Not every “first” is a first person in space, or first person on the moon. But that doesn’t mean they’re not important.
For example, this week saw the deployment of 1KUNS-PF from the International Space Station. 1KUNS is a small satellite, and it’s the first official satellite for Kenya. Designed and built at the University of Nairobi in collaboration with the Italian space agency, it’s a small “cubesat,” that mostly tests a series of components. Those components will be reused. That’s because the “PF” in the name of 1KUNS-PF stands for “precursor flight.” The full-on 1KUNS satellite is still in the design phase and will use information gathered from this test. The 1KUNS-PF was launched to the ISS on a booster from JAXA, the Japanese space agency, and deployed using the Canadian-built robotic arm.
And that is just about as much international cooperation as you’re going to get anywhere. If you have’t watched the inspirational opening sequence from Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets, now would be a good time.
But wait … 1KUNS-PF wasn’t alone. Also launched from the ISS on the same day were Irazú, the first satellite built in Costa Rica and an amateur radio satellite built in Turkey. And if that doesn’t make this a full-blown forget the alt-right, we’re doing cooperation, humankind, full-on Star Trek here, I don’t know what does. Feel free to grin in pleasure about the exploits of your fellow people.
And as long as we’re talking small satellites, here are a couple of stowaways that got little mention (including absolutely none from me) when Mars Insight lifted from Vandenberg this week. In addition to the main lander, the mission includes MarCO — Mars Cube One — which, despite the name, is actually two small cubesats. These little guys are carrying cameras that will help make sure that components on the main InSight probe deploy according to plan as well as doing some exploring and imaging on their own. But they’re not just box-cameras in space. Each one of the cubesats is a complete little spacecraft, with a set of tiny maneuvering thrusters and a small supply of propellent. They’re actually flying to Mars with InSight, not on InSight. Which is pretty cool for something the size of a tissue box.
Cubesats, small satellites of a standard size and weight, are generally meant to be inexpensive means to get access to space, sometimes by taking advantage of spare capacity on a launcher that’s headed out of the atmosphere in any case. But these are the first two cubesats to actually go interplanetary.
And to make these two tiny Mars-bound explorers even cuter, they’ve been given nicknames: WALL-E and EVE.
Now come on in … let’s go to space.
SpaceX
The Bangabandhu launch on Friday afternoon was actually two firsts in one. It was the first geosynchronus communications satellite launched for Bangledesh, and it was also the first flight of SpaceX’s new Falcon 9 ‘Block 5.’ Where previous Falcon 9s could be, and were, reused, the Block 5 is meant to be much more reusuable. So reusuable in fact that the goal is zero maintenance. Not just zero maintenance for one flight, but zero maintenance for ten flights. CEO Elon Musk has also suggested that each of the new Block 5 boosters might be good for 100 flights. All of which seems … fantastic. But then, so does watching the Falcon 9 execute a tail-first landing on a drone ship.
Ironically, the first that that SpaceX plans to do to prove that they don’t need to take apart the Block 5 after each flight is … take it apart. This first booster is unlikely to fly again for months, as it’s going to be disassembled and crawled over just to make sure they got everything right.
The Block 5 is also the version of the Falcon 9 that’s intended to be man-rated. This will be the booster that could begin taking the people up on the Crew Dragon as soon as the end of this year. But before that can happen, NASA is going to need to see several more successful flights, and SpaceX is going to have to fight out concerns from the GAO and from NASA about how SpaceX intends to fuel up their rockets with people on board. Some of the changes in the Block 5 were meant to address issues that the GAO raised last year, but NASA continues to be concerned about SpaceX’ use of super-cooled propellent that’s loaded at the last minute.
NASA is making both SpaceX and Boeing go through so many hoops before their boosters are man rated, that even a former NASA administrator is frustrated.
“I worry, to be perfectly honest, if we would have ever launched Apollo in our environment here today,” [Robert Lightfoot, the former acting NASA administrator] said during a speech at the Space Symposium last month, “if Buzz [Aldrin] and Neil [Armstrong] would have ever been able to go to the moon in the risk environment we have today.”
Based on meeting these safety requirements, a new GAO report earlier this month suggested that neither Crew Dragon nor Starliner is likely to take astronauts to the ISS before 2020, meaning that NASA could be in for some tough negotiating, and high prices, from Russia.
United Launch Alliance
Rocketdyne got some good space news this week when United Launch Alliance decided to reconfigure the first version of Vulcan, their next-generation replacement for both the Delta IV and Atlas V boosters that is supposed to get on the pad some time in the next year. Vulcan is ultimately shooting for a system much like that of SpaceX, in which the booster will return for reuse. But ULA has put that version of Vulcan, known as SMART (Sensible, Modular, Autonomous … and so on, it’s another of those long clumsy acronyms) until no sooner than 2023.
There were expected to be several different configurations of Vulcan, but this week some of those were scrapped for an upper stage made around the well-tested (or old, depending on who does the description) Centauri design. For the next several years, Vulcan’s upper stage will be built using four of Rocketdyne’s RL10C-X engines. But if any of this sounds like a step back for Vulcan, the simplification actually came in the form of “let’s just make them all big.” The standard Vulcan will now have a 5.4 m fairing — a smidge bigger than Falcon 9’s 5.2m fairing.
And speaking of “flight proven,” the first version of the Rocketdyne RL10 was tested in 1959 and flew in 1963. That’s 55 years of RL10s. I wasn’t able to find a number for exactly how many Rocketdyne has made, but I did find pictures of them celebrating the 500th RL10 … in 2003. It looks like they’re going to keep making these engines for several years to come.
At last word, ULA was still seeking to get Boeing’s Starliner certified on the Atlas V configuration, because waiting until Vulcan has enough flights under it’s fairing to become man-rated would be too much of a delay. Still, moving to Vulcan will let ULA get away from their dependence on the Russian-made RD-180, as Vulcan is switching to the Blue Origin BE-4 for the first stage engines. With continued cost and availability concerns on the RD-180, ULA is anxious to make the switch as soon as possible.
CNSA
NASA wasn’t the only agency making launches this week. On Wednesday, the Chinese National Space Agency launched a CZ-4C (Long March 4) rocket carrying the Gaofen 5 remote sensing satellite. Gaofen is carrying a collection of sensors to measure atmospheric conditions and detect environmental issues.
With Trump taking away NASA’s ability to monitor atmospheric carbon, we may all be depending on Gaofen for our basic science data.