Rocket Report: Key Ariane 6 test delayed; NASA urged to look at SLS alternatives

Welcome to Edition 6.16 of the Rocket Report! Lots of news here today about big rockets, including a push by SpaceX to speed up launch licensing by the Federal Aviation Administration. The full-court press in Washington, DC, comes as the company says its Starship rocket is ready for a second flight test but still awaiting final regulatory approval. The earliest the launch could now occur is during the first half of November.

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.

Virgin Galactic to fly sixth mission in six months. The California-based suborbital space tourism company announced this week that its "Galactic 05" mission will take flight as early as November 2. Such a flight would continue Virgin Galactic's impressive monthly cadence of flying its VSS Unity spacecraft this year. This flight will carry researchers who will use the interior of the space plane as a lab for research.

Some notable passengers ... I'm especially excited about Galactic 05 because two of the passengers are acquaintances. Alan Stern is the planetary scientist who led the New Horizons mission to Pluto and is seeking to perform suborbital astronomical observations. Earlier this year, he told me it was significantly cheaper to fly experiments on VSS Unity than it is for NASA to buy a sounding rocket. Another researcher on the flight, Kellie Gerardi, is someone I've gotten to know over the last decade through her advocacy of commercial space. She was kind enough to write a blurb for my book on the origins of SpaceX, Liftoff. Safe travels to both!

Small launch companies struggle with Falcon 9 prices. Industry executives say SpaceX’s dominant position in the launch market is making it difficult for small rockets to compete, Space News reports. In a panel at the Satellite Innovation conference on Tuesday, executives said Falcon 9 Transporter missions have had a “hugely chilling” impact on the small launch industry that struggles to compete on price. “They definitely control and have a dominant position in the market,” said Curt Blake, former chief executive of launch services company Spaceflight, who now leads the commercial space group at law firm Wilson Sonsini, of SpaceX. “I think the real question is pricing, and what is their cost, and why so low, so dramatically low?”

Cornering the market? ... SpaceX started offering rideshare launch opportunities for smallsats as low as $5,000 per kilogram. The company has since raised those prices to $5,500 per kilogram and plans annual increases in future years. However, in most cases, those prices are far below what dedicated small launch vehicles offer. “I don’t think they had to go that low to have a commanding share of the market,” Blake said, estimating SpaceX could have gained significant business at prices of $10,000 to $12,000 per kilogram. “That had to have a hugely chilling effect on any other money flowing into startup launch companies. (submitted by Ken the Bin)

Industry unites for extension of learning period. There are three US companies now capable of flying people into space—SpaceX, Blue Origin, and Virgin Galactic—and representatives from those three companies told lawmakers Wednesday that the industry is not yet mature enough for a new set of federal safety regulations for their customers. A nearly 20-year moratorium on federal regulations regarding the safety of passengers on commercial human spaceflight missions is set to expire on January 1, Ars reports. In a report submitted to Congress on September 29, the FAA said it believes the United States is ready for the sunset of the moratorium.

More time requested ... "The FAA will work together with industry and other US government agencies to establish a new safety framework for space transportation providing for the safety of the crew, government astronauts, and spaceflight participants," FAA officials wrote in the report. But officials from SpaceX, Blue Origin, and Virgin Galactic, the three companies active in the commercial human spaceflight arena, were in lockstep during a Senate hearing. All agreed the moratorium on human spaceflight regulations should be extended. It was scheduled to lapse at the beginning of October, but Congress added a three-month extension to a stopgap spending bill signed into law to prevent a government shutdown.

Two Vega payloads fail to deploy. A pair of payloads that were among a dozen carried to orbit aboard the Arianespace-managed Vega VV23 flight failed to be deployed and likely burned up in the atmosphere still attached to the rocket’s upper stage, European Spaceflight reports. The Vega VV23 flight launched on October 9 from French Guiana. The rocket carried the THEOS-2 and FORMOSAT-7R/TRITON satellites as its primary payloads and 10 smaller satellites as secondary payloads.

Two CubeSats came home sooner than expected ... Following a successful launch, Arianespace published a press release confirming that the two primary payloads and eight of the 10 secondary payloads had been deployed. However, the launch services provider added that “the separation of the last 2 cubesats is still to be confirmed.” Later, Arianespace confirmed that the ESTCube-2 and ANSER-Leader CubeSats likely failed to separate from their respective deployers. (submitted by Ken the Bin)

Astra is having stock troubles. Astra's stock dropped another 19 percent on Wednesday, to 75 cents a share, as it continues its downhill march, Payload reports. The launch startup executed a stock split a month ago in an effort to elevate its share price above $1 and keep its place on the NYSE. But share prices have again plummeted, dropping 70 percent, back to below a dollar.

Seeking to cut expenses ... The launch startup’s market cap now sits at just $14 million—a far cry from the $2.1 billion valuation the company garnered when it went public during 2021’s SPAC-apalooza. The company reported $36.7 million of cash flow burn in Q2 alone, leaving it with just $26.3 million in the bank. In an attempt to keep the lights on, the company slashed general and administrative expenses in half and redoubled focus on spacecraft thruster production.

Ariane 6 hot-fire test delayed again. ArianeGroup and Arianespace delayed a critical hot-fire test of the Ariane 6 rocket from early October until sometime in November, the European Space Agency said Thursday. This test will culminate with a full eight-minute firing of the Vulcain 2.1 engine, representing the entire flight phase of the core stage. This test was delayed after an issue with the thrust vector control system of the main engine was discovered earlier this fall.

Time needed for analysis ... Thrust vector control is how the engine is gimbaled and the direction of the rocket's thrust adjusted. "A group of experts has been tasked to analyze and propose solutions to resolve the anomaly, characterized by an abnormal internal pressure of the hydraulic group," the space agency stated. Officials with the space agency have said that a launch date estimate will be provided after this full-duration test firing occurs and the results analyzed. However, the agency said Ariane 6 remains "on track" for a debut launch in 2024. (submitted by EllPeaTea and Ken the Bin)

Historic launch pad will be turned into a museum. Because it lacks the funding to modernize its most historic launch pad, Russia now instead plans to turn "Gagarin's Start" into a museum, Ars reports. The pad is known as Gagarin's Start because it hosted the world's first human spaceflight in 1961, when the Vostok 1 mission carrying Yuri Gagarin blasted into orbit. Between 1961 and 2019, this workhorse pad accommodated a remarkable 520 launches, more than any other site in the world.

You belong in a museum ... The pad was supposed to have been modernized to accommodate the slightly larger Soyuz 2 rocket. However, as things so often have happened in Russia's space program, this modernization work has been put on hold due to a lack of funding. Roscosmos said Kazakh officials will lead the project to create the museum, as the site is the state property of Kazakhstan. It is hoped by Kazakh officials that the addition of the museum will increase the viability of Baikonur as a tourism site.

NASA urged to consider alternatives to SLS. In recent years, NASA has acknowledged that its large Space Launch System rocket is unaffordable and has sought to bring its costs down to a more reasonable level. The most recent estimate is that it costs $2.2 billion to build a single SLS rocket, and this does not include add-ons such as ground systems, integration, a payload, and more. However, in a damning new report, NASA's inspector general, Paul Martin, says the agency will not be able to reduce costs. Rather, Martin writes, the cost of building the rocket is likely to increase, Ars reports.

Keeping your options open ... "Our analysis shows a single SLS Block 1B will cost at least $2.5 billion to produce—not including Systems Engineering and Integration costs—and NASA’s aspirational goal to achieve a cost savings of 50 percent is highly unrealistic," Martin wrote. As part of his report, Martin made several recommendations to NASA. Perhaps most strikingly, the inspector general suggested that NASA consider using commercial heavy-lift vehicles as an alternative to the SLS rocket for future Artemis missions. "In our judgment, the Agency should continue to monitor the commercial development of heavy-lift space flight systems and begin discussions of whether it makes financial and strategic sense to consider these options as part of the Agency’s longer-term plans to support its ambitious space exploration goals," the report states.

SpaceX urges FAA to double licensing staff. In a remarkably frank discussion this week, several senior SpaceX officials spoke with Ars Technica on background about how working with the Federal Aviation Administration has slowed down the company's progress, and not just on the development of the Starship program. The SpaceX officials said they want to be clear that the FAA is doing a reasonably good job with the resources it has and that everyone supports the mission of safe spaceflight.

Starship is ready to go for its second launch ... However, SpaceX says the FAA needs significantly more people working in its licensing department and should be encouraged to prioritize missions of national importance. In recent months, according to SpaceX, its programs have had to compete with one another for reviews at the FAA. This has significantly slowed down the Starship program and put the development of a Human Landing System for NASA's Artemis program at risk. Inefficient regulation, the officials said, is decreasing American competitiveness as space programs in China and elsewhere around the world rise.

Falcon Heavy launches Psyche mission. A roughly 3-ton spacecraft launched Friday from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida to begin a six-year trip to an enigma in the asteroid belt, an unusual metallic world the size of Massachusetts that could hold clues about the formation of Earth and other rocky planets. Ars reports that this was SpaceX's first Falcon Heavy launch for NASA, which plans to use the heavy-lifter for more critical missions in the coming years.

Psyched up for a unique spacecraft ... This Psyche mission will survey its namesake asteroid for at least 26 months, moving to different altitudes to map the metal world with three science instruments. Like all missions exploring the Solar System, the Psyche spacecraft has a long journey to reach its destination, covering some 2.2 billion miles (3.6 billion kilometers) with the help of plasma engines. No one quite knows what the spacecraft will find when it reaches the asteroid Psyche, as the best images of the asteroid captured through telescopes only show Psyche as a fuzzy blob a few pixels wide. We can't wait to find out.

Astronomers eye Starship capabilities. A consensus among leading American astronomers is that NASA's next wave of great observatories should take advantage of game-changing lift capabilities offered by giant new rockets like SpaceX's Starship, Ars reports. Launching a follow-on to the James Webb Space Telescope on Starship, for example, could unshackle the mission from onerous mass and volume constraints, which typically drive up complexity and cost, a panel of three astronomers recently told the National Academies' Committee on Astronomy and Astrophysics.

Bigger payloads, bigger fairings ... "The availability of greater mass and volume capability, at lower cost, enlarges the design space," said Charles Lawrence, the chief scientist for astronomy and physics at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. "We want to take advantage of that.” Lawrence's presentation dealt with the impact of large, new launch vehicles on future astronomy missions. It seems clear that astronomers are starting to get serious in planning for rockets like the Starship, or Blue Origin's New Glenn with a slightly smaller 7-meter payload fairing, to be available to loft the next generation of big space telescopes.

Next three launches

October 21: Falcon 9 | Starlink 7-5 | Vandenberg Space Force Base, California | 06:19 UTC

October 22: Falcon 9 | Starlink 6-24 | Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida | 03:23 UTC

October 23: Long March 2D | Unknown Payload | Xichang Satellite Launch Center, China | 20:01 UTC