Main Engine Cut Off

After a quiet Thanksgiving week, things really picked up. United Launch Alliance unveiled a new website as part of their push into commercial launch services, and a Soyuz-U carrying a Progress cargo vehicle failed on its way to the ISS.

RocketBuilder

Tory Bruno took the stage in Washington, D.C. on Wednesday to unveil RocketBuilder, a new way for potential customers to explore Atlas V configurations and prices. This is another step on the journey we’ve been watching ULA take into the commercial sector. About two months ago on the podcast, I talked extensively about ULA’s commercial strategy. This week, I discussed how RocketBuilder fits into that, as well as what the announcement means for ULA, at a higher level.

The gist of it is this: Atlas V launches are expensive, but they’re reliable and on-time, which is ULA’s biggest competitive advantage. They’re doing a much better job at getting that message out to people who need to hear it, and they’ve coupled that message with RapidLaunch, RocketBuilder, and fairly big price cuts. RocketBuilder even puts a hard price tag on the slightly-intangible benefits of flying on an Atlas V—reliability, schedule certainty, and insurance savings.

Tory Bruno has said repeatedly that they need to start competing commercially, and this strategy is their best chance at getting their current product lineup into the market. Sure, the announcement he made this week didn’t have any breaking news or unveilings of grand visions—we’ve been discussing this effort from ULA for months—but it isn’t something that should be brushed off.

ULA is finding their voice, and I think it will pay off for them. They built a tool that is exactly what their target customer needs. They need 3–4 organizations a year to realize what ULA sees as the Atlas advantage, and RocketBuilder could be a huge help. It’s a well-designed interface that spits out paperwork with figures to review after the fact—just what someone needs to take into a meeting with those who sign paperwork.

Soyuz-U Failure

We don’t have everything we need to know just yet about yesterday’s failure, but the failure occured while the third stage burn was underway. The station has plenty of supplies, and a Japanese HTV is due to launch in the next few weeks, so the loss of Progress MS–04 isn’t a big concern.

The biggest thing right now is that the Soyuz-U launch vehicle uses the same third stage as the Soyuz-FG launch vehicle used for crew launches. I’ll save the worrying about the failure for when we know exactly what happened.

But, any failure in the single system capable of getting crew to the ISS can, should, and will be used by NASA, Congress, and other interested parties to push the importance of Commercial Crew. A failure, no matter how minor, gives Commercial Crew additional political capital, and after several funding struggles, that program needs everything it can get. Keep an eye out for how this does (or does not) impact Commercial Crew in the final stretch to the first launch.

Odds and Ends

Speaking of NASA and politics, we’ve finally started to get some information on the transition team. More interestingly, Marcia Smith of SpacePolicyOnline.com got her hands on a draft of the new NASA authorization bill. It’s definitely worth reading through what’s in there. Of particluar interest to me were references to nuclear and radioisotopic power systems.

Iridium announced a tenative date and time for their first Iridium NEXT launch. According to their announcement, SpaceX will be returning to flight from Vandenberg Air Force Base on December 16th at 12:36 PM local. My wedding ceremony begins 36 minutes earlier here in Philadelphia, so I’ll be saying vows within minutes of Falcon 9 lifting off. Guess I’ll catch the replay!

Thank you!

Thanks for reading the seventh issue of Main Engine Cut Off Weekly. Each week, I bring you what I find interesting and important in spaceflight, and you can get it however you like best—blog, podcast, or this here column. If you like what I’m doing, I’d really appreciate your support. Head over to Patreon and become a patron for as little as $1 per month. Everything I do is supported entirely by readers and listeners like you, and every little bit of support helps. Big thanks to those of you out there supporting!

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Thanks for reading, and I’ll talk to you next week.

— Anthony