Boeing scraps their next-gen space plane | Space News

This week we have Boeing suddenly pulling out of the DARPA Experimental Space Plane program, we've got SpaceX doing amazing things down in Boca Chica with their Starship rocket, and we've got space weather with Dr. Tamitha Scope. Now, before we begin, make sure that you hit that like button, smash on the subscribe button and ring that notification bell until you're deaf in the ears, because you want to get all of the latest and greatest videos right into your YouTube feed from tomorrow. Alright, my name is Jamie Higginbotham, let's get this thing started. It's Space News for January 26th, 2020. This last Wednesday, January 22nd, 2020, Boeing announced that they'd be backing out of a deal with DARPA to build an experimental space plane. That's a pretty click-baity and fantastical title, but it is true. It also doesn't paint the entire picture here, and I don't think it's fair some of the conclusions that are being drawn. And for that, we really need to understand who DARPA is and what they're trying to accomplish. Alright, going back to the beginning, DARPA stands for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and was founded in 1958 by President Eisenhower, although at that time it was under the name ARPA. It is currently a government program under the United States Department of Defense. And if ARPA rings a bell for some reason, it probably should. This is the agency that helped create the foundation work for some of the amazing stuff we have in our lives today. This is a group that works on huge projects that impact humanity at its core. In 1962, they created ARPANET, which was the foundation for the internet itself. And while Xerox PARC gets the credit for the graphical user interface, actually, that concept was originally seen in an ARPA project called the Augment System back in 1961, a decade before Xerox started to tinker with it, and well before Microsoft and Apple grabbed the idea. How about GPS? DARPA has the foundation work for what we now know as the Global Positioning System all the way back in 1964 with projects called Transit and NavSat, well ahead of the 1978 GPS release date. How about something a little more modern? In 2003, they worked on a voice assistant project, which then spun off and became Siri. That was then later acquired by Apple. Their next-gen voice stuff is also insanely cool. It's like nothing you have heard before. This is an agency that works on impossible projects. And because of that, they have a lot that are just not successful. When you work beyond the bleeding edge of technology, and you're inventing things for the very first time, you're going to encounter a lot of failure. And that's okay. So how does all of this relate to Boeing pulling out of the DARPA contract? Understand, this was a DARPA project to push access to space forward, far further than we've ever been able to do. The program was originally known as XS-1, and was then later renamed to XSP, or Experimental Space Plane. It was broken into three phases. The first phase, we saw Boeing, Northrop Grumman, and Masten Space design a rapidly reusable space plane architecture, but not actually build anything. The design called for a vehicle able to launch 10 times in 10 days, with a recurring cost of no more than $5 million per flight, while also carrying a 1,400 to 2,300 kilogram payload to low Earth orbit. DARPA's favorite design would move on to phase two and three, which Boeing then won for $150 million back in 2017. Their winning design was called the Phantom Express. Much like the Space Shuttle, this was a vertical takeoff, horizontal landing vehicle. It was about the size of an executive jet. It would use an Aerojet Rocketdyne AR-22 engine, which is a sister to the Space Shuttle main engine, or RS-25, but modified to be able to fly 10 times in 10 days. They had some really great flight heritage there, and it seemingly worked. In 2018, they ran a test with this engine on the stand, doing 10 100-second full-throttle firings in 10 days, and they completed it with time to spare. This DARPA program pushed engineers to do things better, faster, and cheaper. One example of this is clearing out moisture that would gather in the engine between tests. Trying to fire the engine with moisture still in it could actually be catastrophic. That was actually the same for the Space Shuttle. And for the Space Shuttle main engine, this procedure took days. For the AR-22, on the other hand, well, they got it down to just 6 hours. And that's just one example of time savings. So what happened? They were making great progress. Engineers are learning things. Why did Boeing kill the Phantom Express? Actually only Boeing knows. Last Wednesday, Boeing informed DARPA that they would be pulling out of the XSP program immediately after following a, quote, detailed review, unquote. That's it. That's all we know. It's easy to hate on Boeing or think of this as a failure. But I wanted to get some context as to DARPA's insight in this, and I happen to know someone who used to be a contractor at DARPA, although not on this specific program. His name is Tim Bailey, and he had some really insightful things to say about DARPA as an agency and how they view success and failure. It's important to have some context when you're talking about DARPA programs. DARPA has a different way of looking at and assessing risk when it comes to putting a program together. So in this case, they were looking at advancing a technology. They were looking at advancing not a single piece of technology, a single endpoint, but really how can the entire industry move forward if this technology happens. They look at how the program progressed and what came out of the program as a whole, not whether or not they reached a very specific endpoint at the end. If good companies were funded and amazing research was done out of this, that can be a huge win for the industry. You don't need to look at a single program and a single endpoint as a win-lose scenario. Sometimes it's just about, did you create a scenario? Did you create an environment where everybody can win at something? And that's DARPA's job, is to explore what's possible out there. It's not to get to some endpoint and put a satellite into a very specific orbit at a specific time. No, it's to figure out, can you do that? Could you put 70 satellites into very specific orbits and points in space inside of a week? That's a DARPA-hard problem. How do we make humanity a space-faring species? How do we create responsive space technologies? That's where you can see the big wins. If you're focused narrowly on, did this one piece of technology, did this one program, did this one little thing work? Of course it's going to be win-lose, black and white, you failed. But in the scope of industry, in the scope of what we're trying to do, everything is a win. Boeing now knows the limits of what they're willing to do in a program like this and how much money they're willing to put in and how much technology they think they can develop. That's huge for a company like Boeing. It's also an opportunity space for other companies to step in and say, if Boeing isn't willing to do this, or if Boeing doesn't want to continue down this road, maybe there's opportunity for somebody else to do that in the future. And to make that case to other people to give a smaller company an opportunity the next time. So overall, I understand that there's frustration that things didn't work out the way they wanted to. There's a mismatch in what we thought was going to happen and what actually happened. And we can address that, but we don't have to look at it as a failure in the program as long as we still learn things from it and we can still move forward after it. I personally think that's a really great way to look at it. But to be fair, there are those who have their doubts as well. Doug Messier of Parabolic Arc did publish this quote. The winning bidder, Boeing, really wasn't interested in the technology. The company was actually interested in government funding and keeping other companies from developing the system. That quote was taken a bit out of context here, so I do suggest heading over to Parabolic Arc and reading his whole take. They are also super awesome over there, and if you're a space nerd like I am, I highly suggest you support and subscribe. I also took a moment to reach out to some of the people we know that worked on the phase one part of this program because there were more than just Boeing working on this. And they didn't really want to speak on the record, but they were all understandably disappointed in Boeing's decision. In the end, I don't think we have enough data to really call this a failure just yet. And actually, when you look at how DARPA works and what it's trying to accomplish, I really don't think it's a failure at all. This is just a path that doesn't work. Maybe next we'll try a different path that does. Now this entire time, you're probably thinking to yourself, reusable rockets, that sounds a lot like SpaceX and Elon Musk. And so now I'm going to take a quick moment to hand it over to Ryan, who's going to give us our latest SpaceX update. SpaceX news has just kept getting busier and busier this past week. But to start off with, Elon Musk revealed some awesome data at the post-in-flight abort test press conference. At the fastest point during fly, the Crew Dragon spacecraft reached Mach 2.2 at a height of 40 kilometres. This is a crazy speed to be thinking about, as the spacecraft was travelling faster than Concorde ever did, and three times far higher than a commercial jet. Another exciting point Elon mentioned was when Demo Mission 2 will hopefully happen. He said that the harbour will be ready by the end of quarter one by the latest. However, they will have to check every system several times before they are certain that they are ready for human flight, which means that SpaceX could be launching actual humans into space before June 30th, and I am so excited for this that I physically cannot describe it, and I find it crazy to think that this will finally break up the nine-year gap of human spaceflight from US soil since STS-135 in 2011. And also as it turns out, the second stage of the Falcon 9 used during the in-flight abort might have actually survived a gigantic fireball that could be seen off the east coast of Florida. As a video released by US Launch Report shows that what seems to be the second stage, with the interstage still attached, falling down towards the ocean. On the 27th January at around 14.50 UTC, SpaceX are also looking to launch the next batch of 60 Starlink satellites on the mission named Starlink-3, as it was delayed from the 24th of January. Sadly, I couldn't find any information about how well the special coating on one of the satellites that was launched on Starlink-2 worked, however if you would want to know more about that, I'd recommend you go and watch the last week's Space News episode where I explained what SpaceX were doing to help astronomers see into the cosmos who could be affected by Starlink's brightness in the night sky. Starship has also been making some awesome progress over the past few weeks, with two test tanks being constructed. Around two weeks ago, two bulkheads were mated to create a tank for pressure testing. This tank reached 7.1 bar, which is only 6 bar required for orbital flight. However, SpaceX didn't stop there, as Elon Musk said on Twitter that if they used an improved welding technique, they could possibly get to around 8.5 bar, which would allow them to reach the 1.4 safety limit needed for human flight. So over the past few days or so, the team down at Boca Chica have been constructing another tank. The chances that this tank will have the same end as the original is very high, as it will need to be tested to its limit to ensure that it can be used within Starship for safe human flight to the Moon, Mars and possibly beyond. A header tank for Starship was also pressurised just before the weekend, however this one didn't meet the same fate of its cousin, as it is still intact when the test was completed. You can also see on the video from BocaChicaGal that SpaceX were actually flying a drone above the tank. And with this week's SpaceX news wrapped up, it's time to head back up on orbit to Station 204. Thanks for the update Ryan, it's kind of exciting to see what they're doing down in Boca Chica. Alright, we didn't have any launches this last week, but we do have some coming up this next week. So, here's a list of all of those, along with everyone's favourite launches. Since there wasn't a whole lot of traffic, there was a bunch of stuff happening in weather. I'm now going to hand it over to Dr. Tamatha Scove, who brings us our latest solar weather report. Space weather this week started out quiet, but it sure didn't stay that way. As we switched to our front side sun, you can see everything was pretty bland until we started seeing a new sunspot emerge on the Earth-facing disk. This region ended up being one of the biggest sunspots we've seen in quite some time. And you can see it fizzling and farting there. This became named region 2757, and on the 25th, it fires off an Earth-directed solar storm. It's kind of hard to see here, and we had to wait for the models to kind of get an idea of when it's going to hit Earth. Right now, it looks like it's going to hit Earth right about the 29th, but it's probably going to be a pretty weak storm. You know, we're not that far from solar minimum, so these storms aren't all that strong yet. But hey, who cares? We're seeing these solar storms being launched far more frequently, and as activity continues to ramp up, these storms are going to get stronger. But believe it or not, this is not the only story. We also have a new bright region that's rotating into Earth-view on the sun's southeast limb. This is a solar cycle 25 sunspot. It's a new cycle sunspot, or it's actually an active region. It didn't last as a sunspot all that long, so it's probably not going to get a designation from NOAA. You know, these new cycle sunspots have a tendency to be a bit shy. They kind of poke out onto the surface of the sun and then dive back down. So we're going to have to deal with these being bright regions for quite some time yet. Now, as we switch to our far-sighted sun, this is stereo A. It's our partially far-sighted monitor. You can see that active region kind of emerging in the center of the disk in the south. Now, this region is helping to boost the solar flux. We are now back into the balmy 70s for emergency radio communications and amateur radio operators. But luckily, this region is not doing any serious flaring, so we don't have to worry about radio blackouts or anything like that for space launch affecting communications or any other types of space traffic. For more details on this week's space weather, including when and where to see Aurora when that solar storm hits on the 29th, come check out my channel or see me at spaceweatherwoman.com. And before we go, a quick note on an anomaly that happened at Firefly Aerospace this last week. There was a fire that occurred during a test firing of the first stage for Firefly's Alpha small satellite launcher. You can't really see too much in this video that they tweeted, but no one was hurt and emergency crews arrived on the scene quickly. The fire itself was extinguished by the automatic ground fire suppression systems on the pad itself. Firefly says they're reviewing data and looking to find root cause. Just on a personal note, I thought it was actually really cool that they tweeted this out. This was a test. This was in a test stand. This is when you want to see the anomalies happen right here on the ground. That's how these things work. It's part of the learning process. It's not a failure. It's just a learning step forward. This seems to be the theme for this particular show. So I was really happy that they were so transparent in an industry that seems to be very, very opaque lately. So kudos to Firefly Aerospace for tweeting that out. That's our show this week. I'd like to thank everyone so much for watching and especially our members over on YouTube. These are the people who make this show happen. We couldn't stay on orbit without you. Our fueling costs are insane. We have launch costs. It's crazy. Also, got to keep the lights on here at Station 204. If you'd like to help crowdfund the shows of tomorrow, head on over to YouTube.com slash T-M-R-O slash join. And as a reminder, if you wouldn't mind hitting that like button, mashing on the subscribe button and ringing that notification bell a whole lot, it really helps us as well. We want to hit 100,000 subscribers by the end of 2020. As I mentioned in a couple of previous shows, analytics says that's not going to happen. I'd like to thank you all so much for watching. We'll see you next week. I have to wait while I install Google Docs. We'll wait together. It's my birthday this Thursday. Oh, I should have brought a towel. Dang it, I'm 42, so I should have brought a towel while I'm turning 42.