What Comes Next Due To The Ukraine War?

The Rosalind Franklin rover was weeks away from being shipped to the launch site when Russia’s invasion of Ukraine led ESA to call off the launch. Its next chance to launch may not come until 2028. (credit: ESA)

Our Mars rover mission was suspended because of the Ukraine war: here’s what we’re hoping for next

by Andrew Coates
Monday, June 6, 2022

Just a few months ago, we were confidently expecting to launch our rover, Rosalind Franklin, to Mars in September as part of the ExoMars mission, a collaboration between Europe and Russia. The landing was planned for June 2023. Everything was ready: the rover, the operations team, and the eager scientists.

We won’t know for sure what happens next until a study by ESA and industry partners reports back in July, but there are causes for optimism.

The final preparations started in February 21, with part of our team heading to Turin, Italy, to carry out the final alignment and calibration tests. All was going well, though some of the team were slightly delayed by Storm Eunice in the UK. Three days later, they had nevertheless finished the work, leaving some wonderful data, which would help us decide where Rosalind would drill on Mars. The industry team started packing the rover, which was ready to be shipped to the launch site.

Then, a storm far more powerful and tragic than Eunice descended on Ukraine: Russia’s invasion. The situation developed in the next days and weeks, leading to a series of emergency meetings. On March 17, the European Space Agency’s council and member states decided to suspend our mission. We won’t know for sure what happens next until a study by ESA and industry partners reports back in July, but there are causes for optimism.

The Rosalind Franklin rover is unique among all the rovers planned for Mars. It can drill deeper than any before it: up to 2 meters below the harsh surface. This is important as the subsurface is protected from harmful radiation and could therefore contain signs of past or present life.

Rosalind’s instruments include our PanCam, which is a camera that will do geology and atmospheric science on Mars, complemented by the other cameras and a subsurface sounding radar. Rosalind will also collect pristine samples from below the surface, which will be deposited in the “analytical drawer,” where three instruments will do mineralogy and search for signs of life.

Some 3.8 billion years ago, at the same time as life was emerging on Earth, Mars was habitable too. There is evidence from orbiters and landers of water on the surface then: there would have been clouds, rain, and a thick atmosphere. There was also a global protective magnetic field, and volcanoes. This means Mars essentially had all the right ingredients for life: carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus, and sulfur. If life emerged there like it did on Earth, we were on a track to find it.

The climate has changed significantly since Mars lost its magnetic field 3.8 billion years ago, though. The planet now is dry, cold, has a thin atmosphere and a surface hostile for life. But below the surface, some living species may have survived, or remains of them could be conserved.

Other missions to Mars are looking for life too. The amazing NASA Perseverance rover landed in February 2021. Its scientists are partly guided by images from a NASA helicopter on the planet, called Ingenuity, and it recently reached an ancient river delta.

Perseverance is collecting samples from Jezero crater, ready to be brought back to powerful labs on Earth by the Mars sample return missions. The results will hopefully complement those from Rosalind Franklin, which will examine deeper samples from a different and slightly older site, Oxia Planum, where there is also abundant evidence of a watery past.

Options for Rosalind

Russia was meant to help launch Rosalind Franklin on one of its rockets. While a European-built spacecraft would then take it to Mars, a Russian-built platform would again be needed to land it. Russia was also meant to provide radioactive heaters to keep the batteries of the rover warm in the cold Martian nights.

My expectation is that 2028 is most likely for our mission, but it will require hard work. The positive thing is that ESA and the member states are still keen to go ahead.

Now, ESA is looking at options. Given that continuing with Russia in 2024 is most unlikely, the main possibilities are either ESA going it alone, or teaming up with a partner such as NASA. ESA’s new Ariane 6 rocket, which is nearly ready, could help launch the rover, as could a SpaceX rocket. For the lander and heaters, ESA would need to develop these alone or in collaboration with NASA, by adapting existing technology.

It could therefore take time. What’s more, because of the way the planets orbit the Sun, there are opportunities for launches to Mars only every two years: in 2024, 2026, and so on. My expectation is that 2028 is most likely for our mission, but it will require hard work. The positive thing is that ESA and the member states are still keen to go ahead, and we are eagerly looking forward to the launch whenever that will be.

Ultimately, life changed for the Rosalind Franklin team on February 24. I’ve been working on the mission since 2003, when we first proposed a camera system for what became ExoMars. We had already provided the “stereo camera system” for the ill-fated Beagle 2 lander, which very nearly worked when it landed on Christmas Day 2003. But orbiter images later showed that the last solar panel didn’t quite unfurl, so communications with Earth were impossible. The wait for data from the Martian surface for our team goes on.

There is no getting away from the huge disappointment we felt when the ExoMars Rosalind Franklin rover that we had worked on for almost 20 years was suspended. But it was ultimately a necessary and understandable step, and we now look forward to a future launch.

This still is cutting-edge science, and it will be for the rest of this decade. Due to the uniquely deep drilling, Rosalind Franklin still may be the first mission to find signs of life in space.

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This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Andrew Coates is Professor of Physics and Deputy Director (Solar System) at the Mullard Space Science Laboratory, University College London.

Will The Economy Affect Space Start-Ups?

SpaceX launched dozens of smallsat payloads on the Transporter-5 rideshare mission last month, heling further the growth of the space industry despite the potential for a downturn. (credit: SpaceX)

Will the economy deflect the trajectory of space startups?

by Jeff Foust
Monday, June 6, 2022

For the last few years, it had been something of a space industry parlor game to predict when there would be a shakeout among the growing number of startups. After all, there were far too many companies working on small launch vehicles, each needing to raise tens to hundreds of millions of dollars, than most reasonable forecasts of the market could support. Then there were the LEO constellations, needing in some cases billions of dollars, for demand that might be filled by only a couple such systems.

Timelines for some electronics, said RBC Signals’ Faith, have “stretched out from what used to be weeks to now many, many months.”

Yet startups and their investors defied those expectations. Space companies continue to thrive in the market, garnering investment at a record-breaking pace. A report in April by BryceTech found that space companies raised $15.4 billion in 2021, double the previous record of $7.7 billion set in 2020. Other records set in 2021 included the number of companies raising money (212) and the average size of reach deal ($64 million).

There are signs, though, the market may be cooling, this time because of external factors. Supply chain problems that rippled through the entire economy have affected space companies, delaying development of satellites and launch systems and increasing costs.

“We see companies that, during a healthy supply chain and healthy markets, would be thriving,” said Jordan Noone, co-founder and general partner at Embedded Ventures who previously cofounded Relativity Space, during a panel session at Space Tech Expo in Long Beach, California, last month. Today, “many of those companies have major struggles.”

A big supply chain issue has been with semiconductors and other electronics. At the Space Tech Expo panel, Ron Faith, president and COO of ground station operator RBC Signals, said his company has seen a “significant impact” in lead times for many essential components. “They’ve stretched out from what used to be weeks to now many, many months,” he said.

Smallsat developers had turned to electronics components designed for automotive and other consumer applications years ago because they were cheaper and more plentiful than space-rated alternatives conventionally used by spacecraft. But Chris Winslett, program manager at Lockheed Martin for its work on the Transport Layer communications satellite constellation for the Space Development Agency, said that’s been turned on its head because of the supply chain disruptions. “With the issues of the pandemic, we actually saw a lot of commercial and automotive parts have longer lead times than space parts,” he said on the panel.

Supply chain challenges extend to logistics. Faith said his company has traditionally transported the antennas, six meters in diameter, for its ground stations by ship to locations around the world. Now, the company is using air freight because of shipping congestion. “It does increase costs,” he said, “but quite frankly the time compression is way more important right now given the other challenges that are in the supply chain.”

Increased costs are also a concern for space companies, and everyone else, with the spike in inflation to levels not seen in four decades. A rise in interest rates to stem inflation could also slow down the economy. Elon Musk, in a memo to management at the automaker Tesla last week, called for a hiring freeze and 10% reduction in that company’s salaried workforce, saying he had a “super bad feeling” about the economy. (President Joe Biden, asked about Musk’s comments Friday, cited investments other companies were making and then quipped, “Lots of luck on his trip to the Moon.”)

“We’re seeing right now a bit of a chilling going on within the industry,” said Lars Hoffman, senior vice president for global launch services at Rocket Lab, during another Space Tech Expo panel, saying the “heating up” of the market over the last few years, with space companies continuing to grow despite the disruptions of the pandemic, was ending.

He said he was watching the level of investment in space companies. “If that starts to slow down,” he said, “that cools down the progress that a lot of us are making.”

“The fact that the space SPAC community had some of the worst returns and worst exposure once those companies became public is going to haunt the growth investor community for five or ten years,” said Noone.

There are signs of a broader downturn in venture capital investment. A report by Crunchbase found $39 billion in VC investment across all industries in May, the lowest total for a single month since November 2020 and down 45% from the peak of $70 billion invested in November 2021.

Another investment tool, the special purpose acquisition corporation (SPAC), has also fallen out of favor. Private companies merging with publicly traded SPACs allowed those companies to go public as an alternative to the traditional initial public offering process. However, the poor performance of many companies after SPAC mergers has soured the markets on them, making them less attractive as a means to raise money.

While a dozen space companies have used SPACs to go public, mostly in the last year, only one such deal is still pending: D-Orbit, a company developing space tugs, is working to close a merger with a SPAC, Breeze Holdings, in the third quarter of this year.

Those that have gone public though SPACs have done poorly. When SPACs raise money by going public, they usually do so at a price of $10 a share, which becomes a de facto baseline for judging the performance of companies after their mergers. Every space company that has gone public via SPACs is trading below $10 a share, in some cases far below. Spire, which operates a constellation of cubesats for tracking and weather data, closed Friday at $1.72 a share. BlackSky closed Friday at $2.60 a share, and even that represented a sharp increase over just a couple weeks earlier, when it was trading just above $1 a share before winning one of three commercial imagery awards from the National Reconnaissance Office.

The poor performance of SPACs in general, and space SPACs in particular, could deter additional investment. “The fact that the space SPAC community had some of the worst returns and worst exposure once those companies became public is going to haunt the growth investor community for five or ten years,” said Noone.

Those investors, he said, might instead turn to “safe investments” in information technology or other fields and stay away from more speculative ones like space. “The growth investors have all been spooked,” he said.

Lunar Outpost raised $12 million to develop robotic lunar rovers, with two small rovers already in development for missions to the Moon. (credit: Lunar Outpost)

The drop in VC investment overall, CrunchBase noted, hasn’t affected all rounds of investment equally. While later-stage funding has dropped significantly, seed-stage funding was 11% higher in May than the monthly average for such rounds in 2021.

Indeed, at the same time that Hoffman and Noone were raising warnings about the climate for space investment, two space startups were raising initial funding rounds. Lunar Outpost announced it raised a $12 million seed round to support its development of robotic lunar rovers. The Colorado company is already working on two such small rovers that will fly on landers by Intuitive Machines for NASA Commercial Lunar Payload Services missions, and will use the funding for work on larger, longer-lived rovers.

Lunar Outpost raised the money from several funds that have previously invested in or even specialize in space, such as Explorer 1 Fund, Promus Ventures, Space Capital, Type 1 Ventures, and Cathexis Ventures. Justin Cyrus, CEO of Lunar Outpost, said those investors will provide business and technical support in addition to capital. “We chose to raise the money with these investors because they provide substantial amount of value to help us get to the Moon sustainably.”

“I certainly don’t see a slowdown,” Haot said. “The launch capacity is not there for what is being built today and for the next five to ten years.”

The company, he said, didn’t need to raise the funding to survive, instead seeking the funding to speed up work on its larger rovers. (In addition to the smaller rovers it is already on contract to build, it has a separate line of environmental monitoring products that he said profitable today.) The first of those larger rovers, weighing 100 to 200 kilograms, could be ready by late 2023 or early 2024.

Another startup, AstroForge, raised $13 million in a “seed-plus” round from several funds, most of which have only dabbled in the space industry. It is, perhaps, better evidence of the continued investor interest in speculative space companies because it wants to revisit asteroid mining.

The company says it’s learned from the failures of Planetary Resources and Deep Space Industries, two ventures that pursued asteroid mining years ago, raised modest amounts of capital, but eventually failed. “All these guys want to build a multibillion-dollar 600-meter-long spacecraft and they’ll get a trillion dollars’ worth of metal,” said co-founder and CEO Matt Gialich. “We think we can do it by thinking about it very differently.”

That means going after platinum-group metals—earlier ventures focused on water ice and other volatiles that could be used to support in-space infrastructure—and taking advantage of the current abundance of small spacecraft and low-cost launch options. The company’s first mission will launch early next year, a 6U cubesat that will test in Earth orbit the company’s extraction technology on an “asteroid-like material” (the company declined to disclose details of that extraction technology or many other technical details.)

“All the first-order math works,” he insisted. “We think we have a way that this can actually be a profitable company and a real business. We can go take a stab at launching it.”

Many in the space industry, including veterans of past asteroid mining ventures, are skeptical. Even Gialich’s co-founder needed convincing. “You’re crazy, man,” Jose Acain recalled when Gialich broached the idea during a long hike. By the end of that hike, “it’s still crazy, but maybe there’s something there.”

Some later-stage companies remain optimistic about the market, seeing strong demand for launch and satellite services. Among them is Max Haot, CEO of Launcher, a company working on a small launch vehicle called Launcher Light as well as an orbital transfer vehicle called Orbiter. The first Orbiter mission is scheduled for this fall on a SpaceX Transporter rideshare mission, and the company has booked three more Orbiter flights on Transporter missions through 2023 before Launcher is ready in 2024.

There’s such strong demand for Transporter flights, he said, that there is now a waiting list to get on launches scheduled 2023. He ties that to growing awareness of the value of space illustrated by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, where commercial satellite systems have played a key role in monitoring the invasion and providing support to Ukraine.

“The unfortunate conflict in Ukraine has made it very clear that launch vehicles and access to space is strategic,” he said, arguing there wasn’t enough supply yet of launch services to meet growing demand. “The same thing is happening in every facet of the industry, where startups are able to achieve more with less money. It’s just the beginning of the small satellite revolution.”

“I certainly don’t see a slowdown,” he said. “Yes, there will be an impact: maybe some less startups for a few years. But the launch capacity is not there for what is being built today and for the next five to ten years.”

Rocket Lab’s Hoffman said he expected less of a contraction of the industry than a slowdown in overall growth. “There’s going to be a little bit of a lull, if you will, over the next year or two, and then things should start picking back up again,” he said. “It’s still growing. It’s just not growing as fast as we were expecting or hoping two years ago or one year ago.”

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Jeff Foust (jeff@thespacereview.com) is the editor and publisher of The Space Review, and a senior staff writer with SpaceNews. He also operates the Spacetoday.net web site. Views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author alone.

Ukraine Could Become A Key Player In The European Space Industry

SETS, which makes electric propulsion systems, is among the Ukrainian space companies that could help support European space ambitions. (credit: SETS)

How Ukraine could help Europe boost its space sector

by Viktor Serbin
Tuesday, May 31, 2022

While Ukraine is paying a high price for its independence and recognition, Ukrainian industries, the space industry among them, are under a heavy toll. Many of the core space facilities and companies are in the areas that were or are still actively being bombed by the Russian air forces. But it seems the ongoing war in Ukraine can offer new opportunities for the space industry, especially considering the high chances for Ukraine of joining the EU.

The inclusion of Ukraine in the family of European countries would mean new opportunities for the Ukrainian space industry.

Ukraine could add to and strengthen the European space effort as one of the ten countries with a full cycle of spacecraft manufacturing, especially after Russia found itself excluded from major space initiatives.

Recently, the EU Commission recognized the high level of the first part of the survey completed by Ukraine to join the European alliance. The inclusion of Ukraine in the family of European countries would mean new opportunities for the Ukrainian space industry. Through Ukraine, Europe can receive extended expertise in most areas of the space industry and years of experience in building outstanding space products.

Along with integration into the EU, Ukraine strives to become a European Space Agency member. In April, during Space Symposium, the ESA chief stated that the State Space Agency of Ukraine had submitted a letter seeking membership, and ESA is looking for ways to assist. Here, I decided to investigate how and why Ukraine could become a valuable part of the European space industry.

Ukraine as global tech player

Ukrainians have already significantly contributed to the global tech scene. Lubomyr Romankiv, born in Ukraine, was co-inventor of magnetic thin-film storage heads for recording and reading information on hard drives. WhatsApp was co-created by a Ukrainian emigrant, just like PayPal. Many other valuable tech projects like Grammarly, Reface, GitLab, People.ai, Ajax Systems, and Revolut are actively used by the global community. Ukrainians are often looking for creative solutions and have the skills necessary to develop world-recognized products. Hence the potential in the space industry. But it’s not only about potential: Ukraine has already proven its leading role in space exploration.

Ukraine is among the countries that can be proud of many big names. Among them, Oleksandr Zasyadko, who developed combat missiles and dreamt of reaching the Moon in early 19th century. Mykola Kybalchych designed a crewed rocket-propelled ship. Yuri Kondratiuk, whose lunar route were used for the landing of American Apollo and its astronauts on the Moon. Sergii Korolov, who started the space era by sending the first satellites and first astronaut into space. And Volodymyr Hlushko, who was the pioneer of liquid rocket propellant engines development in the Soviet Union.

It is no wonder that with such a rich history of space exploration and capability for full-cycle development of space launchers and satellites, Ukraine has the potential to become one of the biggest space hubs in Europe. In Ukraine, there’s a country-wide infrastructure network for research institutions, development offices, and manufacturing facilities. Ukrainian specialists participated in international projects like Sea Launch and Land Launch. Now, Ukrainians create the first stage for the Antares rocket and the engine for the upper stage of the European Vega rocket. Ukrainian rockets Dnipro and Zenit showed high levels of reliability, and even Elon Musk considers Ukrainian Zenit to be the best non-SpaceX launch vehicle.

Strong technical education

Well-educated and highly motivated Ukrainians work at leading space companies and organizations around the globe, including SpaceX and NASA. But it would have been impossible without quality education in the country.

With over 130,000 engineering graduates yearly, Ukraine educates around as many engineers as Germany. If one considers the quality of this education, it’s worth mentioning that according to the QS EECA University ranking in 2022, among 450 top universities in Eastern Europe, 38 are Ukrainian.

Ukraine could become a core player in the European space sector and potentially even fill in the gap that appeared after the exclusion of Russia from major space activities.

With the high interest of the population towards engineering education and the strong expertise of lecturers and professors, many of whom are PhDs, Ukrainians obtain the education that allows them to solve the most pressing issues. Foreigners who come to Ukraine acknowledge that the country has a population exquisitely educated in sought-after STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, & Mathematics) disciplines, and this makes them perfect candidates for engineering jobs. And Ukrainian teams prove their top-quality education regularly. For instance, teams from Ukraine have won or been listed among top projects in the global NASA Space Apps Challenge, having offered the best solutions to global issues.

Active space startups scene

Overall, Ukrainian state space companies employ more than 16,000 specialists, which equals the number of NASA employees. The aerospace industry comprises more than 100 transnational private companies, including Boeing, operating here and providing opportunities for Ukrainian tech specialists to solve global problems and gain unique experience.

Since 2015, Ukraine has seen the arrival of space startups. The space industry is now one of the key focus areas for Ukraine and its government, and the legislation that allows private space companies to engage in rocket building has given a significant boost to the sphere. In 2019, the government allowed private space companies to develop their own launchers. And now a variety of local startups are seeking investors ready to support the development of different types of vehicles—classical liquid- and solid-propellant launchers, air-launch and vertical launch launchers, and more.

Ukrainian engines and their components attract the attention of the global space industry players. For instance, Flight Control company in Dnipro covers the needs of international space companies and has developed engines for Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost lunar lander. SETS, also located in Ukraine, offers unique technology of Hall thrusters necessary to move satellites while in orbit. The tech is similar to that previously provided by Russian Fakel that has fallen under sanctions. At SETS, we have successfully tested technologies on Earth and already sent the products to clients, and propulsion systems will soon be tested in space.

Cost-efficient space industry

Without the limitless opportunities in the American space market and intensive investments in the space industry in Europe, Ukrainians are accustomed to working within limited budgets. This allows them to make the most out of available financing and offer cost-efficient solutions, making Ukraine an attractive spot for space project development.

While relatively low in cost, Ukrainian specialists offer the best price-to-quality ratio. Limited financing also causes space startups to think about gaining profits as soon as possible to be able to further invest in project development. Space startups also prefer locations with well-developed space infrastructure, which impacts the cost of the final product and serves as a significant benefit.

Ukraine could become a core player in the European space sector and potentially even fill in the gap that appeared after the exclusion of Russia from major space activities. The Ukrainian space sector is not only the state enterprise able to sell former Soviet technologies, but also dozens of young, dynamic, and ambitious private space companies and startups working to solve different problems, including lunar landings, lunar bases, space debris removal, and planetary defense, not to mention spaceport and launcher development. The European space sector would win from cooperation with Ukraine, both in terms of technologies and economically.

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Viktor Serbin is CEO of Space Electric Thruster Systems (SETS) in Dnipro, Ukraine.

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Is The Boeing Starliner Ready FOr Human Crews?

Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner descends under parachutes, its landing airbags inflated, just before touching down at White Sands Space Harbor in New Mexico May 25. (credit: NASA/Bill Ingalls)

Boeing’s commercial crew vehicle is finally (almost) ready for crew

by Jeff Foust
Tuesday, May 31, 2022

During a press conference a few hours after Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner touched down in the New Mexico desert Wednesday, a reporter asked Mark Nappi, Boeing’s commercial crew program manager, to rate the just-completed Orbital Flight Test (OFT) 2 mission on a scale of one to ten.

“On a scale of 1 to 10, I think I’d give it a 15. This was incredible,” he responded.

“It’s great to have this incredible test flight behind us,” Stich said. “The test flight was extremely successful. We met all the mission objectives.”

That assessment may have been hyperbolic—Spinal Tap, after all, only went to 11—but it was understandable. Nearly two and a half years after the original OFT mission failed to meet its goals, and more than nine months after the first attempt at launching OFT-2 was cancelled because of corroded valves in the spacecraft’s service module, Starliner had made it to the International Space Station and back, largely successfully.

After docking with the ISS a day after its May 19 launch (see “For Starliner, better late than never”, The Space Review, May 23, 2022), NASA and Boeing wrapped up work on the spacecraft by May 24. That included checking communications and other systems on the spacecraft, while transferring more than 200 kilograms of cargo from the spacecraft to the station and nearly 300 kilograms from the station to the spacecraft for return to Earth.

The final phases of the mission went smoothly, with Starliner undocking from the station at 2:36 pm EDT Wednesday. It moved away from the station, performed a deorbit burn and jettisoned its service module. The spacecraft deployed its drogue and main parachutes as planned, landing at White Sands Space Harbor at 6:49 pm EDT.

Steve Stich, NASA commercial crew program manager, called the landing “picture perfect” at that briefing. The capsule landed within 500 meters of the intended spot, a variance he said was due to winds that were different than what was predicted.

“It’s great to have this incredible test flight behind us,” he said. “The test flight was extremely successful. We met all the mission objectives.”

While successful, the flight wasn’t perfect. Two of 12 Orbital Maneuvering and Attitude Control (OMAC) thrusters, both in the same pod or “doghouse” on the service module, shut down during the orbital insertion burn just after the May 19 launch. Stich said that controllers tested them after undocking but could not recover them. “We saw an interesting signature that looks a little bit like the signatures we saw on shutdown: maybe 25% or so of the thrust that we expected out of those thrusters.”

Nappi said that test can help better understand the root cause of the OMAC thruster failures. “This isolates it more to the thrusters themselves than any other part of the system,” he said.

Stich said that the fact that the thrusters fired showed that commands were reaching the thrusters to open valves and ignite. “We’ll have to look at the legs of the fault tree where we got thrust, but it was not quite the level we expected,” he said.

He said controllers were able to restore two reaction control system thrusters that failed after launch but added one such thruster on the crew capsule may have shut down just before the deployment of the parachutes. That may be easier to investigate than the OMAC thruster failures since that thruster can be inspected, whereas the OMAC thrusters were on the jettisoned service module.

A SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft, docked to the ISS, is in the foreground as Starliner moves away from the station after undocking. (credit: NASA)

Despite the thruster glitches, both NASA and Boeing sounded optimistic that they would be able to move on to the Crew Flight Test (CFT) mission, where Starliner will carry astronauts for the first time. “I don’t see any reason why we can’t proceed toward the Crew Flight Test next,” Stich said. “I don’t really see any showstoppers this time relative to last time.”

He said OFT-2 compared favorably with Demo-1, the uncrewed test flight of SpaceX’s Crew Dragon in March 2019. “The performance was very similar in lots of ways,” he said, adding that SpaceX had to upgrade its abort thrusters between Demo-1 and the crewed Demo-2 missions, as well as work on parachutes. “I don’t see that here from what we saw on this flight.”

Exactly when CFT will launch, and who will be on board, remains to be seen. Nappi said at the briefing the company is preparing the other Starliner crew capsule, called Spacecraft 3 or Calypso, for CFT. That spacecraft previously flew OFT, while the capsule that returned from OFT-2, called Spacecraft 2, will be prepared for the first operational mission, Starliner-1. (Spacecraft 1 was used for a pad abort test and will not fly in space.)

“We’re off working that right now,” he said. That work will depend on what changes Boeing will need to make to the spacecraft based on lessons from OFT-2. In addition, Boeing will have to negotiate with NASA to find a time when the ISS can accommodate the mission given the schedule of other visiting vehicles. The company will also need an Atlas 5 from United Launch Alliance.

“All that has to come together in order to set a flight date, and we’re probably several months from being able to do that,” he said.

Another issue is who will fly CFT. When NASA made the original crew assignment for the mission in August 2018, agency astronauts Eric Boe and Nicole Mann, along with Boeing commercial astronaut (and retired NASA astronaut) Chris Ferguson were slated to fly. In 2019, Mike Fincke replaced Boe for medical reasons. In 2020, Ferguson announced he would not fly CFT, then expected in 2021, to avoid conflicts with family events. NASA replaced him with astronaut Butch Wilmore.

Last October, NASA reassigned Mann and Josh Cassada, who had been set to go on Starliner-1, to SpaceX’s Crew-5 mission. At a prelaunch briefing for OFT-2 earlier this month, Wilmore, Fincke, and Suni Williams, a NASA astronaut who had also been assigned to Starliner-1, said they were now training together as a “cadre” to fly CFT or Starliner-1. (Jeanette Epps, the NASA astronaut who was bumped from a Soyuz mission to the ISS in 2018 for still-mysterious reasons, remains assigned to Starliner-1 and is not part of that cadre, agency officials later said.)

Wilmore said the OFT-2 postponement in August, along with the reassignments of Mann and Cassada, led to the change. “Since that time in August, the three of us have been working as a cadre supporting Starliner, and we know we are not necessarily assigned to CFT.”

“It was truly a fantastic test flight, and it puts us in a great position to fly CFT,” said Nappi.

Kathy Lueders, NASA associate administrator for space operations, said at that prelaunch briefing that crew assignments for CFT would likely come in the summer, after determining the schedule of other missions to the station and how long CFT would last. NASA once envisioned having CFT spend as long as six months at the station, using it as a crew rotation mission when access to Soyuz seats appeared uncertain, but that is no longer necessary as SpaceX’s Crew Dragon is now handling routine crew missions.

“You realize the challenge the crew office has about the assignments and why it’s important to get the right timing and understand when exactly the Crew Flight Test is going to show up,” she said at that briefing. She added there are no plans to have Ferguson or another Boeing commercial astronaut rejoin the CFT mission.

If CFT is needed only as a test flight, the mission would likely last no more than two weeks, and perhaps as little as five to seven days, just enough to confirm the vehicle can safely carry people. Joel Montalbano, NASA ISS program manager, said the station program would make the most of even a limited stay by CFT. “Once we have the mission objectives set for the CFT mission, we’ll make every use of the crew time and add science as required,” he said.

Stich said he felt “ecstatic” about OFT-2, particularly seeing Starliner docked to the ISS at the same time as Crew Dragon. “That’s what the commercial crew program has been about all along, having these two different companies, with the great systems they’ve developed, prove crew transportation to the space station,” he said. “The flight that just landed today demonstrates that the Starliner is a great vehicle for crew transportation.”

“We couldn’t have asked for a better mission,” Nappi said after giving OFT-2 a rating of 15 on a 1-to-10 scale. “It was truly a fantastic test flight, and it puts us in a great position to fly CFT.”

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Jeff Foust (jeff@thespacereview.com) is the editor and publisher of The Space Review, and a senior staff writer with SpaceNews. He also operates the Spacetoday.net web site. Views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author alone.

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Cubesats To The Moon

CAPSTONE, a cubesat weighing 25 kilograms at launch, will test the stability of the near-rectilinear halo orbit NASA plans to use for Artemis missions, while also demonstrating autonomous positioning technologies. (credit: NASA/Daniel Rutter)

by Jeff Foust
Tuesday, May 31, 2022

On the evening of Monday, June 13, in New Zealand, a Rocket Lab Electron rocket is scheduled to lift off from the company’s Launch Complex 1. That launch will look like many others by the company except for a prominent white NASA “worm” logo on the side of the booster, an indication that the launch is being performed for the space agency. (As this article was being prepared for publication, NASA announced the launch had slipped to June 13 from June 6 in order to provide more time for final readiness checks.)

CAPSTONE, flying in a near-rectilinear halo orbit, “will provide that operational experience before we go do that with Gateway,” said Baker.

At facilities in California and Colorado, where the launch will take place in the early morning hours of Monday, controllers will be closely watching the single cubesat on board, called the Cislunar Autonomous Positioning System Technology Operations and Navigation Experiment (CAPSTONE). About six days later, after a series of burns by a Rocket Lab upper stage called Lunar Photon, CAPSTONE will be released on a trajectory that will eventually place it into a near-rectilinear halo orbit (NRHO) around the Moon, the same orbit that will be used by NASA’s Artemis program for the Gateway and crewed missions to the lunar surface.

CAPSTONE is, in many respects, the first mission of the overall Artemis campaign, launching ahead of the Artemis 1 uncrewed test of the Orion spacecraft now scheduled for no earlier than August. It is a pathfinder, testing the stability of the NRHO and comparing it to existing models.

“The NRHO is influenced by both the Earth and the Moon,” said Brad Cheetham, CEO of Advanced Space, the Colorado company that owns and operates CAPSTONE, during a call with reporters about the mission last week. For about six days of the seven-day orbit, the Earth is the bigger factor in the orbit. The Moon has greater influence on the seventh day, when the spacecraft passes closest to the Moon in that elliptical orbit. “That really drives some of those operational complexities.”

That NRHO has the benefit of lower energy needed to both enter the orbit and also to leave it to head to the lunar surface, as Artemis lunar landing missions will do, said Christopher Baker, small spacecraft technology program executive at NASA. “But you are then riding this balance point between the gravitational pull of the Earth and the gravitational pull of the Moon, and that’s what gets into that complexity about making sure you know how to stay in that,” he said. CAPSTONE “will provide that operational experience before we go do that with Gateway.”

Cheetham said there are “several measurable objectives” for the mission. That includes comparing the actual propellant usage by CAPSTONE to maintain its orbit versus what was predicted before the mission.

The data from CAPSTONE will be useful for planning future missions, but is not absolutely required. “The data will be really helpful to refine models, maybe find efficiencies, but it’s not necessary or required to proceed,” said Nujoud Merancy, head of the exploration mission planning office at NASA’s Johnson Space Center.

“CAPSTONE is already yielding benefits for the planning and development efforts for Gateway and Artemis,” Cheetham added. “Our team is working day-to-day with the team at JSC.”

Testing the stability of the NRHO is one part of the overall CAPSTONE mission. The other part—the CAPS part of CAPSTONE—will test the ability of the cubesat to measure its position by communicating directly with NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) spacecraft.

“The CAPSTONE spacecraft will imitate a ground station and will send a ranging tone to the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter that LRO will turn around and send back to us,” Cheetham explained. “From that, the CAPSTONE spacecraft, using the CAPS software, will be able to estimate both spacecraft.” That does require, he said, some initial knowledge about the location of both spacecraft in order to communicate with each other. The spacecraft also has a chip-scale atomic clock, he said, that will be used to determine position by listening to transmissions from Earth.

“Cubesats and smallsats have been great for a long time at demonstrating new technologies, and they’re starting to build toward deep space exploration roles,” said Shoer.

All that will be done by a single cubesat. CAPSTONE is a 12U spacecraft, sometimes called a 12U XL because of a large antenna on one end of the spacecraft. (Cheetham, speaking at an FAA commercial space transportation conference in February, described the space craft as comparable in size of a microwave oven or a case of beer.) Terran Orbital, a smallsat manufacturer, built the spacecraft, and Stellar Exploration provided the propulsion system for the 25-kilogram spacecraft.

Boosting it to the Moon will be Lunar Photon, a version of Rocket Lab’s Photon satellite bus equipped with a new high-performance “HyperCurie” engine. “That was a tremendous amount of work,” Peter Beck, CEO of Rocket Lab, said of the engine, which uses hypergolic propellants and offers 320 seconds of specific impulse.

The combination of CAPSTONE and Lunar Photon will weigh about 300 kilograms, making it the heaviest payload launched yet by Electron. Beck said that the company is considering the same combination of Lunar Photon and cubesat for a planned private mission to Venus “and a bunch of other potential programs” that have high delta-V requirements.

CAPSTONE will need only a small amount of delta-V from its own thrusters to get into NRHO once released from Lunar Photon. That’s because the spacecraft will follow a low-energy “ballistic lunar trajectory” that will take it out nearly 1.5 million kilometers from Earth because heading back, reaching NRHO on October 15.

Cheetham said the cubesat will need tens of meters per second of delta-V to get into the NRHO versus hundreds of meters per second for a more direct transfer. “That’s a key enabler for CAPSTONE, because from the beginning we were looking at a small spacecraft,” he said.

CAPSTONE is another sign of the growing capabilities of cubesats to carry out missions that once would have required larger spacecraft. While CAPSTONE may be the first launch of the overall Artemis effort, it may not be the first cubesat linked with Artemis to arrive at the Moon. Several cubesats flying as secondary payloads on the Artemis 1 SLS launch, currently projected for some time in August, will either fly by or go into orbit around the Moon.

Among them is LunIR, a 6U cubesat developed by Lockheed Martin. It will test an infrared sensor as it flies past the Moon that will look for evidence of water ice. That instrument will be supported by a cryocooler that is the smallest yet built by the company, one that can fit in the shoebox-sized satellite with the instrument and other spacecraft subsystems.

“Cubesats and smallsats have been great for a long time at demonstrating new technologies, and they’re starting to build toward deep space exploration roles,” said Joe Shoer of Lockheed Martin during a briefing at the Space Symposium in Colorado Springs in April. “They’re a new and different way to investigate science questions.”

“For us, it’s really just the beginning,” Cheetham said of CAPSTONE.

LunIR will be a mix of science and technology demonstration. The instrument will take images on both the day and night side of the Moon as it flies by, he said, evaluating both the performance of the infrared sensor “and potentially whether it could point astronauts towards interesting sites to visit.”

The ability to do missions like CAPSTONE and LunIR reflects the growing maturity of the field. At the Space Symposium briefing, Elwood Agasid, deputy program manager for small spacecraft technology at NASA Ames, said that when the agency first started experimenting with cubesats, it extensively tested components, unsure that what was commercially available was suitable.

Now, he says, suitable products are readily available. “Now, you go downstairs or you go to the Smallsat Conference and those providers are there,” he said at the briefing, held a floor above the exhibit hall at Space Symposium. “That’s allowed us to rely more on the commercial sector for those components.”

“You can buy pretty much every subsystem off the shelf,” said Andres Martinez, program executive for small spacecraft in NASA’s Exploration Systems Development Mission Directorate, at the Space Symposium briefing. That’s not the case for instruments, though. “Instruments is where we’ll continue to do R&D, because you can’t buy that off the shelf.”

Cheetham, who was also at the April briefing, said his company is thinking about what’s next after CAPSTONE. That includes future missions leveraging the technology that CAPSTONE will demonstrate for the Moon or other places in the solar system, including national security interest in cislunar space situational awareness. “For us, it’s really just the beginning,” he said.

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Jeff Foust (jeff@thespacereview.com) is the editor and publisher of The Space Review, and a senior staff writer with SpaceNews. He also operates the Spacetoday.net web site. Views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author alone.