Enlarge/ Image of the New Glenn second stage on its mobile test stand.
Blue Origin
Blue Origin plans to enter the final phase of its launch preparations for the New Glenn rocket on Monday by rolling the vehicle’s second stage to Launch Complex 36 in Florida. Pending weather and other final considerations, a rollout could occur as early as Monday afternoon.
This is the flight version of the vehicle, with the exception of a fixed adaptor for weather protection during a test campaign. The launch company is targeting a hot fire test of the upper stage, which is powered by two BE-3U engines, within the next week or so.
The launch company, founded by Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, is closing in on the debut launch of the massive New Glenn rocket, which will be one of the most powerful launch vehicles in the world. With a fully reusable first stage, New Glenn has a lift capacity of 45 metric tons to low-Earth orbit.
A tight launch window
NASA has contracted with Blue Origin for the first launch of New Glenn, seeking to boost two relatively small spacecraft to Mars. These ESCAPADE orbiters have a tight launch window, from October 13 to October 21. Managed by the Space Sciences Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley, the ESCAPADE spacecraft will analyze the Martian magnetic field.
It is an open question as to whether Blue Origin can integrate, test, and launch ESCAPADE within the launch window, which opens in less than six weeks. Between now and then the company must successfully test fire the second stage, and then roll the first stage out to the company’s facilities at the Cape Canaveral launch complex.
The company’s plan is to mate the second and first stages of the rocket, and add the payload fairing with the spacecraft inside of it, before conducting a short hot fire test of the first stage. If all goes well, Blue Origin plans to attempt a launch during the October window for ESCAPADE. These spacecraft arrived at the company’s launch facilities a couple of weeks ago.
This seems like an ambitious timeline for the new rocket, as final integration of stages is often where issues are discovered with new launch vehicles. However, Blue Origin has found a new sense or urgency under chief executive Dave Limp, who joined the company in December—hence the frenetic activity with the second stage over the Labor Day holiday weekend in the United States.
The road to commercial heavy lift
Limp led devices and services at Amazon for more than a decade, which included oversight of the Project Kuiper satellite project. In his nine months at Blue Origin, he has prioritized completion and launch of the New Glenn rocket amid a large portfolio of projects at the company.
New Glenn will join SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy and Starship rockets as privately developed, heavy lift rockets. Its debut will confirm the trend in US spaceflight toward commercial developed large rockets that can be reused. Both Bezos and SpaceX founder Elon Musk have identified lower cost, rapidly reusable rockets as a key to expanding human activity in outer space. Bezos would like to see mining and other destructive industrial activities moved off world in order to preserve the natural vitality of Earth.
Whether it launches ESCAPADE next month, or some other payload on its debut flight after October, New Glenn will attempt an ambitious drone ship landing of the first stage on its debut launch. Success is unlikely—SpaceX did not manage to land its first Falcon 9 at sea until the 23rd launch of this rocket.
However, Bezos and Blue Origin are determined to gather all of the data possible from New Glenn’s initial flight in order to reach reusability of the larger booster as soon as possible. The attempt, whether successful or not, should make for compelling viewing.
Enlarge/ Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft is seen docked at the International Space Station on June 13.
On Saturday NASA astronaut Butch Wilmore noticed some strange noises emanating from a speaker inside the Starliner spacecraft.
“I’ve got a question about Starliner,” Wilmore radioed down to Mission Control, at Johnson Space Center in Houston. “There’s a strange noise coming through the speaker … I don’t know what’s making it.”
Wilmore said he was not sure if there was some oddity in the connection between the station and the spacecraft causing the noise, or something else. He asked the flight controllers in Houston to see if they could listen to the audio inside the spacecraft. A few minutes later, Mission Control radioed back that they were linked via “hardline” to listen to audio inside Starliner, which has now been docked to the International Space Station for nearly three months.
Wilmore, apparently floating in Starliner, then put his microphone up to the speaker inside Starliner. Shortly thereafter, there was an audible pinging that was quite distinctive. “Alright Butch, that one came through,” Mission control radioed up to Wilmore. “It was kind of like a pulsing noise, almost like a sonar ping.”
“I’ll do it one more time, and I’ll let y’all scratch your heads and see if you can figure out what’s going on,” Wilmore replied. The odd, sonar-like audio then repeated itself. “Alright, over to you. Call us if you figure it out.”
A space oddity
A recording of this audio, and Wilmore’s conversation with Mission Control, was captured and shared by a Michigan-based meteorologist named Rob Dale.
It was not immediately clear what was causing the odd, and somewhat eerie noise. As Starliner flies to the space station, it maintains communications with the space station via a radio frequency system. Once docked, however, there is a hardline umbilical that carries audio.
Astronauts notice such oddities in space from time to time. For example, during China’s first human spaceflight int 2003, astronaut Yang Liwei said he heard what sounded like an iron bucket being knocked by a wooden hammer while in orbit. Later, scientists realized the noise was due to small deformations in the spacecraft due to a difference in pressure between its inner and outer walls.
This weekend’s sonar-like noises most likely have a benign cause, and Wilmore certainly did not sound frazzled. But the odd noises are worth noting given the challenges that Boeing and NASA have had with the debut crewed flight of Starliner, including substantial helium leaks in flight, and failing thrusters. NASA announced a week ago that, due to uncertainty about the flyability of Starliner, it would come home without its original crew of Wilmore and Suni Williams.
Starliner is now due to fly back autonomously to Earth on Friday, September 6. Wilmore and Williams will return to Earth next February, flying aboard a Crew Dragon spacecraft scheduled to launch with just two astronauts later this month.
Enlarge/ The first stage of the RFA One rocket collapses on its launch pad in Scotland after an aborted test-firing.
Welcome to Edition 7.09 of the Rocket Report! When will SpaceX launch the next test flight of Starship? It certainly doesn’t look to be imminent, with SpaceX ground teams in Texas feverishly working to beef up the launch pad in preparation for an attempt to catch the rocket’s massive Super Heavy booster when it returns to the launch site on the next flight. Meanwhile, the FAA is reviewing SpaceX’s proposal to recover the booster on land for the first time. And on Thursday, a NASA official monitoring SpaceX’s Starship effort said the next test flight was scheduled for launch in the “fall,” suggesting it could be a month or more away. Also, we’ve listed the next three launches as “TBD” (To Be Determined) because SpaceX is waiting for FAA approval to resume Falcon 9 launches following a booster landing failure this week, and the Polaris Dawn mission is on hold due to an unfavorable weather forecast.
As always, we welcome reader submissions. If you don’t want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.
Firefly has a new chief executive. Jason Kim, former head of Boeing-owned satellite-maker Millennium Space Systems, has been appointed CEO of Firefly Aerospace effective October 1, Aviation Week & Space Technology reports. Kim joins Firefly as the ambitious space transportation startup, which has raised close to $600 million from investors since its 2021 founding, looks to launch a commercial lunar lander for NASA before the end of the year. Firefly is also working on a medium-lift rocket in partnership with Northrop Grumman, with the goal of competing for missions to resupply the International Space Station and launch payloads for the US military and commercial customers.
Kim brings national security chops … At Millennium, Kim shepherded several national security space missions to completion, including Victus Nox, a responsive satellite and launch mission for the US Space Force. Millennium manufactured the satellite for the Victus Nox mission, and Firefly Aerospace successfully launched it on an Alpha rocket just 27 hours after receiving the launch order from the military. This required Millennium and Firefly to integrate the satellite with the Alpha rocket on short notice. Kim replaces Bill Weber, who left the CEO role at Firefly in July after allegations he had an improper relationship with a female employee.
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New Shepard flies again. Blue Origin launched six passengers, including a NASA-sponsored researcher and the youngest woman to fly in space, on a sub-orbital trip out of the lower atmosphere Thursday in the company’s eighth crewed spaceflight, CBS News reports. University of Florida researcher Rob Ferl, philanthropist Nicolina Elrick, adventurer Eugene Grin, Vanderbilt University cardiologist Elman Jahangir, American-Israeli entrepreneur Ephraim Rabin, and University of North Carolina senior Karsen Kitchen lifted off from Jeff Bezos’ West Texas launch site on Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket. Kitchen became the youngest woman to fly higher than 100 kilometers (62 miles), and Ferl was the first NASA-funded researcher to fly on a suborbital rocket. Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic, its competitor in the suborbital human spaceflight market, have long touted their vehicles’ ability to support human-tended research in microgravity.
Three good chutes … This was Blue Origin’s first New Shepard flight since May 19, when one of the crew capsule’s three main parachutes failed to open fully on the descent. The passengers on that flight were fine, and Blue Origin says the capsule can return safely with just a single parachute if two fail. Blue Origin said it identified the cause of the parachute issue on the May flight, but didn’t offer details other than that the investigation “focused on the dis-reefing system that transitions the parachutes from the reefed to the disreefed state that did not function as designed on one of the three parachutes on NS-25,” Space News reports.
ABL’s rocket test failure damaged ground systems. A fiery malfunction on an Alaska launch pad last month not only destroyed the RS1 rocket ABL Space Systems was preparing for launch, but also damaged some ground systems at the site, ABL said in an update posted on X. The company said a fire developed “external to RS1’s base” after the booster’s 11 engines shut down during an aborted test-firing at Kodiak Island, Alaska. The fire was fed by fuel leaks from two of the engines, and ABL’s launch team was able to use water and inert gases to suppress the fire for more than 11 minutes. But the remote launch site doesn’t have a direct water supply, and mobile water tanks ran dry, causing the fire to grow until the rocket collapsed. ABL said a majority of the plumbing and electrical connections to the launch mount were damaged, but the launch mount’s structure, flame deflector, and other equipment were unharmed.
Few details on next steps … ABL published a detailed update on its investigation into the test failure, and its openness is worth noting. Engineers found two of the engines—the ones that leaked and fueled the fire—experienced “combustion instability” during their startup sequence. ABL said it believes differences in this RS1 rocket, called a Block 2 design, resulted in a higher-energy startup than expected. The company will return its damaged ground support equipment from Alaska to a facility in Long Beach, California, for refurbishment, and ABL says its next RS1 rocket is “well into production.” But the company didn’t share any information on corrective actions or a timeline for implementing them and returning to the launch pad with RS1. ABL aims to compete with other, more established small satellite launch companies like Rocket Lab and Firefly Aerospace, but its RS1 rocket hasn’t made it far from the launch pad. ABL’s first orbital launch attempt in January 2023 ended when the RS1 rocket lost power and fell back on its launch pad.
Enlarge/ Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft undocks from the International Space Station at the conclusion of an unpiloted test flight in May 2022.
NASA
NASA and Boeing are proceeding with final preparations to undock the Starliner spacecraft from the International Space Station next Friday, September 6, to head for landing at White Sands Space Harbor in southern New Mexico.
Astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, who were supposed to return to Earth inside Starliner, will remain behind on the space station after NASA decided last week to conclude the Boeing test flight without its crew on board. NASA officials decided it was too risky to put the astronauts on Starliner after the spacecraft suffered thruster failures during its flight to the space station in early June.
Instead, Wilmore and Williams will come home on a SpaceX Dragon capsule no earlier than February, extending their planned stay on the space station from eight days to eight months. Flying on autopilot, the Starliner spacecraft is scheduled to depart the station at approximately 6: 04 pm EDT (22: 04 UTC) on September 6. The capsule will fire its engines to drop out of orbit and target a parachute-assisted landing in New Mexico at 12: 03 am EDT (04: 03 UTC) on September 7, NASA said in a statement Thursday.
NASA officials completed the second part of a two-day Flight Readiness Review on Thursday to clear the Starliner spacecraft for undocking and landing. However, there are strict weather rules for landing a Starliner spacecraft, so NASA and Boeing managers will decide next week whether to proceed with the return next Friday night or wait for better conditions at the White Sands landing zone.
Over the last few days, flight controllers updated parameters in Starliner’s software to handle a fully autonomous return to Earth without inputs from astronauts flying in the cockpit, NASA said. Boeing has flown two unpiloted Starliner test flights using the same type of autonomous reentry and landing operations. This mission, called the Crew Flight Test (CFT), was the first time astronauts launched into orbit inside a Starliner spacecraft, and was expected to pave the way for future operational missions to rotate four-person crews to and from the space station.
With the Starliner spacecraft unable to complete its test flight as intended, there are fundamental questions about the future of Boeing’s commercial crew program. NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said last week that Boeing’s new CEO, Kelly Ortberg, told him the aerospace company remained committed to Starliner. However, Boeing will be on the hook to pay for the cost of resolving problems with overheating thrusters and helium leaks that hamstrung the CFT mission. Boeing hasn’t made any public statements about the long-term future of the Starliner program since NASA decided to pull its astronauts off the spacecraft for its return to Earth.
Preparing for a contingency
NASA is clearly more comfortable with returning Wilmore and Williams to Earth inside SpaceX’s Dragon capsule, but the change disrupts crew operations at the space station. This week, astronauts have been reconfiguring the interior of a Dragon spacecraft currently docked at the outpost to support six crew members in the event of an emergency evacuation.
With Starliner leaving the space station next week, Dragon will become the lifeboat for Wilmore and Williams. If a fire, a collision with space junk, a medical emergency, or something else forces the crew to leave the complex, the Starliner astronauts will ride home on makeshift seats positioned under the four regular seats inside Dragon, where crews typically put cargo during launch and landing.
At least one of the Starliner astronauts would have to come home without a spacesuit to protect them if the cabin of the Dragon spacecraft depressurized on the descent. This has never happened on a Dragon mission before, but astronauts wear SpaceX-made pressure suits to mitigate the risk. The four astronauts who launched on Dragon have their suits, and NASA officials said a spare SpaceX suit already on the space station fit one of the Starliner astronauts, but they didn’t identify which one.
A pressure suit for the other Starliner crew member will launch on the next Dragon spacecraft—on the Crew-9 mission—set for liftoff on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket no earlier than September 24. Starliner’s troubles have also disrupted plans for the Crew-9 mission.
On Friday, NASA announced it would remove two astronauts from the Crew-9 mission, including its commander, Zena Cardman, who is a spaceflight rookie. Veteran astronaut Nick Hague will move from the pilot’s seat to take over as Crew-9 commander. Russian cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov will join him.
NASA and Russia’s space agency, Roscosmos, have an agreement to launch Russian cosmonauts on Dragon missions and US astronauts on Russian Soyuz flights to the station. In exchange for NASA providing a ride for Gorbunov, NASA astronaut Don Pettit will fly to the space station on a Soyuz spacecraft next month.
The so-called “seat swap” arrangement ensures that, even if Dragon or Soyuz were grounded, there is always at least one US astronaut and one Russian cosmonaut on the station overseeing each partner’s segment of the outpost, maintaining propulsion, power generating, pointing control, thermal control, and other critical capabilities to keep the lab operational.
Enlarge/ Nick Hague, left, and Zena Cardman train inside a Crew Dragon spacecraft mock-up in November 2023.
NASA
On Friday NASA publicly announced a decision that has roiled the top levels of the agency’s human spaceflight program for several weeks. The space agency named the two crew members who will launch on a Crew Dragon mission set to lift off no earlier than September 24 to the International Space Station.
NASA astronaut Nick Hague will serve as the mission’s commander, and Roscosmos cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov will serve as mission specialist. Instead of a usual complement of four astronauts, a two-person crew was necessitated by the need to use the Crew 9 spacecraft, Freedom, as a rescue vehicle for astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams. They flew to the station in June aboard Boeing’s Starliner vehicle, which has been deemed unsafe for them to return in.
Wilmore and Williams will join the Crew-9 increment on board the space station and fly back to Earth with Hague and Gorbunov next February.
The story behind the story
This represents a significant change from the original makeup of the Crew-9 manifest. NASA publicly named the original members of Crew-9 last January, which included three NASA astronauts and Gorbunov. It was to be commanded by Zena Cardman, piloted by Hague, with Stephanie Wilson and Gorbunov as mission specialists.
At the time, the naming of Cardman was significant—she would have been the first rookie astronaut without test pilot experience to command a NASA spaceflight. A 36-year-old geobiologist, Cardman joined NASA in 2017 and is well-regarded by her peers. The assignment of a rookie, non-test pilot to command the Crew-9 mission reflected NASA’s confidence in the self-flying capabilities of Dragon, which is intended to reach the station autonomously. The assignment was made by then-chief astronaut Reid Wiseman in 2022, and the Astronaut Office was confident that Cardman, with an experienced hand in Hague at her side, could command the mission.
The need to rescue Wilmore and Williams changed the equation. It fell upon Joe Acaba, a veteran astronaut who became chief of the Astronaut Office in February 2023, to down-select to a new crew manifest. To maintain its ongoing rotation with the Russian space program, one of the crew members needed to be Gorbunov. So Acaba had to pick from Cardman, Hague, and Wilson.
Initially, Acaba stuck with Cardman. She was the original commander of the mission, after all. But this prompted considerable dissent within the Astronaut Office, sources said. While Cardman is respected, and Dragon designed to be fully autonomous, it was asking a lot of her to be the sole NASA representative on board the vehicle. (Russian astronauts, generally, are not trained in depth on piloting US vehicles.) A non-trivial percentage of professional astronauts succumb to space sickness during the initial hours of their spaceflights.
Some members of the astronaut office argued that Hague was the safer choice. An Air Force test pilot, Hague survived a harrowing Soyuz spacecraft abort in 2018, and subsequently flew to space for more than six months in 2019. Hague, these astronauts said, was the safer choice for NASA if the agency truly sought to maximize chances of mission success.
Eventually these dissenters, with some support from the upper echelons of NASA management, prevailed, and Acaba swapped Hague for Cardman. A decision was reached before a Flight Readiness Review meeting on August 24, but it was not publicly announced until this Friday.
NASA’s official comment
“While we’ve changed crew before for a variety of reasons, downsizing crew for this flight was another tough decision to adjust to given that the crew has trained as a crew of four,” Acaba said in a news release issued Friday. “I have the utmost confidence in all our crew, who have been excellent throughout training for the mission. Zena and Stephanie will continue to assist their crewmates ahead of launch, and they exemplify what it means to be a professional astronaut.”
There was also a classy quote in the news release from Cardman, who revealed Friday that her father, Larry Cardman, passed away three weeks ago. “I am deeply proud of our entire crew,” she said. “And I am confident Nick and Alex will step into their roles with excellence. All four of us remain dedicated to the success of this mission, and Stephanie and I look forward to flying when the time is right.”
Enlarge/ Gen. Stephen Whiting, commander of US Space Command, speaks earlier this year at Peterson Space Force Base, Colorado.
The head of US Space Command said Wednesday he would like to see more transparency from the Chinese government on space debris, especially as one of China’s newer rockets has shown a propensity for breaking apart and littering low-Earth orbit with hundreds of pieces of space junk.
Gen. Stephen Whiting, commander of US Space Command, said he’s observed some improvement in the dialogue between US and Chinese military officials this year. But the disintegration of the upper stage from a Long March 6A rocket earlier this month showed China could do more to prevent the creation of space debris, and communicate openly about it when it happens.
The Chinese government acknowledged the breakup of the Long March 6A rocket’s upper stage in a statement by its Ministry of Foreign Affairs on August 14, more than a week after the rocket’s launch August 6 with the first batch of 18 Internet satellites for a megaconstellation of thousands of spacecraft analogous to SpaceX’s Starlink network.
Space Command reported it detected more than 300 objects associated with the breakup of the upper stage in orbit, and LeoLabs, a commercial space situational awareness company, said its radars detected at least 700 objects attributed to the Chinese rocket.
“I hope the next time there’s a rocket like that, that leaves a lot of debris, that it’s not our sensors that are the first to detect that, but we’re getting communications to help us understand that, just like we communicate with others,” Whiting said at an event hosted by the Mitchell Institute marking the fifth anniversary of the reestablishment of Space Command.
Whiting said he didn’t have any technical details about why the Long March 6A rocket’s upper stage broke apart, but it happened after the rocket deployed all of its payloads. “They had already released the satellites at that point, and it seems like the mission was overall successful, but all this debris gets left in orbit,” he said. “We certainly don’t want to see that kind of debris.”
Due regard
The Space Force’s 18th Space Defense Squadron, located at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California, is responsible for tracking objects in Earth orbit, maintaining a catalog of all satellites and space junk, and monitoring for potential collisions between spacecraft or debris. Space Command regularly issues warnings of conjunctions, or close approaches, between objects to commercial companies and foreign governments.
“For decades now, the United States has so cared about the space domain that we have made available the vast majority of tracking data that we have, for free, for the world,” Whiting said. “Every day, we screen every active satellite against all that debris, and we provide notifications out to everyone, including the Chinese and Russians.
“People sometimes ask, ‘Well, why do you do that?’ Well, it’s because we don’t want satellites to run into pieces of debris and create more debris. So we think it’s really important, and we have a set of responsible behaviors that we follow each and every day. We provide these notifications to the Chinese,” Whiting said.
The Commerce Department plans to take over some of the military’s role in space traffic management, but Space Command will maintain its own catalog and will remain responsible for working with foreign militaries on space debris matters, according to Whiting.
Pretty much every day for the last couple of weeks, workers wielding welding guns and torches have climbed onto SpaceX’s Starship launch pad in South Texas to make last-minute upgrades ahead of the next test flight of the world’s largest rocket.
Livestreams of the launch site provided by LabPadre and NASASpaceflight.com have shown sparks raining down two mechanical arms extending from the side of the Starship launch tower at SpaceX’s Starbase launch site on the Gulf Coast east of Brownsville, Texas. We are publishing several views here of the welding activity with the permission of LabPadre, which runs a YouTube page with multiple live views of Starbase.
If SpaceX has its way on the next flight of Starship, these arms will close together to capture the first-stage booster, called Super Heavy, as it descends back to Earth and slows to a hover over the launch pad.
This method of rocket recovery is remarkably different from how SpaceX lands its smaller Falcon 9 booster, which has landing legs to touch down on offshore ocean-going platforms or at concrete sites onshore. Catching the rocket with large metallic arms—sometimes called “mechazilla arms” or “chopsticks”—would reduce the turnaround time to reuse the booster and simplify its design, according to SpaceX.
SpaceX has launched the nearly 400-foot-tall (121 meter) Starship rocket four times, most recently in June, when the Super Heavy booster, itself roughly 233 feet (71 meters) tall, made a pinpoint splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico just off the coast of Starbase.
On the same flight in June, the Starship upper stage flew halfway around the world and reentered the atmosphere over the Indian Ocean. The ship survived reentry and splashed down in the open ocean northwest of Australia. This flight was the first time either part of the Starship rocket made it back to Earth intact, but SpaceX didn’t recover the booster or the ship.
Doubling up
Lessons learned from the June test flight prompted SpaceX to replace thousands of heat shield tiles on the Starship vehicle for the next mission. While the ship survived reentry in June, onboard camera views showed numerous tiles ripped away from the vehicle. Last month, SpaceX test-fired engines on the booster and ship assigned to the next launch.
On August 8, SpaceX said Starship and Super Heavy were “ready to fly, pending regulatory approval” from the Federal Aviation Administration. An FAA spokesperson said the agency is evaluating SpaceX’s proposed flight profile for the next Starship test flight, when SpaceX wants to try catching the booster on the pad. This will be the first time SpaceX will try to bring the stainless-steel Super Heavy booster, as long as and wider than a Boeing 747 jumbo jet, back to a landing on land.
Enlarge/ Sparks fly at Starbase as welders work overnight at the Starship launch pad.
While the rocket appears to be ready to fly, SpaceX officials clearly believe there’s more work to do on the launch pad. Closer views revealed welders are installing structural supports, or doublers, to certain parts of the catch arms. Elsewhere on the arms, workers were seen removing and adding other unknown pieces of hardware. SpaceX hasn’t specified exactly what kind of work teams are doing on the Starship launch pad in Texas, but the focus is on beefing up hardware necessary for catching the Super Heavy booster.
All of this work is occurring during the hottest part of the year in South Texas. On most days this month, afternoon temperatures have soared into the mid-to-upper 90s Fahrenheit, with sticky humidity. A lot of the work on the catch arms has occurred at night, when temperatures drop into the lower 80s.
It’s unclear how long it will take for the FAA to approve a license for SpaceX to launch and recover the rocket on the next test flight or when SpaceX will complete the upgrades on the launch pad. Elon Musk, SpaceX’s founder and CEO, suggested earlier this month that the flight could take off by the end of August, but the condition of the launch pad and remaining tests indicate a launch is still probably at least a couple of weeks away.
Once workers finish up their tasks upgrading the pad and clearing scaffolding and cranes from the area, SpaceX will likely stack the Super Heavy booster and Starship upper stage and fill them with propellants during a full countdown rehearsal, as it has before each previous Starship launch.
Musk has signaled several times that the company will try to catch the Super Heavy booster on the next flight, which will also accelerate the Starship upper stage to nearly orbital velocity for another reentry demonstration over the Indian Ocean. Last month, SpaceX released a video teasing a catch of the booster on the next Starship flight, showing the rocket returning to Starbase with its Raptor engines firing.
Meanwhile, SpaceX has stacked a second Starship launch tower next to the existing launch pad in Texas. The company still has a lot of work to do to outfit the second launch pad before it is ready to support a Starship flight, but SpaceX could have it ready for activation sometime next year. SpaceX also plans two Starship launch pads at Cape Canaveral, Florida. All these sites will allow SpaceX to launch Starships more often. The company is also finishing a sprawling factory near the Starship factory in South Texas, just a couple of miles inland from the launch pads there.
Enlarge/ Teams with NASA’s Exploration Ground Systems Program and primary contractor Bechtel National, Inc. continue construction on the base of the platform for the new mobile launcher at Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Wednesday, April 24, 2024.
NASA/Isaac Watson
NASA’s problems with the mobile launch tower that will support a larger version of its Space Launch System rocket are getting worse rather than better.
According to a new report from NASA’s inspector general, the estimated cost of the tower, which is a little bit taller than the length of a US football field with its end zones, is now $2.7 billion. Such a cost is nearly twice the funding it took to build the largest structure in the world, the Burj Khalifa, which is seven times taller.
This is a remarkable explosion in costs as, only five years ago, NASA awarded a contract to the Bechtel engineering firm to build and deliver a second mobile launcher (ML-2) for $383 million, with a due date of March 2023. That deadline came and went with Bechtel barely beginning to cut metal.
According to NASA’s own estimate, the project cost for the tower is now $1.8 billion, with a delivery date of September 2027. However the new report, published Monday, concludes that NASA’s estimate is probably too conservative. “Our analysis indicates costs could be even higher due in part to the significant amount of construction work that remains,” states the report, signed by Deputy Inspector General George A. Scott.
Bigger rocket, bigger tower
NASA commissioned construction of the launch tower—at the express direction of the US Congress—to support a larger version of the Space Launch System rocket known as Block 1B. This combines the rocket’s existing core stage with a larger and more powerful second stage, known as the Exploration Upper Stage, under development by Boeing.
The space agency expects to use this larger version of the SLS rocket beginning with the Artemis IV mission, which is intended to deliver both a crewed Orion spacecraft as well as an element of the Lunar Gateway into orbit around the Moon. This is to be the second time that astronauts land on the lunar surface as part of the Artemis Program. The Artemis IV mission has a nominal launch date of 2028, but the new report confirms the widely held assumption in the space community that such a date is unfeasible.
To make a 2028 launch date for this mission, NASA said it needs to have the ML-2 tower completed by November 2026. Both NASA and the new report agree that there is a zero percent chance of this happening. Accordingly, if the Artemis IV mission uses the upgraded version of the SLS rocket, it almost certainly will not launch until mid-2029 at the earliest.
Why have the costs and delays grown so much? One reason the report cites is Bechtel’s continual underestimation of the scope and complexity of the project.
“Bechtel vastly underestimated the number of labor hours required to complete the ML-2 project and, as a result, has incurred more labor hours than anticipated. From May 2022 to January 2024, estimated overtime hours doubled to nearly 850,000 hours, reflecting the company’s attempts to meet NASA’s schedule goals.
Difficult to hold Bechtel to account
One of the major takeaways from the new report is that NASA appears to be pretty limited in what it can do to motivate Bechtel to build the mobile launch tower more quickly or at a more reasonable price. The cost-plus contracting mechanism gives the space agency limited leverage over the contractor beyond withholding award fees. The report notes that NASA has declined to exercise an option to convert the contract to a fixed-price mechanism.
“While the option officially remains in the contract, NASA officials informed us they do not intend to request a fixed-price proposal from Bechtel,” the report states. “(Exploration Ground Systems) Program and ML-2 project management told us they presume Bechtel would likely provide a cost proposal far beyond NASA’s budgetary capacity to account for the additional risk that comes with a fixed-price contract.”
In other words, since NASA did not initially require a fixed price contract, it now sounds like any bid from Bechtel would completely blow a hole in the agency’s annual budget.
The spiraling costs of the mobile launch tower have previously been a source of frustration for NASA Administrator Bill Nelson. In 2022, after cost estimates for the ML-2 structure neared $1 billion, Nelson lashed out at the cost-plus mechanism during testimony to the US Congress.
“I believe that that is the plan that can bring us all the value of competition,” Nelson said of fixed-price contracts. “You get it done with that competitive spirit. You get it done cheaper, and that allows us to move away from what has been a plague on us in the past, which is a cost-plus contract, and move to an existing contractual price.”
Enlarge/ The crew of Polaris Dawn, from L to R: Scott “Kidd” Poteet, Anna Menon, Sarah Gillis, and Jared Isaacman.
Polaris Program/John Kraus
SpaceX is set to launch the 14th crewed flight on its Dragon spacecraft early on Tuesday morning—and it’s an intriguing one.
This Polaris Dawn mission, helmed and funded by an entrepreneur and billionaire named Jared Isaacman, is scheduled to lift off at 3: 38 am ET (07: 38 UTC) on Tuesday from Launch Complex 39A at Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
This is just the second free-flying Crew Dragon mission that SpaceX has flown, and like the Inspiration4 mission that came before it, Polaris Dawn will once again field an entire crew of private astronauts. Although this is a private spaceflight, it really is not a space tourism mission. Rather, it seeks to push the ball of exploration forward. Isaacman has emerged as one of the most serious figures in commercial spaceflight in recent years, spending hundreds of millions of dollars to fly into space and push forward the boundaries of what private citizens can do in space.
“The idea is to develop and test new technology and operations in furtherance of SpaceX’s bold vision to enable humankind to journey among the stars,” Isaacman said last week during a news conference ahead of Tuesday’s launch.
A novel step forward
Isaacman, chief executive of the Shift4 payments company, led the Inspiration4 mission in September 2021, which was unique because the crew consisted of himself—an experienced pilot—and three newcomers to spaceflight. Isaacman used the world’s first all-civilian spaceflight, on a private vehicle, to raise hundreds of millions of dollars for charity and expand the window of who could become an astronaut.
Yet whereas Inspiration4 felt like something of a novelty, Polaris Dawn is truly pushing the boundary of private spaceflight forward. Working closely with SpaceX, Isaacman has plotted a five-day flight that will accomplish a number of significant tasks after it launches.
During the initial hours of the spaceflight, the crew will seek to fly in a highly elliptical orbit, reaching an altitude as high as 1,400 km (870 miles) above the planet’s surface. This will be the highest Earth-orbit mission ever flown by humans and the farthest any person has flown from Earth since the Apollo Moon landings more than half a century ago. This will expose the crew to a not insignificant amount of radiation, and they will collect biological data to assess harms.
The Resilience spacecraft will then descend toward a more circular orbit about 700 km above the Earth’s surface. Assuming a launch on Tuesday, the crew will don four spacesuits on Friday and open the hatch to the vacuum of space. Then Isaacman, followed by mission specialist Sarah Gillis, will each briefly climb out of the spacecraft into space.
Isaacman’s interest in performing the first private spacewalk accelerated, by years, SpaceX’s development of these spacesuits. This really is just the first generation of the suit, and SpaceX is likely to continue iterating toward a spacesuit that has its own portable life support system (PLSS). This is the “backpack” on a traditional spacesuit that allows NASA astronauts to perform spacewalks untethered to the International Space Station.
The general idea is that, as the Starship vehicle makes the surface of the Moon and eventually Mars more accessible to more people, future generations of these lower-cost spacesuits will enable exploration and settlement. That journey, in some sense, begins with this mission’s brief spacewalks, with Isaacman and Gillis tethered to the Dragon vehicle for life support.
Enlarge/ Sarah Gillis, a mission specialist on Polaris Dawn, is pretty darn excited about going to space.
Polaris Program/John Kraus
Lasers and SpaceXers
Isaacman and his crew will also conduct a number of other research experiments, including trying to better understand a recently detected but major concern of space habitation, spaceflight-associated neuro-ocular syndrome. This will also be the first crewed mission to test Starlink-based laser communications in space.
Then, there is the crew. Isaacman’s close friend, retired US Air Force Col. Scott “Kidd” Poteet, will be the mission’s pilot, with Gillis and Anna Menon serving as mission specialists. Both Gillis and Menon are SpaceX engineers who worked with Isaacman during Inspiration4. Now, they’ll become the first SpaceX employees to ever go into orbit, bringing their experiences back to share with their colleagues.
This is the first of three “Polaris” missions that Isaacman is scheduled to fly with SpaceX. The plan for the second Polaris mission, also to fly on a Dragon spacecraft, has yet to be determined. But it may well employ a second-generation spacesuit based on learnings from this spaceflight. The third flight, unlikely to occur before at least 2030, will be an orbital launch aboard the company’s Starship vehicle—making Isaacman and his crew the first to fly on that rocket.
Enlarge/ A Starliner spacecraft mounted on top of an Atlas V rocket before an unpiloted test flight in 2022.
Ten years ago next month NASA announced that Boeing, one of the agency’s most experienced contractors, won the lion’s share of government money available to end the agency’s sole reliance on Russia to ferry its astronauts to and from low-Earth orbit.
At the time, Boeing won $4.2 billion from NASA to complete development of the Starliner spacecraft and fly a minimum of two, and potentially up to six, operational crew flights to rotate crews between Earth and the International Space Station (ISS). SpaceX won a $2.6 billion contract for essentially the same scope of work.
A decade later the Starliner program finds itself at a crossroads after Boeing learned it will not complete the spacecraft’s first Crew Flight Test with astronauts onboard. NASA formally decided Saturday that Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, who launched on the Starliner capsule June 5, will instead return to Earth inside a SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft. Put simply, NASA isn’t confident enough in Boeing’s spacecraft after it suffered multiple thrusters failures and helium leaks on the way to the ISS.
So where does this leave Boeing with its multibillion contract? Can the company fulfill the breadth of its commercial crew contract with NASA before the space station’s scheduled retirement in 2030? It now seems that there is little chance of Boeing flying six more Starliner missions without a life extension for the ISS. Tellingly, perhaps, NASA has only placed firm orders with Boeing for three Starliner flights once the agency certifies the spacecraft for operational use.
Boeing’s bottom line
Although Boeing did not make an official statement Saturday on its long-term plans for Starliner, NASA Administrator Bill Nelson told reporters he received assurances from Boeing’s new CEO, Kelly Ortberg, that the company remains committed to the commercial crew program. And it will take a significant commitment from Boeing to see it through. Under the terms of its fixed price contract with NASA, the company is on the hook to pay for any expenses to fix the thruster and helium leak problems and get Starliner flying again.
Boeing has already reported $1.6 billion in charges on its financial statements to pay for delays and cost overruns on the Starliner program. That figure will grow as the company will likely need to redesign some elements in the spacecraft’s propulsion system to remedy the problems encountered on the Crew Flight Test (CFT) mission. NASA has committed $5.1 billion to Boeing for the Starliner program, and the agency has already paid out most of that funding.
Enlarge/ Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft, seen docked at the International Space Station through the window of a SpaceX Dragon spacecraft.
The next step for Starliner remains unclear, and we’ll assess that in more detail later in the story. Had the Starliner test flight ended as expected, with its crew inside, NASA targeted no earlier than August 2025 for Boeing to launch the first of its six operational crew rotation missions to the space station. In light of Saturday’s decision, there’s a high probability Starliner won’t fly with astronauts again until at least 2026.
Starliner safely delivered astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams to the space station on June 6, a day after their launch from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida. But five of the craft’s 28 reaction control system thrusters overheated and failed as it approached the outpost. After the failures on the way to the space station, NASA’s engineers were concerned Starliner might suffer similar problems, or worse, when the control jets fired to guide Starliner on the trip back to Earth.
On Saturday, senior NASA leaders decided it wasn’t worth the risk. The two astronauts, who originally planned for an eight-day stay at the station, will now spend eight months on the orbiting research lab until they come back to Earth with SpaceX.
If it’s not a trust problem, is it a judgement issue?
Boeing managers had previously declared Starliner was safe enough to bring Wilmore and Williams home. Mark Nappi, Boeing’s Starliner program manager, regularly appeared to downplay the seriousness of the thruster issues during press conferences throughout Starliner’s nearly three-month mission.
So why did NASA and Boeing engineers reach different conclusions? “I think we’re looking at the data and we view the data and the uncertainty that’s there differently than Boeing does,” said Jim Free, NASA’s associate administrator, and the agency’s most senior civil servant. “It’s not a matter of trust. It’s our technical expertise and our experience that we have to balance. We balance risk across everything, not just Starliner.”
The people at the top of NASA’s decision-making tree have either flown in space before, or had front-row seats to the calamitous decision NASA made in 2003 to not seek more data on the condition of space shuttle Columbia’s left wing after the impact of a block of foam from the shuttle’s fuel tank during launch. This led to the deaths of seven astronauts, and the destruction of Columbia during reentry over East Texas. A similar normalization of technical problems, and a culture of stifling dissent, led to the loss of space shuttle Challenger in 1986.
“We lost two space shuttles as a result there not being a culture in which information could come forward,” Nelson said Saturday. “We have been very solicitous of all of our employees that if you have some objection, you come forward. Spaceflight is risky, even at its safest, and even at its most routine. And a test flight by nature is neither safe nor routine. So the decision to keep Butch and Suni aboard the International Space Station and bring the Starliner home uncrewed is the result of a commitment to safety.”
Now, it seems that culture may truly have changed. With SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft available to give Wilmore and Williams a ride home, this ended up being a relatively straightforward decision. Ken Bowersox, head of NASA’s space operations mission directorate, said the managers polled for their opinion all supported bringing the Starliner spacecraft back to Earth without anyone onboard.
However, NASA and Boeing need to answer for how the Starliner program got to this point. The space agency approved the launch of the Starliner CFT mission in June despite knowing the spacecraft had a helium leak in its propulsion system. Those leaks multiplied once Starliner arrived in orbit, and are a serious issue on their own that will require corrective actions before the next flight. Ultimately, the thruster problems superseded the seriousness of the helium leaks, and this is where NASA and Boeing are likely to face the most difficult questions moving forward.
Enlarge/ NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams aboard the International Space Station.
Boeing’s previous Starliner mission, known as Orbital Flight Test-2 (OFT-2), successfully launched in 2022 and docked with the space station, later coming back to Earth for a parachute-assisted landing in New Mexico. The test flight achieved all of its major objectives, setting the stage for the Crew Flight Test mission this year. But the spacecraft suffered thruster problems on that flight, too.
Several of the reaction control system thrusters stopped working as Starliner approached the space station on the OFT-2 mission, and another one failed on the return leg of the mission. Engineers thought they fixed the problem by introducing what was essentially a software fix to adjust timing and tolerance settings on sensors in the propulsion system, supplied by Aerojet Rocketdyne.
That didn’t work. The problem lay elsewhere, as engineers discovered during testing this summer, when Starliner was already in orbit. Thruster firings at White Stands, New Mexico, revealed a small Teflon seal in a valve can bulge when overheated, restricting the flow of oxidizer propellant to the thruster. NASA officials concluded there is a chance, however small, that the thrusters could overheat again as Starliner departs the station and flies back to Earth—or perhaps get worse.
“We are clearly operating this thruster at a higher temperature, at times, than it was designed for,” said Steve Stich, NASA’s commercial crew program manager. “I think that was a factor, that as we started to look at the data a little bit more carefully, we’re operating the thruster outside of where it should be operated at.”
Enlarge/ Crew Dragon approaches the International Space Station
NASA TV
Following weeks of speculation, NASA finally made it official on Saturday: two astronauts who flew to the International Space Station on Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft in June will not return home on that vehicle. Instead, the agency has asked SpaceX to use its Crew Dragon spacecraft to fly astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams back to Earth.
“NASA has decided that Butch and Suni will return with Crew-9 next February,” said NASA Administrator Bill Nelson at the outset of a news conference on Saturday afternoon at Johnson Space Center.
In a sign of the gravity surrounding the agency’s decision, both Nelson and NASA’s deputy administrator, Pam Melroy, attended a Flight Readiness Review meeting held Saturday in Houston. During that gathering of the agency’s senior officials, an informal “go/no go” poll was taken. Those present voted unanimously for Wilmore and Williams to return to Earth on Crew Dragon. The official recommendation of the Commercial Crew Program was the same, and Nelson accepted it.
Therefore, Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft will undock from the station early next month—the tentative date, according to a source, is September 6—and attempt to make an autonomous return to Earth and land in a desert in the southwestern United States.
Then, no earlier than September 24, a Crew Dragon spacecraft will launch with two astronauts (NASA has not named the two crew members yet) to the space station with two empty seats. Wilmore and Williams will join these two Crew-9 astronauts for their previously scheduled six-month increment on the space station. All four will then return to Earth on the Crew Dragon vehicle.
Saturday’s announcement has big implications for Boeing, which entered NASA’s Commercial Crew Program more than a decade ago and lent legitimacy to NASA’s efforts to pay private companies for transporting astronauts to the International Space Station. The company’s failure—and despite the encomiums from NASA officials during Saturday’s news conference, this Starliner mission is a failure—will affect Boeing’s future in spaceflight. Ars will have additional coverage of Starliner’s path forward later today.
Never could get comfortable with thruster issues
For weeks after Starliner’s arrival at the space station in early June, officials from Boeing and NASA expressed confidence in the ability of the spacecraft to fly Wilmore and Williams home. They said they just needed to collect a little more data on the performance of the vehicle’s reaction control system thrusters. Five of these 28 small thrusters that guide Starliner failed during the trip to the space station.
Engineers from Boeing and NASA tested the performance of these thrusters at a facility in White Sands, New Mexico, in July. Initially, the engineers were excited to replicate the failures observed during Starliner’s transit to the space station. (Replicating failures is a critical step to understanding the root cause of a hardware problem.)
However, what NASA found after taking apart the failed thrusters was concerning, said the chief of NASA’s Commercial Crew Program, Steve Stich.
“I would say the White Sands testing did give us a surprise,” Stich said Saturday. “It was this piece of Teflon that swells up and got in the flow path and causes the oxidizer to not go into the thruster the way it needs to. That’s what caused the degradation of thrust. When we saw that, I think that’s when things changed a bit for us.”
When NASA took this finding to the thruster’s manufacturer, Aerojet Rocketdyne, the propulsion company said it had never seen this phenomenon before. It was at this point that agency engineers started to believe that it might not be possible to identify the root cause of the problem in a timely manner and become comfortable enough with the physics to be sure that the thruster problem would not occur during Starliner’s return to Earth.
Thank you for flying SpaceX
The result of this uncertainty is that NASA will now turn to the other commercial crew provider, SpaceX. This is not a pleasant outcome for Boeing which, a decade ago, looked askance at SpaceX as something akin to space cowboys. I have covered the space industry closely during the last 15 years, and during most of that time Boeing was perceived by much of the industry as the blueblood of spaceflight while SpaceX was the company that was going to kill astronauts due to its supposed recklessness.
Now the space agency is asking SpaceX to, in effect, rescue the Boeing astronauts currently on the International Space Station.
It won’t be the first time that SpaceX has helped a competitor recently. In the last two years SpaceX has launched satellites for a low-Earth orbit Internet competitor, OneWeb, after Russia’s space program squeezed the company; it has launched Europe’s sovereign Galileo satellites after delays to the Ariane 6 rocket; and it has launched the Cygnus spacecraft built by NASA’s other space station cargo services provider, Northrop Grumman, multiple times. Now SpaceX will help out Boeing, a crew competitor.
After Saturday’s news conference, I asked Jim Free, NASA’s highest-ranking civil servant, what he made of the once-upstart SpaceX now helping to backstop the rest of the Western spaceflight community. Without SpaceX, after all, NASA would not have a way to get crew or cargo to the International Space Station.
“They’re flying a lot, and they’re having success,” Free said. “And you know, when they have an issue, they find a way to recover like with the second-stage issue, We set out to have two providers to take crew to station to have options, and they’ve given us the option. In the reverse, Boeing could have been out there, and we still would face the same thing if they had a systemic Dragon problem, Boeing would have to bring us back. But I can’t argue with how much they’ve flown, that’s for sure, and what they’ve flown.”
Enlarge/ NASA astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore, seen in their Boeing flight suits.
After months of consideration, NASA said Thursday that it will finally decide the fate of two astronauts on board the International Space Station, Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, by this weekend. As soon as Saturday, the two crew members will learn whether they’ll return on a Starliner spacecraft in early September or a Crew Dragon vehicle next February.
On the eve of this fateful decision, the most consequential human spaceflight safety determination NASA has had to make in more than two decades, Ars has put together a summary of what we know, what we believe to be true, and what remains yet unknown.
Why has NASA taken so long?
Wilmore and Williams arrived at the International Space Station 11 weeks ago. Their mission was supposed to last eight days, but there was some expectation that they might stay a little longer. However, no one envisioned the crew remaining this long. That changed when, during Starliner’s flight to the space station, five of the 28 small thrusters that guide Starliner failed. After some touch-and-go operations, the astronauts and flight controllers at Johnson Space Center coaxed the spacecraft to a safe docking at the station.
This failure in space led to months of testing, both on board the vehicle in space and with similar thrusters on the ground in New Mexico. This has been followed by extensive data reviews and modeling by engineers to try to understand the root cause of the thruster problems. On Friday, lower-level managers will meet in a Program Control Board to discuss their findings and make recommendations to senior managers. Those officials, with NASA Administrator Bill Nelson presiding, will make a final decision at a Flight Readiness Review on Saturday in Houston.
What are the two options?
NASA managers will decide whether to send the astronauts home on Starliner, possibly as early as September 2, or to fly back to Earth on a Crew Dragon vehicle scheduled to be launched on September 24. To make room for Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, this so-called “Crew-9” mission would launch with two astronauts instead of a full complement of four. Wilmore and Williams would then join this mission for their six-month increment on board the space station—their eight-day stay becoming eight months.
How are Butch and Suni feeling about this?
We don’t know, as they have not spoken to the media since it became apparent they could be in space for a long time. However, based on various sources, both of the crew members are taking it more or less in stride. They understand this is a test flight, and their training included the possibility of staying in space for an extended period of time if there were problems with Starliner.
That’s not to say it’s convenient. Both Wilmore and Williams have families back on Earth who expected them home by now, and the station was not set up for an extended stay. Wilmore, for example, has been having to sleep in a science laboratory rather than a designated sleeping area, so he has to pack up his personal things every morning.
What does seem clear is that Wilmore and Williams will accept NASA’s decision this weekend. In other words, they’re not going to stage a revolt in space. They trust NASA officials to make the right safety decision, whatever it ends up being. (So, for that matter, does Ars.)
Why is this a difficult decision?
First and foremost, NASA is concerned with getting its astronauts home safely. However, there are myriad other secondary decision factors, and bringing Butch and Suni home on Dragon instead of Starliner raises a host of new issues. Significantly among these is that it would be devastating for Boeing. Their public optics, should long-time rival SpaceX have to step in and “rescue” the crew from an “unsafe” Boeing vehicle, would be terrible. Moreover, the company has already lost $1.6 billion on the Starliner program, and there is the possibility that Boeing will shut it down. NASA does not want to lose a second provider of crew transport services to the space station.
