Rocket Report: Blue Origin to resume human flights; progress for Polaris Dawn

Enlarge / Ed Dwight stands in front of an F-104 jet fighter in 1963.

Welcome to Edition 6.38 of the Rocket Report! Ed Dwight was close to joining NASA's astronaut corps more than 60 years ago. With an aeronautical engineering degree and experience as an Air Force test pilot, Dwight met the qualifications to become an astronaut. He was one of 26 test pilots the Air Force recommended to NASA for the third class of astronauts in 1963, but he wasn't selected. Now, the man who would have become the first Black astronaut will finally get a chance to fly to space.

As always, we welcome reader submissions, and if you don't want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets, as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.

Ed Dwight named to Blue Origin's next human flight. Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos' space company, announced Thursday that 90-year-old Ed Dwight, who almost became the first Black astronaut in 1963, will be one of six people to fly to suborbital space on the company's next New Shepard flight. Dwight, a retired Air Force captain, piloted military fighter jets and graduated test pilot school, following a familiar career track as many of the early astronauts. He was on a short list of astronaut candidates the Air Force provided NASA, but the space agency didn't include him. It took 20 more years for the first Black American to fly to space. Dwight's ticket with Blue Origin is sponsored by Space for Humanity, a nonprofit that seeks to expand access to space for all people. Five paying passengers will join Dwight for the roughly 10-minute up-and-down flight to the edge of space over West Texas. Kudos to Space for Humanity and Blue Origin for making this happen.

Return to flight ... This mission, named NS-25, will be the first time Blue Origin flies with human passengers since August 2022. Blue Origin hasn't announced a launch date yet for NS-25. On an uncrewed launch the following month, an engine failure destroyed a New Shepard booster and grounded Blue Origin's suborbital rocket program for more than 15 months. New Shepard returned to flight December 19 on another research flight, again without anyone onboard. As the mission name suggests, this will be the 25th flight of a New Shepard rocket and the seventh flight with people. Blue Origin has a history of flying aviation pioneers and celebrities. On the first human flight with New Shepard in 2021, the passengers included company founder Jeff Bezos and famed female aviator Wally Funk. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

Revisit Astra's 2020 rocket explosion. In March 2020, as the world was under the grip of COVID, Astra blew up a rocket in remote Alaska and didn't want anyone to see it. New video published by TechCrunch shows Astra's Rocket 3 vehicle exploding on its launch pad. This was one of several setbacks that have brought the startup to its knees. The explosion, which occurred at Alaska’s Pacific Spaceport Complex, was simply reported as an “anomaly” at the time, an industry term for pretty much any issue that deviates from the expected outcome, TechCrunch reports. Satellite imagery of the launch site showed burn scars, suggesting an explosion, but the footage published this week confirms the reality of the event. This was Astra's first orbital-class rocket, and it blew up during a fueling rehearsal.

A sign of things to come ... Astra eventually flew its Rocket 3 small satellite launcher seven times, but only two of the flights actually reached orbit. This prompted Astra to abandon its Rocket 3 program and focus on developing a larger rocket, Rocket 4. But the future of this new rocket is in doubt. Astra's co-founders are taking the company private after its market value and stock price tanked, and it's not clear where the company will go from here. (submitted by Ken the Bin)

Russia's plan to “restore” its launch industry. Yuri Borisov, chief of the Russian space agency Roscosmos, has outlined a strategy for Russia to regain a dominant position in the global launch market, Ars reports. This will include the development of a partially reusable replacement for the Soyuz rocket called Amur-CNG. The country's spaceflight enterprise is also working on "ultralight" boosters that will incorporate an element of reusability. In an interview posted on the Roscosmos website, Borisov said he hopes Russia will have a "completely new fleet of space vehicles" by the 2028-2029 timeframe. Russia has previously discussed plans to develop the Amur rocket (the CNG refers to the propellant, liquified methane). The multi-engine vehicle looks somewhat similar to SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket in that preliminary designs incorporated landing legs and grid fins to enable a powered first-stage landing.

Reason to doubt ... Russia's launch industry was a global leader a couple of decades ago when prices were cheap relative to Western rockets. But the heavy-lift Proton rocket is nearing retirement after concerns about its reliability, and the still-reliable Soyuz is now excluded from the global market after Russia's invasion of Ukraine. In the 2000s and 2010s, Russia's position in the market was supplanted by the European Ariane 5 rocket and then SpaceX's Falcon 9. Roscosmos originally announced the medium-lift Amur rocket program in 2020 for a maiden flight in 2026. Since then, the rocket has encountered a nearly year-for-year delay in its first test launch. I'll believe it when I see it. The only new, large rocket Russia has developed in nearly 40 years, the expendable Angara A5, is still launching dummy payloads on test flights a decade after its debut.

Biden administration proposes new commercial launch tax. In the White House's fiscal year 2025 budget proposal released last month, the Biden administration suggested that for-profit space companies start paying for their use of US airspace, The New York Times reports. Commercial space companies are exempt from aviation excise taxes that fill the coffers of the Airport and Airway Trust Fund, which pays for the FAA’s work and will get roughly $18 billion in tax revenues for the current fiscal year. The taxes are paid primarily by commercial airlines, which are charged 7.5 percent of each ticket price and an additional fee of about $5 to $20 per passenger, depending on the destination of each flight. The budget proposal also proposes raising excise taxes on private and corporate jet flights.

Sharing resources ... The FAA's air traffic controllers handle an average of 45,000 daily airplane flights transiting through US airspace. Rocket launches are several orders of magnitude more rare. The FAA licensed 117 commercial space launches last year, and the industry, dominated by SpaceX, is on track to exceed this number in 2024. While there are fewer rockets than airplanes, launches have a significant impact on FAA operations. Air traffic controllers are responsible for clearing airspace before a rocket launch and then quickly reopening the airspace after liftoff to reduce launch-induced delays to air travel. Biden's proposal for commercial launch companies to pay is based in part on an independent safety report commissioned by the FAA, which advises that the federal government update the excise taxes to charge commercial space companies. Members of the commercial space industry argue it is still at a nascent stage, and taxing the industry is “not appropriate at this time,” said Karina Drees, president of the Commercial Spaceflight Federation.

Polaris Dawn is getting closer to launch. In a series of posts on the social media platform X this week, SpaceX said the Crew Dragon spacecraft assigned to the all-private Polaris Dawn mission is heading into thermal vacuum testing. The thermal vacuum test will expose the capsule to the airless environment it will see in orbit, both inside and outside the spacecraft, when it is depressurized for the first fully commercial spacewalk in history. This capability required modifications to the spacecraft, which last flew in 2021. Billionaire Jared Isaacman will command the mission. He'll be joined by former Air Force test pilot Scott "Kidd" Poteet and SpaceX engineers Sarah Gillis and Anna Menon.

But we want to see the spacesuits ... In parallel with modifications to the Crew Dragon spacecraft, SpaceX has designed an upgraded spacesuit to protect the four Polaris Dawn crew members in the vacuum of space. SpaceX hasn't yet revealed the new spacesuit, but Isaacman posted last month that the Polaris Dawn crew completed most of the suit's "acceptance test" procedure, which involved actually putting on the final assembled suits. Upcoming milestones include a test run with the crew members inside the actual Crew Dragon spacecraft, vacuum chamber testing, and mission simulations. Other objectives for Polaris Dawn include flying to a higher orbit around Earth than any human has reached since Apollo, testing Starlink internet connectivity in space, and conducting more than 35 research experiments. Launch is scheduled for early summer.

A dozen Falcon 9 launches in March. SpaceX set a record with 12 Falcon 9 rocket launches in March, demonstrating the cadence the company must achieve to meet its goal of 144 Falcon rocket missions in a year. This number doesn't count the March 14 test flight of the Starship rocket from South Texas. Kiko Dontchev, SpaceX's vice president of launch, wrote on X that so far this year, the company has set records for turnaround times at all three of its Falcon 9 launch pads and with all three drone ships in Florida and California.

Repeatability … SpaceX officials have said before that the company needs to have the capacity for 13 launches in a month in order to fly 144 Falcon 9 or Falcon Heavy missions in a year. This would account for delays caused by minor technical snags or bad weather. SpaceX closed out March with a launch doubleheader Saturday from two launch pads in Florida, one mission carrying a commercial TV broadcast satellite for Eutelsat and another with 23 Starlink Internet satellites. In fact, SpaceX was on track to launch another Falcon 9 rocket the same day, which would have been the 13th launch for the month of March. But bad weather delayed this Falcon 9 launch from California until April 1.

New date for Starliner. NASA announced the target launch date for the first crew flight of Boeing's Starliner spacecraft is now no earlier than May 6, six days later than previously planned. This delay has nothing to do with Starliner, but it gives NASA and its partners some breathing room to complete other critical operations on the International Space Station. These activities include the packing and departure of a SpaceX Cargo Dragon spacecraft, a Russian spacewalk, and the relocation of a Crew Dragon capsule from one docking port to another, clearing the path for the arrival of Starliner.

Night launch … Unfortunately (in my opinion!), a lot of rather significant launches have recently occurred at night. These include NASA's Artemis I launch in 2022, the debut of Relativity's Terran 1 rocket last year, and the first flight of United Launch Alliance's Vulcan in January. Right now, a launch of Starliner on ULA's Atlas V rocket would happen at 10:34 pm EDT on May 6 (02:34 UTC on May 7). This is simply a consequence of the space station's orbit. A launch to the ISS must occur when the Earth's rotation brings the launch pad underneath the station's orbital path. Launches heading to the ISS from Cape Canaveral, Florida, must head to the northeast, meaning there's just one launch opportunity per day. These launch times move about 23 minutes earlier each day. (submitted by Ken the Bin)

ULA's second Vulcan launch may lack a payload. ULA's first Vulcan rocket launch in January was a resounding success, raising hopes the second Vulcan rocket could fly as soon as April. Well, now we're in April, and it appears possible Vulcan won't fly again until September or later, Ars reports. This is primarily driven by the readiness of the payload for the second Vulcan flight, Sierra Space's DreamChaser spaceplane, which will deliver cargo to the International Space Station. This will be the first flight of the reusable DreamChaser spacecraft, and a recent update to NASA's planning schedule shows it may not fly until September, and this appears to be a soft date. ULA would like to fly sooner than that to allow the Space Force to complete certification of Vulcan in time to begin launching military satellites before the end of this year.

Still waiting on BE-4s … The second flightworthy Vulcan rocket is still at ULA's factory in Alabama, and ULA is waiting on delivery of the second BE-4 engine for Vulcan's first stage from Blue Origin. One Vulcan uses two BE-4 engines, which each produce more than a half-million pounds of thrust. Development delays on the methane-fueled BE-4 engine were responsible for most of the delays in getting Vulcan to its first flight, but the BE-4s used on the January 8 debut launch "performed flawlessly" with higher specific impulse, or efficiency, than predicted, said Tory Bruno, ULA's president and CEO. However, the "pacing item" in the Vulcan supply chain remains the BE-4, he said.

Delta IV Heavy will try again. Trouble with nitrogen pumps at an off-site facility at Cape Canaveral, Florida, thwarted ULA's first try to launch the final Delta IV Heavy rocket last week. The nitrogen is used to purge parts of the Delta IV rocket during the countdown. Now, ULA is ready to try again. The new target launch date for the Delta IV Heavy is Tuesday, April 9. It will carry a classified spy satellite into orbit for the National Reconnaissance Office. This will mark the retirement of the Delta rocket family after 64 years of service, and it is a significant milestone in the transition of ULA to the new-generation Vulcan rocket. Vulcan will replace the Delta IV and Atlas V rockets, but there are 17 more Atlas Vs left to fly over the rest of this decade.

Nitrogen woes … The nitrogen distribution system at Cape Canaveral, operated by Air Liquide, services all operational launch pads at the spaceport. Air Liquide did not respond to questions on the matter from Ars, but this is the same system that caused problems during the first launch campaign for NASA's Space Launch System rocket in 2022. While the issue that affected the Delta IV Heavy appears to be different, it raises questions about the infrastructure managed by Air Liquide and NASA, which oversees the nitrogen network at the Cape. The nitrogen is pumped from a plant just outside the gate of the Kennedy Space Center, then distributed through a pipeline stretching several miles to the launch pads. Nevertheless, SpaceX was able to launch two Falcon 9 rockets from Cape Canaveral over the weekend without issue.