NASA, SpaceX, Boeing and Others SpaceX is making the other aerospace companies look very bad. It was just announced today August 3, 2021 the giant rocket developed by Boeing, Aerojet Rocketdyne, Lockheed, and Northrop Grumman, and others is delayed again because of a valve error. The last big delay caused the rocket to have to be taken apart to reach a valve to fix it. This took many months. Boeing is in charge of the Exploration Upper Stage. The Inspector General of NASA has blasted the companies for all the delays which put the SLS, Space Launch System years behind and also because of incredible cost overruns. It is time for us to just stop this hemorrhaging of money and time and just cancel the contract and sue the contractors? It is time these companies are made responsible for not meeting their obligations on time. Perhaps fines or reduction in payments, or even cancelling contracts is in order. Do we have an alternative if we would cancel the contract? Yes, and it is SpaceX the aerospace company which is hated by the others. They hate the company because they are not able to compete with it. Just recently SpaceX installed 29 engines into its Starship rocket, a rocket with twice the power of the Saturn 5, which took the Apollo astronauts to the moon. The amazing thing was this company did it overnight. It usually takes a company one day per engine to install engines into a rocket. Their new rocket is Starship Super Heavy. It he gets this beast into orbit on his first try it will then be ahead of the SLS rocket from NASA. The SLS was proposed way back in 2010 and is still waiting to pass its final test. After the last launch problem was announced where the rocket had to be disassembled due to a part failure which couldn’t be reached without disassembly, it was announced it had redundant parts in some areas so when another problem arose it was decided to go for the test with the backup system. It seems to me this meant there was no backup system for the backup system so if anything went wrong that was it for the rocket. The overruns are in the billions of dollars and the delays are in years. When asked about the problems, a Boeing spokesman said, “No one is building a rocket like this, and we’re creating a very in-depth database for all future rockets.” Obviously, he was ignoring the fact SpaceX was also building a giant heavy rocket. On top of all that NASA gave award fees to both Boeing and Lockheed. It was almost 146 million dollars for Boeing and 87 million for Lockheed. Nothing like getting an award for a job badly done and unfinished. In case I haven’t made it clear the SpaceX super heavy is called the Starship and there are plans to use it to send people to Mars and not only the moon. It will have the ability to carry over a 100 metric tons into Earth orbit. The SLS is using a version of the space shuttle engine which was first flown in April, 1981. In all this time one would have to think a newer engine would have been developed. True this engine is being updated, but still, it seems to be old technology. If we talk about rocket engines the SpaceX Raptor engine is more powerful than the SLS RS-25 rocket engine and it only costs about one million dollars to build according to Elon Musk. The RS-25 rocket engines NASA is using are said to cost 40 million each. They are said to be reusable and Musk says his engines can be used many times. He also states he hopes to get the price down to $250,000 as he builds more of them. It doesn’t take a genius to notice everything is far cheaper to do with a SpaceX rocket. I am not talking about a little cheaper, I am talking about incredibly cheaper. If we look at the other new aerospace companies, SpaceX doesn’t seem to have much competition. Some of them are even using some SpaceX parts. Blue Origin is developing a rocket which it claims will also land vertically, but it has been delayed to late 2022 at the earliest. New Glenn is the rocket they will launch first. They are pinning their hopes on the LC-36. That is a launch complex which Bezos, the leader of Blue Origin is building. He has big planes for it and is calling it his road to space. There is a company named Relativity Space. It is a smaller company than some, but it has big plans. It is trying to become the first company to build a rocket using the world’s biggest 3D metal printers. The company is based in California and is building the Terran 1 rocket. It plans to transport its rocket to the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station by truck. It also wants to reuse as much of the rocket as possible to keep cost down. Without firing off one rocket the value of the company has climbed to over 4 billion dollars. Firefly is another new company. The company is working on building its Alpha rocket and also launch pads all over the country. It got a nice contract from NASA when it was selected to build a moon lander for the Artemis program and was awarded 93 million dollars to do it. This company’s value has now passed 1 billion dollars. It seems just the promise of building a particular thing will boost a company’s value. One segment of the rocket launch programs is becoming popular and that is the companies with small rockets like Rocket Lab. They are known as SPACs or Special-Purpose Acquisition Companies. I can understand this. Why pay for bigger rockets when a smaller, cheaper one will do? Look for new comers in the future joining the party. After all, the future is in space travel.
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