April 16, 2020 | International, Aerospace

Economics Of Rocket Reuse Still Up In The Air

Irene Klotz

The first Falcon 9 rocket to land successfully after dispatching a payload into orbit stands on permanent display outside SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne, California, a testament to the perseverance of founder, CEO and chief engineer Elon Musk, who wants a fleet of fully reusable spaceships to reduce the cost of colonizing Mars.

The vision is shared by fellow tech entrepreneur Jeff Bezos, whose Kent, Washington-based Blue Origin space company is developing a series of reusable vehicles, beginning with the New Shepard suborbital passenger transport system. The New Shepard made 12 uncrewed flight tests over the last five years, with more to come before commercial flights begin.

Bezos also has pumped $2.5 billion into developing the New Glenn, a reusable system powered by seven BE-4 methane-fueled engines designed to carry nearly 50 tons to low Earth orbit. “That is the smallest orbital vehicle we are planning to build and launch,” says Clay Mowry, Blue Origin vice president of sales, marketing and customer experience.

But the first BE-4s to power a rocket to orbit may not be aboard the New Glenn. United Launch Alliance (ULA) is buying the engines to power the first stage of its Vulcan rocket, an expendable booster—at least for now—which, like the New Glenn, is slated to debut next year.

At some point, ULA may decide to recover and reuse just the BE-4 engines, a pair of which will fly on each Vulcan. The idea is for the engine compartment to disengage after launch and fall back through the atmosphere protected by an inflatable hypersonic shield. A helicopter would be positioned to snag the engine section midair as it makes a parachute descent. ULA calls the approach its Sensible Modular Autonomous Return Technology, or SMART.

“It does not impact, in any significant way, the overall performance of the launch vehicle because you don't have to save fuel to fly home with,” ULA CEO Tory Bruno tells Aviation Week. “You still get to burn up all your fuel, separate your engine, which is the most expensive piece, and recover it.”

“We have not really changed our assessment over the last couple of years because we have yet to see the other forms of reusability—flyback or propulsive return to Earth—demonstrate economic sustainability on a recurring basis,” Bruno says. “It's pretty darn hard to make that actually save money. . . . We've seen nothing yet that changes our analysis on that.”

SpaceX currently is the only launch company reflying orbital rockets. SpaceX launched its final version of the workhorse Falcon 9 booster, called the Block 5, in May 2018. Within two months, the company was flying Block 5s exclusively. The upgrade includes higher-thrust Merlin engines, stronger landing legs and dozens of upgrades to streamline recovery and reuse.

Block 5s were designed to fly 10 times with minimal maintenance between flights, and up to 100 times with refurbishment. SpaceX President and Chief Operating Officer Gwynne Shotwell says the company no longer expects to need to fly a Falcon 9 more than 10 times.

“We don't have to ramp up our production, at least for boost phases, like we thought we were going to,” Shotwell said on March 10 at the Satellite 2020 conference in Washington.

“From a reliability perspective, we want to know the limits of Falcon 9, so we'll push them, but . . . some government customers want new vehicles—I think over time, they will come to flight-proven vehicles as well,” she added. “But if I have to build a couple of new ones every year, or 10 new ones a year, that adds to the fleet, and I don't know that I'll have to push a rocket more than 10 [flights.]”

With regard to how much the company has been able to cut costs by reflying rockets, Shotwell would only say, “We save a lot of money.”

As a privately held company, those operating expenses are not publicly available, but the Block 5 flight record is. So far, SpaceX has flown 14 Block 5 core boosters over 31 missions, including two Falcon Heavy flights, which use three cores apiece.

Of those 14 boosters with flight history, five remain part of the operational fleet. The rest were expended—several after multiple missions—due to payload performance requirements or unsuccessful landings. One booster was intentionally destroyed as part of a Crew Dragon capsule launch abort flight test.

SpaceX's fleet leader flew five times before failing to land on a drone ship stationed off the Florida coast on March 18. SpaceX has not said if the botched landing was related to a premature engine shutdown during the final phases of ascent. The rocket's remaining eight Merlin engines compensated for the shutdown, and the payload—a batch of 60 SpaceX Starlink broadband satellites—reached its intended orbit.

While it continues to fly the Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy for NASA, national security and commercial missions, SpaceX is developing a fully reusable, human-class deep-space transportation system called Starship at its own expense.

Another company testing the waters of reusability is Rocket Lab, which builds and flies the Electron small-satellite launcher.

“For a long time, I said we weren't going to do reusability,” Rocket Lab CEO Peter Beck said in August 2019, when he announced the new initiative. “This is one of those occasions where I have to eat my hat.”

Electrons do not have the performance for a propulsive return like SpaceX's Falcons do, so Rocket Lab is pursuing a midair, helicopter recovery system to snare the booster's first stage. The intent is not to reduce costs per se but to increase flight rates without having to boost production. The company currently is producing one Electron rocket about every 30 days. “We need to get that down to one a week,” Beck says.

“We view [rocket reuse] as sort of a journey,” ULA's Bruno adds. “We're going to start with the engines because we're pretty sure we can save money with that and pass those savings on right away. As we learn more by doing, we'll continue to assess other valuable parts of the rocket, and we may discover that we can do that there as well.”

“There is one funny thing about reusability,” he adds. “As you make your rocket less expensive, and you make parts of your rocket less expensive, it's harder to close a business case on reuse because the thing you're recovering isn't as valuable. There's a balance there.”

https://aviationweek.com/shows-events/space-symposium/economics-rocket-reuse-still-air

On the same subject

June 10, 2019 | International, Aerospace

How did the two offerings competing to be the US Army’s future engine measure up?
By: Jen Judson WASHINGTON — Cost appears to have played a major role in the Army's decision to pick GE Aviation's T901 engine for its future helicopter engine, based on a look at documents laying out the service's post-award analysis, obtained by Defense News. Yet, other factors not shown could have also contributed to the Army's choice, which the Government Accountability Office upheld following a protest from losing team Advanced Turbine Engine Company (ATEC) — a partnership between Honeywell and Pratt & Whitney. The GAO is expected to release a redacted version of its decision next week, which could shed more light on how the Army decided to move forward with GE. While the cost of GE'S engine seems to have been a deciding factor, the document outlining the service's criteria to determine a winning engine design to move into the engineering and manufacturing development phase states that “all non-cost/price factors when combined are significantly more important than cost/price factor.” According to that chart, the Army said it would primarily measure the engine submissions against its engine design and development, followed by cost/price, followed by life-cycle costs and then small business participation in order of importance. The Army assessed ATEC's and GE's technical risk as good and gave ATEC a risk rating of low while it gave GE a risk rating of moderate when considering engineering design and development for each offering. Both GE and ATEC had moderate risk ratings when it came to engine design and performance. And while GE received a technical risk rating of moderate for component design and systems test and evaluation, ATEC received low risk ratings for both. Almost all other technology risk assessments and risk ratings were the same for both engine offerings. GE scored “outstanding” in platform integration capabilities. Based off the chart, it appears ATEC won, so its likely the documents are not an exhaustive representation of how the Army decided to move forward with GE. While both ATEC and GE offered prices within the Army's requirements, GE came in 30 percent lower in cost. And according to Brig. Gen. Thomas Todd, the program executive officer for aviation, in an interview with Defense News in April, GE was also working on trying to shrink the timeline within the EMD phase by roughly a year. But, in ATEC's view, the charts show it had offered the best value product to the Army. ATEC's president, Craig Madden, told Defense News that the company took the Army's selection criteria laid out in the request for proposals seriously across the board from engineering design and development factors to cost to even small business participation, where it scored higher than GE in the analysis chart. “We did come in higher in cost but this was considered a best value evaluation and not lowest price, technically acceptable,” Madden said. “I think low price is good for a plastic canteen or a bayonet, it's not good for a highly technical turbine engine.” And despite coming in at a higher cost, Jerry Wheeler, ATEC's vice president said, the up front cost in the EMD phase will be higher but the delta would shrink when considering life-cycle costs of both engine offerings. Both ATEC and GE received good technical ratings and were given risk ratings of low. When just going by the chart, GE's four moderate risk ratings in key categories means “they could have disruption in schedule, increased cost and degradation of performance,” Madden said. He added ATEC was also focused on lowering risk, so that, although the Army offered incentives to finish the EMD phase earlier than 66 months, ATEC presented a plan to complete at 66 months with a plan to look at acceleration wherever possible. ATEC is now pushing to be a part of the EMD phase, essentially extending the competition, so that more data on engines can be garnered. The Army had periodically weighed keeping the EMD phase competitive with two vendors, but ultimately chose to downselect to one. For GE, the Army made the right decision and had enough data to do so. “The U.S. Army competitively selected GE's T901 engine over ATEC T900 engine after more than 12 years of development,” David Wilson told Defense News in a statement. “Those 12 years included the Advanced Affordable Turbine Engine (AATE) program, during which both companies ran tow full engine tests,” he said. Additionally, both companies executed a 24-month technology maturation and risk reduction contract where GE self-funded and successfully completed and tested a third engine, a full-sized T901 prototype engine, with successful tests on all components, Wilson said. “We've done three full-engine tests and provided an unprecedented amount of test data to the Army for them to determine which engine was the best to move forward with in EMD,” he added. Funding a second engine through EMD would cost more than twice as much and delay critical Army modernization by at least two years, Wilson argued. https://www.defensenews.com/land/2019/06/07/how-did-the-two-offerings-competing-to-be-the-us-armys-future-engine-measure-up/
January 30, 2019 | International, Aerospace

Lockheed: F-35A Cost To Drop Below $80 Million Per Fighter In 2023
By: Ben Werner Lockheed Martin is committed to producing the F-35A Lightning II Joint Strike Fighter for $80 million each by next year and further reducing the overall program costs as part of the next production contract negotiations with the Department of Defense, the company said on Tuesday In 2022, Lockheed Martin officials expect to negotiate the next multiyear F-35 contract with the Joint Program Office. The goal is to use the steady cash flow from a multiyear contract to drive down further the production costs once the contract kicks in. As part of a pitch for multiyear contract, Lockheed Martin officials say such a deal will lower the F-35A price to less than $80 million per fighter, Marillyn Hewson, chief executive of Lockheed Martin, told analysts during a conference call today discussing the company's 2018 year-end results and expectations for 2019. “That's our target, to continue to drive the unit cost down,” Hewson said. “And we won't stop there, we will always be looking at ways that we can take the cost down in the program as it continues to mature and grows.” Currently, the F-35A, the standard take-off and landing variant primarily used by the U.S. Air Force and foreign partners, has a price tag of $89.2 million. The F-35B short takeoff/vertical landing variant used by the Marine Corps and some foreign partners currently cost $115.5 million each, and the F-35C carrier variant used by the Navy cost $107.7 million per fighter, according to Lockheed Martin. As production increases, the price per F-35 is expected to decrease due to efficiencies in the production process and the ability to lock in lower prices for large quantities of raw materials and components. Lockheed Martin plans to deliver 131 fighters this year, compared to the 91 F-35 fighters delivered in 2018. Within two years, company officials expect to deliver more than 161 fighters per year. However, with F-35 production is closing in on what's considered the full capacity for the program of record, Hewson said the company could build more. Increasing the production rate would require coordination with the JPO, the supply chain and international customers, but Hewson said the company could handle increased demand. Germany, Switzerland and Finland are currently considering buying the F-35, Hewson said. Already the U.S. and 12 other countries are either part of the program of record or committed to purchasing F-35 fighters, according to Lockheed Martin. “We could certainly go to a higher rate if the demand were such that we needed to do that,” Hewson said. Other segments of Lockheed Martin's weapons systems portfolio are also expected to perform well in 2019. The company's Missiles and Fire Control business are expected to record a profit of between $1.3 billion and $1.4 billion in the year. The Rotary and Mission Systems business is expected to record a profit of about $1.3 billion for the year, Bruce Tanner, Lockheed Martin's chief financial officer, said during the call. After the call, the U.S. Department of State's Defense Security Cooperation Agency announced it approved the sale of two Aegis Weapon Systems, two Multi-Mission Signal Processors and two Command and Control Processor refreshes to Japan. Lockheed Martin's Rotary and Mission Systems division is the prime contractor for the Aegis Weapon System and Multi-Mission Signal Processor portion of the $2.1-billion total buy. Japan selected Lockheed Martin in July to outfit its Aegis Ashore system but needed State Department approval before finalizing the deal. In September, the Japanese Maritime Self-Defense Force successfully tested its sea-based Aegis ballistic missile defense capability with the U.S. Missile Defense Agency. Japan currently has four Aegis-equipped destroyers and is in the process of building two more. The following is the State Department notice it approved a proposed Aegis Weapon System sale to Japan. AEGIS Weapon Systems Transmittal No: 19-08 WASHINGTON, January 29, 2019 – The State Department has made a determination approving a possible Foreign Military Sale to Japan of two (2) AEGIS Weapon Systems (AWS), two (2) Multi-Mission Signal Processors (MMSP) and two (2) Command and Control Processor (C2P) Refreshes and related equipment for an estimated cost of $2.150 billion. The Defense Security Cooperation Agency delivered the required certification notifying Congress of this possible sale today. The Government of Japan has requested to buy two (2) AEGIS Weapon Systems (AWS), two (2) Multi-Mission Signal Processors (MMSP) and two (2) Command and Control Processor (C2P) Refreshes. Also included is radio navigation equipment, naval ordnance, two (2) Identification Friend or Foe (IFF) Systems, Global Command and Control System-Maritime (GCCS-M) hardware, and two (2) Inertial Navigation Systems (INS), U.S. Government and contractor representatives' technical, engineering and logistics support services, installation support material, training, construction services for six (6) vertical launch system launcher module enclosures, communications equipment and associated spares, classified and unclassified publications and software, and other related elements of logistical and program support. The total estimated program cost is $2.150 billion. This proposed sale will contribute to the foreign policy and national security of the United States by improving the security of a major ally that is a force for political stability and economic progress in the Asia-Pacific region. It is vital to U.S. national interests to assist Japan in developing and maintaining a strong and effective self-defense capability. This proposed sale will provide the Government of Japan with an enhanced capability against increasingly sophisticated ballistic missile threats and create an expanded, layered defense of its homeland. Japan, which already has the AEGIS in its inventory, will have no difficulty absorbing this system into its armed forces. The proposed sale of this equipment and support does not alter the basic military balance in the region. The prime contractor for the Aegis Weapon System and Multi-Mission Signal Processors will be Lockheed Martin Rotary and Mission Systems, Washington, DC. The Command and Control Processor Refresh will be provided by General Dynamics, Falls Church, VA. There are no known offset agreements proposed in connection with this potential sale. Implementation of this proposed sale will require annual trips to Japan involving U.S. Government and contractor representatives for technical reviews, support, and oversight for approximately eight years. There will be no adverse impact on U.S. defense readiness as a result of this proposed sale. This notice of a potential sale is required by law and does not mean the sale has been concluded. All questions regarding this proposed Foreign Military Sale should be directed to the State Department's Bureau of Political Military Affairs, Office of Congressional and Public Affairs, pm-cpa@state.gov. https://news.usni.org/2019/01/29/40708
May 21, 2020 | International, C4ISR

This platform will help train AI algorithms for the military
Nathan Strout After landing a contract with the U.S. Air Force in April, California-based company Labelbox announced May 20 it is making its artificial intelligence training data platform available more widely to the federal government and intelligence community. Labelbox offers a software platform by the same name that allows development teams to manage the data used to train machine learning algorithms. For instance, in order for a machine learning tool to successfully begin identifying missile launchers in satellite imagery, it needs to be fed hundreds — or even millions — of pre-labeled pictures identifying the objects it needs to identify. The more accurate training data is fed to the algorithm, the better it works. Some government machine learning projects need to process petabytes of data per day, the company says, a flow of data that can be overwhelming. “Labelbox is an integrated solution for data science teams to not only create the training data but also to manage it in one place,” said CEO Manu Sharma in a statement. “It's the foundational infrastructure for customers to build their machine learning pipeline.” The platform can be used in the cloud or on-premises, allowing data science teams to work together across agencies or locations, the company claims. In April, the company announced it had won an Air Force Innovation Hub Network (AFWERX) Phase 1 Small Business Innovation Research contract to conduct feasibility studies on how their platform could integrate with ongoing Air Force efforts. Now, the company is partnering with Carahsoft Technology Corp. to make their platform more widely available to the federal government and the intelligence community. Carahsoft will be able to provide the platform to interested agencies through its NASA Solutions for enterprise-wide procurement contracts and reseller partners, the company announced May 20. https://www.c4isrnet.com/artificial-intelligence/2020/05/20/this-platform-will-help-train-ai-algorithms-for-the-military/

All news