a significant setback when, during a test of its emergency abort system in June, officials discovered a propellant leak, the company confirmed.
This leak will probably delay the scheduled unmanned launch of the system, which was to take place in September. And it’s inconvenient timing for Boeing, which was enjoying a bit of ahead-of-SpaceX reputation boost.