Main Engine Cut Off

In the Flexible Path era, NASA has always been flexible on both the vision and the details. That is why the human exploration program is floundering.

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Chris Gebhardt of NASASpaceflight wrote a great rundown of Orbital ATK’s Next Generation Launcher that included a great little nugget of info at the end.

There are two payloads on CRS-14 that caught my eye as very important to the future in space.

Large federal funding of a Boeing-built system which the private sector says is unnecessary because they can provide the government with more services for less money. Sounds familiar.

Maybe the change was brought about by the seemingly-slower ramp up of BE-4 testing, but nonetheless it gets them to the pad quicker, simplifies their production lines and operations, and allows them to hit just about every useful flight profile from day one.

Hmm.

This seems like a great addition to the MEV architecture, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it grew out of customer inquiries for a stationkeeping-only service, rather than one that includes attitude control, too.

I’m holding off on making too many assessments of the Swarm authorization fiasco until we know a little more than we do now. Did one of the parties knowingly make a nefarious decision to proceed? Or did this really fall through the cracks because of how many parties were involved in getting these satellites up?

We’ll see if anything comes of this, and “last summer” is not an insignificant amount of time in the past, but it’s at least an intriguing project to think about and consider. I’d hate to see Stratolaunch repeat some mistakes from Shuttle with Black Ice, though.