Rocket Report: Tearing down Ariane’s SUSIE concept; is ChatGPT a rocket scientist?

"If you have someone who is worried, don't slough it off. Deal with it."

Welcome to Edition 5.24 of the Rocket Report! I joined Ars more than seven years ago to write about space. It has been an amazing ride, and now I'm thrilled to say we're expanding our coverage. Come work with me as a space reporter! Pay is competitive, and you can work remotely. But you must be passionate about space and writing. At least some experience in space journalism is preferred. Here is the place to apply. Anyway, in a few months, I hope to have someone to help with the Rocket Report, so there will no longer be interruptions!

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.

A deeper dive into the German launch industry. A German market research firm, Capitol Momentum, has published an extensive report on the financial and technical health of Germany's three most prominent small launch companies—HyImpulse Technologies, Isar Aerospace, and Rocket Factory Augsburg. The report (which requires an email address to download) provides a trove of data about the companies, which are all attempting to bring orbital rockets online within the next 12 to 24 months.

That's a lot of projected launches ... Since they are all private, limited recent data exists about their overall progress, but the report culls what is available. What emerges is a paradoxical picture: One company, Isar, is well funded but has not produced significant technical milestones of late; the other companies, HyImpulse and Rocket Factory Augsburg, have less financing but appear to be closer to launch readiness. One red flag for me is that both HyImpulse and Rocket Factory Augsburg have business cases built around 50 commercial launches a year, which seems completely unrealizable, both from a demand standpoint as well as the exceptional technical capability needed to reach such a cadence.

Virgin Orbit in financial trouble. This week, small launch company Virgin Orbit formally notified investors that it raised an additional $10 million from Virgin Investments Limited, an investment firm owned by Sir Richard Branson. Exactly what this filing means for the company's future will probably not become clear until Virgin Orbit releases financial details about its fourth-quarter earnings for 2022, and this may not happen until late March. But there are a few things in the filing that raise concerns about the financial solvency of the US-based small-launch company, Ars reports.

Paying a higher rate ... The $10 million amount is very low, providing only a few weeks of funding for the company given its high overhead and large payroll. Moreover, the note has an interest rate of 12 percent, double the rate of the November and December notes, which had interest rates of 6 percent. And finally, the new filing contains a separate security agreement that explicitly turns the unsecured November Branson note into a secured obligation. This could have been an injection of cash to meet payroll.

Blue Origin still 'mum' on New Shepard. More than four months have passed since the September 12 launch of Blue Origin's New Shepard rocket ended in failure. Three days after this accident with the New Shepard-23 mission, the bipartisan leadership of the House Subcommittee on Space and Aeronautics sent a letter to the Federal Aviation Administration, calling for a thorough investigation. In an interview with Ars later that month, the chair of the subcommittee, US Rep. Don Beyer (D-Va.), urged Blue Origin to be transparent. Yet so far, the company has made no public comments on the failure, Ars reports.

Just a routine filing ... Based on an application filed with the Federal Communications Commission last week, it appeared that Blue Origin might be targeting a time period from April 1 to June 1 of this year for its next New Shepard flight. However, a spokesperson for the company said not too much should be read into this date as it is not tied to a specific launch. "As a matter of course, we submit rolling FCC license requests to ensure we have continuous coverage for launches," the spokesperson said. So we wait.

South Korea selects Vega C. South Korea chose Arianespace’s Vega C rocket to launch a multipurpose imaging satellite, KOMPSAT-6, that has remained grounded due to sanctions imposed on Russia for invading Ukraine, Space News reports. Vega-C was selected for the launch following international bidding for the launch contract.

Not from Russia with love ... In December, South Korea formally revoked a Russian contract for what was supposed to be a late 2022 launch of KOMPSAT-6 from the Plesetsk Cosmodrome in northern Russia aboard an Angara rocket, according to South Korea’s vice minister for science, Oh Tae-seog. It is unclear whether the Korean government would seek Russian compensation for the delay. (submitted by Ken the Bin)

ISRO completes launch failure investigation. The Indian space agency announced Wednesday that an investigation into the failed inaugural launch of its Small Satellite Launch Vehicle last August found an unexpectedly strong shock during separation of the second-stage saturated accelerometers in the rocket’s guidance system. This triggered a “salvage mode” that ended up placing its payload into an unacceptably low orbit, Space News reports.

Returning to flight soon ... The payload, the EOS-02 Earth observation satellite and the student-built AzaadiSAT smallsat, ended up in an orbit with a perigee of only 75.7 kilometers. That orbit caused them to reenter “immediately,” ISRO concluded. ISRO outlined several corrective actions to prevent a similar problem from repeating and said that with those measures in place, it is ready to attempt a second SSLV launch later this quarter. (submitted by EllPeaTea and Ken the Bin)

French startup ignites engine for the first time. French launch startup Latitude has completed the first hot-fire test campaign of its Navier engine, which will be used to power the company’s two-stage Zephyr launch vehicle. The several-month-long test campaign was conducted at an airport on the island of Unst in the Shetlands, Scotland. It included several hot fire tests, the longest lasting for 35 seconds, which was the full duration the custom-built test bench could accommodate, Payload reports.

Launch within two years? ... One of the most promising launch startups in France, Latitude, is targeting a debut flight of Zephyr in 2024. The small launch vehicle is designed to deploy 100 kg payloads to Sun-synchronous orbit at an altitude of 700 km. The vehicle’s first stage features nine Navier engines, and the second a single vacuum-optimized Navier engine. (submitted by brianrhurley and Ken the Bin)

ChatGPT is not a rocket scientist. The recently released chatbot from OpenAI has been a sensation online, demonstrating the potential and power of artificial intelligence to change industries. But just don't ask it to be a rocket scientist. NPR put ChatGPT to the test with the help of actual, real, human rocket scientists to judge the AI application. Alas, it failed to accurately reproduce even the most basic equations of rocketry. Its written descriptions of some equations also contained errors.

Don't go designing rockets just yet ... Independent researchers say these failures, especially in contrast to the successful use of computers for half a century in rocketry, reveal a fundamental problem that may put limits on the new AI programs: They simply cannot figure out the facts. "There are some people that have a fantasy that we will solve the truth problem of these systems by just giving them more data," says Gary Marcus, an AI scientist. This was a fun experiment, but doubtlessly AI will continue to make inroads into rocket design and, likely, the software used to operate launch vehicles in flight.

SpaceX launches 200th Falcon 9 rocket. SpaceX launched 53 of its Starlink Internet satellites to orbit on its Falcon 9 rocket early Thursday morning, marking the 200th flight of the workhorse rocket, Space.com reports. (To be pedantic, this is the 200th successful mission of the rocket; a count that excludes CRS-7 and Amos-6, but includes the Crew Dragon in-flight abort test). Thursday's launch was the fourth this year that SpaceX devoted to Starlink and the company's eighth launch of 2023.

An accelerating cadence ... Since adopting its reuse technology, SpaceX has radically increased the cadence of its Falcon 9 launches. The company required nearly 125 months to complete its first 100 launches. The second 100 flights were completed in a little more than 25 months. The company is shooting for a total of 100 missions this year but may fall just short of that goal. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

Korean turbopump test ends in fire. A fire broke out at a national space center in southern South Korea during an experiment on a turbopump for a next-generation space rocket, the Yonhap News Agency reports. According to the country's science ministry, some experimental equipment was affected by the fire, but there were no reported injuries. Researchers were conducting tests on a turbopump prototype for the KSLV-III rocket, which is under development and will not make its debut launch for several more years.

Plenty of time and money ... Viewed as a successor to the smaller KSLV-II or Nuri rocket, the proposed booster will have nine kerosene-LOX engines and is advertised as capable of lifting up to 18 metric tons to low-Earth orbit. Wednesday's test had nothing to do with the smaller Nuri vehicle, which is scheduled to make its third launch in May. South Korea has committed up to $1.6 billion to develop the KSLV-III rocket, which will be used to launch geostationary satellites. (submitted by Ken the Bin)

Reflecting on Columbia 20 years later. This week marked the 20th anniversary of the loss of space shuttle Columbia. Consider this: Challenger's loss came 19 years after Apollo 1. Columbia's loss came 17 years after Challenger. It's sobering to realize this cadence of accidents on the 20th anniversary of Columbia's tragic loss. Two decades is a generation. So does every new generation have to learn these hard lessons? There are certainly a lot of new people and new vehicles in the field. The United States has begun flying humans into space again with SpaceX's Crew Dragon, and this will be soon followed by Boeing's Starliner and NASA's Orion spacecraft.

Don't slough it off ... In a feature, Ars asked former flight director Milt Heflin, who experienced all three spaceflight tragedies during his NASA career, for advice to the operators of these new vehicles. "We have enough examples now of what not to do," Heflin said. "I don't care what it is. If you have someone who is worried, don't slough it off. Deal with it. The program manager is under all this pressure to complete a mission. But you just can't ignore someone who might just have something you really need to pay attention to. You can't allow all of these successes to blind you to things you should pay attention to."

Pulling back the curtain on Europe's SUSIE concept. During the International Astronautical Congress in September 2022, ArianeGroup announced its SUSIE (Smart Upper Stage for Innovative Exploration) concept. Capable of crew, cargo, and servicing missions, the reusable upper stage would be launched aboard an Ariane 64 rocket initially but also be compatible with future European launch vehicles. One of the spacecraft’s most notable features is control surfaces that enable it to be propulsively landed on Earth.

Is SUSIE sus? ... In a compelling analysis, the European Spaceflight newsletter notes that SUSIE has a projected 22.6 metric ton "wet" mass. According to both the Arianespace and ArianeGroup websites, Ariane 64 can deliver 20 metric tons to low-Earth orbit. A SUSIE flight configuration would do away with the rocket's need for a fairing or payload adaptor, so it might meet Ariane's mass constraints for the rocket to orbit. But that is cutting the development margin for mass extremely short. This project will never happen without funding from the European Space Agency, and unfortunately, it seems more like a vanity project at this point than something that will become real. Which is too bad, because Europe could use a vehicle like this.

Next three launches

Feb. 5: Proton M | Elektro-L No. 4 | Baikonur Cosmodrome, Kazakhstan | 09:12 UTC

Feb. 5: Falcon 9 | Amazonas Nexus | Cape Canaveral, Fla. | 22:32 UTC

Feb. 9: Soyuz 2.1a | Progress 22 | Baikonur Cosmodrome, Kazakhstan | 06:15 UTC

Rocket Report: Tearing down Ariane’s SUSIE concept; is ChatGPT a rocket scientist?

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Rocket Report: Tearing down Ariane’s SUSIE concept; is ChatGPT a rocket scientist?

"If you have someone who is worried, don't slough it off. Deal with it."

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