Since I was a young child Mars held a special fascination for me. It was so close and yet so faraway. I have never doubted that it once had advanced life and still has remnants of that life now. I am a dedicated member of the Mars Society,Norcal Mars Society National Space Society, Planetary Society, And the SETI Institute. I am a supporter of Explore Mars, Inc. I'm a great admirer of Elon Musk and SpaceX. I have a strong feeling that Space X will send a human to Mars first.
I was working with NASA and was at a meeting at Johnson Space Center in the 1987. I met an engineer who took me on a tour of the Shuttle simulator. While we were there she had me sit in the pilot’s seat and asked me to turn on the emergency oxygen which at the time was located on the back of the commander’s seat out of reach of any normal human. The emergency procedures required the crew in the jump seats to turn on the Oxygen.
When they recovered the intact cabin, they discovered that all of the emergency oxygen bottles were partially empty. This led them to suspect that the astronauts had survived and they did an analysis that showed the crew experienced about 10 g’s during the explosion and then settled in to a 0 g free fall. So the crew was not only alive but were alert enough to follow emergency procedures.
When the autopsy results came some had died of blunt force trauma on impact and others drowned. You can look this up on the net as well.
What have Elon and his team built and what will they be able to do with it?
by John K. Strickland Monday, February 21, 2022
This path is supported by a mixture of pure determination, massive cooperation and support, and the solid mathematics of significantly improving designs and increasing production rate of vehicles. The numbers are like bacteria multiplying in a Petri dish: in a few days the individually invisible cells become a visible colony, overwhelming some others in sheer numbers.
To the public, the media and even some of the space community, the last year for SpaceX has not seemed to be progressing that fast. However, right before our eyes, what Musk calls “stage zero”, the complex launch tower and associated platform and tank farm, was being designed and built and is now almost ready to support launches. Steady progress has been made in the production of and design improvements to the two main space vehicles, the Starship stage and the Super Heavy booster. The capacity to build more vehicles at Boca Chica is shortly to be four times larger, as a much larger high bay building nears completion.
What can be accomplished with this enormously strong and still burgeoning capacity? Musk will, once the stages are flight proven, soon have the ability to allocate Starship vehicles for several different purposes.
In his February 10 talk (see “Starship status check”, The Space Review, February 14, 2022), Musk also gave clear answers for the lack of progress in some areas such as the ocean platforms, Cape area launch facilities, the Starship crew cabin design, and development of a set of cargo items for his first Mars flights. He fairly pointed out that his available work force (and his own personal time) is focused on current needs: design, development, and construction of rocket vehicles and the Boca Chica experimental launch complex.
Mostly out of sight of the media’s cameras, work has been going on at the Hawthorne, California, site and in McGregor, Texas, where a second assembly line for Raptor engines is being built. By March, SpaceX expects to be able to build about one Raptor engine a day. By 2023, this production rate could exceed 400 engines per year. It is also reasonable to expect that production of Starship and Super Heavy components, especially the standard two-meter-high stainless steel rings, will increase before the end of 2022, to allow production of at least one vehicle in every bay about every three months. The eight bays they will have would thus allow them to build 32 vehicles per year. However, in a year, expect another increase in production capacity of both components, and bays to assemble and stack them in, as more high bay structures will be built at site at Cape Canaveral.
What does this translate into in terms of actual vehicle production? For each complete booster, they need 33 Raptors on the Super Heavy stage and 9 on the Starship stage: a total of 42 Raptors, with a few being the vacuum version with the extended nozzle. I will assume arbitrarily that the Super Heavy boosters will launch multiple Starship stages during a given period with production components apportioned appropriately for this use at roughly three Starship stages for each Super Heavy. At one Raptor per day, in one year they could soon produce enough parts for 20 Starship stages (with 180 engines) and about six Super Heavies (with 165 engines.) If at some point, construction of designated production vehicles begins, they would soon have at least that many production vehicles. This does not count any existing stages which are presumably all development vehicles.
Note that increases in the capabilities of Starship and Super Heavy are continuing, as occasional scrapping of outdated models demonstrates. Starship will be lengthened to enable it to carry larger payloads. This is made possible by steady increases in the capacity of the Raptor engines, which have almost staggeringly large thrusts and pressures. Each Raptor 1 has a thrust of 185 tons, while the new Raptor 2 is now reaching thrusts of 230 tons and is aiming for 250 tons, with each engine producing about one gigawatt of energy while it is firing. Thus, for a few minutes, the first stage would produce as much energy as one of our larger states. The chamber pressure is more than 300 bar or over two tons per square inch, with the exhaust velocity more than three kilometers per second.
In the near future, a Super Heavy stage with 33 engines could have a liftoff thrust of 8,250 tons. If we assume the liftoff mass will be about 5,100 tons with payload, the thrust to mass ratio would be about 1.6 compared to the Saturn V’s 1.2. Future changes in the Starship stage mass will probably change this value, but this booster will rise off the pad fast.
What can be accomplished with this enormously strong and still burgeoning capacity? Musk will, once the stages are flight proven, soon have the ability to allocate Starship vehicles for several different purposes, and will also have several different versions of them. Several could be produced without aerodynamic surfaces and a small crew cabin for the NASA-sponsored lunar flight, with the expectation of those stages not returning to Earth’s surface. Some will eventually be outfitted with an extensive passenger quarters for the trip to Mars, but even more would be needed to carry bulk cargo to both the Moon and Mars. Just as in any city, the total mass of buildings far outweighs the mass of the people living in them. This is even truer for Mars, where the buildings must be pressurized, so the ratio of cargo flights to passenger flights could be as high as about 10 to 1. SpaceX will also be able to deliver extensive cargo to any site on the Moon with this reusable stage, for pay.
A significant number of Starship stages will be turned into tankers, to deliver propellant to payload-carrying Starship stages already in Earth orbit. If a stage can hold 1,200 tons of propellant, and a tanker stage can deliver 150 tons per flight, it would take eight tanker flights to refill the empty tanks. The most recent SpaceX images show the refueling being done with the stages side by side, rather than end to end. How the cryogenic propellant will be transferred rapidly still seems to be a proprietary secret, as the problem of rapid transfer of such propellant has been difficult to solve.
A lot of the decisions on first cargo flights to Mars will depend on the timing: when the first cargo flights can be flown, and where the first landing site is located. The best guess now would be during the 2024 Mars window. However, use of such an early window would also depend on having a set of cargo items built and ready to be launched in just two years.
Partial self-sufficiency depends heavily on two issues: energy production and food production, which itself depends on energy production.
Cargo flights can be flown on Hohmann transfer orbits, the optimal path to save propellant, since there would be no crew on board and the cargo is not very sensitive to cosmic radiation. Such orbits end (a) directly opposite the sun from the starting point, but also (b) in the orbit of Mars and (c) right where Mars is located at that time. Current plans call for direct entry of the vehicles, using the Mars atmosphere to get rid of the bulk of interplanetary velocity before the last of it is zeroed during the landing by a combination entry and landing burn, very similar to what is done by Falcon 9 rockets. Such direct entry methods may depend on the positioning of radio beacons at the desired landing location for best landing precision, and/or a simple Mars GPS system, to allow use of active trajectory management during entry, but this would require another two years of delay.
The landing site must be proven to have millions of tons of water ice accessible relatively close to the surface, either by direct excavation or by drilling and melting. Otherwise no vehicles would be able to return to Earth from that site. Concepts for landing sites have been changing more rapidly as new sensor technology is applied to detect water ice deposits. The site will almost certainly be either along the equator of Mars or south of the 40th parallel north. The approximate location of the accessible “permafrost” boundary seems to be at about 32 degrees north, but recent detection of hydrogen in the floor of equatorial Vallis Marineris indicates there could be vast amounts of water ice under the glacial debris on the floor.
However, the first cargo vehicles to land probably will not return to Earth since they will have to sit on Mars for several years before crews arrive. It is unlikely that robotics will have developed to the point of being able to unload a ship and set up a propellant plant by late 2024. Thus the first crews to arrive at Mars, about two years after the first cargo flights, would have as one of their first major tasks the construction of the propellant plant and water ice extraction system. This would need to include the ability to store the accumulated cryogenic propellant, which is not as great a burden in the cold Mars climate, with a near vacuum surrounding the storage tanks. The water can be obtained by either direct excavation of ice or drilling, melting in place and pumping.
In addition to water ice, the site should if possible be selected for the availability of iron and other minerals which could be of near-term use to the first Mars development base, focused on the construction of a settlement. Compact equipment can be used to make pure iron from iron ore, which can be alloyed to produce steel on Mars. Mars rocks in some areas are essentially iron ore. NASA should make it a priority to try to find such sites with both water ice and useful minerals with its orbiting satellites and possibly dedicated landers equipped with real, rotary sampling drills.
The first crew vehicles to land on Mars will also probably not return to Earth since they may be used as initial crew quarters. Crew flights to Mars will probably be at higher speeds to reduce the in-space transit time and thus the space radiation dose. The Mars atmosphere will easily absorb the extra entry velocity with appropriate thermal shielding. Both cargo and crew flights would need to land at a site at a safe distance of several kilometers away from the Mars base and be very careful to not overfly the base area on approach in case of a landing accident.
More cargo vehicles would probably be launched during the same window but well before the crew vehicles, and would be able to carry a large amount of basic equipment, along with food supplies for several years. Distributing the different kinds of supplies among several vehicles raises the chances of at least one landing successfully, enabling the crew to get right to work when it arrives. By 2026, a fleet of ten cargo vehicles carrying over 1,000 tons to Mars would be quite likely.
Shielding the crew from the cosmic radiation flux at the surface should also be a high priority as it would slowly degrade health and increase cancer risk if shielding is not provided. One concept for such shielding would be to use vacant space provided above and around the crew cabin areas inside the Starship stages after cargo is removed. Regolith—soil, sand, and rocks—is plentiful and free on Mars. It can be excavated, sifted, and poured into bags by an automatic system, and could also be lifted to the top of a Starship using the ship’s own elevator. The crew could manually move this regolith in bags into the space, providing the needed dense shielding. This is much easier in 38% gravity! Alternatively, this space could be filled with pure, filtered Mars water, but a much larger volume of water would be needed for the same amount of protection.
Elon Musk estimates that he will need to transport one million tons of cargo to Mars before a settlement is relatively self-sufficient.
Once a larger crew has arrived, probably after 2030, underground or buried habitats can be installed, with just a few meters of regolith able to completely protect the crew from the space radiation. We would want to reduce the exposure from the expected surface dose of about 250 millisieverts per Earth year down to less than 50. (Mars itself and its thin air blocks about 60% of the slowly varying interplanetary dose of 500 to 700 millisieverts.) The surface dose might be even less if the landing site is in Vallis Marineris, due to the high canyon walls blocking some of the sky.
As later crews arrive, some of the early crews can return to Earth on Starship stages filled with Mars-derived propellant. Part of the rationale for many people to go to (or stay at) a developing Mars base and settlement is the attractive dynamics of participating in building a steadily expanding living space, rather than living on Earth in a more static social environment. Part of the planning would be in determining (as a ratio) how much larger the next crew, with a new crew arriving every 26 months, could be. Each existing crew would, in addition to other tasks, prepare living quarters and growth areas large enough to house, feed and support the next crew. This ratio could be called the ramp-up factor, but it would probably vary from year to year as the base starts to become more self-sufficient.
Partial self-sufficiency depends heavily on two issues: energy production and food production, which itself depends on energy production. In addition, both depend on the ability to build industrial facilities to make fuel and materials, and to construct pressurized habitats to house crew and provide growing areas for food plants.
Most people greatly underestimate the effort it will take to build growing areas and grow food crops on Mars or in space. On Earth, a one-square-kilometer (247-acre) farm gets a maximum of about a one gigawatt of sunlight on a clear day, at noon in midsummer. Much less than this gets to the plants due to clouds, etc., and the plants only use about 1% of what they get to make plant tissue, only part of which is actually edible food. To create one square kilometer of pressurized growing space will require a huge amount of structural materials, and most of that will need to be made locally. Even so, Elon Musk estimates that he will need to transport one million tons of cargo to Mars before a settlement is relatively self-sufficient.
If NASA is willing to cooperate with the SpaceX-led Mars effort, it can reap a huge scientific benefit, since direct human access to even one location on Mars would be of immense use to Mars science.
It is important to realize how large the SpaceX cargo capacity to an operating Mars development base will be. Most NASA concepts envision barely enough mass—typically a few tens of tons—to support a crew for one short mission. The high SpaceX mass transport capacity will allow a large amount of industrial equipment to be sent. This would include equipment designed to smelt Mars minerals into metals, alloy them, and then to turn the structural metals into pressurized habitats, drill rigs, and other kinds of equipment. Large amounts of other artificial materials, such as plastics and polymers, will also be produced. Tunnel boring and lining equipment would also be included. Operations will be limited more by manpower than by lack of equipment and supplies.
Musk has a goal of building the large fleet of Starships needed to carry the required amount of equipment and supplies to get a settlement going. If an advanced Starship stage can carry 200 tons of cargo to the surface of Mars, 5,000 trips of such vehicles to Mars would be able to carry the one million tons. Ignoring the prior build-up phase, if he had 500 Starship stages with the tankers to support them, he would be able to transport that much during just ten Mars launch windows or in about 22 years. In actuality, the number of flights would be increasing from year to year, as the 500 stages could carry 100,000 tons during each window, and the existing crew would not be able to handle such a large volume of materials without a carefully planned ramp-up sequence.
In addition, the 500 stages would need a total of something like 500,000 tons of cryogenic propellant, stored and ready in tanks, to be able to take off from Mars and leave on a rapid return to Earth to be ready for the next launch window. To handle this, mass production of large fuel storage tanks from Mars metals will be required. If the fuel plant ran steadily for 25 months before each Earth return window opened, it would need to produce 20,000 tons per month, or about 67 tons per day. Some power will also be needed for cryo-coolers, even on Mars.
The amount of propellant needed to get the cargo on its way to Mars from Earth is also very large. For each Mars window with a planned 500 payloads, several thousand tons is needed to launch each payload into Earth orbit, and perhaps 25,000 tons is needed via Starship-derived tankers to refill each cargo Starship. This is needed for the cargo stage to leave Earth orbit and enter the transfer orbit to Mars. The total launch propellant needed per window could be about 15 million tons. Settling a planet is a large-scale operation. Switching to lunar derived propellant accumulated at an L1 depot between launch windows is one way to massively reduce propellant use.
Life on Earth is of immeasurable value, so a good backup location, outdoors on Mars, is certainly a grand goal for humanity to achieve.
Although there are a wide array of different opinions on required areas for food production in space, estimates seem to center around 200 square meters of growing area with 100 kilowatts of power per person. That would mean a construction crew of 100 people would need 10 megawatts of power with 20,000 square meters of growing area for food production. If the growing areas are trays on four levels, the pressurized building area might need to be only 5,000 square meters, comparable to a football field. The amount of structure to keep this area pressurized, lit and at the right temperature, will be in the many thousands of tons, so production of structural metals and plastics from local Mars materials will be required rather quickly as the base and settlement grows. Thus the one-square-kilometer farm transferred to Mars (250 by 250 meters with four growing levels), could possibly support 5,000 vegetarians or about 2,500 people with some fish and meat production, needing about 500 megawatts of power. A large amount of power will also be needed for propellant production. The power would need to come from fission, fusion, or space solar arrays, as there are no fossil fuels on Mars, and erecting huge ground solar arrays in Mars weaker sunlight would be very difficult.
If NASA is willing to cooperate with the SpaceX-led Mars effort, it can reap a huge scientific benefit, since direct human access to even one location on Mars would be of immense use to Mars science. Geologists would be able to investigate a huge area around the base or settlement with pressurized rovers, possibly discovering mineral site deposits of great use to the settlement. As Mars is a naturally cold-accreted planet, with ground water and volcanism through most of its geological history, it will have most of the common rock-forming minerals that Earth does, but not as many concentrated ore deposits and these may be hard to find.
As the settlement(s) grow, Mars will slowly grow in importance in our minds as a second abode of life beyond the Earth, and if the Mars settlers are persistent, they will be able to turn the planet into a second living world, even if much cooler and dryer than the Earth is. The settlers would have a very good reason to terraform Mars, as their descendants could then truly go outdoors without even wearing an oxygen mask. As Musk points out, space settlement is one way of improving the persistence of consciousness (and even intelligence) in the universe. Life on Earth is of immeasurable value, so a good backup location, outdoors on Mars, is certainly a grand goal for humanity to achieve.
John K. Strickland is the author of the books Developing Space and Settling Space, and is a member of the Board of Directors for the National Space Society. However, in his articles, he does not speak for any organization. His opinions are his own.
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Most conference panels are fairly anodyne affairs. Participants, even competitors in the same field, stick to their talking points and, at most, only politely disagree with one another. It often requires prodding from the panel’s moderator, or audience questions, to bring differences among the panelists into sharper focus.
“So I would say, number one, small satellite customers want reliability. They need to get to space,” said Hart. “Satellites that are not placed in space are not that useful.”
Sometimes, though, such prodding isn’t required. The right mix of personalities on a panel can turn it into something like MTV’s “The Real World” from 30 years ago, “when people stop being polite and start getting real.” That was the case a couple times during the SmallSat Symposium earlier this month in Mountain View, California, amid discussions about the hypercompetitive launch market for smallsats.
Big talk about small rockets
One panel at the conference covered the ever-popular topic of small launch vehicles, with representatives of five vehicle developers on stage. That was only a small cross-section of a larger market featuring dozens of companies worldwide developing vehicles, far more than even the most optimistic estimates of smallsat demand can support.
One question posed to the panel is what they thought smallsat customers were looking for in a launch service. “So I would say, number one, small satellite customers want reliability. They need to get to space,” said Dan Hart, president and CEO of Virgin Orbit. “Satellites that are not placed in space are not that useful.”
Other factors, he said, include “schedule dependability” and flexibility to get to their desired orbit. “Certainly price matters,” he added, “but as part of the whole value proposition.”
Another panelist strongly disagreed. “I don’t think it’s all about reliability,” said Chris Kemp, CEO of Astra. “We’re not flying people. We’re not flying billion-dollar satellites. The cost of manufacturing the satellite is often a fraction of the cost of the launch. If you have a company that can build several spare satellites, it’s the agility and the speed with which you can get to orbit, ultimately, that is of value.”
That’s particularly the case, he said, of megaconstellations, where the loss of an individual satellite has little impact. “The smaller your launch is, the more frequent it is, the less eggs you place in one basket,” he said. “I think there’s really high value, for startups especially, to be able to get something into orbit rapidly and precisely the orbit they want to get to, the inclination, on their schedule. And if you can make that attempt five different times at the same cost than a rocket that’s more reliable, many companies will make that trade.”
Hart jumped in. “I agree with you that reliability is not everything, but it is important,” he said. “I think if you asked satellite customers, it is one of the very important elements. A lot of them aren’t planning the way you just described, and there may be a day when they do, in which case it’ll shift. But a lot of them put their heart and soul into a couple spacecraft and they’re really counting on them to get there.”
That wasn’t the only time that Kemp took a contrarian or controversial view. “Starship’s coming,” he said of SpaceX’s next-generation launch system. “You’ll be able to move 100,000 pounds into low Earth orbit for a relatively small amount of money.”
“I think what we’re going to see as an industry is stratification between incredibly inexpensive freight services to space” like Starship, he said. “What’s on the other end of that spectrum is ultra high frequency.”
“That’s why we’re not going to do a big rocket. We’re going to let Elon [Musk] do that. He’s really good at it. We’re going to do a small rocket and we’re going to scale up: we’re going to scale the factory not the rocket,” he said. “There’s not a lot in the middle there.”
That seemed to be a swipe at companies that have talked about moving from small to medium-class vehicles, such as Rocket Lab and its Neutron vehicle under development. Lars Hoffman, senior vice president of global launch services at Rocket Lab, was on the panel but didn’t take the bait.
“We did the market research analysis looking out over the rest of the decade and we see a lot of these megaconstellations coming along,” he said. “There will be some bulk deployment, but we found that there was an opening there, a gap that needed to be addressed, and we’re filling that with our Neutron medium-lift rocket.”
“What’s going to happen with space is what happened in Silicon Valley,” Kemp said. “Something big is happening and we’re just at the beginning.”
Kemp believed there would be plenty of demand for small launch services, drawing comparisons to growth of the Internet. “We’re in the carcass of Silicon Graphics,” he said, referring to the Computer History Museum building that hosted the conference that once belonged to Silicon Graphics, a high-flying but now defunct workstation company.
“What’s going to happen with space is what happened in Silicon Valley,” he said, with “homogenous infrastructures developed at scale” replacing customized hardware. “Something big is happening and we’re just at the beginning.”
Not everyone shared his confidence. “The ecosystem overall is growing like crazy and there will be more demand,” said Jörn Spurmann, cofounder and chief operating officer of Rocket Factory Augsburg, a German small launch vehicle developer. “I still believe there’s too many providers. I think it will be very interesting to see who will still be here in a few years.”
“There’s probably not enough demand for all the providers,” said Hart. “The ones that make it will be the ones that execute, and execute consistently, in getting their customers to orbit, and the ones who can differentiate themselves.”
Cost versus price
The debate on that panel, though, was mild compared to another launch services panel near the very end of the conference. That brought together both small launch vehicle developers as well as rideshare service providers and launch brokers.
“I think reusability is clearly the most profound thing in the last five to ten years. It’s just really, dramatically reduced the price of launch,” said Curt Blake, president and CEO of Spaceflight, which arranges for launches of smallsats on both small launchers and as rideshares on larger vehicles. “It’s led to price pressure for all the different launch providers, which in turn has led to more satellites being manufactured and launched.”
SpaceX, of course, is the company that has been leading in reusability and lowering launch prices. “Reusability really helps drives the cost down,” said Jarrod McLachlan, senior manager of rideshare sales at SpaceX. “You’re not having to build an entire new rocket every launch. That helps.”
It prompted skepticism from other panelists, though. “Is this level of price from SpaceX sustainable or not? I don’t know,” said Marino Fragnito, senior vice president at Arianespace.
“I actually don’t think price is the number-one driver,” McLachlan said. “The feedback I hear from my customers is schedule assurance is really the number-one thing.”
“The launch services costs, in my mind, bear no relationship to the prices,” said Giulio Ranzo, CEO of Avio, which makes the Vega small launcher. He pointed to SpaceX’s price of $5,000 per kilogram for its rideshare launch services. “If you add that up, the revenue doesn’t make the cost of the launcher. There must be something else that makes the business case successful other than the price paid by the objects being launched.”
McLachlan didn’t go into details about pricing but noted that the company benefits from strong demand to specific orbits served by SpaceX’s Transporter series of dedicated rideshare missions. “Most of the smallsat demand is in Sun-synchronous orbits,” he said. “It’s much easier to aggregate than you might suspect from looking at it from a numbers standpoint because there’s synergies on the business case.”
SpaceX’s critics were not convinced. “I’m not sure cost of launching is going down. Price is going down, for sure; that’s what we see,” Fragnito said. “The price is crushed because of SpaceX’s approach to rideshare. Is cost going down the same way? I’m not sure.”
Both Fragnito and Ranzo were suggesting that SpaceX was, in effect, engaging in predatory pricing: charging less than its cost to gain market share. SpaceX’s McLachlan avoided the issue. “I actually don’t think price is the number-one driver,” he said. “The feedback I hear from my customers is schedule assurance is really the number-one thing. Being able to plan to a date and know that your spacecraft is going to go on that date is by far the biggest driver in the conversations I’ve had.”
Fragnito also appeared to be frustrated with a lack of support from European governments. He cited the case of Cosmo-SkyMed Second Generation (CSG) 2, a radar mapping satellite for the Italian government launched last month on a Falcon 9. Last fall, the Italian space agency ASI announced it procured a Falcon 9 launch for CSG-2 because of delays with the Vega C, whose first launch has been pushed back to no earlier than this May. However, ASI said it planned to use Vega for the next CSG spacecraft launching in 2024.
“We see institutional payloads coming to the US,” he said. “This cannot happen the other way around, you know. We’ll never launch a US government satellite in Europe.”
Someone in the audience then piped up. “What about James Webb?” The NASA-led James Webb Space Telescope launched on an Ariane 5 last Christmas Day from French Guiana.
“James Webb was a different story,” he said, claiming that, at the time the agreement between NASA and ESA was signed two decades ago regarding the launch, there was no vehicle in the US capable of doing so. “We would be very happy to launch US government satellites.”
Fragnito took one more shot at the issue as the panel ended. Even as the moderator tried to wrap up the session and usher the panelists off the stage, Fragnito wanted to address a question he saw submitted through an online system. “Is Arianespace selling below cost?” he said, reading the question.
He noted that Vega, which is sold by Arianespace, is produced by Avio, a publicly traded company. “You just go on the website and you check it out and you check the profit,” he said. “I would like to do the same thing for SpaceX.”
SpaceX, of course, is a privately held company, and does not disclose earnings. Vega, according to a presentation on its website, reported €197.8 million (US$223.9 million) in net revenues through the first nine months of 2021, with earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization (EBITDA) of €8.0 million (US$9.1 million). Both, though, were down from the first nine months of 2020, including a 54% decline in EBITDA.
Fragnito’s own company, Arianespace, reported €1.25 billion (US$1.42 billion) in revenue in 2021. However, it did not disclose its profitability beyond a statement from a company executive that the company was roughly breakeven for the year.
If you’re going to talk the talk…
Minutes after that contentious panel ended, attention turned across the country to Cape Canaveral, Florida. At Space Launch Complex 46 there, Astra had its Rocket 3.3 vehicle on the pad for another launch attempt. One launch attempt was scrubbed five days earlier because of a range problem, while a second two days later was aborted just as the main engines fired because of a telemetry issue.
“I’m not sure cost of launching is going down. Price is going down, for sure,” Fragnito said. “The price is crushed because of SpaceX’s approach to rideshare. Is cost going down the same way? I’m not sure.”
There were no last-second hitches on this launch attempt, and the vehicle, designated LV0008, lifted off at 3 pm EST. All seemed to be going well until right after the upper stage separated, when onboard video showed it spinning and tumbling. The video was soon lost—or, at least, not shown on the company’s webcast.
“An issue has been experienced during flight that prevented the delivery of our customer payloads to orbit today. We are deeply sorry to our customers,” Carolina Grossman, director of product management at Astra, said several minutes later on the launch webcast. More than a week and a half later, the company has yet to provide any additional details about the failure.
The onboard video from the launch suggests there was a problem with the payload fairing separation, which takes place before stage separation. The fairing failed to separate cleaning, and the upper stage, having separated, ran into the fairing. After a few seconds, the fairing separates or is pulled away by the upper stage, which immediately starts tumbling.
This launch came after the first successful orbital launch of the vehicle last November, and means Astra is now just one for five in orbital launch attempts dating back to September 2020. That is probably not what the company had in mind when it deemphasized reliability.
This was also the first launch to carry satellite payloads: four cubesats sponsored by NASA, which paid for the launch through its Venture Class Launch Services program. Three of the cubesats were built by universities, and the fourth by NASA. Rather than the fleets of identical spacecraft that populate constellations, each was a one-of-its-kind satellite. No doubt the students and others who helped build them put a lot of heart and soul into them.
Jeff Foust (jeff@thespacereview.com) is the editor and publisher of The Space Review, and a senior staff writer with SpaceNews. He also operates the Spacetoday.net web site. Views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author alone.
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A simulation of the intercept of the Cosmos 1408 satellite by a Russian ASAT missile in a November 15, 2021 test. (credit: COMSPOC)
Arms control in outer space won’t work
by Brian Britt Monday, February 21, 2022
It was early evening in Washington on January 11, 2007, when an SC-19 ballistic missile took off from the Sichuan province in the People's Republic of China.[1] The missile climbed 860 kilometers before releasing a 600-kilogram payload that slammed into the defunct Chinese FengYun 1C weather satellite.[2] The test generated an estimated 35,000 pieces of orbital debris spanning 3,540 vertical kilometers, the largest debris-creating event to date that would threaten private, civil, and international assets in space, including the International Space Station.[3]
Attempts at comprehensive ASAT arms control are a waste of time. Energy is better spent pursuing narrower, more effective bans on debris-creating, kinetic ASAT tests and norms of behavior in outer space.
It was the first such test since 1985, when the United States shot down an American satellite using a direct-ascent air-launched missile. The Chinese test represented a turning point for the outer space domain, a revitalization in the struggle for outer space supremacy and the rise of a new threat to stability: anti-satellite (ASAT) weaponry. To American policymakers watching in dismay, the violent disassembly of FengYun 1C made two things clear. First, American satellites were vulnerable to attack from its largest foreign competitor. Second, in a domain devoid of rules and regulations, anything goes.
Perhaps the largest effect of the 2007 test was the urgency it gave to the outer space arms control cause. Here was the clearest demonstration that unregulated outer space was in need of better rules. Arms control in outer space, it was said, could prevent the next disaster.[4]
It was not to be. In the 15 years since China’s ASAT test, remarkably little progress has been made towards outer space arms control. One year after the 2007 test, China and Russia jointly proposed the Treaty on Prevention of the Placement of Weapons in Outer Space and of the Threat or Use of Force against Outer Space Objects, or PPWT for short, at the 2008 Conference on Disarmament. The draft treaty has floated in purgatory since its proposal, condemned to irrelevance in the face of staunch American opposition. But it remains the front runner for arms control treaties of its kind given a notable lack of proposed alternatives.
The PPWT’s fate is representative of the impossibility of codifying comprehensive arms control for outer space. Despite the legitimate threat of ASAT weapons, arms control agreements that would prevent their proliferation, restrict their use, and block their development remain out of reach. Difficulties defining ASATs, attributing their use, and verifying compliance make efforts to codify comprehensive ASAT arms control fruitless. What’s worse, arms control agreements such as these could degrade American competitiveness in space.
Attempts at comprehensive ASAT arms control are a waste of time. Energy is better spent pursuing narrower, more effective bans on debris-creating, kinetic ASAT tests and norms of behavior in outer space that could make outer space more stable and sustainable over the long-term.
Elusive definitions
Treaties that ban or control weapons must define what, exactly, they aim to ban or control. Without an ASAT definition that is simultaneously inclusive and precise, international regimes preventing the development, deployment, and use of ASATs are ineffective. Two obstacles make constructing a useful definition nearly impossible: weaponry diversity and the dual-use problem.
By the most literal interpretation of this PPWT language, almost everything can be classified as an ASAT and cannot be put into space.
The variety of potential ASAT weaponry presents a problem. ASAT weapons are any technology that can temporarily or permanently disable or destroy a satellite’s functionality. This means lasers and other directed energy weapons, air- and land-launched kinetic missiles, cyber uplink and downlink attacks, radiofrequency jamming attacks, attacks on ground stations, and maneuverable attack satellites are all ASAT weapons.
The diversity of ASAT weapons makes articulating a sufficiently comprehensive and precise definition impossible. Any attempt to do so will inevitably leave significant loopholes because each technology exists in a separate domain defined by unique operational requirements, norms, and expectations that require specific rules and regulations to control.
Controlling these technologies is especially difficult given most have legitimate, peaceful, or commonplace uses. Satellites are fragile. It takes little force to render them temporarily or permanently ineffective. When a target is defined by fragility, everything becomes a weapon, meaning innocent and commonplace technologies can be weaponized. Remotely operated repair satellites, for instance, are being developed to revitalize failing satellites.[5] But the same capabilities used to repair can be repurposed to destroy. Similarly, any satellite equipped with a radiofrequency antenna necessary to receive signals can also emit them with sufficient strength to jam the communications of nearby satellites.[6] This dual-use problem presents an obstacle for ASAT arms control by pitting legitimate and peaceful operational freedom against national security.
The PPWT defines a weapon as “any outer space object or its component produced or converted to eliminate, damage or disrupt normal functioning of objects in outer space.”[7] But by the most literal interpretation of this language, almost everything can be classified as an ASAT and cannot be put into space. The PPWT does not even attempt to address ASAT weapons that are deployed from the ground. Effective definitions elude the PPWT and will also elude future arms control attempts.
Verification problems
To identify and differentiate between compliance and disobedience, the international community must be able to identify and characterize objects in orbit. International arms control treaties cannot rely on goodwill alone. Verification capabilities must therefore be an inherent part of any agreement that restricts the use or deployment of weaponry.
But it won’t be in outer space—no reliable verification capabilities currently exist. Once an asset is deployed in orbit, it’s remarkably difficult to tell what it is and what it is capable of doing. For non-physical weapons, like cyber and jamming capabilities, there are no means to verify compliance. Any attempt to ban non-physical ASAT weapons would rely exclusively on trust. The PPWT seeks to bar signatories from placing “any weapons in outer space.”[8] It’s mere finger-wagging more than an enforceable rule without a means to verify compliance.
Effective verification mechanisms would be costly, complicated, and ineffective. And without verification capabilities, useful arms control agreements are hopeless.
Advocates for ASAT arms control would disagree, pointing to modern space situational awareness capabilities that can detect space launches and track the orbital inclination of their payloads through space-based infrared and infrasound monitoring systems.[9] Even if states can track objects that are placed into orbit, “verifying the function of a particular space object already in orbit is significantly more difficult.”[10] The “PAXSAT A” study demonstrated that uncovering the functionality of satellites in orbit is possible by utilizing a four-satellite constellation.[11] But this investigation method relies on the ability of the constellation to position itself near the object in question and the assumption that form follows function. Two problems are presented here. First, we do not have the infrastructure to conduct on-orbit investigations. Second, the logic that form follows function is fallible. Because space launches are expensive, advocates argue that the extra weight and cost needed to obscure the true function of an ASAT weapon in orbit with facade architecture is too expensive to be realistic. But basing arms control agreements on the predicted frugality of nation-states seems illogical, at best.
Even with perfect launch monitoring capabilities, significant unknowns remain. Many space-related armaments are ground-based, meaning these weapons can be developed and deployed outside of the scope of current ASAT monitoring systems. Also, for non-physical weapons, verification is simply impossible. No mechanism exists, for example, to verify compliance with moratoriums against developing or deploying cyberweapons or jamming capabilities.
In short, effective verification mechanisms would be costly, complicated, and ineffective. And without verification capabilities, useful arms control agreements are hopeless.
Attribution problems
Attribution, the ability to identify a violation and legitimately tie it to an actor, is a key ingredient of arms control agreements. The ability to attribute violations is key to justifying the invoking of punishments in accordance with international treaty law. Thus, attribution capabilities are the foundation of a deterrence mechanism that makes arms control agreements attractive and practical.
Attribution capabilities, or the lack thereof, present another problem for ASAT arms control. Some forms of ASAT attacks are attributable. Others are not. Non-physical threats, for instance, are particularly difficult to tie actions to national actors.
In the event a laser, for example, is used against a space asset, satellite operators would have a difficult time identifying the actor responsible for the attack. In the harsh environment of space, systems frequently fail without explanation. Unless the targeted satellite is equipped with sensors that could identify “a spike in thermal energy or sudden saturation of optical sensors,” there is no way to differentiate between a random satellite failure and a malicious laser attack.[12] And even if such capabilities exist, there is no guarantee one could attribute the laser’s use to a national actor.
Russia and China proposed the PPWT specifically because it satisfies the political hunger for ASAT arms control while permitting loopholes for a variety of ASAT possessions.
Jamming attacks are similarly difficult to attribute. Satellites use a narrow range of the electromagnetic spectrum to communicate. The crowded nature of orbits today means it is common for multiple space assets to use similar or identical frequencies and, as a result, routinely unintentionally jam the communications of a neighboring satellite.[13] Differentiating between intentional and unintentional jamming is difficult, if not impossible. In this environment, verification and compliance mechanisms are complicated to construct.
Recent cyberattacks have laid bare the difficult, lengthy, and uncertain process of attributing, much less identifying and understanding, cyber incursions. The Russian SolarWinds hack demonstrated a lack of an ability to definitively identify the scope and duration of a cyber penetration.[14] Similar problems will plague efforts to assert arms control regimes on cyber ASAT weapons.
Adversarial interests
International participation is another key ingredient of effective ASAT arms control regimes. But many of America’s key space-capable competitors perceive ASAT weapon possession as a strategic necessity. In other words, the interests of America’s rivals decrease the likelihood of reaching an international consensus on an anti-ASAT treaty, which is a necessary ingredient for a successful ASAT arms control regime. The United States relies on its space assets for a “diverse array of political, military and economic activities” fundamental to its national security.[15] This overreliance is seen as a weakness, something America’s adversaries can reliably exploit when conventional American military capabilities outstrip theirs.
Mutual weakness is a source of stability. American competitors, notably China and Russia, enjoy having ASATs because this allows them to exploit a major American weakness. Russia and China proposed the PPWT specifically because it satisfies the political hunger for ASAT arms control while permitting loopholes for a variety of ASAT possessions. From the perspective of Russia and China, ASATs are an equalizer that allows them to overcome a relative conventional weaknesses. The perceived strategic value of ASAT weapons makes arms control agreements that seek to legitimately and comprehensively eliminate or reduce the ability of countries to develop and possess ASATs unlikely.
Where arms control advocates go wrong
Despite these challenges, some argue that ASAT arms control agreements are a necessary aspect of a safe, secure, and stable space environment. Advocates for arms control maintain agreements could prevent an ASAT arms race. This is wrong. Arms control agreements will do more to shape the direction of, rather than prevent, an ASAT arms race. Because any agreement will be less than comprehensive, states will seek to develop ASAT weapons that fall outside of the agreement’s jurisdiction. If the agreement bans kinetic ASAT weapons, for instance, space-capable nations will push to develop more diverse, more effective non-kinetic weapons.
In addition, any agreement will likely increase the incentives to camouflage and disguise ASAT technology, worsening a problem that the arms control agreement initially set out to resolve. Any restrictions will inevitably force nations to make ASAT capabilities increasingly integrated with innocent infrastructure to avoid detection, furthering the dual-use problem, seeding doubt among the reliability of routine space assets, and incentivizing the weaponization of outer space.
ASAT weapons are a legitimate threat to the global community, and the space domain could benefit from more relevant, stronger rules of the road. But the solution is not ASAT arms control.
Even worse, pursuing ASAT arms control agreements could be detrimental to the competitiveness of American assets in space. One probable response to an ASAT arms control agreement is reduced federal government’s willingness to fund improvements to the resiliency and survivability of American space constellations.[16] Maintaining American competitiveness in space necessarily entails bolstering defensive measures against hostile ASAT capabilities. But reducing, or appearing to reduce, the threat to United States space assets through arms control agreements could make it harder to convince legislators and policymakers that expensive satellite acquisitions are worth pursuing.
From any perspective, ASAT arms control is a waste of time and detrimental to American interests.
Alternative measures
Despite challenges to a comprehensive ASAT arms control regime, two near-term actions are worth pursuing to bolster the sustainability and safety of the space environment.
First, as Michael Krepon suggests, the international community should agree to a moratorium on kinetic ASAT tests that generate debris and make the space environment more dangerous to operate in for everyone.[17] Tests like these have the characteristics that make them amenable to arms control agreements. It’s clear when it happens, how it happens, and where it comes from—in other words, tests like these are straightforward to define, monitor, verify, and attribute. They also invite international agreement. Debris-generating on-orbit ASAT tests make the space environment more difficult for everyone to operate and are, therefore, against the interest of all space-faring nations.
Second, the international community should try to establish norms of behavior that dictate activity in outer space. Norms will be more useful than codified, ineffective arms control agreements. Norms are built intentionally over time through repeated action. “Norms,” explains Audrey Schaffer, “can serve to highlight abnormal behavior, enabling warning of and protection against space threats.”[18] They can’t constrain malicious action, but they can serve to flag violations and increase international clarity as to what is right and wrong in the space domain. The United States, to capitalize on the utility of norms should, first, acknowledge that norms exist and, second, build a non-binding list of norms that can be communicated to the international community. This will serve to ignite an international conversation around what is good and what is not. Already, the international community is making meaningful progress. The United Nation’s Guidelines for the Long-term Sustainability of Outer Space Activities are a good start to a solidified, articulated collection of norms. To continue progress, the UN First Committee recently approved “a new working group to develop rules of the road for military activities in space.”[19]
ASAT weapons are a legitimate threat to the global community, and the space domain could benefit from more relevant, stronger rules of the road. But the solution is not ASAT arms control. The United States and the international community generally should let the PPWT revel in irrelevance. Instead, effort would be better spent on constructing a useful and implementable ban on definable, monitorable, and verifiable kinetic ASAT tests and solidifying general norms for behavior in outer space. Comprehensive ASAT arms controls might be politically pleasant but realistically, they're practical pitfalls.
Ben Baseley-Walker and Brian Weeden, “Verification in space: theories, realities and possibilities,” in Disarmament Forum: Arms Control Verification (Geneva: United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research, 2010), 45.
Brian Britt is a M.A. candidate at Georgetown University’s Security Studies Program studying space security, terrorism, and the changing Arctic environment.
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