#united-launch-alliance

[spacenutspod]

Astronomy Daily - The Podcast: S03E172 Welcome to Astronomy Daily, your source for the latest space and Astronomy news. I'm Anna, your host, and today we have an exciting lineup of stories that will take us from groundbreaking rocket launches to mind-bending discoveries in the depths of space. Let's dive into the latest developments in space exploration and astronomical research. Highlights: - United Launch Alliance's Vulcan Rocket Flight: ULA's second Vulcan rocket flight launched last Friday, marking a pivotal test for certifying the new launcher for high-priority national security missions. Despite an anomaly with one of the solid propellant boosters, the mission showcased the rocket's resilience and the successful performance of its core stage and Centaur upper stage. - Peculiar Galaxy Captured by Hubble: The Hubble Space Telescope has captured an image of NGC 4694, a peculiar galaxy in the Virgo cluster. This cosmic oddball, a lenticular galaxy, combines features of both elliptical and spiral galaxies and has undergone a collision with a nearby dwarf galaxy, offering insights into galactic evolution. - Blue Origin's Upcoming Spacecraft Debut: Blue Origin is set to debut a new spacecraft on their NS-27 mission, scheduled for October 7. This uncrewed flight will feature technology upgrades and carry twelve research payloads, marking a significant step in Blue Origin's commercial spaceflight ambitions. - Record-Breaking Triple Star System: NASA's TESS has discovered a tightly packed triple star system, TIC 290-06-1484, challenging our understanding of stellar systems. This discovery highlights the power of collaborative efforts between professional astronomers and citizen scientists. - James Webb Space Telescope's Surprising Findings: The James Webb Space Telescope has revealed unexpectedly bright and mature galaxies in the early universe, prompting a reevaluation of galaxy formation models. These ancient galaxies, observed just 300 million years after the Big Bang, challenge existing cosmological theories. - NASA's Parker Solar Probe Update: NASA's Parker Solar Probe has completed its 21st close approach to the sun, matching its distance record and reaching unprecedented speeds. Upcoming encounters promise even closer passes, providing invaluable data about the sun's atmosphere and magnetic fields. For more space news, visit our website at astronomydaily.io. There, you can sign up for our free Daily newsletter, catch up on all the latest space and Astronomy news with our constantly updating newsfeed, and listen to all our previous episodes. Don't forget to follow us on social media. Just search for #AstroDailyPod on Facebook, X, YouTubeMusic, and TikTok. Thank you for tuning in. This is Anna signing off. Until next time, keep looking up and stay curious about the wonders of our universe. Sponsor Link: NordVPN the reliable VPN service you need to look after your online security...get the deal!

[without-ado]

Vulcan at sunrise l John Kraus

[supplyside]

Delta IV

[spaceflight-insider]

What's next for NASA's Artemis program?

The Artemis 1 Space Launch System (SLS) rocket at Kennedy Space Center’s (KSC) Launch Pad 39B, on the morning of March 18, 2022. Credit: Scott Johnson / Spaceflight Insider KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Fla. — Late last year, NASA successfully launched its first Space Launch System rocket, propelling an uncrewed Orion capsule on a flight to a distant retrograde orbit around the Moon. That was Artemis…

[prcg]

TechCrunch Space: Sentirse un poco impulsivo

Hola y bienvenido de nuevo a TechCrunch Space. El La agenda final para el Space Stage en TechCrunch Disrupt está disponible y nos encantaría verte allí.. ¡Ven a escuchar las últimas y mejores ideas de los principales empresarios e inversores espaciales! ¿Quieres comunicarte con un consejo? Envíe un correo electrónico a Aria a aria.techcrunch@gmail.com o envíe un mensaje a Signal al 512-937-3988.…

[mohitbisresearch]

United Launch Alliance (ULA) and Beyond Gravity, a manufacturer of rocket parts, are currently investing $140 million to expand their operations in northern Alabama, according to reports. This development involves the construction of two new facilities in Decatur, Alabama.

The facility in Decatur, Alabama, is responsible for providing carbon fiber composite components to ULA's Atlas rockets, including the payload fairing for the Atlas V-500 launcher and the interstage adapter for the Atlas V-400.

[talkoftitusville]

Atlas V, Starliner Are Ready To Fly Tomorrow

Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner “Carlypso” On Top Of Altas V This Afternoon.Phtoo: Charles Boyer After about a decade of setbacks and challenges, Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner is set to head to orbit with crew aboard tomorrow evening. To say that it has been a roller coaster for engineers and managers of legacy-rich company would be a massive understatement, but the mood among the Space Coast workers at…

[outer-space-youtube]

Blue Origin set to buy ULA

When I saw this video by The Angry Astronaut, my first thought was, ‘Didn’t Angry already, or is this an old video?’ Okay sorry, I have heard that it looks like BO is the only real option for the purchase of ULA. The U.S. Government might do as they did with Bell Telephone, years ago.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakup_of_the_Bell_System Seriously if not BO, what would happen if no one…

[temp-check]

Monday's temperature check (1-8)

"Let's get this mutha out of here." Those are the last words any human has uttered from the Moon.  Astronaut Gene Cernan spoke that immortal sentence as the lunar module, “Challenger” was about to lift off from the Moon on 14 December 1972 in NASA’s final Apollo mission.  The phrase is no “One small step…”, but will certainly join my toolkit of pre-trip utterances that will grace the ears of my fellow travelers. Well, this morning, for the first time in five decades, United Launch Alliance launched its first-ever Vulcan Centaur rocket, with the aim of returning the United States to the Moon.  Aboard for the inaugural flight the Peregrine Mission One lunar lander, which separated from the rocket a little after 50 minutes into the flight, which is intended to, as the module name states, touch down on the lunar surface.  That landing will not be for five weeks on 23 February.  Of the 20 payloads that Peregrine will carry to the moon, only five are NASA science instruments. The other 15 come from a range of customers.  Six nations have payloads on the commercial lunar lander. The lunar is also transporting human remains and the DNA of 66 people.  It costs upward from $10 thousand to have your remains flown to the Moon.  Perhaps many of these ashes belong to Star Wars fan-boys.  Maybe the 1964 Count Basie and Frank Sinatra recording of “Fly Me To The Moon”, which NASA adopted as the theme song for the Apollo program, hit home for these guys.  By the way, none of these folks are going to play among stars or see what Spring is like on “A-Jupiter” and/or Mars.  It will probably be a few more decades before those lunar graves are included in Wreaths-Across-America.  In the meantime, it’s just a lot of money on a novelty that these unnamed folks can’t even brag about.  They would have been better off having their ashes pressed into jewelry.  At lease an unsuspecting garage-sale customer can gain some joy from this gratuitous opulence.  Who knows, maybe someday, while browsing a local yard sale, I’ll find the cryogenically frozen head of Ted Williams and make a “killing”.

Stay safe!

Tom

After a flawless launch, it appears (at first look) the Peregrine Mission One, or the Peregrine Lunar Lander flight 01, is having a bit of a problem. NASA has a couple of weeks to figure it out before it enters lunar orbit.

[delstonejr]

Congratulations to United Launch Alliance and Jeff Bezos for the successful launch of the new Vulcan Centaur rocket carrying the Peregrin lander on a journey to the moon. The Vulcan was equipped with BE4 engines, which appeared to operate flawlessly!

[spacenutspod]

Welcome to Astronomy Daily! In this episode, host Anna takes you on an exhilarating journey through the latest in space and Astronomy news. Discover SpaceX's groundbreaking plans to land and recover its Starship rocket off the coast of Australia, delve into NASA's fascinating findings from the DART mission on near-Earth asteroids, and get the scoop on the United Launch Alliance's successful mission for the US Space Force. Plus, learn about the upcoming repair mission for NASA's NICER X-ray telescope aboard the International Space Station. Tune in for these stories and more as we explore the cosmos together! For more visit our website at www.astronomydaily.io www.bitesz.com

[jenakuns]

Alternate crew transportation solutions to NRHO

You have to be very sneaky like when discussing this topic, because if people understand what you're getting at before you arrive at the topic area, they will form arguments. They will feel less obliged to do so if they're already committed to the idea because it got explained to them in fullness. So you kinda have to pretend to be a little old lady and then bam you hit them with the upper cut of the entire architecture. 

The inspiration for this is the recent OIG report and the reaction to this quote.

Although the SLS is the only launch vehicle currently available that meets Artemis mission needs, in the next 3 to 5 years other human-rated commercial alternatives that are lighter, cheaper, and reusable may become available.

Most people I feel dismissed this instantly, because of the Falcon Heavy historical argument, where Orion could be easily launched on Falcon Heavy, SLS bad. In practicality, Orion can't easily launch on Falcon Heavy; it's a very marginal solution. But there is a question here of, well are there now more solutions on the horizon in 2023 than there was in 2018?

I'll start with the Lockheed pill. So what do Lockheed have, or will have in the next five-ish years. They are the prime contractor for Orion, so they have the most interest in having the most effective version of that vehicle in face of any potential competition and the more it can launch, the more money they could make. Currently SLS has a cap of roughly 1 launch/year on it near term, if they do arrive at effective reuse of Orion, presumably they could do better than that. What else do Lockheed have. Well they gunna have a Cislunar Transporter, a zero boil off hydrolox depot, developed as part of the Blue Moon HLS contract. And if the rumours are correct they are interested in buying ULA out from Boeing, which would give them full ownership of the Vulcan rocket. They also have no stakes in the SLS rocket itself, so if they were able to develop their own launch solution, they would stand to make a fair bit more money per launch from it. 

Vulcan has a hydrolox upper stage called Centaur V, which is planned to be implemented with long duration and refuelling capabilities, which in turn with a ZBO depot in LEO would enable it to be refuelled. Vulcan has about 27.2 tons to LEO (Orion weighs like 27 tons) and is designed to be able to be human rated, it's a glove that fits. Technically Orion weighs more than that with the launch escape system, but there will be performance enhancements to the engines (BE-4 Block upgrades and RL10C-X) that should cover that. Diameter wise, Orion is 5 metres wide, Vulcan Centaur is 5.4m, so there's no weird aero covers required.

So we can launch Orion to LEO on Vulcan, what next? Well we send it to the Cislunar Transporter depot and refuel it there. With a single New Glenn launch worth of propellant to the depot, we can then transfer that propellant to Centaur and launch Orion to NRHO (needs 35 tons of hydrolox propellant, min, so should be margin there). 

The good thing about this architecture is A. there are clear incentive structures for the companies involved to do this. B. it leverages the tools available in such a manner that doesn't require them to go widely outside of their existing operations. C. it does so with contractors that a lot of the SLS fans have a reasonable amount of respect for. Like any Starship proposal is going to be met with eye rolls, but a Lockheed/ULA/Blue one that uses their capabilities in reasonable manners is something they're going to find harder to reject.

The other big thing is that it doesn't require a 2 billion/year overhead, because all aspects (Vulcan, New Glenn and Cislunar Transporter) have existing operations to cover their baseline costs. So it could be like a $200M Vulcan launch, a $100M New Glenn launch and the cost of the depot operations. There's an interesting question of whether the depot can return to LEO from Blue Moon refuelling in time for Orion launch ops, but you could also spend the capex (idk like 0.5-1B) on just building another. The development is human rating Vulcan Orion and Centaur refuelling, which is like a billion $, but nothing too unreasonable (+Blue Moon/Cislunar Transporter work will help out with the latter). In addition, it develops the LEO Orion launch and reduces the cost for adding additional Artemis flights in a year (or just makes it possible in the first place). 

So to summarise this concisely, Lockheed could reasonably leverage their own hardware/IP to develop a cislunar Orion launch solution with solid costs and flight rates. They are also somewhat incentivized to do so from an optimising potential $ perspective. The main additional critical risk is a single docking and refuelling op which is not insignificant, but in the scope of what it offers is reasonable.

Ok there my motivation is gone lets get through the others quickly. Blue Origin refuelling Lunar Clipper and launching Orion. Basically the same as the Lockheed one but probably less popular because of Blue's execution to date. And SpaceX Starship with expendable Starship stage and maybe another stage on top to get a TLI payload of some sort that would be Orion capable. People really don't like this because SLS fans are inherently going to be sceptical of Starship. Also SpaceX isn't interested inherently unless you come with $.

There you have 3 potential options for Orion launch.

Anything like a Relativity Space Terran R option is no good; start ups don't have the program of large scale execution to worry about giving crew cislunar transportation to. There's the skip Orion people, use CCrew vehicles or Starship entirely; if you think the SLS people dislike alternate Orion launch solutions; just you wait until they see alternate Orion solutions. I'm sympathetic, requirements for Cislunar ops are a fair bit different from LEO transport requirements. And Starship crew rating is not something to emphasise right now. There's some thinking that you could add a habitation module to Cislunar Transporter and have it act like a taxi between LEO stations and Gateway. It does appeal to me on a thought basis; the main criticism is required propulsive to LEO and in general LOC/human rating problems.

IDK, sometimes Orion feels underwhelming from a capsule point of view; is it even capable of launching 3 times in a year without a large increase in $?

[richdadpoor]

ULA Readies 'Bruiser' for Space Force Threat Tracking Mission

In an effort to bolster the country’s awareness of what’s going on in space, the U.S. Space Force and the National Reconnaissance Office have teamed up and are readying to launch the SILENTBARKER/NROL-107 mission tomorrow morning to track current and anticipated threats in orbit. Three Astronauts May Be Stranded on the ISS After Disturbing Soyuz Coolant Leak The mission will ride on a United…

[nerdwelt]

Amazon wechselt von Vulcan zu Atlas V, um Prototypensatelliten früher zu starten

Amazon hat entschieden, den Start seiner ersten Testsatelliten für sein Internetkonstellationsprojekt Kuiper zu verschieben. Die beiden Satelliten werden nun am 26. September mit einer Atlas-V-Rakete der United Launch Alliance (ULA) vom Space Launch Complex 41 der Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida abheben. Ursprünglich sollten die Satelliten mit der Vulcan Centaur-Rakete der ULA…