In case you missed it, earlier this month SpaceX — founded and led by Elon Musk — came this close (your thumb and forefinger separated by a millimeter) to achieving something never done before in the field of big-time, commercial rocketry:

1. Launching a full-blown, multistage spacecraft, in this case a Falcon 9;
2. to deliver a payload into earth orbit;
3. and then retrieving the spent first-stage of the rocket;
4. by having it auto-navigate to a soft-landing on a fixed target!

This is like throwing a pencil as hard as you can up into the air and expecting it to land vertically on the eraser end without toppling over.   Yes, the U.S. Space Shuttle and the Soviet Buran space shuttle could do this but those were immensely expensive and required legions of technical staff to help them fly and land.

Elon Musk almost nailed it this time — he has been testing the retrieval and landing technology for a few years.   Basically, the Falcon 9 was on track to make its vertical landing but ran short of hydraulic fluid, causing it come in “hot” and pitched too steeply.  The first-stage did hit its target, just a bit “abruptly.”

If you’ ve not seen the video of the landing, turn on your speakers and watch here:

http://spaceflightnow.com/2015/01/16/elon-musk-shares-images-of-falcon-9s-crash-landing/

SpaceX is going to make this work soon and when it does, it will be a game-changer in terms of the economics of spaceflight  including human spaceflight.   It was not too surprising, then, to see Google and Fidelty make a $1 billon investment in the company as they did last week.   It’s a good investment.  Competitors Boeing and Lockheed should be getting nervous.

The clock is ticking down to a couple of very cool experimental flights in December.

The first is NASA’s Experimental Test Flight-1, which will throw the first, flight-ready Orion crew capsule into orbit.  That mission is slated for this Thursday and appears ready to fly — barring a moderate probability of isolated showers and winds.  A lot hangs on the success of EFT-1:   beyond a smooth launch and orbital insertion, we need to see maintenance of the capsule’s structural integrity during flight, near-flawless avionics performance, a safe, high-speed re-entry through the Earth’s atmosphere, full-deployment of parachutes and an on-target splashdown.  Because of the relativity slow “cadence” of the Orion and Space Launch System development-effort (at least compared to Apollo/Saturn and Shuttle), if there is a major malfunction on this flight, we will see a serious confounding of the critical path to the first non-experimental flights late in this decade and in the 2020’s.

Liftoff is a couple minutes past 7AM ET Thursday.  Don’t forget to tune in to NASA TV online or via cable TV.

The other big reveal this month, one that points in the direction of a major reworking of the economics of human spaceflight to low Earth orbit, is the launch of a SpaceX Falcon rocket on a resupply flight to the International Space Station.  This will not be any routine Falcon flight.  SpaceX will be pushing the envelope, after some testing, by endeavoring to retrieve and ultimately re-use the first stage structure and engines of the Falcon through a precision, soft-landing on an autonomous landing pad positioned in the Atlantic.

This is a bit like landing a plane on a rolling aircraft carrier EXCEPT this craft will travel 50 miles up into the atmosphere at supersonic speeds and then descend relatively slowly and vertically toward a less than stable bulls-eye on the vast ocean surface — without a pilot.   And did I mention that it has grasshopper legs that must deploy at just the right moment?  Kudos to Elon Musk, CEO and visioneer of SpaceX for thinking this big.  If it all works — or comes close to working — we will be a major step closer to a drop in the cost to get humans and cargo into low Earth orbit.   The Falcon flight is scheduled for mid-December.

It’s great to see this kind of innovation taking flight from NASA’s southernmost spaceport!

“Space is hard” has been the refrain of the week after the tragic Virgin Galactic loss of crew and craft following the frustrating destruct-on-launch of the Antares rocket. Two commercial systems that have very different purposes and architectures but perhaps suffered mishaps due to the same profit-driven motives.

Orbital Sciences Antares is commercial in the sense that the design, engineering and integration of the rocket were entrusted to a for-profit business that received huge, upfront cash infusions from NASA — with NASA regulating key operating standards. Virgin Galactic is truly commercial. Other than subsidies from the State of New Mexico and California in the form of below-cost spaceports, this system is the product of unfettered capitalistic impulses. The only regulatory burden on Virgin Galactic was the need for a first-of-its-kind FAA certificate for a hybrid craft that takes off like a plane and is the launch platform for a mini-rocketplane that travels into suborbital space. The FAA, under pressure not to get in the way of commercial spaceflight, issued the certificate with very little scrutiny — certainly nothing like that afforded the development of conventional planes like the 787, 777, and A380.

Because the Virgin Galactic test-flight was operating under a FAA license when it failed and it was piloted, a first-of-its-kind investigation by the National Transportation Safety Board will be required. This is a very good thing because the NTSB findings will be public and few agencies are as competent and dispassionate in the analysis of accidents as the NTSB is.

Contrast this with the ill-fated Antares rocket which operates under a wholly different part of the Code of Federal Regulations. In theory and under law, the cause of the Antares accident could be withheld from the public. Such was the case when a quality assurance test of the Antares first-stage engine resulted in a catastrophic explosion back in May. To this day, the diagnosis behind that explosion has been kept private — information that belongs to and is controlled by Orbital Sciences. Of course, since the Antares rocket blew up while thousands watched live via Internet and on the ground, Orbital Sciences may have lost the ability to hide the failings of its rocket design from the public.

This leads me to two observations about commercial spaceflight: one my own (well, me and many others) and another belonging to James Oberg, former NASA manager and current space journalist. Oberg commented this week that commercial spaceflight — at this stage of the developmental curve — is riskier spaceflight than that directed and engineered by NASA. That is because of the profit motive which drives the search for cheaper ways to orbit and subsequently a willingness to push the risk envelope: fewer test flights and fewer static tests of components equals lower costs. Could Oberg be right? Orbital Sciences decision to buy at very low cost and rebuild 40+ year-old Soviet rocket engines was a cost-saving maneuver — or so it seemed. Certainly, buying spares was cheaper than designing new. We know that the Antares first-stage engine, the AJ26, failed repeatedly during dynamic tests in its original mission: lofting a huge Soviet rocket to the move. That rocket never made it to orbit because the large number of AJ26 engines it employed would shake apart due to destructive resonance.

Here’s my point. The corporate secrecy that has come with NASA’s commercial cargo and commercial crew business model is disappointing. (Leaving Virgin Galactic out of this since the NTSB will shine a very bright light on its circumstances). As noted earlier, Orbital Sciences has received a $1.6 billion commitment from NASA, meaning from all of us taxpayers. Why was Orbital allowed to keep secret the causes of the test-engine failure in May? What if that failure and last week’s failure are connected?

And what about Sierra Nevada’s Dream Chaser spacecraft — the mini shuttle that, until recently, was in the running as an option for NASA’s commercial crew program. One year ago, in a flight test of its automated guidance and landing systems, the spaceplane was dropped from altitude with the goal of flying itself to a smooth landing on NASA’s runway at Edwards Air Force Base. The spaceplane flew brilliantly but crash-landed (on-target) when one of its landing gears failed. Sierra Nevada called its a success — key objectives accomplished! NASA conspicuously made no comment. When this reporter filed a FOIA request with NASA for all video and photographic images of the accident captured by NASA, the request was denied because the test article was privately owned and NASA was operating on behalf of Sierra Nevada when it recorded the incident. An appeal to NASA senior management noting that the test article was funded with hundreds of millions of taxpayers dollars AND that the test article crashed on a government runway operated by NASA received a response noting that almost all photos and videos had been handed over to Sierra Nevada and the case was closed. As for the remainder not handed over, I was out of luck. (Ultimately, many months later, one photo was leaked to the web showing the extent of the damage).

The point? We can’t forget that secrecy and the profit-motive are linked in the development of commercial spaceflight, no less so than when government bureaucracies rely on secrecy to achieve certain aims

Space fans, the situation in the Crimea and Eastern Ukraine may have immediate and ironically salutary implications for NASA and the ongoing push to develop a commercial human-to-LEO (low earth orbit) capability. “How so,” you ask?

While Putin’s military incursion does not affect directly the Kazakhstan spaceport, nor the operation of the Soyuz taxis the US has been renting to get our astronauts up to the International Space Station (ISS), U.S. access to the Soyuz and Kazak launch assets may be severely curtailed or blocked altogether in the coming weeks. Everything depends on the stance our diplomats take regarding the invasion and how far Putin decides to go in retaliation. Yes, Kazakhstan is an independent nation with good U.S. relations, but it is Russia that makes the rockets, delivers the rockets, launches and pilots them. Russia could decide that seats on the Soyuz are no longer available to the US.

Right now, Charlie Bolden, NASA Administrator and the agency’s human spaceflight/ISS management team must be sweating bullets. The ISS without a U.S. presence is suddenly a very plausible scenario. In the post shuttle era (PSE) U.S-based human spaceflight capability is two years away – at best – given the current development calendar and levels of public funding. SpaceX is planning to conduct abort tests of its DragonRider crewed vehicle late this year, with the outside possibility of a crewed flight using company (not NASA) test pilots in 2015. Sierra Nevada continues to develop its Dream Chaser space plane with human-rating test flights on the books for 2016.

Those dates are too far off. If the launch agreement with Russia goes south completely, perhaps we could decide that the current ISS crew should hold down the zero-G fort until we get the commercial crew program up and running 3 years from now. No one has ever lived in zero-G for such a lengthy period of time, for good reason; the impact of long-duration spaceflight on human physiology is fierce: massive reductions in bone density and muscle mass, reductions in visual acuity, and long-term exposure to radiation. One could argue that it is unethical to ask U.S. astronauts and indirectly their families to endure such risk. Maybe we could ask a nation that continues to maintain solid working relations with Russia (the likely candidates being Canada and Japan, each with hardware on orbit at ISS) to supply caretaker astronauts lofted to ISS on the Soyuz. And if we needed a push to begin conversations in earnest with China about cooperative space ventures, here you go.

All of those options are suboptimal. What makes the most sense? Accelerate funding for the commercial human spaceflight program. For years now, the Obama Administration and Congress have refused to fully fund NASA’s budget requests for the commercial cargo and human spaceflight initiatives. The end result? Greatly lengthened development calendars and pushed-back milestones for the commercial crew program. The consequence: our investment in ISS now hangs in the balance of a diplomatic crisis far beyond NASA’s control. (And the inert shell of Shuttle Atlantis sits in a museum just 6 miles away from its once-upon-a-time launchpad.)

Could accelerated funding shave off time getting to a U.S. human spaceflight launch option? Yes. While engineering lead times are not all that flexible, SpaceX has shown its ability to successfully collapse project timelines and milestones in the development of the Falcon 9 and Dragon cargo capsule. And Elon Musk seems eager to take on and conquer challenges. In any event, NASA is expected to downselect to two competing human spaceflight solutions by year’s end. Given current circumstances, the downselect should happen as soon as possible and Charlie Bolden should go to OMB and the Hill next week to ask for the needed bolus of funding to push our homegrown space launch capabilities ahead at high speed.

Let’s see what happens next…..