NGLS - Next-Generation Launch System от ULA

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Tory Bruno‏Подлинная учетная запись @torybruno 9 ч. назад

Super advanced, automated welding gear showing up in our factory to support Vulcan. Thanks @PaRSystemsInc

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https://spaceflightnow.com/2017/04/18/ula-chief-says-blue-origin-in-drivers-seat-for-vulcan-engine-deal/

ULA chief says Blue Origin in driver's seat for Vulcan engine deal
 April 18, 2017 Stephen Clark

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The first fully-assembled BE-4 engine. Credit: Blue Origin

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A full-scale BE-4 engine developed by Blue Origin, the space company founded by Amazon.com's Jeff Bezos, is installed on a test stand in West Texas for a series of hotfire tests that United Launch Alliance will closely examine before settling on the reusable methane-fueled engine for its new-generation Vulcan rocket.

If the engine firings are successful, ULA will likely sel ect the BE-4 engine for the first stage of the Vulcan booster set to begin launching by the end of 2019, according to Tory Bruno, ULA's president and chief executive.

ULA will decide between Blue Origin's BE-4 engine and the kerosene-fueled AR1 powerplant fr om Aerojet Rocketdyne, a more traditional aerospace supplier.

But the BE-4 is ahead of the AR1 in development, and Bruno said ULA will go with the Blue Origin-built engine as soon as the first series of test-firings are successfully accomplished.

"When that engine begins its testing and we collect enough data, we'll be able to decide if the engine is going to work and meet the performance requirements," Bruno said April 4 at the 33rd Space Symposium in Colorado Springs. "When that data is in hand, then we'll make the down-selection. I expect that to be this year."

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Blue Origin kicked off development of the BE-4 engine for its own launcher several years before ULA approached Bezos's company. Bruno and Bezos announced the engine partnership in September 2015, a few months before ULA unveiled the name and basic design of the Vulcan launch vehicle.

At the time, full-scale testing of the BE-4 engine was expected to begin before the end of 2016. A timetable for the first full-scale BE-4 hotfire test has not been released, but officials fr om ULA and Blue Origin said the first test engine has been installed on a firing stand at Bezos's West Texas test facility for final checks.

Rob Meyerson, president of Blue Origin, said April 5 that the first firing of the test engine would occur "very soon."

 
Rob Meyerson, Blue Origin's president, presents a photo of the BE-4 engine being mounted on a test stand in West Texas during remarks at the 33rd Space Symposium on April 5. Credit: Stephen Clark/Spaceflight Now

According to Bruno, the hotfire tests will eliminate sufficient risk in the engine's development to permit ULA to settle on the BE-4 as the main propulsion system for the Vulcan booster stage.

Despite a delay of several months in the start of full-scale BE-4 testing, Bruno said the Vulcan rocket is still on track for a maiden flight by the end of 2019 if Blue Origin ends up the winner in ULA's engine test-off.

"Assuming we can make this decision in a reasonable span of time, yes," Bruno told reporters on the sidelines of the Space Symposium. "If we're on the BE-4, it's a pretty clear schedule. If the BE-4 is not going to work out and we sel ect AR1, they're further behind, so that puts a little more pressure on that schedule ... If we had to sel ect the AR1, I cannot fly it by 2019."

ULA will introduce the Vulcan launcher in phases, eventually replacing the company's Atlas 5 and Delta 4 rocket fleets in the 2020s.

The first step is developing a new high-power engine to replace the Russian-made RD-180 engine currently flying on the Atlas 5's first stage, followed by work on a new upper stage to replace the Centaur second stage, which is based on a 1960s-era design.

The advanced upper stage will be capable of refueling in space and can generate its own electricity with an on-board fuel cell, allowing it to loiter in orbit for weeks or months to conduct multiple missions as a space tug.

If ULA decides on the BE-4 as the RD-180's replacement, the Vulcan's first stage will be powered by two of the commercially-developed and privately-funded engines, each generating about 550,000 pounds of thrust at full throttle.

The U.S. Air Force last year committed more than $46 million of government funding to partially pay for the cost of accommodating the BE-4 engines on the Vulcan's first stage.

 
Artist's concept of ULA's Vulcan rocket, powered by two BE-4 engines and strap-on solid rocket boosters. Credit: ULA

Development of the BE-4 engine itself is a commercial effort, primarily funded by Blue Origin, with additional investment by ULA. Officials have not disclosed the BE-4's development cost, but Bruno said new rocket engines of its scale have typically cost about $1 billion to design, test, and certify.

The Air Force has obligated at least $115 million to the AR1 engine project in a cost-sharing arrangement with ULA and Aerojet Rocketdyne.

ULA engineers are designing two versions of the Vulcan first stage in case company managers pick either of the candidate engines.

Both engines use oxygen-rich staged combustion technology, a technique that minimizes propellant waste during launch. The BE-4 will burn a combination of super-cold liquified natural gas and liquid oxygen, while the AR1 consumes kerosene fuel at room temperature.

In the case of the BE-4, the Vulcan first stage will measure around 16.7 feet (5.1 meters) in diameter. The wider propellant tanks are needed to hold the BE-4's methane fuel, which is less dense than the RP-1 kerosene fuel used by the RD-180 and AR1.

The AR1 variant of the Vulcan launcher would have a first stage closer in design to the Atlas 5, which has a diameter of about 12.5 feet (3.8 meters). The AR1 engine will produce more than 500,000 pounds of thrust at sea level.

Aerojet Rocketdyne says the AR1 is the lowest-risk engine option for the Vulcan and offers the fastest path to end ULA's reliance on Russian engines to send U.S. military payloads into orbit.

 
Artist's illustration of the twin AR1 engine package proposed by Aerojet Rocketdyne for the Vulcan rocket. Credit: Aerojet Rocketdyne

Both engine candidates are designed to cost less than similarly-sized U.S.-made rocket engines, such as the RS-68 engine on the Delta 4 rocket and the reusable RS-25 engine built for the space shuttle and now being modified for NASA's huge Space Launch System.

ULA launches the lion's share of U.S. national security satellites, but its hold on the military launch market has loosened with SpaceX now allowed to compete for Pentagon launch contracts.

Bruno said the both versions of the Vulcan will have a lengthened first stage to hold more propellant, taking full advantage of the power of the twin BE-4 or AR1 engines, which will deliver over a million pounds of combined thrust, higher than the 860,000 pounds of thrust fr om the RD-180 engine.

Blue Origin kicked off the design of the BE-4 engine in 2011, and ULA officials previously said the BE-4 development schedule was about two years ahead of the AR1's timeline.

Bruno said Blue Origin originally intended the BE-4 to produce about 400,000 pounds of thrust. The engine was initially conceived for Blue Origin's own orbital launcher, now named New Glenn.

Blue Origin agreed to increase the power of the BE-4 for ULA, Bruno said.

The head start and steady funding stream fr om Bezos, who is now ranked as the second-richest person in the world, give the BE-4 an advantage in the competition with the AR1, Bruno said.

"Normally, when you're developing an engine, you start testing at a relatively low-scale — 10, 20 sometimes 25 percent — and you test components, then you jump to full-scale," Bruno said. "Blue was already developing this engine for their New Glenn vehicle when we entered our partnership.

"They were at 400,000 pounds of thrust. We asked them to increase it to 550, which they've done," he said. "But that meant that when we started working together, they already had hardware at 80 percent scale. They finished testing that hardware, and now they're at 100 percent scale."

The AR1 engine's development got a "cold start" when ULA started working with Aerojet Rocketdyne, Bruno said.

"They're still at the sub-scale component level," Bruno said. "They've been testing their preburner, which is like a miniature version of their main engine's combustion chamber that powers the powerpack, so they've been testing that and other components.

"Both of them are doing fine, but they just happen to be in different places on those development timelines," he said.

 
ULA chief executive Tory Bruno. Credit: Space Foundation

Meyerson said the BE-4 engine can be recovered and reused up to 100 times. Seven BE-4 engines will propel the company's heavy-lift New Glenn rocket into space.

Engineers contend the methane fuel used on the BE-4 makes it easier to reuse than kerosene-fueled engines like the AR1 and SpaceX's Merlin powerplant, leaving less soot and other contaminants that might need to be cleaned out between flights.

In an update emailed to news media last month, Bezos said Blue Origin's engineers installed new hydrostatic bearings inside the BE-4 turbopump to replace traditional ball and roller bearings, reducing contact between engine parts between startup and shutdown as the the pump produces 70,000 horsepower fr om a turbine spinning at 19,000 rpm.

"Why do we go to all this trouble instead of just using traditional bearings? Engine life," Bezos wrote. "We're relentlessly focused on reusability, and properly designed hydrostatic bearings offer the potential for longer engine life without refurbishment. This is one of the many engineering decisions we've made that we hope will lead to reusability – not just in principle – but to practical, operational reusability."

ULA plans to begin recovering the Vulcan's BE-4 engines, if they are selected, around 2024 using a giant parafoil that can be plucked out of the sky with a helicopter. The first stage structure will crash into the ocean and be discarded.

ULA officials say their approach salvages the engines, which represent about 70 percent of the cost of the first stage, without reserving fuel and adding steering and landing mechanisms for flyback maneuvers like SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket.

Bruno called SpaceX's reflight of a previously-used Falcon 9 rocket stage March 30 a "tremendous engineering accomplishment."

"The notion of booster recovery has been around for a long time, as well as things like single stage to oribt, which implies recovery, so I think it was a great accomplishment, and I had total confidence that they would get it done," Bruno said.

"The reason you do it is an economic reason," he said. "It's in order to lower the cost of what would otherwise be a fully expendable launch service. The jury is still out on what is the best way to do that. They have a full booster recovey concept. We're working on a concept wh ere we recover just the engines because it turns out two-thirds of the price of that booster is in literally one part — it's just the engine."

The BE-4 is, by far, the most powerful methane-fueled rocket engine ever built. That adds to the importance of the upcoming ground test campaign in West Texas, according to Bruno.

"Whenever you develop a new liquid rocket engine, if you change the fuel, or if you stay with the same fuel and change the scale of the engine, or if you keep the scale, keep the fuel but change the thermodynamic cycle ... Any one of those three variables can create a situation we call combustion instability," Bruno said.

All three variables are new with the BE-4.

"It's just like if you went out to start your car (in cold weather), you start it up and it idles rough for a few minutes, and then it warms up and everything's cool," he said. "That is actually combustion instability in your car's engine.

"When a rocket engine is sitting there putting out hundreds of thousands of horsepower, those few seconds can tear your engine up," Bruno said. "So it's one of the technical issues we deal with in engine development.

"Blue Origin's engine is methane," he added. "This will the largest scale we've ever done in methane, therefore, combustion instability is an inherent technical risk."

The first sequence of BE-4 hotfire tests will tell engineers if the engine has any such hiccups at startup.

"It's not unusual, by the way, to have some instability when you develop a new engine," Bruno said. "There are tried and true techniques that you apply to smooth that out. If they work right way, you're usually home free. I've never developed an engine that I didn't have to tune, but I have been in situations wh ere you tried the tried and true things, then nothing works, and nine months later you're still stuck. That's the risk we're retiring here."

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Apollo13 пишет:
Вулкан-Центавр полетит на пол года позже, но сразу получит апгрейд Центавра (не ACES), который позволит заменить Дельту-4 Хэви.

 http://spacenews.com/op-ed-building-on-a-successful-record-in-space-to-meet-the-challenges-ahead/

ULA is confident its engine and rocket development efforts will meet the 2022 deadline imposed by the Congress for ending purchases of the RD-180. We're making great progress on Vulcan – the all-American replacement for the venerable Atlas rocket – and have two of the country's best engine companies working on two options for its engine.

 We're making enhancements to Vulcan's Centaur upper stage to add crucial heavy lift capability for the Air Force. That will add about six months to the program's original schedule , but the resulting delay is months, not years, and it's a purpose-driven change to deliver better performance, not a schedule slip.

 The Vulcan-Centaur combination will permit launch of the nation's heaviest satellites to any of the nine reference orbits our national security customers require. Moreover, the enhanced Centaur stage will allow this heavy lift capability without resorting to the costly three-booster configuration of today's "heavy" launch configurations.

https://www.reddit.com/r/ula/comments/75j5yb/oped_by_tory_bruno_building_on_a_successful/

ToryBruno President & CEO of ULA 9 points 9 hours ago

Continuing with ACES. Remember it does 3 special things: heavy lift, crazy long duration, and in orbit reusability. Upgraded Centaur will bring the first capability forward. ACES will still Be need for the others

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 Jeff Foust‏ @jeff_foust  3 ч.3 часа назад
Bruno: no schedule pressure for making Vulcan engine decision, relative to ongoing Air Force Launch Services Agreement competition.
 
   Jeff Foust‏ @jeff_foust  3 ч.3 часа назад  
Bruno: still looking at recovering only the engine from Vulcan booster, versus entire stage. We'll see in the market which approach is better.
 
   Jeff Foust‏ @jeff_foust  4 ч.4 часа назад
Q: do you have an update on the Vulcan engine competition? Bruno: no.

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http://www.spacelaunchreport.com/vulcan.html

April-May 2017 Updates

First BE-4 Rolls Out at Blue Origin during March, 2017

During mid-April, 2017, ULA President and CEO Tony Bruno confirmed that Vulcan would use 5.4 meter diameter tanks.  The new tanks, fatter than even the Delta 4 tanks, would be fabricated by friction stir welding four orthogrid panels together.  Use of the orthogrid design, replacing the previous isogrid, will play a role in reducing production time by half.

Earlier in the same month, Bruno had confirmed that a final propulsion decision between BE-4 and AR-1 would be made by the end of 2017.  At the time, BE-4 was expected to begin full-scale testing within a few weeks.  The results of that testing would inform ULA's decision.

Blue Origin had rolled-out its first BE-4 engine during March, 2017.  The engine was delivered to the company's Texas test site for full-scale testing.

During May, 2017, Blue Origin suffered a BE-4 "power pack" failure at the company's West Texas test site. The failure appeared to set back development efforts for several months since the expected full-scale BE-4 engine test did not take place "within a few weeks" after its delivery as originally announced.

BE-4 Test 1 (Blue Origin)BE-4 Hot Fire Success

On October 18, 2017, after months of delay following a May 2017 power pack test failure, Blue Origin performed an initial successful hot fire test of its full-scale BE-4 engine.  The engine was fired at 50% thrust for about three seconds at the company's West Texas test facility.

Vulcan Centaur 5

On October 10, 2017, ULA CEO Tory Bruno announced, in a Space News opinion piece, that ULA had decided to modify Vulcan's Centaur stage to meet heavy lift requirements provided in the October 5, 2017 U.S. Air Force EELV Launch Services Agreement RFP. The specification listed payload masses for nine reference orbits. Bruno stated that the change would add about six months to the original program schedule.

Original plans had called for the existing "Centaur 3" stage currently flown atop Atlas 5 to serve as the second stage for an initial Vulcan Centaur variant.

Later, in a question and answer session on Reddit, Bruno revealed that the upgraded stage would be named "Centaur 5" and that it would be 5.4 meters diameter, a substantial increase from the current 3.048 meters. He also noted that while Centaur 5 would bring the heavy lift capabilty forward sooner, the previously-planned ACES stage would still be needed to provide long duration and in-orbit reusability. He said that ACES and Centaur 5 would use the same tooling. He also said that ULA had not yet selected an ACES engine, suggesting that Centaur 5 would still be powered by RL10 engines.

Although ULA had not revealed details of Centuar 5 by month's end, it was clear that the stage would have to carry substantially more propellant than the existing Centaur 3 stage. Such a stage would almost certainly need two or more RL10 engines.

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http://spacenews.com/ula-feels-no-schedule-pressure-to-select-vulcan-engine/

ULA feels no schedule pressure to sel ect Vulcan engine
by Jeff Foust — November 10, 2017  

ULA Chief Executive Tory Bruno said there was no "schedule pressure" to sel ect an engine for the company's next-generation Vulcan rocket. Credit: ULA  

WASHINGTON — The chief executive of United Launch Alliance said Nov. 9 that he doesn't feel any urgency to sel ect a main engine for his company's next-generation Vulcan rocket, despite an impending deadline for an Air Force launch competition.
During a question-and-answer session after his speech at a Washington Space Business Roundtable luncheon, Bruno declined to give an update on the competition between the BE-4 engine from Blue Origin and the AR1 from Aerojet Rocketdyne to power the first stage of the Vulcan.
ULA has long indicted its preferred choice is the BE-4, but wanted to wait until the engine completed a series of test firings to confirm it would be suitable. Blue Origin announced Oct. 19 it had carried out the first hotfire test of the engine, but has not disclosed if it has carried out any additional tests to date. Bruno didn't comment on that test beyond the statement ULA issued at the time congratulating Blue Origin for the achievement.
The test comes as companies face a Nov. 20 deadline to reply to a request for proposals fr om the U.S. Air Force for its Launch Services Agreement program. That effort is designed to support the development of new Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicle-class rockets, including initial launches needed to obtain certification. The Air Force plans to make up to three awards through cost-sharing agreements.
Despite that impending deadline, Bruno said there was no hurry to select an engine, based on assessment of work needed to complete the vehicle in time to meet the Air Force's certification schedules. "I am not concerned about I would say is schedule pressure" for selecting an engine to meet that timeline, he said. "We have time to execute our process."
Bruno also said he was not concerned about getting approvals fr om ULA's two owners, Boeing and Lockheed Martin, to continue development of Vulcan. "We generate our own operating cash and expenses and investment fr om our ongoing business," he said. "Our parents — our owners — generously allow us to invest in this new platform rather than simply turn that money back into cash in their pockets."
Bruno declined to specify how much internal investment was going into Vulcan, but noted the company has consistently been profitable. "I might hazard to argue that ULA is one of the very few space launch companies that has consistently earned a reasonable profit," he said.
He reiterated that ULA's approach to reusability for Vulcan remained recovering the first stage engines, rather than landing the entire first stage. That contrasts with SpaceX, which now routinely lands the first stage of its Falcon 9, and Blue Origin, which plans to land the first stage of its upcoming New Glenn orbital launch vehicle.
Bruno said it appeared to ULA that recovering just the engines, which account for most of the value of the stage, made more sense than the entire stage, as in some cases performance requirements for a mission will make it impossible to land the stage. "We're going to find out in the marketplace which is true," he said.

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http://spacenews.com/ula-taps-l3-for-vulcan-rocket-avionics/

ULA taps L3 for Vulcan rocket avionics
by Caleb Henry — December 4, 2017


Artist's rendering of ULA's future Vulcan rocket. Credit: ULA and L3

WASHINGTON — United Launch Alliance today selected L3 Technologies to provide avionics and related services for its next-generation Vulcan rocket.

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L3 expects to provide ULA with more than $1 billion in hardware and serves over the next 10 years, L3 said in a Dec. 4 release.

ULA specified that the avionics are for Vulcan Centaur, the first iteration of the rocket that uses a new first stage paired with the existing Centaur upper stage used on the Atlas 5. The second version of that rocket will have the Advanced Cryogenic Evolved Stage, or ACES, to lift heavier payloads that would go on the Delta 4 Heavy. The first launch of Vulcan Centaur is planned for 2019 (though the company has yet to downselect either Blue Origin's BE-4 or Aerojet Rocketdyne's AR1), followed by Vulcan ACES in 2023.

"United Launch Alliance is proud to select L3 to develop the complete avionics package for our Vulcan Centaur launch systems," said ULA President and CEO Tory Bruno. "We have exceptional confidence in the quality, performance and value of L3's avionics design, which will give our customers even greater capability for new missions at a significant reduction in cost."

L3's Sensor Systems division will supply the avionics equipment, which L3 and ULA will collaboratively integrate into Vulcan's design and manufacturing processes.

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https://spaceflightnow.com/2018/03/20/ula-touts-new-vulcan-rocket-in-competition-with-spacex/

ULA touts new Vulcan rocket in competition with SpaceX
March 20, 2018 | William Harwood

STORY WRITTEN FOR CBS NEWS & USED WITH PERMISSION


Artist's illustration of a Vulcan rocket launching fr om Cape Canaveral. Credit: United Launch Alliance

SpaceX and its visionary founder Elon Musk win the lion's share of public attention in the commercial rocket arena, with dramatic, increasingly routine booster landings and spectacular stunts like the launch of Musk's Tesla Roadster on the maiden flight of the company's new Falcon Heavy rocket last month.

But arch-rival United Launch Alliance, a much more buttoned-down corporate alliance between Boeing and Lockheed Martin, is responding to the threat posed by the upstart SpaceX with long-range plans to phase out its workhorse Atlas 5 rocket and costly Delta 4 rockets in favor of a powerful, less-expensive launcher known as the Vulcan.

Featuring reusable engines and an advanced, long-lived upper stage, company executives expect the Vulcan to be a major contender in the increasingly fierce slugfest between SpaceX, ULA and other international launch providers.

That battle was center stage Wednesday when the Air Force awarded SpaceX a $290 million contract to launch three Global Positioning System navigation satellites atop Falcon 9 rockets in late 2019 and 2020.

At the same time, ULA won a $351 million contract to launch two Space Situational Awareness Program satellites using an Atlas 5 rocket in 2020, along with a second flight to launch another pair of military payloads.

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"I am a big supporter of competition," ULA CEO Tory Bruno said in a recent interview. "Makes it an exciting time to be in space, you never know what's going to happen. In my 35 years as a rocket scientist I never thought I'd see somebody just launch a car into space for fun. I'm not sure what I think of that yet. So yeah I'm with you. These are exciting times."

In one sense, ULA is playing the tortoise to SpaceX's hare. Musk was first out of the blocks with development of reusable rocket boosters, but Bruno believes ULA's Vulcan, with reusable first stage engines, makes the most sense financially given current market projections.

He said the Vulcan's engines represent two-thirds of the cost of the stage. Under ULA's approach, the engines will be recovered and reused after every flight. SpaceX's design calls for recovery of the entire rocket stage. Depending on the weight of the payload and the requirements of its orbit, that cannot be done on every flight.

"It boils down to as simple as this: is it better to recover 100 percent of the value of the booster some of the time or only two thirds of the value of the booster all of the time?" Bruno said reporters during a roundtable discussion earlier this week.

"Well, that depends on how often you get a big, heavy payload. We've each made market forecasts, and if we're right, our solution will be economically advantageous. If I'm wrong and they're right, then theirs will."

ULA is staking its future on the Vulcan. Equipped with up to six upgraded strap-on solid-fuel boosters, the new rocket will generate some 3.8 million pounds of liftoff thrust.


ULA chief executive Tory Bruno. Credit: Space Foundation

Out-performing ULA's current heavy lift booster, the three-core Delta 4, the Vulcan will be able to boost 80,000 pounds to low-Earth orbit or up to 35,900 pounds to the elliptical geosynchronous transfer orbits — GTOs — used by communications satellites bound for operational stations 22,300 above the equator.

The least powerful version of the new rocket, one without any solid-fuel boosters and an advanced upper stage known as ACES, is expected to sell for less than $100 million. The base version of ULA's Atlas 5 rocket currently goes for about $109 million, Bruno said, while a heavy lift Delta 4 sells for about $350 million.

Even with six solid-fuel boosters and a large payload fairing, the most powerful version of the Vulcan will still cost "more like a quarter or a third of the cost of the Delta 4 Heavy," Bruno said in the interview with CBS News.

For comparison, SpaceX sells a commercial version of its Falcon 9 rocket for $62 million, according to the company's website, although the price climbs to more than $90 million a copy for military missions.

A commercial version of the company's Falcon Heavy rocket, which debuted in February, has a list price of $90 million, but that apparently assumes all three core stages are recovered for reuse. That version of the rocket, according to the SpaceX website, can boost eight metric tons, or 17,600 pounds to geosynchronous transfer orbit.

That's the version launched last month, roughly equivalent, Bruno said, to a "mid-range Atlas." A fully expendable version of the Falcon Heavy can lift nearly 59,000 pounds to that same orbit, easily making it the most powerful rocket in the world.

Bruno said he was impressed by the Falcon Heavy and SpaceX's maturing ability to recover spent rocket stages.

"I'm a rocket scientist, and that was very cool to watch," he said. "I certainly give credit to Elon Musk for sort of creating more excitement around space than we had a decade ago."

But this is not a particularly friendly competition. SpaceX's website brags the Falcon Heavy "can lift more than twice the payload of the next closest operational vehicle, the Delta IV Heavy, at one-third the cost."

Not so fast, says Bruno.

"Delta Heavy was really designed around the national security, primarily NRO (National Reconnaissance Office) mission set, which has complicated orbits, and it's optimized for that," he said. "It goes for about $350 million. It's a military mission only, I don't offer it commercially, at least today, there's no commercial market for a Heavy."

The Delta 4, designed by Boeing, and the Atlas 5, built by Lockheed Martin, originally were developed for the Air Force as "evolved expendable launch vehicles," or EELVs, intended to provide assured access to space for high-priority national security payloads.

With government approval, the two companies formed a partnership and the first Atlas 5, carrying a commercial satellite, blasted off in August 2002.

SpaceX launched its first Falcon 9 in 2010 and, after Air Force certification and vocal complaints about ULA's perceived monopoly in the military space arena, the California rocket builder was cleared to compete for military contracts.

"We've been competing now for almost two years in the military market space," Bruno said before this week's Air Force contracts were announced. "Falcon 9s are going for about $97 million, $96.5 million, I think, is the most recent one. They've won half, we've won half. The government discloses the winner's price because we're public procurements. So I think we each know what our prices are."


The Falcon Heavy rocket takes off on its first test flight. Credit: Walter Scriptunas II / Spaceflight Now

To compare the Falcon Heavy with the Delta 4, "you want to compare government missions," he said. "We don't market (the Delta 4) commercially. So I would look at the Falcon 9 at $96.5 million as a single stick. Scale that up to be a Falcon Heavy, which is a three-core version of that rocket, and whatever that price is is what I would compare to $350 million.

"If you want to take a massively large payload to LEO (low-Earth orbit), that would be the rocket that would do it. If you want to go higher, you might want to fly on a Delta 4."

But a Falcon Heavy is not made up of three Falcon 9s. It is, more accurately, one Falcon 9 with a modified central stage and two additional Falcon 9 core stages.

SpaceX has said a fully expendable version of the Falcon Heavy, one capable of boosting nearly 59,000 pounds to GTO, would cost around $150 million, less than half the cost of a Delta 4 Heavy.

But ULA says a rocket's cost is just one factor in a sale. The company also is selling reliability and "schedule certainty."

ULA has launched 76 Atlas 5 rockets and 36 more expensive Delta 4s without a single failure. SpaceX has suffered one catastrophic in-flight failure in 50 Falcon 9 launches to date and one on-the-pad explosion.

A rocket's reliability affects insurance rates and meeting a promised launch date means a commercial satellite will start generating revenue as soon as possible. ULA says both of those factors act to reduce the actual cost of a launch on one of its rockets.

Another wild card in the equation is SpaceX's plan to build an even more powerful rocket known as the BFR, for Big F-ing Rocket, intended for eventual missions to Mars. It is not yet clear where the Falcon Heavy fits into the company's long-range plans or whether the BFR will be used for the sorts of payloads ULA hopes to launch on its Vulcan.

But the Delta 4-Falcon Heavy debate will be moot soon enough as ULA phases out the Delta 4 and the Atlas 5 in favor of the Vulcan. Bruno said "at least" seven to eight more Delta 4s will be launched between now and the early 2020s while the Atlas 5 likely will fly into the mid 2020s, overlapping with the Vulcan program as the new rocket begins operational flights.

In the meantime, the Atlas 5 also will be used to launch Boeing's CST-100 commercial crew ship on flights to ferry astronauts to and from the International Space Station. SpaceX also holds a NASA contract to develop a piloted version of its Dragon cargo ship that will launch atop a Falcon 9. Both companies hope to begin routine flights to the station next year.

The maiden flight of the Vulcan currently is targeted for the middle of 2020. Two successful commercial launches are required as part of the government certification process, followed by a required upper stage upgrade to improve performance, either Aerojet Rocketdyne RL10 engines or a different set of engines altogether.

If all goes well, ULA will introduce its new upper stage in 2024, the Advanced Cryogenic Evolved Stage, or ACES, that Bruno says will revolutionize spaceflight.


United Launch Alliance's ACES upper stage. Credit: United Launch Alliance

"This is on the scale of inventing the airplane," Bruno told reporters during the media roundtable. "That's how revolutionary this upper stage is. It's 1900, and I'm inventing the airplane. People don't even know what they're going to do with it yet. But I'm confident it's going to create a large economy in space that doesn't exist today. No one is working on anything like this."

The Vulcan will stand 228 feet tall with a first stage powered by two engines provided by either Blue Origin, a company owned by Amazon-founder Jeff Bezos, or Aerojet Rocketdyne. Blue Origin's BE-4 engine burns methane and liquid oxygen while Aerojet Rocketdyne's AR-1 powerplant burns a more traditional mixture of oxygen and highly refined kerosene.

Both engines will generate between 500,000 and 550,000 pounds of thrust and two will be used to power the Vulcan's first stage. Bruno said ULA is nearing a decision on which engine to employ but would not provide any sort of timetable other than to say the company would announce its choice "soon."

"They're both good engines," he told CBS News. "They both use the what we think of as a very advanced Russian engine cycle, an oxygen-rich stage combustion that the U.S. has never, ever had, and we now will. They just use two different hydrocarbon fuels as you know, one is kerosene and one is methane."

Both engines "have a lot of additive manufacturing content, which takes that Russian technology and makes it a lot more manufacturable and really updates it to modern standards. So they were both good engines. They are both, you know, hitting their marks and wh ere they planned to be. That's probably all I can say."

Whichever engines are used, the Vulcan first stage is being designed with reusability in mind. But unlike SpaceX, which can recover it's Falcon 9 first stage intact with a rocket-powered return to landing on shore or on an off-shore droneship, ULA only plans to recover the Vulcan's first stage engines.

ULA plans to begin engine recovery operations after the Vulcan is routinely flying and after the ACES upper stage is implemented.

Bruno said the engines represent two-thirds of the cost of the stage and getting them back every time, with no impact on mission performance, will pay big dividends. SpaceX, in contrast, must use propellant to fly its Falcon 9 stages back to touchdown. Heavy payloads bound for high orbits require most if not all of the rocket's propellant and in those cases, recovery may not be possible.

As a result, SpaceX's ability to recover rocket stages depends on its manifest and the orbital demands of those payloads.


ULA's concept for reusing booster engines involves retrieving the engines by a helicopter in mid-air. Credit: United Launch Alliance

"Simplistically, if you recover the old booster propulsively then you can do that part of the time, you get all the value back some of the time," Bruno said. "Or, you can recover just the engine, which is our concept, and then you get only part of the value back, about two thirds ... but you get to do it every single time because there's no performance hit. So it really turns into math."

And that math is based on market projections about future satellite builds and the percentage of heavy-weight payloads ULA expects to be launching.

"We've made a forecast of what we think the future marketplace will be and said engine recovery is more financially attractive," Bruno said. "I think SpaceX has made different calculus. And we'll both go to the market and find out who's right."

To recover the Vulcan engines, a small pod housing an inflatable heat shield and a gas generator will be mounted on the bottom of the first stage. After boosting the rocket out of the lower atmosphere, the engines will shut down and the propulsion section will be disconnected, allowing it to fall free.

The heat shield, based on NASA technology, then will inflate using the gas generator, protecting the engines from the heat and stress of atmospheric entry. Once clear of the plasma heating region, a parafoil will deploy to fly the engines to their planned pickup point.

A large helicopter then will swoop overhead, snagging a cable to capture the engine package, which will be lowered to the deck of a nearby salvage ship. A similar technique was used to capture film canisters ejected from Corona spy satellites in the 1960s.

"We'll separate really the whole back end (of the first stage)," Bruno said. "Then, we're going to re-enter it behind the NASA inflatable heat shield and then pop a parachute, really a parafoil, because that allows us to make sure we fly to GPS coordinates and a big helicopter will be waiting for it and snag it set it down."

Recovering the engines non-propulsively will allow the Vulcan to use virtually all of its propellant to put the payload into the best possible orbit "for a pretty modest weight penalty, you know, the weight of a parachute, the weight of the subsystem," Bruno said.

For a booster, five pounds of inert weight only costs one pound of payload, he added, whereas it's pound for pound on an upper stage.

In any case, Bruno said the entry environment behind the heat shield is much more benign than what a Falcon 9 experiences with its tail-first propulsive descent and ULA engineers expect engine refurbishment to be a relatively straight forward affair.

"The engines that we're developing we think are going to be pretty easy to refurbish," Bruno said. "What we think we're going to do is get them back, inspect them, for the first few times we'll likely hot fire them to make sure we know how they're behaving. If they're behaving the way we expect, we'll probably stop doing that. We'll just clean them up, inspect them and use them."

Along with recoverable first stage engines, the Vulcan first stage features redesigned plumbing with an internal liquid oxygen feed line, freeing up real estate on the side of the rocket for a sixth strap-on solid-fuel booster.

The Vulcan will be marketed in a variety of configurations depending on payload requirements. If all six SRBs are used, liftoff thrust will be 3.8 million pounds, out performing the Delta 4.

ULA has not yet announced which company will provide the upper stage engines used for the rocket's initial flights before a planned performance upgrade. But the company expects to introduce the ACES upper stage in 2024.

Featuring up to four hydrogen-fueled rocket engines, ACES will carry three times the propellant of current ULA upper stages, will be able to operate for weeks or months at a time and will enable complex orbital operations near Earth, the moon or beyond.

The keys to its performance are ultra lightweight propellant tanks and dual "straight-six" internal combustion engines mounted on the bottom of the stage burning gaseous oxygen and hydrogen produced by the normal "boil off" of propellants in the main tanks.

The 1,000-cc engines, under development at Roush Fenway Racing, will be used to pressurize the propulsion system, push propellants to attitude control jets and generate electrical power, allowing ULA to replace multiple systems with a single solution.

"In a conventional stage, you've got to have electrical power, so you have big, long-duration batteries," Bruno said. "You have to have an attitude control system, so you have typically an entirely separate propulsion system, usually hydrazine. And then you need to pressurize your propellant, which you use (helium) to do."

Such stages typically have lifetimes measured in hours because the supercold propellants are continually boiling off into gas and batteries lose their power.

ACES solves those problems by using the internal combustion engines to accomplish all of those tasks over an extended period.

"The engine has a generator on it just like your car does so you don't need the batteries anymore," Bruno said. "And we're using the power that comes off of that internal combustion engine to run a compressor and a heat exchanger ... that's putting energy back into the gases. We pipe them back up into the tank and that pressurizes the tanks. So we don't need helium at all anymore."

Or heavy time-limited batteries.

"Each one of these (generators) throws off about 60 kilowatts," Bruno said. "We run a Centaur (stage) at about 10 watts. So now you've got 120 kilowatts of electrical power that you could use for other things."

And the same waste hydrogen and oxygen burned by the engines also can be used to power the stage's attitude control thrusters, eliminating the need for a separate propulsion system using toxic hydrazine.

"So as long as you've got all of this gaseous hydrogen and gaseous oxygen you have propellant," Bruno said. "So we've also developed (oxygen-hydrogen) thrusters and we've been testing those as well. They provide the attitude control and ... that allows us to delete the entire hydrazine system.

"So that's how it works. We've probably got, I'd say 300, 350 tests on that engine now. It's pretty cool."

[свернуть]

[Salo]

 Chris B - NSF‏ @NASASpaceflight
ARTICLE: ULA laying the foundations for an Econosphere in CisLunar space - https://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2018/03/ula-laying-foundations-econosphere-cislunar-space/ ... Latest reference baseline for CisLunar Econosphere. More to come on Vulcan/ACES. (Thanks to @ulalaunch for putting the slides together and @CUEngineering for webcasting it).
 
 
 
 

[tnt22]

http://spacenews.com/air-force-stakes-future-on-privately-funded-launch-vehicles-will-the-gamble-pay-off/

Air Force stakes future on privately funded launch vehicles. Will the gamble pay off?
by Sandra Erwin — March 25, 2018


The Vulcan Centaur rocket. Credit: ULA

Analyst Bill Ostrove: Vulcan's first flight has slipped from 2019 to 2020. "The engine choice will affect the design of the entire rocket."

WASHINGTON — The schedule is getting tight for the U.S. Air Force as a 2022 deadline looms to bid farewell to the Atlas 5 and switch to a different rocket that is not powered by a Russian engine.

The target date was mutually agreed by Congress and the Air Force in 2016, allowing what was considered sufficient time to find alternatives to the United Launch Alliance's Atlas 5 that uses the Russian RD-180 engine. The solution they settled on was for the Air Force to sign deals with the space industry to co-finance the development of new rocket propulsion systems.

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The program known as the "launch service agreement" fits the Air Force's broader goal to get out of the business of "buying rockets" and instead acquire end-to-end services from companies.

The Air Force signed cost-sharing partnerships with ULA, SpaceX, Orbital ATK and Aerojet Rocketdyne. The original request for proposals noted the Air Force wants to "leverage commercial launch solutions in order to have at least two domestic, commercial launch service providers."

The next step is to sel ect three companies this summer to move forward with enginet prototypes.

"We are on schedule to make LSA awards in July 2018," a spokesman for the Air Force Space and Missile Systems Center told SpaceNews.

The sel ected competitors will face a schedule that seems ambitious even by the standards of commercial space companies.

ULA's CEO Tory Bruno called the launch service agreement a "pretty rational" approach that puts the onus on the private sector.

As the operator of the Atlas 5 rocket, ULA will come under enormous scrutiny as it moves to develop its replacement, the Vulcan Centaur vehicle. Although the Atlas 5 will continue to be sold commercially, without the ability to offer Atlas 5 to the military after 2022, the future of ULA rests on Vulcan.

Which explains why there is so much anticipation about what engine ULA will sel ect for the reusable first stage of the Vulcan Centaur. It is considering either the BE-4 made by startup Blue Origin or the AR-1 designed by established military contractor Aerojet Rocketdyne. The new first stage would be paired with the existing Centaur upper stage from the Atlas 5. A decision was expected months ago, and Bruno has said recently that it is "coming soon."

Asked about the implications of the delayed engine selection on the LSA program, the Air Force Space and Missile Systems Center spokesman said officials would not comment on an ongoing source selection.

During a recent talk with reporters, Bruno predicted ULA would be able to meet the LSA timelines regardless of what engine is picked. From the government's perspective, the risk lies in the fact that private industry is "bringing most of the money," he said. "That's always what governs a big complicated aerospace development program — being funded."

The good news for the government is that there are multiple bidders, Bruno said. "That bodes well, that means the government has choices."

Vulcan Centaur is 75 percent privately funded, Bruno said. To remain a contender in the LSA program, it needs to be ready for certification flights by 2020. ULA has agreed to two non-government flights to certify Vulcan for national security missions. The certification could happen as early as 2020 or early 2021.

"We feel very confident about our schedule and our plan to achieve that whole timeline," he said.

The engine choice has kept the industry in suspense.

The Blue Origin engine is further along in development than the AR-1, although there are other issues to consider. "If we were to select AR-1 that puts more pressure on the schedule," said Bruno. "But it does not necessarily invalidate the LSA requirements. I have much less schedule margin if I choose AR-1. But I could still meet the timelines."

Some companies in the LSA program are partners and rivals at the same time. Orbital ATK will compete with its own rocket but it also has invested in the development of the Vulcan solid rocket booster. There is speculation that Blue Origin could also jump into the LSA fray with its New Glenn rocket.

"Having a competitor in my supply chain ... Absolutely that is considered carefully," said Bruno. "That is not unusual in our industry." Orbital ATK is not only a competitor and major supplier to ULA but also a ULA customer for cargo missions to the International Space Station.

Orbital ATK has made a "substantial investment in developing that component for Vulcan," he noted. "The supplier in this case is investing their own money. In exchange we give them a long-term contract that allows us to have stability in pricing."

Blue Origin is investing a "considerable amount," he said. "To a lesser degree Aerojet Rocketdyne is investing their own funding in AR-1." The engines are the most expensive parts of the rocket, accounting for two-thirds of the cost of the booster.

Timeline too ambitious?

William Ostrove, aerospace and defense analyst at Forecast International, noted that ULA has been on the verge of picking a winner "for a long time."

Vulcan's first flight has slipped fr om 2019 to 2020, said Ostrove. "The engine choice will affect the design of the entire rocket. A decision has to be made if the Air Force is going to stick to the plan" of phasing out the Atlas 5 by 2022.

The delay could be adding risk to the Air Force LSA strategy, Ostrove said. For the program to succeed, launch contractors need to have both government and commercial business. "If there is no market for these large launch vehicles then the Air Force may have to step in and provide more funds." That is exactly what the Air Force had to do more than a decade ago with Atlas 5 and Delta 4, which were originally intended as dual use.

A contrarian view comes fr om the defense industry establishment. Loren Thompson, of the Lexington Institute — a think tank that receives funding fr om ULA owners Boeing and Lockheed Martin, Aerojet and other defense firms — has called on the Air Force to keep the Atlas 5 and swap the RD-180 engine for Aerojet Rocketdyne's AR-1 rather than develop a new launch vehicle.

"In an effort to save time and money, they accept greater risk," Thompson told SpaceNews. "In an attempt to spur innovation, they turn to untested commercial products and practices. This approach was an utter failure in the 1990s, and yet we are gradually backing into the same errors again."

Air Force Secretary Heather Wilson has expressed confidence in the LSA approach.

"We are cost sharing with companies as they develop alternatives to the Russian engine," she told reporters last month on Capitol Hill. "We are doing that intentionally. We need a couple of options. It's a risky business," Wilson said.

The program is moving forward as planned, she said. "Usually if they haven't walked in and said, 'Houston we've got a problem,' it means it's continuing on, on schedule."

[свернуть]

[tnt22]

Tory Bruno‏Подлинная учетная запись @torybruno 39 мин. назад

Vulcan is coming

[tnt22]

https://www.ulalaunch.com/about/news/2018/05/11/united-launch-alliance-selects-aerojet-rocketdyne-s-rl10-engine-for-next-generation-vulcan-centaur-upper-stage

United Launch Alliance Selects Aerojet Rocketdyne's RL10 Engine for Next-generation Vulcan Centaur Upper Stage

Centennial, Colo., May 11, 2018 – United Launch Alliance (ULA) today announced Aerojet Rocketdyne as a strategic partner for the RL10 upper stage engine for ULA's next-generation Vulcan Centaur rocket following a competitive procurement process.

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"ULA and Aerojet Rocketdyne have a long and successful history together that began with the first flight of our Atlas and Delta rockets in the 1960s," said Tory Bruno, ULA president and CEO. "We could not be more pleased to have selected the proven and reliable RL10 to power our Vulcan Centaur upper stage."

This partnership is a long-term agreement for Aerojet Rocketdyne to provide upper stage propulsion for the next decade. As part of this partnership, Aerojet Rocketdyne will provide RL10s and develop the RL10C-X, the next generation of the RL10 family. The RL10C-X will increase the use of additive manufacturing and introduce other advanced technologies to improve the quality, reliability, affordability and performance.

"Key determining factors to our selection included price and delivery schedule," said Bruno. "We look forward to continuing our strong partnership to ensure a successful introduction of Vulcan Centaur."

Over the course of nearly 60 years, more than 450 RL10 engines have flown on various ULA heritage vehicles with an unmatched record of mission success.

ULA continues its competitive procurement process for the booster engine and plans to make a down select soon.

With more than a century of combined heritage, United Launch Alliance is the nation's most experienced and reliable launch service provider. ULA has successfully delivered more than 125 satellites to orbit that provide critical capabilities for troops in the field, aid meteorologists in tracking severe weather, enable personal device-based GPS navigation and unlock the mysteries of our solar system.

[свернуть]

[tnt22]

Chris B - NSF‏ @NASASpaceflight 4 мин. назад

ARTICLE: RL10 engine – pushing towards 60 years of service – to live on with Vulcan -

https://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2018/05/rl10-engine-60-years-service-live-vulcan/ ...

Vulcan render by Nathan Koga (@kogavfx)

Спойлер

[свернуть]

[tnt22]

Jeff Foust‏ @jeff_foust 7 мин. назад

Bernard Kutter, ULA: the Centaur V that will be used on initial Vulcan launches traces its heritage back to "wide body Centaur" studies from more than a decade ago. #ISDC2018

2 мин. назад

Kutter: pad modifications already underway at Cape's SLC-41 to support Vulcan launches in parallel with Atlas. At Vandenberg, will do a "hard cut-over" from last Atlas launch there, around 2021, to Vulcan. #ISDC2018

[tnt22]

Jeff Foust‏ @jeff_foust 6 мин. назад

Jonathan Barr, ULA: for the ACES upper stage looking at options with 2 and 4 RL10 engines. No longer considering BE-3U for it. #ISDC2018

[tnt22]

RUAGSpace‏ @RuagSpace 3 ч. назад

Another important milestone for @ulalaunch Vulcan Centaur rocket. Critical design review of heatshield was passed. Check out the variety of our launchers products https://www.ruag.com/en/products-services/space/launchers ...

[Чебурашка]

Грузоподъёмность различных версий

Взято отсюда https://www.ulalaunch.com/docs/default-source/evolution/vulcan-centaur-overview-17may2018.pdf

[Astro Cat]

Че то какие то хилые характеристики у Вулкана. В чем его смысл? Дешевле в изготовлении, чем Дельта-4?

[triage]

Astro Cat пишет:
Че то какие то хилые характеристики у Вулкана. В чем его смысл? Дешевле в изготовлении, чем Дельта-4?

В чем, чем... в двигателях.

Для запусков к МКС (типа Сигнуса на Атласе-5) кажется даже младшая версия очень мощная.

[Apollo13]

Astro Cat пишет:
Че то какие то хилые характеристики у Вулкана.

Ничего себе хилые. Моноблок + 6 ТТУ заменяет трехблочную Дельту-4.