Space

nasa-wants-a-cheaper-mars-sample-return—boeing-proposes-most-expensive-rocket

NASA wants a cheaper Mars Sample Return—Boeing proposes most expensive rocket

Mars Sample Return, Science, Space / /
The Space Launch System rocket lifts off on the Artemis I mission.

Enlarge / The Space Launch System rocket lifts off on the Artemis I mission.

NASA is looking for ways to get rock samples back from Mars for less than the $11 billion the agency would need under its own plan, so last month, officials put out a call to industry to propose ideas.

Boeing is the first company to release details about how it would attempt a Mars Sample Return mission. Its study involves a single flight of the Space Launch System (SLS) rocket, the super heavy-lift launcher designed to send astronauts to the Moon on NASA’s Artemis missions.

Jim Green, NASA’s former chief scientist and longtime head of the agency’s planetary science division, presented Boeing’s concept Wednesday at the Humans to Mars summit, an annual event sponsored primarily by traditional space companies. Boeing is the lead contractor for the SLS core stage and upper stage and has pitched the SLS, primarily a crew launch vehicle, as a rocket for military satellites and deep space probes.

All in one

Green, now retired, said the concept he and Boeing engineers propose would reduce the risks of Mars Sample Return. With one mission, there are fewer points of potential failure, he said.

“To reduce mission complexity, this new concept is doing one launch,” Green said.

This argument makes some sense, but the problem is SLS is the most expensive rocket flying today. Even if NASA and Boeing introduce cost-cutting measures, NASA’s inspector general reported last year it’s unlikely the cost of a single SLS launch would fall below $2 billion. The inspector general recommended NASA consider buying commercial rockets as an alternative to SLS for future Artemis missions.

NASA’s Perseverance rover, operating on Mars since February 2021, is collecting soil and rock core samples and sealing them in 43 cigar-size titanium tubes. The rover has dropped the first 10 of these tubes in a depot on the Martian surface that could be retrieved by a future sample return mission. The remaining tubes will likely remain stowed on Perseverance in hopes the rover will directly hand off the samples to the spacecraft that comes to Mars to get them.

Boeing says a single launch of the Space Launch System rocket could carry everything needed for a Mars Sample Return mission.

Enlarge / Boeing says a single launch of the Space Launch System rocket could carry everything needed for a Mars Sample Return mission.

Boeing

In his remarks, Green touted the benefits of launching a Mars Sample Return mission with a single rocket and a single spacecraft. NASA’s baseline concept involves two launches, one with a US-built lander and a small rocket to boost the rocket samples back off the surface of Mars, and another with a European spacecraft to rendezvous with the sample carrier in orbit around Mars, then bring the specimens back to Earth.

“This concept is one launch vehicle,” he said. “It’s the SLS. What does it do? It’s carrying a massive payload. What is the payload? It’s a Mars entry and descent aeroshell. It has a propulsive descent module.”

The lander would carry everything needed to get the samples back to Earth. A fetch rover onboard the lander would deploy to drive out and pick up the sample tubes collected by the Perseverance rover. Then, a robotic arm would transfer the sample tubes to a container at the top of a two-stage rocket called the Mars Ascent Vehicle (MAV) sitting on top of the lander. The MAV would have the oomph needed to boost the samples off the surface of Mars and into orbit, then fire engines to target a course back to Earth.

Boeing has no direct experience as a prime contractor for any Mars mission. SpaceX, with its giant Starship rocket designed for eventual Mars missions, and Lockheed Martin, which has built several Mars landers for NASA, are the companies with the technology and expertise that seem to be most useful for Mars Sample Return.

NASA is also collecting ideas for Mars Sample Return from its space centers across the United States. The agency also tasked the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which was in charge of developing the original dead-on-arrival concept, to come up with a better idea. Later this year, NASA officials will reference these new proposals as they decide how to proceed with Mars Sample Return, with the goal of getting samples back from Mars in the 2030s.

NASA wants a cheaper Mars Sample Return—Boeing proposes most expensive rocket Read More »

analyst-on-starlink’s-rapid-rise:-“nothing-short-of-mind-blowing”

Analyst on Starlink’s rapid rise: “Nothing short of mind-blowing”

quilty, Science, Space, starlink / /

$tarlink —

Starlink’s estimated free cash flow this year is about $600 million.

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60 of SpaceX's broadband satellites stacked before launch.

Enlarge / 60 Starlink satellites stacked for launch at SpaceX facility in Cape Canaveral, Florida in 2019.

According to the research firm Quilty Space, SpaceX’s Starlink satellite Internet business is now profitable.

During a webinar on Thursday, analysts from the firm outlined the reasons why they think SpaceX has been able to achieve a positive cash flow in its space Internet business just five years after the first batch of 60 satellites were launched.

The co-founder of the firm, Chris Quilty, said the rapidity of Starlink’s rise surprised a lot of people, including himself. “A lot of industry veterans kind of scoffed at the idea,” he said. “We’d seen this before.”

Some history

Both SpaceX and another company, OneWeb, announced plans to build satellite megaconstellations in 2015 to deliver broadband Internet from low-Earth orbit. There was a lot of skepticism in the space community at the time because such plans had come and gone before, including a $9 billion constellation proposed by Teledesic with about 800 satellites that only ever managed to put a single demonstration satellite into space.

The thinking was that it would be too difficult to launch that many spacecraft and too technically challenging to get them all to communicate. Quilty recalled his own comments on the proposals back in 2015.

Analysis of Starlink financials in the last three years.

Enlarge / Analysis of Starlink financials in the last three years.

Quilty Space

“I correctly forecast that there would be no near term impact on the industry, but boy, was I wrong on the long-term impact,” he said. “I think I called for possibly a partial impact on certain segments of the industry. Incorrect. But remember the context back in 2015, the largest constellation in existence was Iridium with 66 satellites, and back in 2015, it wasn’t even entirely clear that they were going to make it successfully without a second dip into bankruptcy.”

It is clear that SpaceX has been successful on the launch and technical challenges. The company has deployed nearly 6,000 satellites, with more than 5,200 still operational and delivering Internet to 2.7 million customers in 75 different countries. But is the service profitable? That’s the question Quilty and his research team sought to address.

Build a model

Because Starlink is part of SpaceX’s portfolio, the company’s true financial situation is private. So Quilty built a model to assess the company’s profitability. First, the researchers assessed revenue. The firm estimates this will grow to $6.6 billion in 2024, up from essentially zero just four years ago.

“What Starlink achieved in the past three years is nothing short of mind-blowing,” Quilty said. “If you want to put that in context, SES and Intelsat announced in the last two weeks—these are the two largest geo-satellite operators—that they’re going to combine. They’ll have combined revenues of about 4.1 billion.”

In addition to rapidly growing its subscriber base, SpaceX has managed to control costs. It has built its satellites, which are connected to Internet hubs on Earth and beam connectivity to user terminals, for far less money than historical rivals. The version 1.0 satellites are estimated to have cost just $200,000.

Building satellites for less.

Enlarge / Building satellites for less.

Quilty Space

How has SpaceX done this? Caleb Henry, director of research for Quilty, pointed to three major factors.

“One is, they really, really aggressively vertically integrate, and that allows them to keep costs down by not having to absorb the profit margins from outside suppliers,” he said. “They really designed for manufacture and for cheap manufacture. And you can kind of see that in some of the component selections and designs that they’ve used. And then they’ve also built really high volume, so a production cadence and rate that the industry has not seen before.”

Getting to a profit

Quilty estimates that Starlink will have an EBITDA of $3.8 billion this year. This value indicates how well a company is managing its day-to-day operations and stands for earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization. Additionally, Quilty estimates that capital expenditures for Starlink will be $3.1 billion this year. This leaves an estimated free cash flow from the business of about $600 million. In other words, Starlink is making money for SpaceX. It is self-sustaining.

According to Quilty’s analysis, the Starlink business has also addressed some concerns about its long-term financial viability. For example, it no longer subsidizes the cost of user terminals in the United States, and the replenishment costs for satellites in orbit are manageable.

These figures, it should be noted, do not include SpaceX’s Starshield business, which is building custom satellites for the US military for observation purposes and will likely leverage its Starlink technology.

There is also room for significant growth for Starlink as the larger Starship rocket comes online and begins to launch version 3.0 Starlink satellites. These are significantly chunkier, likely about 1.5 metric tons each, and will have the capability for significantly more broadband and enable direct-to-cell communications, removing the need for user terminals.

Analyst on Starlink’s rapid rise: “Nothing short of mind-blowing” Read More »

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Rocket Report: German launch from Australia; Neutron delayed until 2025

rocket report, Space / /
HyImpulse's single-stage rocket, SR75, lifts off from Australia.

Enlarge / HyImpulse’s single-stage rocket, SR75, lifts off from Australia.

HyImpulse

Welcome to Edition 6.43 of the Rocket Report! This week saw the debut of two new rockets, a suborbital lifter from a German startup, and a new variant of the Long March 6 from China’s state-owned launch provider. We also got within two hours of the debut of a crewed launch of Boeing’s Starliner vehicle, but a rocket issue forced a 10-day delay. Soon, hopefully.

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.

Orbital launch tally running ahead of 2023. There were 63 orbital launch attempts worldwide in the first quarter of 2024, which is 10 more than the same time last year, Payload reports. SpaceX accounted for 32 of the 34 US orbital launch attempts in Q1. One ULA Vulcan launch and one Rocket Lab Electron launch out of Wallops rounded out the remaining total. (Rocket Lab flights out of New Zealand are not counted in US launch totals.)

SpaceX accounts for more than half … SpaceX flew 31 Falcon missions and one Starship mission in Q1. The company’s launch attempts increased by 11 flights in Q1 2024 vs. Q1 2023. China’s Q1 launch was flat year over year at 14 flights, with its Long March 2 vehicle leading the way with four missions. Europe’s planned summer Ariane 6 launch can’t come soon enough, as the region saw zero launch attempts in the quarter.

Virgin Galactic will lean heavily on mothership. Virgin Galactic says it will fly its existing “mothership” aircraft more frequently than previously planned with its upcoming Delta-class suborbital spaceplanes, allowing the company to defer development of a new plane, Space News reports. In a May 7 earnings call, Virgin Galactic executives said they expect to fly their VMS Eve aircraft up to 125 times a year once the company starts commercial service of the Delta spaceplanes, the successor to the existing VSS Unity, in 2026.

Asking a lot of Eve … “The planned increase in flight cadence for our mothership Eve is a game changer when our first two Delta ships enter commercial service,” added Doug Ahrens, chief financial officer of Virgin Galactic. That is a lot to ask of what was originally a developmental aircraft, which started flights in 2008. Eve was never intended to fly this many times, and it seems likely that refurbishment of the plane between launches could become a major bottleneck for Virgin Galactic as it seeks to scale up operations. (submitted by Ken the Bin)

The easiest way to keep up with Eric Berger’s space reporting is to sign up for his newsletter, we’ll collect his stories in your inbox.

HyImpulse conducts its first launch. The Germany-based startup launched a suborbital rocket from Southern Launch’s Koonibba Test Range in Australia late last week. The SR75 rocket’s “Light this Candle!” mission was the inaugural launch attempt of HyImpulse’s booster, a pathfinder for an eventual orbital rocket. In a news release, the company characterized the flight as a “success” but did not specify what altitude the vehicle reached. Nominally, it is capable of flying to 250 km.

Literally lighting a candle … “With this successful launch, which also provides us with valuable data for further development, we have validated our technical concept and demonstrated our market readiness,” said Christian Schmierer, co-founder and co-CEO of HyImpulse. The German launch company is developing its rockets with hybrid technology, using solid paraffin (commonly known as candle wax) and liquid oxygen as fuel. HyImpulse aims to learn from this launch as it develops the SL1 multi-stage orbital launch vehicle, which may debut next year. (submitted by Marakai and Joey S-IVB)

Rocket Report: German launch from Australia; Neutron delayed until 2025 Read More »

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NASA confirms “independent review” of Orion heat shield issue

artemis, artemis I, artemis II, human spaceflight, NASA, orion, Science, Space, victor glover / /
The Orion spacecraft after splashdown in the Pacific Ocean at the end of the Artemis I mission.

Enlarge / The Orion spacecraft after splashdown in the Pacific Ocean at the end of the Artemis I mission.

NASA has asked a panel of outside experts to review the agency’s investigation into the unexpected loss of material from the heat shield of the Orion spacecraft on a test flight in 2022.

Chunks of charred material cracked and chipped away from Orion’s heat shield during reentry at the end of the 25-day unpiloted Artemis I mission in December 2022. Engineers inspecting the capsule after the flight found more than 100 locations where the stresses of reentry stripped away pieces of the heat shield as temperatures built up to 5,000° Fahrenheit.

This was the most significant discovery on the Artemis I, an unpiloted test flight that took the Orion capsule around the Moon for the first time. The next mission in NASA’s Artemis program, Artemis II, is scheduled for launch late next year on a test flight to send four astronauts around the far side of the Moon.

Another set of eyes

The heat shield, made of a material called Avcoat, is attached to the base of the Orion spacecraft in 186 blocks. Avcoat is designed to ablate, or erode, in a controlled manner during reentry. Instead, fragments fell off the heat shield that left cavities resembling potholes.

Investigators are still looking for the root cause of the heat shield problem. Since the Artemis I mission, engineers conducted sub-scale tests of the Orion heat shield in wind tunnels and high-temperature arcjet facilities. NASA has recreated the phenomenon observed on Artemis I in these ground tests, according to Rachel Kraft, an agency spokesperson.

“The team is currently synthesizing results from a variety of tests and analyses that inform the leading theory for what caused the issues,” said Rachel Kraft, a NASA spokesperson.

Last week, nearly a year and a half after the Artemis I flight, the public got its first look at the condition of the Orion heat shield with post-flight photos released in a report from NASA’s inspector general. Cameras aboard the Orion capsule also recorded pieces of the heat shield breaking off the spacecraft during reentry.

NASA’s inspector general said the char loss issue “creates a risk that the heat shield may not sufficiently protect the capsule’s systems and crew from the extreme heat of reentry on future missions.”

“Those pictures, we’ve seen them since they were taken, but more importantly… we saw it,” said Victor Glover, pilot of the Artemis II mission, in a recent interview with Ars. “More than any picture or report, I’ve seen that heat shield, and that really set the bit for how interested I was in the details.”

NASA confirms “independent review” of Orion heat shield issue Read More »

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Here’s why a rich guy going to space for a second time actually matters

Space / /

A new dawn —

Polaris Dawn will be the first time that SpaceX employees have actually gone to space.

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The crew of Polaris Dawn from L to R: Anna Menon, Scott Poteet, Jared Isaacman, and Sarah Gillis.

Enlarge / The crew of Polaris Dawn from L to R: Anna Menon, Scott Poteet, Jared Isaacman, and Sarah Gillis.

John Kraus/Polaris Program

Over the weekend the crew of the upcoming Polaris Dawn mission shared a wealth of details about the intriguing private mission that will send humans farther than they have flown from Earth in half a century.

Commanded and funded by private astronaut Jared Isaacman, the mission seeks to test new technologies that will further the expansion of humanity into space. Among the objectives are pushing the performance of the Dragon spacecraft and Falcon 9 rocket, performing the first commercial spacewalk in a new spacesuit developed by SpaceX, and testing Starlink laser-based communications in space.

“Our first objective is to travel farther from the Earth and the last time humans walked on the Moon with Apollo 17, more than 50 years ago,” Isaacman said during an online chat hosted by the social network site X. “So we target an apogee of 1,400 kilometers. That puts us just inside the Van Allen radiation belt. It’s an awesome opportunity for us to get some data, but really it’s about pushing beyond our comfort zone.”

The Polaris Dawn mission does not have a launch date, but SpaceX officials confirmed that it is now the next crewed mission the company will fly. There are likely several scheduling issues at play, but it’s possible the mission could launch within the next six to eight weeks.

Flying high

After liftoff from Florida, Isaacman said Dragon will complete seven orbits with a maximum altitude of about 1,400 km, which is about twice as high as any crewed mission has flown since 1972. After that the vehicle will descend to a more circular orbit of about 700 km and prepare for a spacewalk.

Besides Isaacman, who flew to space for the first time in September 2021 as the commander of the all-civilian Inspiration 4, the crew of this mission includes a retired Air Force Lieutenant Colonel and experienced pilot named Scott Poteet, and two SpaceX engineers, Sarah Gillis and Anna Menon. This will be the first time that any employee of SpaceX has ever flown into space.

After settling into the lower orbit, the crew will prepare for a spacewalk. They will don spacesuits, and the atmosphere inside the Dragon spacecraft will be vented into space. Then Isaacman and Gillis will exit the spacecraft, with their suits connected to Dragon’s air and other consumables by an umbilical.

Polaris Dawn astronaut and SpaceX engineer Sarah Gillis shows off the new spacesuit.

Enlarge / Polaris Dawn astronaut and SpaceX engineer Sarah Gillis shows off the new spacesuit.

SpaceX

Although government astronauts have conducted hundreds of spacewalks over the last 60 years, no private citizen has ever undertaken one.

“This is important because we are going to get to the Moon and Mars one day, and we’re going to have to get out of our vehicles, and out of the safety of the habitat to explore and build and repair things,” Isaacman said. SpaceX has already said it is working on a second generation of the suit for operations on the Moon and Mars.

The company spent about two years designing the first generation of this extravehicular activity spacesuit, an upgrade from its current flight suit. It has been extensively tested in vacuum chambers and other facilities at locations such as NASA’s Johnson Space Center. Isaacman shared more details about the suits in a subsequent conversation with former Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield.

SpaceX has also modified Dragon for the spacewalk. Stu Keech, the vice president of Dragon at SpaceX, said a structure named “Skywalker” has been attached to the spacecraft near the hatch as a mobility aid.

Is this guy legit?

It would be easy to dismiss Isaacman as a space fanboy living out his spaceflight dreams after he got rich. (According to Forbes, the founder of Shift4 Payments is worth an estimated $1.5 billion.) Absolutely, he loves to fly. He owns and regularly pilots a MiG-29—one of only a few of these Soviet fighter aircraft operating in the United States. Spaceflight is the ultimate boundary for people who love to fly.

But Isaacman appears to be in this for more than thrills. On his first two spaceflights, Isaacman sought out crewmates from diverse backgrounds and made charitable donations a major component of each mission. I have had a number of conversations with Isaacman over the last five years, and he has consistently emphasized the goal of opening spaceflight to more people. For example, if humans are ever to have a truly sustained presence in space, spacewalks must be commonplace. Hence, non-NASA astronauts need to start making them. His funding of Polaris Dawn helped SpaceX focus on developing suits for such a purpose down the line.

During the social media event on Saturday, I asked Isaacman about the risks entailed by this mission. By flying higher than a conventional spaceflight, venting the cabin, and performing a spacewalk, he and the crew were taking on a new set of risks.

“We’ve gotten really comfortable going from point A to B to an extraordinary floating international laboratory, but I think humankind’s ambitions are beyond that,” Isaacman said of the International Space Station. “We’re going to encounter different things. The risk is different when you vent the vehicle down to vacuum, and you’re in a spacesuit. But I think these are all positive steps in the direction of goodness towards, you know, humankind’s interest to explore our Solar System and beyond.”

Isaacman has clearly bought in to the idea of space settlement. He’s personally taking risks to help achieve that vision, investing a significant chunk of money and time for training. It is a brave and bold and important thing to be doing.

Here’s why a rich guy going to space for a second time actually matters Read More »

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Faulty valve scuttles Starliner’s first crew launch

atlas v, Boeing, butch wilmore, commercial crew, human spaceflight, international space station, NASA, Security, Space, starliner, suni williams, united launch alliance / /
The Atlas V rocket and Starliner spacecraft on their launch pad Monday.

Enlarge / The Atlas V rocket and Starliner spacecraft on their launch pad Monday.

Astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams climbed into their seats inside Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft Monday night in Florida, but trouble with the capsule’s Atlas V rocket kept the commercial ship’s long-delayed crew test flight on the ground.

Around two hours before launch time, shortly after 8: 30 pm EDT (00: 30 UTC), United Launch Alliance’s launch team stopped the countdown. “The engineering team has evaluated, the vehicle is not in a configuration where we can proceed with flight today,” said Doug Lebo, ULA’s launch conductor.

The culprit was a misbehaving valve on the rocket’s Centaur upper stage, which has two RL10 engines fed by super-cold liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen propellants.

“We saw a self-regulating valve on the LOX (liquid oxygen) side had a bit of a buzz; it was moving in a strange behavior,” said Steve Stich, NASA’s commercial crew program manager. “The flight rules had been laid out for this flight ahead of time. With the crew at the launch pad, the proper action was to scrub.”

The next opportunity to launch Starliner on its first crew test flight will be Friday night at 9 pm EDT (01: 00 UTC Saturday). NASA announced overnight that officials decided to skip a launch opportunity Tuesday night to allow engineers more time to study the valve problem and decide whether they need to replace it.

Work ahead

Everything else was going smoothly in the countdown Monday night. This mission will also be the first time astronauts have flown on ULA’s Atlas V rocket, which has logged 99 successful flights since 2002. It is the culmination of nearly a decade-and-a-half of development by Boeing, which has a $4.2 billion contract with NASA to ready Starliner for crew missions, then carry out six long-duration crew ferry flights to and from the International Space Station.

This crew test flight will last at least eight days, taking Wilmore and Williams to the space station to verify Starliner’s readiness for operational missions. Once Starliner flies, NASA will have two human-rated spacecraft on contract. SpaceX’s Crew Dragon has been in service since 2020.

When officials scrubbed Monday night’s launch attempt, Wilmore and Williams were already aboard the Starliner spacecraft on top of the Atlas V rocket at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida. The Boeing and ULA support team helped them out of the capsule and drove them back to crew quarters at the nearby Kennedy Space Center to wait for the next launch attempt.

“I promised Butch and Suni a boring evening,” said Tory Bruno, ULA’s CEO. “I didn’t mean for it to be quite this boring, but we’re going to follow our rules, and we’re going to make sure that the crew is safe.”

When the next launch attempt actually occurs depends on whether ULA engineers determine they can resolve the problem without rolling the Atlas V rocket back to its hangar for repairs.

The valve in question vents gas from the liquid oxygen tank on the Centaur upper stage to maintain the tank at proper pressures. This is important for two reasons. The tank needs to be at the correct pressure for the RL10 engines to receive propellant during the flight, and the Centaur upper stage itself has ultra-thin walls to reduce weight, and requires pressure to maintain structural integrity.

Faulty valve scuttles Starliner’s first crew launch Read More »

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The surprise is not that Boeing lost commercial crew but that it finished at all

Boeing, Features, Science, Space, starliner / /

Boeing really is going —

“The structural inefficiency was a huge deal.”

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Boeing's Starliner spacecraft is lifted to be placed atop an Atlas V rocket for its first crewed launch.

Enlarge / Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft is lifted to be placed atop an Atlas V rocket for its first crewed launch.

United Launch Alliance

NASA’s senior leaders in human spaceflight gathered for a momentous meeting at the agency’s headquarters in Washington, DC, almost exactly ten years ago.

These were the people who, for decades, had developed and flown the Space Shuttle. They oversaw the construction of the International Space Station. Now, with the shuttle’s retirement, these princely figures in the human spaceflight community were tasked with selecting a replacement vehicle to send astronauts to the orbiting laboratory.

Boeing was the easy favorite. The majority of engineers and other participants in the meeting argued that Boeing alone should win a contract worth billions of dollars to develop a crew capsule. Only toward the end did a few voices speak up in favor of a second contender, SpaceX. At the meeting’s conclusion, NASA’s chief of human spaceflight at the time, William Gerstenmaier, decided to hold off on making a final decision.

A few months later, NASA publicly announced its choice. Boeing would receive $4.2 billion to develop a “commercial crew” transportation system, and SpaceX would get $2.6 billion. It was not a total victory for Boeing, which had lobbied hard to win all of the funding. But the company still walked away with nearly two-thirds of the money and the widespread presumption that it would easily beat SpaceX to the space station.

The sense of triumph would prove to be fleeting. Boeing decisively lost the commercial crew space race, and it proved to be a very costly affair.

With Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft finally due to take flight this week with astronauts on board, we know the extent of the loss, both in time and money. Dragon first carried people to the space station nearly four years ago. In that span, the Crew Dragon vehicle has flown thirteen public and private missions to orbit. Because of this success, Dragon will end up flying 14 operational missions to the station for NASA, earning a tidy fee each time, compared to just six for Starliner. Through last year, Boeing has taken $1.5 billion in charges due to delays and overruns with its spacecraft development.

So what happened? How did Boeing, the gold standard in human spaceflight for decades, fall so far behind on crew? This story, based largely on interviews with unnamed current and former employees of Boeing and contractors who worked on Starliner, attempts to provide some answers.

The early days

When the contracts were awarded, SpaceX had the benefit of working with NASA to develop a cargo variant of Dragon, which by 2014 was flying regular missions to the space station. But the company had no experience with human spaceflight. Boeing, by contrast, had decades of spaceflight experience, but it had to start from scratch with Starliner.

Each faced a deeper cultural challenge. A decade ago, SpaceX was deep into several major projects, including developing a new version of the Falcon 9 rocket, flying more frequently, experimenting with landing and reuse, and doing cargo supply missions. This new contract meant more money but a lot more work. A NASA engineer who worked closely with both SpaceX and Boeing in this time frame recalls visiting SpaceX and the atmosphere being something like a frenzied graduate school, where all of the employees were being pulled in different directions. Getting engineers to focus on Crew Dragon was difficult.

But at least SpaceX was in its natural environment. Boeing’s space division had never won a large fixed-price contract. Its leaders were used to operating in a cost-plus environment, in which Boeing could bill the government for all of its expenses and earn a fee. Cost overruns and delays were not the company’s problem—they were NASA’s. Now Boeing had to deliver a flyable spacecraft for a firm, fixed price.

Boeing struggled to adjust to this environment. When it came to complicated space projects, Boeing was used to spending other people’s money. Now, every penny spent on Starliner meant one less penny in profit (or, ultimately, greater losses). This meant that Boeing allocated fewer resources to Starliner than it needed to thrive.

“The difference between the two company’s cultures, design philosophies, and decision-making structures allowed SpaceX to excel in a fixed-price environment, where Boeing stumbled, even after receiving significantly more funding,” said Lori Garver in an interview. She was deputy administrator of NASA from 2009 to 2013 during the formative years of the commercial crew program and is the author of Escaping Gravity.

So Boeing faced financial pressure from the beginning. At the same time, it was confronting major technical challenges. Building a human spacecraft is very difficult. Some of the biggest hurdles would be flight software and propulsion.

The surprise is not that Boeing lost commercial crew but that it finished at all Read More »

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AI in space: Karpathy suggests AI chatbots as interstellar messengers to alien civilizations

AI, Andrej Karpathy, Arecibo, Biz & IT, chatgpt, chatgtp, Fei-Fei Li, Google, google ai, GPT-2, GPT-3, GPT-4, large language models, LLMs, machine learning, openai, Space, Tech, Tesla, Voyager / /

The new golden record —

Andrej Karpathy muses about sending a LLM binary that could “wake up” and answer questions.

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Close shot of Cosmonaut astronaut dressed in a gold jumpsuit and helmet, illuminated by blue and red lights, holding a laptop, looking up.

On Thursday, renowned AI researcher Andrej Karpathy, formerly of OpenAI and Tesla, tweeted a lighthearted proposal that large language models (LLMs) like the one that runs ChatGPT could one day be modified to operate in or be transmitted to space, potentially to communicate with extraterrestrial life. He said the idea was “just for fun,” but with his influential profile in the field, the idea may inspire others in the future.

Karpathy’s bona fides in AI almost speak for themselves, receiving a PhD from Stanford under computer scientist Dr. Fei-Fei Li in 2015. He then became one of the founding members of OpenAI as a research scientist, then served as senior director of AI at Tesla between 2017 and 2022. In 2023, Karpathy rejoined OpenAI for a year, leaving this past February. He’s posted several highly regarded tutorials covering AI concepts on YouTube, and whenever he talks about AI, people listen.

Most recently, Karpathy has been working on a project called “llm.c” that implements the training process for OpenAI’s 2019 GPT-2 LLM in pure C, dramatically speeding up the process and demonstrating that working with LLMs doesn’t necessarily require complex development environments. The project’s streamlined approach and concise codebase sparked Karpathy’s imagination.

“My library llm.c is written in pure C, a very well-known, low-level systems language where you have direct control over the program,” Karpathy told Ars. “This is in contrast to typical deep learning libraries for training these models, which are written in large, complex code bases. So it is an advantage of llm.c that it is very small and simple, and hence much easier to certify as Space-safe.”

Our AI ambassador

In his playful thought experiment (titled “Clearly LLMs must one day run in Space”), Karpathy suggested a two-step plan where, initially, the code for LLMs would be adapted to meet rigorous safety standards, akin to “The Power of 10 Rules” adopted by NASA for space-bound software.

This first part he deemed serious: “We harden llm.c to pass the NASA code standards and style guides, certifying that the code is super safe, safe enough to run in Space,” he wrote in his X post. “LLM training/inference in principle should be super safe – it is just one fixed array of floats, and a single, bounded, well-defined loop of dynamics over it. There is no need for memory to grow or shrink in undefined ways, for recursion, or anything like that.”

That’s important because when software is sent into space, it must operate under strict safety and reliability standards. Karpathy suggests that his code, llm.c, likely meets these requirements because it is designed with simplicity and predictability at its core.

In step 2, once this LLM was deemed safe for space conditions, it could theoretically be used as our AI ambassador in space, similar to historic initiatives like the Arecibo message (a radio message sent from Earth to the Messier 13 globular cluster in 1974) and Voyager’s Golden Record (two identical gold records sent on the two Voyager spacecraft in 1977). The idea is to package the “weights” of an LLM—essentially the model’s learned parameters—into a binary file that could then “wake up” and interact with any potential alien technology that might decipher it.

“I envision it as a sci-fi possibility and something interesting to think about,” he told Ars. “The idea that it is not us that might travel to stars but our AI representatives. Or that the same could be true of other species.”

AI in space: Karpathy suggests AI chatbots as interstellar messengers to alien civilizations Read More »

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NASA hasn’t landed on the Moon in decades—China just sent its third in six years

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Marching on —

China is going. NASA is talking about going. What gives?

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A Long March 5 rocket carrying the Chang'e-6 lunar probe blasts off from the Wenchang Space Launch Center on May 3, 2024 in Wenchang, China.

Enlarge / A Long March 5 rocket carrying the Chang’e-6 lunar probe blasts off from the Wenchang Space Launch Center on May 3, 2024 in Wenchang, China.

Li Zhenzhou/VCG via Getty Images

China is going back to the Moon for more samples.

On Friday the country launched its largest rocket, the Long March 5, carrying an orbiter, lander, ascent vehicle, and a return spacecraft. The combined mass of the Chang’e-6 spacecraft is about 8 metric tons, and it will attempt to return rocks and soil from the far side of the Moon—something scientists have never been able to study before in-depth.

The mission’s goal is to bring about 2 kg (4.4 pounds) of rocks back to Earth a little more than a month from now.

Chang’e-6 builds upon the Chinese space program’s successful lunar program. In 2019, the Chang’e-4 mission made a soft landing on the far side of the Moon, the first time this had ever been done by a spacecraft. The far side is more challenging than the near side, because line-of-sight communications are not possible with Earth.

Then, in late 2020, the Chang’e-5 mission landed on the near side of the Moon and successfully collected 1.7 kg of rocks. These were subsequently blasted off the surface of the Moon and returned to China where they have been studied since. It marked the first time in half a century, since efforts by the United States and Soviet Union, that samples were returned from the Moon.

Ambitious plans

The latest Chinese flight to the Moon launched Friday will synthesize the country’s learnings from its last two missions, by collecting and returning samples from the far side of the Moon.

“If the Chang’e-6 mission can achieve its goal, it will provide scientists with the first direct evidence to understand the environment and material composition of the far side of the moon, which is of great significance,” said Wu Weiren, an academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering and chief designer of China’s lunar exploration program.

This mission follows the launch and deployment of the Queqiao-2 relay satellite in March, which will serve as a bridge between communications from the far side of the Moon to operators back on Earth. China has also announced two future lunar missions, Chang’e-7 and Chang’e-8, later this decade. These robotic missions will land near the lunar South Pole, test lunar resources, and prepare the way for future crewed missions.

Nominally, China’s current plan calls for the first landing of two taikonauts on the surface of the Moon in 2029 or 2030. Eventually it wants to establish a lunar outpost.

China’s lunar missions are not operating in a vacuum—OK, technically, they are—but the point here is that China’s exploration efforts are proceeding alongside a parallel effort by the United States, NASA, and about three dozen partners under the auspices of the Artemis program.

Can NASA compete?

After decades of focusing its exploration efforts elsewhere, NASA finally turned back to the Moon about seven years ago. Since that time it has worked alongside the commercial space industry to develop a plan for a sustainable return to the lunar surface.

From the outside, China’s lunar program appears to be in the lead. It is difficult to argue about the string of successes with the Chang’e lunar program and the unprecedented landing on the far side of the Moon. If Chang’e-6 proves successful, that will be another strike in favor of China’s lunar program.

But to its credit, NASA is not simply seeking to replicate the glories of its Apollo lunar program in the 1960s and early 1970s. China’s first lunar mission with astronauts, for example, is intended to land two taikonauts on the Moon for just a few hours. The vehicles will be fully expendable, as were the Apollo rockets and spacecraft more than half a century ago.

NASA is taking a different approach, working with industry to develop a fleet of commercial cargo landers—such as Intuitive Machines’ largely successful Odysseus mission earlier this year—as well as larger human landers built by SpaceX and Blue Origin. This overall “architecture” is far more complex, requiring myriad launches to refuel spacecraft in orbit. It will likely take several years longer to get to the first lunar landing missions, either later this decade or earlier in the 2030s. But should NASA persist and succeed in this approach, it will open up a highway to the Moon the likes of which could only be dreamed of during the Apollo era. Imagine a flotilla of spacecraft going to and from the Moon. That’s the vision.

So it’s a competition between China’s embrace of a traditional approach versus NASA’s efforts to open the way into some kind of new future. Watching how this lunar competition unfolds over the next decade will be one of the most fascinating stories to follow.

NASA hasn’t landed on the Moon in decades—China just sent its third in six years Read More »

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Rocket Report: Astroscale chases down dead rocket; Ariane 6 on the pad

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RIP B1060 —

Rocket Factory Augsburg, a German launch startup, nears a test-firing of its booster.

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This image captured by Astroscale's ADRAS-J satellite shows the discarded upper stage from a Japanese H-IIA rocket.

Enlarge / This image captured by Astroscale’s ADRAS-J satellite shows the discarded upper stage from a Japanese H-IIA rocket.

Welcome to Edition 6.42 of the Rocket Report! Several major missions are set for launch in the next few months. These include the first crew flight on Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft, set for liftoff on May 6, and the next test flight of SpaceX’s Starship rocket, which could happen before the end of May. Perhaps as soon as early summer, SpaceX could launch the Polaris Dawn mission with four private astronauts, who will perform the first fully commercial spacewalk in orbit. In June or July, Europe’s new Ariane 6 rocket is slated to launch for the first time. Rest assured, Ars will have it all covered.

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.

German rocket arrives at Scottish spaceport. Rocket Factory Augsburg has delivered a booster for its privately developed RFA One rocket to SaxaVord Spaceport in Scotland, the company announced on X. The first stage for the RFA One rocket was installed on its launch pad at SaxaVord to undergo preparations for a static fire test. The booster arrived at the Scottish launch site with five of its kerosene-fueled Helix engines. The remaining four Helix engines, for a total of nine, will be fitted to the RFA One booster at SaxaVord, the company said.

Aiming to fly this year… RFA hopes to launch its first orbital-class rocket by the end of 2024. The UK’s Civil Aviation Authority last month granted a range license to SaxaVord Spaceport to allow the spaceport operator to control the sea and airspace during a launch. RFA is primarily privately funded but has won financial support from the European Space Agency, the UK Space Agency, and the German space agency, known as DLR. The RFA One rocket will have three stages, stand nearly 100 feet (30 meters) tall, and can carry nearly 2,900 pounds (1,300 kilograms) of payload into a polar Sun-synchronous orbit.

Arianespace wins ESA launch contract. The European Space Agency has awarded Arianespace a contract to launch a joint European-Chinese space science satellite in late 2025, European Spaceflight reports. The Solar wind Magnetosphere Ionosphere Link Explorer (SMILE) is a 4,850-pound (2,200-kilogram) spacecraft that will study Earth’s magnetic environment on a global scale. The aim of the mission is to build a more complete understanding of the Sun-Earth connection. On Tuesday, ESA officially signed a contract for Arianespace to launch SMILE aboard a Vega C rocket, which is built by the Italian rocket-maker Avio.

But it may not keep it … In late 2023, ESA member states agreed to allow Avio to market and manage the launch of Vega C flights independent of Arianespace. When the deal was initially struck, 17 flights were contracted through Arianespace to be launched aboard Vega vehicles. While these missions are still managed by Arianespace, Avio is working with the launch provider to strike a deal that would allow the Italian rocket builder to assume the management of all Vega flights. The Vega C rocket has been grounded since a launch failure in 2022 forced Avio to redesign the nozzle of the rocket’s solid-fueled second-stage motor. Vega C is scheduled to return to flight before the end of 2024. (submitted by Ken the Bin)

The easiest way to keep up with Eric Berger’s space reporting is to sign up for his newsletter, we’ll collect his stories in your inbox.

Update on ABL’s second launch. ABL Space Systems expected to launch its second light-class RS1 rocket earlier this year, but the company encountered an anomaly during ground testing at the launch site in Alaska, according to Aria Alamalhodaei of TechCrunch. Kevin Sagis, ABL’s chief engineer, said there is “no significant delay” in the launch of the second RS1 rocket, but the company has not announced a firm schedule. “During ground testing designed to screen the vehicle for flight, an issue presented that caused us to roll back to the hangar,” Sagis said, according to Alamalhodaei. “We have since resolved and dispositioned the issue. There was no loss of hardware and we have validated vehicle health back out on the pad. We are continuing with preparations for static fire and launch.”

Nearly 16 months without a launch … ABL’s first RS1 test flight in January 2023 ended seconds after liftoff with the premature shutdown of its liquid-fueled engines. The rocket crashed back onto its launch pad in Alaska. An investigation revealed a fire in the aft end of the RS1 booster burned through wiring harnesses, causing the rocket to lose power and shut off its engines. Engineers believe the rocket’s mobile launch mount was too small, placing the rocket too close to the ground when it ignited its engines. This caused the hot engine exhaust to recirculate under the rocket and led to a fire in the engine compartment as it took off.

Rocket Report: Astroscale chases down dead rocket; Ariane 6 on the pad Read More »

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Two giants in the satellite telecom industry join forces to counter Starlink

Amazon, Commercial space, Intelsat, kuiper, Science, ses, Space, spacex, starlink / /

M&A —

SES is buying Intelsat, the world’s first commercial satellite operator, for $3.1 billion.

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The Intelsat 901 satellite is seen by a Northrop Grumman servicing vehicle in 2020.

Enlarge / The Intelsat 901 satellite is seen by a Northrop Grumman servicing vehicle in 2020.

Facing competition from Starlink and other emerging satellite broadband networks, the two companies that own most of the traditional commercial communications spacecraft in geostationary orbit announced plans to join forces Tuesday.

SES, based in Luxembourg, will buy Intelsat for $3.1 billion. The acquisition will create a combined company boasting a fleet of some 100 multi-ton satellites in geostationary orbit, a ring of spacecraft located more than 22,000 miles (nearly 36,000 kilometers) over the equator. This will be more than twice the size of the fleet of the next-largest commercial geostationary satellite operator.

The problem is that demand is waning for communication services through large geostationary (GEO) satellites. There are some large entrenched customers, like video media companies and the military, that will continue to buy telecom capacity on geostationary satellites. But there’s a growing demand among consumers, and some segments of the corporate and government markets, for the types of services offered by constellations of smaller satellites flying closer to Earth.

The biggest of these constellations, by far, is SpaceX’s Starlink network, with more than 5,800 active satellites in its low-Earth orbit fleet a few hundred miles above Earth. Each of the Starlink satellites is smaller than a conventional geostationary platform, but linked together with laser communication terminals, thousands of these spacecraft pack enough punch to eclipse the capacity of internet networks anchored by geostationary satellites. Starlink now has more than 2.6 million subscribers, according to SpaceX.

Satellites in low-Earth orbit (LEO) offer some advantages over geostationary satellites. Because they are closer to users on the ground, low-Earth orbit satellites provide signals with lower latency. The satellites for these constellations can be mass-produced at relatively low cost, compared to a single geostationary satellite, which often costs $250 million or more to build and launch.

“In a fast-moving and competitive satellite communication industry, this transaction expands our multi-orbit space network, spectrum portfolio, ground infrastructure around the world, go-to-market capabilities, managed service solutions, and financial profile,” said Adel Al-Saleh, CEO of SES, in a statement announcing the acquisition of Intelsat.

A trend of consolidation

Some of the largest legacy operators in geostationary orbit have made moves over the last decade to respond to the new competition.

The only operational low-Earth orbit internet constellation besides Starlink was launched by OneWeb, which primarily sells capacity to existing internet providers, who then distribute services to individual consumers. This is in contrast to SpaceX’s approach with Starlink providing services direct to homes and businesses.

Eutelsat, the third-largest operator of geostationary satellites, merged with OneWeb last year, creating a company with a blended offering of GEO and LEO services. Viasat, a pioneer in satellite internet services using dedicated spacecraft in geostationary orbit, last year purchased Inmarsat, which specialized in providing connectivity to airplanes and ships.

SES’s acquisition of Intelsat stands apart due to the size of their satellite fleets. Founded in 1985, SES currently operates 43 geostationary satellites, plus 26 broadband spacecraft in medium-Earth orbit (MEO) a few thousand miles above Earth. These MEO satellites operate in a kind of middle ground between LEO and GEO satellites, offering lower-latency than geostationary networks, while still flying high enough to not require hundreds or thousands of spacecraft to blanket the globe.

Intelsat has 57 geostationary satellites, primarily for television and video relay services. Al-Saleh said the combined company will offer coverage over 99 percent of the world, and provide services through a range of communication bands. For now, LEO broadband satellites in the Starlink and OneWeb networks beam signals to user terminals in Ku-band.

Al-Saleh said the combined networks of SES and Intelsat will span Ka-band, Ku-band, X-band, C-band, UHF, and secure bands tailored for military use. “That gives us a unique position in the market place to be able to deliver to our clients,” he said.

SES and Intelsat have 13 new satellites on order, including six GEO spacecraft and seven broadband MEO satellites. Intelsat also brings to the table access to OneWeb’s LEO constellation. Earlier this year, Intelsat announced it reserved $250 million of capacity on OneWeb’s network over the next six years, with an option to purchase double that amount.

This illustration shows the relative locations of satellites in geostationary orbit, medium-Earth orbit, and low-Earth orbit.

Enlarge / This illustration shows the relative locations of satellites in geostationary orbit, medium-Earth orbit, and low-Earth orbit.

“We will create a stronger expanded network capabilities that are multi-orbit,” Al-Saleh said in an earnings call Tuesday. “We are not just a GEO player. We are an all-orbit player.”

Internet signals coming from a GEO satellite, like a Viasat spacecraft, typically have a latency of about 600 milliseconds. Al-Saleh said SES’s O3b network in medium-Earth orbit provides signals with a latency of about 120 milliseconds. According to SpaceX, Starlink latency ranges between 25 and 60 milliseconds.

A satellite pioneer

Intelsat has a storied history. Founded in 1964 as an intergovernmental organization, Intelsat operated the first commercial communications satellite in geostationary orbit. It became a private company in 2001, then went public in 2013 before filing for bankruptcy in 2020. Intelsat emerged from bankruptcy proceedings as a private company in 2022.

“Over the past two years, the Intelsat team has executed a remarkable strategic reset,” said David Wajsgras, CEO of Intelsat, in a statement. “We have reversed a 10-year negative trend to return to growth, established a new and game-changing technology roadmap, and focused on productivity and execution to deliver competitive capabilities.”

SES and Intelsat expect the acquisition to close in the second half of 2025, pending regulatory approvals. The boards of both companies unanimously approved the transaction.

Both companies maintain hundreds of millions of dollars of business with the US government each year, and the military’s appetite for commercial satellite communications is going up. “I think many of the satellite players are seeing the benefit of that, not just us,” Al-Saleh said. “You can look at our competitors. You can look at Starlink. You can look at others. We’re all seeing an uptick in demand.”

Al-Saleh said he doesn’t foresee any roadblocks from the Pentagon or any government regulators before closing the transaction next year.

SES and Intelsat revealed last year there were in talks to combine. According to Al-Saleh, SES looked at multiple opportunities for mergers or acquisitions to make use of a multibillion-dollar windfall from the Federal Communications Commission tied to the auction of C-band satellite spectrum for cellular networks.

“It was clear to us that this particular transaction, if we’re able to successfully close it with the right type of value, is the most compelling proposition we had on the table,” he said.

Two giants in the satellite telecom industry join forces to counter Starlink Read More »

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NASA lays out how SpaceX will refuel Starships in low-Earth orbit

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Artist's illustration of two Starships docked belly-to-belly in orbit.

Enlarge / Artist’s illustration of two Starships docked belly-to-belly in orbit.

SpaceX

Some time next year, NASA believes SpaceX will be ready to link two Starships in orbit for an ambitious refueling demonstration, a technical feat that will put the Moon within reach.

SpaceX is under contract with NASA to supply two human-rated Starships for the first two astronaut landings on the Moon through the agency’s Artemis program, which aims to return people to the lunar surface for the first time since 1972. The first of these landings, on NASA’s Artemis III mission, is currently targeted for 2026, although this is widely viewed as an ambitious schedule.

Last year, NASA awarded a contract to Blue Origin to develop its own human-rated Blue Moon lunar lander, giving Artemis managers two options for follow-on missions.

Designers of both landers were future-minded. They designed Starship and Blue Moon for refueling in space. This means they can eventually be reused for multiple missions, and ultimately, could take advantage of propellants produced from resources on the Moon or Mars.

Amit Kshatriya, who leads the “Moon to Mars” program within NASA’s exploration division, outlined SpaceX’s plan to do this in a meeting with a committee of the NASA Advisory Council on Friday. He said the Starship test program is gaining momentum, with the next test flight from SpaceX’s Starbase launch site in South Texas expected by the end of May.

“Production is not the issue,” Kshatriya said. “They’re rolling cores out. The engines are flowing into the factory. That is not the issue. The issue is it is a significant development challenge to do what they’re trying to do … We have to get on top of this propellant transfer problem. It is the right problem to try and solve. We’re trying to build a blueprint for deep space exploration.”

Road map to refueling

Before getting to the Moon, SpaceX and Blue Origin must master the technologies and techniques required for in-space refueling. Right now, SpaceX is scheduled to attempt the first demonstration of a large-scale propellant transfer between two Starships in orbit next year.

There will be at least several more Starship test flights before then. During the most recent Starship test flight in March, SpaceX conducted a cryogenic propellant transfer test between two tanks inside the vehicle. This tank-to-tank transfer of liquid oxygen was part of a demonstration supported with NASA funding. Agency officials said this demonstration would allow engineers to learn more about how the fluid behaves in a low-gravity environment.

Kshatriya said that while engineers are still analyzing the results of the cryogenic transfer demonstration, the test on the March Starship flight “was successful by all accounts.”

“That milestone is behind them,” he said Friday. Now, SpaceX will move out with more Starship test flights. The next launch will try to check off a few more capabilities SpaceX didn’t demonstrate on the March test flight.

These will include a precise landing of Starship’s Super Heavy booster in the Gulf of Mexico, which is necessary before SpaceX tries to land the booster back at its launch pad in Texas. Another objective will likely be the restart of a single Raptor engine on Starship in flight, which SpaceX didn’t accomplish on the March flight due to unexpected roll rates on the vehicle as it coasted through space. Achieving an in-orbit engine restart—necessary to guide Starship toward a controlled reentry—is a prerequisite for future launches into a stable higher orbit, where the ship could loiter for hours, days, or weeks to deploy satellites and attempt refueling.

In the long run, SpaceX wants to ramp up the Starship launch cadence to many daily flights from multiple launch sites. To achieve that goal, SpaceX plans to recover and rapidly reuse Starships and Super Heavy boosters, building on expertise from the partially reusable Falcon 9 rocket. Elon Musk, SpaceX’s founder and CEO, is keen on reusing ships and boosters as soon as possible. Earlier this month, Musk said he is optimistic SpaceX can recover a Super Heavy booster in Texas later this year and land a Starship back in Texas sometime next year.

NASA lays out how SpaceX will refuel Starships in low-Earth orbit Read More »