Rocket Report: A ULA sale tidbit; Polaris Dawn mission is on deck

Welcome to Edition 7.08 of the Rocket Report!  Lots of news as always, but what I'm most interested in is the launch of the Polaris Dawn mission. If all goes as planned, the flight will break all sorts of ground for commercial spaceflight, including the first-ever private spacewalk. Best of luck to Jared Isaacman and his crew on their adventurous mission.

As always, we welcome reader submissions, and if you don't want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.

RFA One blows up a booster. The first stage of Rocket Factory Augsburg's first orbital launcher was destroyed in a fireball during a test-firing Monday evening at a spaceport in Scotland, Ars reports. It's a notable event for the European commercial space industry as the German launch startup aimed to send its first rocket into space later this year and appeared to be running ahead of several competitors in Europe's commercial launch industry that are also developing rockets to deploy small satellites in orbit. BBC obtained video of the fiery explosion.

Now comes the hard work of an anomaly investigation ... In a statement, RFA said there was "an anomaly that led to the loss of the stage" Monday evening. The company said no one was injured and reported that the launch pad had been "saved and secured." This was the same rocket RFA planned to launch on its inaugural test flight. The hot fire test Monday was the first with all nine engines on RFA One's first stage. "We are now working closely with SaxaVord Spaceport and the authorities to gather data and info to eventually resolve what happened," RFA said. "We will take our time to analyze and assess the situation." On Thursday, the cause was attributed to a turbopump fire. (submitted by SPHK_Tech, gizmo23, brianrhurley, Jay500001, and Ken the Bin)

Orbex says it's targeting a 2025 launch, but get real. UK-based Orbex is now projecting a 2025 first launch of its small launch vehicle, the company's chief executive told Space News recently. Phil Chambers, chief executive of the United Kingdom-based company, said the company was making progress on both its Prime small rocket and launch site at Sutherland Spaceport in northern Scotland. “We are shooting for a 2025 launch,” Chambers said but declined to be more specific about a launch date other than to say that the company wanted to avoid a launch in winter because of poor weather conditions. “But I do want it to be 2025.”

Shooting to be the first orbital launch success from the UK ... There is an interesting detail in the story that caught my eye: "Vehicle subsystems are going through critical design reviews, with some flight hardware under construction." Let's be honest, if they're still working through the critical design review process for subsystems, the chance of a launch in 2025 is zero, and honestly for a company founded in 2015 it should not provide much confidence that the company will ever successfully launch an orbital rocket. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

SSLV makes its third launch. India successfully launched its third Small Satellite Launch Vehicle on Thursday, placing an Earth observation satellite into orbit and completing the solid rocket’s development process, Space News reports. The rocket carried the experimental Earth observation EOS-08 spacecraft into its intended 475-kilometer circular orbit for the Indian Space Research Organization.

Two for three ... According to ISRO chairman S. Somanath, the successful completion of the SSLV’s development phase paves the way for technology transfer to Indian industry, enabling serial production and operational deployment of the SSLV. The first SSLV flight failed in August 2022 when an upper stage malfunction left its payloads stranded in a very low orbit. The second launch, in February 2023, was successful. (submitted by Ken the Bin)

Indian firm plans suborbital launch. A Chennai-based startup, Space Zone India, plans to launch its Rhumi-01 suborbital rocket on Saturday from a mobile launcher. The hybrid vehicle, combining both solid and liquid rocket propellants, will carry three cubesats and 50 smaller picosats on its debut launch, the New Indian Express reports.

Seeking to recycle rockets ... According to the company's website, the Rhumi launch vehicle can reach an altitude of about 30 km. The three cubesats are designed to monitor and collect data on atmospheric conditions, including cosmic radiation intensity, UV radiation intensity, air quality, and more. The company said most of the rocket is designed to be recoverable and reused. (submitted by brianrhurley)

Sierra Space kicking the tires on ULA. Boeing and Lockheed Martin are in talks to sell their rocket-launching joint venture United Launch Alliance to Sierra Space, Reuters reports. A deal could value ULA at around $2 billion to $3 billion, sources told the publication. A potential deal would be an ambitious move for Sierra Space, spun off from Sierra Nevada in 2021 to focus on bringing to market its long-delayed Dream Chaser spaceplane. A deal with ULA could give the company a rocket, Vulcan, for uncrewed and potentially crewed launches of Dream Chaser.

A source believes the deal is unlikely ... ULA has been up for sale, actively, for more than a year. Blue Origin and Cerberus Capital Management had placed bids in early 2023 for the company, but none of those offers resulted in a deal. I heard about Sierra's interest last Friday, but the Reuters story came out before I could write something up. I will say, from the reporting I have been able to do, that the discussions between Sierra and ULA's owners were serious and substantial. However, at this time, my best information indicates that a sale is unlikely to happen. The parents believe ULA is worth more than Sierra is willing to pay. Sierra would also need to borrow substantially to make any transaction happen. (submitted by Hacker Uno and Ken the Bin)

Polaris Dawn set for launch next week. A private astronaut mission that will attempt the first commercial spacewalk is ready for launch on a SpaceX Crew Dragon, Space News reports. SpaceX has said it is targeting the early morning hours of Tuesday, August 27, for the launch attempt on a Falcon 9 rocket. The mission, designed to last five days, will take the spacecraft to altitudes as high as 1,400 kilometers, the highest for a crewed mission since Apollo 17 went to the moon in 1972. The mission will also test laser inter-satellite links with SpaceX Starlink spacecraft and perform 40 experiments.

Highlight is the first private EVA ... All four members will don new spacesuits developed by SpaceX as the cabin will be brought to vacuum. Two of the four will briefly emerge from the hatch to conduct tests during the two-hour spacewalk. "The idea is to learn as much as we possibly can about this suit and get it back to the engineers to inform future suit design evolutions," Jared Isaacman, the billionaire backing the Polaris program of missions and commander of Polaris Dawn, said at a press conference shortly after arriving at KSC this week. "It feels like a huge honor to have that opportunity to test it out on this flight." (submitted by Ken the Bin)

Blue Origin experiences rocket stage incidents. Blue Origin sustained failures in recent weeks of testing, including a factory mishap that damaged a portion of a future New Glenn rocket, Bloomberg reports. The upper portion of one rocket crumpled into itself, in part due to worker error, while it was being moved to a storage hangar, the publication reported. In a separate incident, another upper rocket portion failed during stress testing and exploded. Repairs are underway, another person said, noting there were no injuries during either episode.

Running into a tight timeline ... Notably, the incidents with these stages involved hardware that had been intended for use on the second and third launches. The upper stage that will be used by the first launch of New Glenn appears to not have been impacted. It is unclear whether these incidents will impact the debut launch of New Glenn, which is facing a tight deadline in mid-October to launch a Mars mission for NASA. More on this in the next item. (submitted by brianrhurley)

Payload for New Glenn's debut shipped to launch site. Two NASA spacecraft built by Rocket Lab are on the road from California to Florida this weekend to begin preparations for launch on Blue Origin's first New Glenn rocket, Ars reports. These two science probes must launch between late September and mid-October to take advantage of a planetary alignment between Earth and Mars that only happens once every 26 months. NASA tapped Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos' space company, to launch the Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers (ESCAPADE) mission with a $20 million contract.

Will it or won't it be ready? ... Rocket Lab announced Friday that its manufacturing team packed the satellites and shipped them from their factory in Long Beach, California. Over the weekend, they arrived at a clean room facility just outside the gates of NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida, where technicians will perform final checkups and load hydrazine fuel into both spacecraft, each a little more than a half-ton in mass. There's a lot for Blue Origin to accomplish in the next couple of months if the New Glenn rocket is going to be ready to send the ESCAPADE mission toward Mars in this year's launch period. Blue Origin has not fully exercised a New Glenn rocket during a launch countdown, hasn't pumped a full load of cryogenic propellants into the launch vehicle, and hasn't test-fired a full complement of first stage or second stage engines.

SLS contract hints at additional delays. NASA plans to extend the contract for one element of the current version of the Space Launch System with options that suggest the agency is protecting against multi-year delays in future missions, Space News reports. The contract concerns the Launch Vehicle Stage Adaptor, which connects the core stage to the upper stage of the Block 1 version of the SLS rocket. Teledyne Brown Engineering is the prime contractor for the adaptor under a contract awarded in 2014. The contract, valued at about $200 million, was scheduled to end in September.

Atremis III could be delayed to the end of the decade ... ln an August 14 procurement filing, NASA announced its intent to extend that contract to at least September 2026. That would allow Teledyne Brown to complete work on the third and final LVSA "as well as to ultimately conclude LVSA activities" under the contract, which runs through the Artemis III lunar landing mission. The proposed extension also includes several options for additional extensions. The first is a nine-month extension allowing the contract to run through June 2027. Additional options allow for the contract to be extended through December 2029. (submitted by Ken the Bin)

Next three launches

August 23: Falcon 9 | Starlink 9-5 | Vandenberg Space Force Base, Calif. | 08:00 UTC

August 26: Ceres 1S | Unknown Payload | Haiyang Spaceport, China offshore seas | 05:20 UTC

August 27: Falcon 9 | Polaris Dawn | Kennedy Space Center, Fla. | 07:38 UTC