Crew Dragon splashes down to end Ax-1 private astronaut mission

A Crew Dragon spacecraft returned to Earth April 25, ending a 17-day mission that ferried four private astronauts to and from the International Space Station. The Crew Dragon spacecraft Endeavour splashed down in the Atlantic Ocean off the coast from Jacksonville, Florida, at 1:06 p.m. Eastern after a normal reentry. The spacecraft had undocked from the station 16 hours earlier. Unlike two previous Dragon splashdowns, where one of four main parachutes opened later than the other three, all four parachutes on this spacecraft opened at the same time. NASA and SpaceX had played down any concerns about the delayed parachute opening, saying it may be a normal aerodynamic phenomenon and did not pose a risk to the spacecraft or the people inside. Endeavour returned to Earth four private astronauts on Axiom Space’s Ax-1 mission. Michael López-Alegría, a former NASA astronaut, commanded the mission. One customer, Larry Connor, served as pilot, while two others, Eytan Stibbe and Mark Pathy, were mission specialists. The four launched April 8 and docked with the station less than 24 hours later for what was planned to be an eight-day stay. However, persistent bad weather at splashdown locations in the Atlantic Ocean and Gulf of Mexico kept Dragon in orbit for an extra week. NASA and Axiom Space said their agreement for the mission incorporated the possibility of such delays, so that Axiom Space was not charged extra for the additional time on the station.

The Crew Dragon Endeavour splashes down in the Atlantic Ocean to end the Ax-1 mission. Credit: SpaceX

“Here we are at the conclusion of an incredible mission, and I must say the teams exceeded every expectation,” Amir Blachman, chief business officer of Axiom Space, said on the joint Axiom/SpaceX webcast after splashdown. “We could not be more proud of what has just been accomplished.”

“Overall, this has been an amazing success. The crew performed beyond expectations,” said Derek Hassmann, operations director at Axiom Space, in call with reporters after splashdown. The additional time in orbit, he said, allowed the private astronauts to complete a “handful” of experiments they deferred earlier in the mission as well as perform additional outreach events. “Our Ax-1 crew pitched in on the general care and feeding and upkeep of ISS.”

The crew itself went to Orlando, Florida, after being recovered from the capsule. Hassmann said they will spend a few days there for post-flight medical tests and rest before going home.

The departure and return of Ax-1 allows NASA to proceed with the launch of a new set of professional astronauts to the ISS. The Crew-4 mission is scheduled to launch on another Crew Dragon spacecraft, Freedom, April 27 at 3:52 a.m. Eastern. It will deliver the Crew-4 astronauts of Kjell Lindgren, Bob Hines and Jessica Watson of NASA and Samantha Cristoforetti of the European Space Agency to the ISS.

The tight turnaround — less than 39 hours between splashdown and the scheduled Crew-4 launch — won’t be an issue, said Benji Reed, senior director of human spaceflight programs at SpaceX. Both SpaceX and NASA were reviewing data from the Ax-1 mission throughout the flight, and he indicated no issues with the spacecraft. “Everything is looking great for our launch of Crew-4.”

Approximately five days after the arrival of Crew-4, the Crew-3 astronauts of Raja Chari, Thomas Marshburn and Kayla Barron of NASA and Matthias Maurer of ESA will return to Earth on another Crew Dragon spacecraft, ending a mission that started with their launch to the station in November 2021.

Ax-1 was the first in a series of private astronaut missions to the station planned by Axiom Space before it installed a private module on the station, scheduled for as soon as 2024. Hassmann said the next mission, Ax-2, was tentatively scheduled for early spring of 2023. The company previously announced that former NASA astronaut Peggy Whitson will command Ax-2 with an Axiom customer, John Shoffner, as pilot.

Axiom has not announced who the other two members of the Ax-2 will be. “I believe you will hear something relatively soon” about those other crew members, he said. “Probably in the next few weeks.”

Mars scientists look to less expensive missions

On the eve of the release of the planetary science decadal survey likely to place a decreased emphasis on Mars, scientists and NASA officials are planning how to continue exploration of the planet with less expensive missions. The National Academies is scheduled to release the latest decadal survey for planetary sciences April 19. The report will set priorities for planetary science and astrobiology missions for 2023 through 2032. The previous planetary science decadal survey, released in 2011, recommended as its top priority for large, or flagship, missions a rover that could cache samples for later return to Earth. NASA ultimately implemented that recommendation as Mars 2020, with the Perseverance rover currently collecting those samples. Agency officials, speaking at a conference on low-cost Mars mission options in Pasadena, California, in late March, acknowledged it’s unlikely another flagship-class Mars mission will be the top priority of the new decadal survey. Even if it was, the expense of the ongoing Mars Sample Return (MSR) campaign to return the samples Perseverance is caching makes it unlikely the agency could afford another large mission this decade. “In the coming years, MSR is going to be the top priority for NASA relative to Mars and it seems unlikely that the next large-scale mission that the decadal recommends will have Mars as a target,” said Eric Ianson, director of the Mars Exploration Program at NASA Headquarters, in remarks that opened the meeting. “As such, there will not be the budget to develop a flagship-level mission on the order of Perseverance or MRO,” the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter mission launched in 2005.

NASA's fiscal year 2023 budget proposal would cut the International Mars Ice Mapper mission, the only large Mars mission the agency has under development outside of Mars Sample Return. Credit: NASA

Another factor, he added, was NASA’s push to send humans to Mars as soon as the late 2030s. “Large science missions are probably not going to be the number-one priority,” he said.

Beyond MSR, the only other large Mars mission that NASA had announced was the International Mars Ice Mapper (I-MIM), an orbiter equipped with a radar to look for subsurface ice deposits of interest to both scientists and human exploration planners. The mission would include contributions from Canada, Italy and Japan, with NASA primarily responsible for mission management.

However, just before the conference, NASA’s fiscal year 2023 budget proposal zeroed out funding for I-MIM. “Due to the need to fund higher priorities, including to cover cost growth expected from the Mars Sample Return mission, the budget terminates NASA financial support for the Mars Ice Mapper,” the agency’s budget document stated.

At the conference, Rick Davis, NASA program executive for I-MIM, pressed ahead with a presentation about the mission, including how it could incorporate solar electric propulsion and also deploy a communications relay in Mars orbit to support other missions.

“We have some programs that are overrunning and they’re very high priority programs. That’s the driver for the budget submit,” he said when asked about the budget proposal, adding it would be up to Congress to restore funding for the program.

“The prime driver was overall stress on the budget for multiple projects,” Ianson said. “It’s not unprecedented for the budget to propose a cut to a mission and then Congress puts it back in.”

He sounded skeptical, though, that I-MIM could be revived in that way. “It depends on what kind of advocacy there is,” he said, noting successful efforts to restore funding for astrophysics and Earth science missions. “It’s not as clear to me that a strong advocacy for Ice Mapper exists in Congress.”

At the conference, many were pinning their hopes on smaller missions, both orbiters and landers, that could address key scientific issues. Recent studies, one by the Mars Architecture Strategy Working Group (MASWG) and another by a committee organized by Caltech’s Keck Institute for Space Studies, concluded that low-cost Mars missions were both feasible and useful.

Bruce Jakosky of the University of Colorado, who chaired the MASWG study, said at the conference that there was potential for missions with a total lifecycle cost of between $100 million and $300 million. “We think missions in this range have the potential to do outstanding science,” he said.

There are a couple recent examples, he noted, of such missions. Hope, the Mars orbiter by the United Arab Emirates launches in 2020, has an estimated cost of $200 million. NASA is also funding a smallsat mission to Mars called ESCAPADE with a cost cap of $55 million, scheduled to launch in 2024.

Rob Lillis of the University of California Berkeley, principal investigator for ESCAPADE, cautioned at the conference that his mission might not be applicable to other concepts for low-cost Mars missions. The mission, to study the interaction of the solar wind with the Martian atmosphere, can use low-cost instruments that do not require high data rates. The mission also won a commitment from Rocket Lab, which is supplying the Photon buses for the twin ESCAPADE spacecraft, to stick to the cost cap for the mission.

“$55 million is too low for most realistic missions,” he said. “It’s not the right cost cap for Mars missions in general.”

Jakosky agreed. “The MASWG committee thought that opportunities would really begin to open up to do important science at around $100 million,” he said. Within a projected cost range of $100–300 million, “we have a wide range of capabilities and a wide range of boxes that we can fit in.”

NASA to roll back SLS for repairs

NASA announced late April 16 it will roll back the Space Launch System from the launch pad for various repairs, further delaying the rocket’s long-anticipated first launch. In a statement late April 16, NASA announced it planned to roll back the SLS to the Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) “due to upgrades required at an off-site supplier of gaseous nitrogen used for the test,” the agency said. Problems with the supply of gaseous nitrogen, used to support activities at the pad, had delayed two previous countdown rehearsals. NASA did not state when the vehicle would go back from Launch Complex 39B, where it rolled out March 17, to the VAB. The agency said it will hold a briefing April 18 about its plans. The agency added it would use the time in the VAB to repair a faulty helium check valve in the SLS’s upper stage and a hydrogen leak detected shortly after starting to load liquid hydrogen into the rocket’s core stage during the April 14 attempt. It was the first time that controllers had reached that stage of the countdown after technical problems halted two previous attempts before liquid hydrogen could start loading. The leak is on the ground side of an umbilical plate on the mobile launcher’s tail service mast, and not on the SLS itself. “The good news is that there’s only a few things in that purge enclosure and there’s a couple of discrete penetrations that could be the culprit,” said Charlie Blackwell-Thompson, Artemis launch director, during an April 15 briefing.

NASA said late April 16 they will roll back the SLS to the VAB in order to fix a gaseous nitrogen issue at the pad and do repairs to the SLS and its mobile platform. Credit: NASA/Joel Kowsky

At that briefing, agency officials expressed some optimism about correcting the problem on the pad. Mike Sarafin, NASA Artemis mission manager, said those potential sources for the leak represented “low-hanging fruit” for fixing the problem and allowing another wet dress rehearsal as soon as April 21.

However, he suggested even then that rolling the SLS back the VAB was an option. “There are some more invasive options that require getting further into the hardware and potentially having to get into some extended troubleshooting,” he said, work he indicated might be best done in the VAB.

Sarafin said engineers also had to consider environmental issues of having the vehicle on the pad for an extended period, such as wind stresses on the towering vehicle. “The longer we stay at the pad, the more we stress the vehicle,” he explained. “Every time the wind blows against it, it creates a bending moment and, over time, that adds up.”

“We haven’t fully outlined all the options right now,” he said at the April 15 briefing. “The one that we’re pursuing with great vigor is the low-hanging fruit option and we’ll let the team come up with some other options.”

Blackwell-Thompson suggested one option would be to do another tanking test once the vehicle returns to the pad for the Artemis 1 launch. “You could certainly look at your schedule risk for launch countdown and make a decision whether or not you wanted to do a tanking prior to a launch countdown,” she said. In that scenario, the rocket would go through a tanking test and practice countdown and, if all went well, “some days later decide to go launch.”

Despite not getting through the countdown test in three attempts to date, and uncertainty about when the hydrogen leak will be fixed, Blackwell-Thompson said she was not particularly concerned. She noted there were five or six tanking tests before the first launch of the shuttle more than four decades ago. “Putting it into context, I would say we’re within family of our experience in the past for first-time ops,” she said.

ULA orders 116 Aerojet Rocketdyne engines for Vulcan’s upper stage

Aerojet Rocketdyne announced April 11 it has received an order from United Launch Alliance for 116 engines for the upper stage of ULA’s Vulcan Centaur rocket. Aerojet said this was the company’s largest ever contract for the RL10 engine. The large purchase of rocket engines comes on the heels of Amazon’s announcement April 5 that it selected Arianespace, Blue Origin and ULA to launch up to 3,236 satellites for its Project Kuiper broadband constellation. CEO Tory Bruno said ULA plans to fly Vulcan’s first mission late in 2022. Winning the Amazon deal would more than double the annual rate of Vulcan launches to as many as 25 per year, and ULA will ramp up production to meet the demand, Bruno said last week at the Space Symposium. ULA’s engine choice for Vulcan’s upper stage dates back to 2018 when it selected a variant of the RL10, the same engine used to power the upper stages of ULA’s legacy rockets Atlas 5 and Delta 4 Heavy. Over the past 60 years, more than 450 RL10 engines have flown on various ULA heritage vehicles. Due to a congressional mandate to end the U.S. military’s reliance on the Russian RD-180 rocket engine used in the Atlas 5’s first stage, ULA in 2015 announced it would build Vulcan Centaur as its next-generation rocket and selected Blue Origin’s BE-4 engine for the first stage. Each Vulcan Centaur upper stage will use two RL10C-X engines.

A Vulcan Centaur upper stage powered by two RL10 engines. Credit: Aerojet Rocketdyne

Aerojet said the RL10C-X is a variant of the RL1o developed for Vulcan Centaur that will “increase the use of additive manufacturing and introduce other advanced technologies to improve the quality, reliability, affordability and performance.” 

The RL10C-X uses a 3D-printed main injector and main combustion chamber, and has a 94-inch monolithic lightweight composite nozzle. According to Aerojet, the specific impulse, or Isp, of the RL10C-X is 461 seconds, which “puts it near the very top of the RL10 engine family in terms of performance. Specific impulse measures the amount of thrust generated by a rocket engine per unit of propellant consumed per second.

The engine is made at Aerojet Rocketdyne’s facility near West Palm Beach, Florida. The RL10 also powers the upper stage of NASA’s Space Launch System.

During a meeting with reporters at the Space Symposium, Bruno said one of his key “supply chain” concerns is building enough rocket engines for Vulcan to meet the projected demand.

“We are most concerned about the things that are the most complicated to build and take the most time,” he said. “Those are rocket engines and rocket motors. So Blue Origin, Aerojet Rocketdyne and Northrop Grumman are the key places we’ll focus on.” Northrop Grumman supplies Vulcan’s strap-on solid boosters.

Amazon signs multibillion-dollar Project Kuiper launch contracts

In the largest commercial launch deal ever, Amazon is purchasing up to 83 launches from Arianespace, Blue Origin and United Launch Alliance to deploy most of its 3,236-satellite Project Kuiper broadband megaconstellation, contracts worth several billion dollars. Amazon announced April 5 the agreements to launch an unspecified number of satellites on Ariane 6, New Glenn and Vulcan Centaur rockets over five years. The launches are in addition to nine Atlas 5 launches it purchased from ULA a year ago. Amazon did not disclose financial terms but said it is spending billions of dollars on these contracts as part of the constellation’s $10 billion overall cost. “Securing launch capacity from multiple providers has been a key part of our strategy from day one,” Rajeev Badyal, vice president of technology for Project Kuiper at Amazon, said in a statement. “This approach reduces risk associated with launch vehicle stand-downs and supports competitive long-term pricing for Amazon.” Amazon is buying 38 Vulcan launches from ULA. The agreement includes additional investments in launch infrastructure to support a higher flight rate, such as a dedicated launch platform for Vulcan launches of Kuiper satellites. ULA will make its own investments to support processing two launch vehicles in parallel.

Amazon’s 83-launch deal includes 18 Ariane 6 launches, 12 to 27 New Glenn launches and 38 United Launch Alliance Vulcan Centaur. Credit: Arianespace/Blue Origin/ULA

“With a total of 47 launches between our Atlas and Vulcan vehicles, we are proud to launch the majority of this important constellation,” Tory Bruno, chief executive of ULA, said in a company statement. “Amazon’s investments in launch infrastructure and capability upgrades will benefit both commercial and government customers.”

The Arianespace deal includes 18 Ariane 6 launches, a contract that Stéphane Israël, chief executive of Arianespace, described in a statement as the largest contract in his company’s history. Blue Origin is selling 12 New Glenn launches with an option for 15 more.

Amazon declined to provide details about the launch agreements, including the number of satellites each vehicle will carry. Beyond Gravity, formerly known as RUAG Space, will build satellite dispensers for the Kuiper satellites at a new facility in Sweden.

The launches will take place over five years, but Amazon declined to state when the launches would begin. None of the three vehicles are currently in service, although both Ariane 6 and Vulcan are scheduled to make their first launches this year. Blue Origin has not announced a revised date for the inaugural New Glenn launch but noted at the Satellite 2022 conference in March that it would not take place this year.

Amazon did not disclose which vehicles it considered beyond the three it awarded contracts for. Notably absent is SpaceX, which in addition to its Falcon and Future Starship vehicles is developing its Starlink broadband constellation that will compete with Kuiper. “Amazon has talked to every major launch provider and they will continue to explore all options for future launch services,” a spokesperson representing Amazon told SpaceNews.

Amazon needs many launches quickly to meet requirements of its Federal Communications Commission license awarded in July 2020. That license requires Amazon to have half its satellites in orbit by July 2026 and the complete constellation in orbit three years later. The spokesperson representing Amazon told SpaceNews that the contracts keep the company “on track to meet deadlines set forth in the FCC license.”

Amazon has yet to launch any Kuiper satellites. Two prototype satellites are scheduled to launch later this year on ABL Space Systems’ RS1 small launch vehicle, which also has yet to make its first flight.

“These launch agreements reflect our incredible commitment and belief in Project Kuiper, and we’re proud to be working with such an impressive lineup of partners to deliver on our mission,” said Dave Limp, senior vice president for Amazon Devices and Services, in a statement.