Orbital-ATK Merger: A logistical juggernaut?

Excelsior · 2014-04-30 11:59:26

Orbital and ATK form space flight super group

Orbital and ATK have merged forces to form a joint company that will combine the talents and resources of two well-known space industry stalwarts. To be known as Orbital ATK Inc. – the deal will give birth to a new Global Aerospace and Defense Systems Company that will result in the further merging of synergies with their respective space hardware.
Orbital ATK Inc:
While Tuesday’s announcement was heavily angled at investors and the financial market, the initiation of the merger is aimed at a combination of forces that may result in some interesting and positive implications for the space hardware both companies currently run separately and together.
With a focus on affordability, the merger is targeting a stronger foothold in the increasingly competitive space market.

One wonders what this merger means for orbital logistics going forward. Orbitals Antares kind of earned the COTS consolation prize, but other than a slightly extended payload module, it is essentially a dead end system flying a Russian first stage engine that will increasingly struggle to compete with the reusable Falcon.

ATK on the other hand, has to know that depending on the SLS is not going end well for them, and they need to break to more viable market. They already provide the Castor second stage on the Antares, and has previously partnered with Orbital to provide the solid first and second stages of the Pegasus II airborne rocket.

So where are they going with this? ATK has tried every which way to find a customer for the old (or new) shuttle SRB. The SLS is not long for this world, and though the Liberty rocket went over like a lead balloon as a manned launcher, it does have tremendous potential as a logistical launcher, providing far more cargo in a scaled up Cygnus II than the Dragon can deliver, on what is, after the Ares I-X flight, essentially proven flight and ground hardware. I think they are looking to replace the Antares first stage with a reusable SRB, with the Pegasus II filling the lower end of the market, and an Antares two providing serious supplies to future exploration outposts and Bigelow commercial, or government owned space stations, striking a happy medium between the Falcon 9 and Heavy, in order to take over the orbital logistics market, compete on equal terms on the satellite market, and leaving the manned, and politically volatile super heavy exploration market with SpaceX.

For a while there it looked like SpaceX would be by itself, which of course isn't good from the competitive standpoint. But between the two I think we might have a good mix of competition, specialization and diversity in our commercial providers to do great things in an all commercial launch provider space program.

Last edited by Excelsior (2014-04-30 12:02:12)

JoshNH4H · 2014-04-30 12:26:15

I like the sound of this. I would expect, though, that whatever we do with solid rockets will have the same issues with thrust oscillations as the Ares 1 did, and will therefore likely make them infeasible for use in crew launch systems.

Which, by the way, is a huge shame. The design of the Ares 1 really was a promising one.

Excelsior · 2014-04-30 13:49:02

I thought the biggest issue was no known LAS system could get a capsule out of the way of the shower of burning fuel that continues upward when a SRB explodes. Not that one ever has, at least in that way. Other than that, as long as your not launching the massive Orion, I'm sure you could put enough dampening material to cancel that out.

It would be nice to have a completely domestically sourced alternative for manned launches, God forbid the Falcon had an issue. I suppose we have the Delta IV Heavy, for a heavy price.

On that note, I wonder how the Falcon will develop along side the MCT. I could see them trying to switch to an all methane fuel line. Maybe just cut to a 3-4 Raptor stack for that price and mission scale point. That way you maintain your engine out and reusablilty.

Its bizarre how ULA doesn't even seem to be trying to compete on the price point. I guess they are that certain of their lackeys in the Congress.

Last edited by Excelsior (2014-04-30 13:52:04)

GW Johnson · 2014-04-30 15:12:55

Not all solids have bad thrust oscillations, just that one did. The SRB as a 4-segment design did not oscillate (although there were some other mistakes in it).

When they went to the longer 5-segment design, they brought one of the many possible oscillation modes into resonance with some of the basic combustion noise and flow separation zones inside the motor. They never tried to identify and fix this, they just tried adding ballast as a dampener, which was nothing but a band aid.

That's just being too cheap, plain and simple. Not to mention risking other people's lives had it ever flown manned. I personally consider those things unethical, but that's just me.

GW

JoshNH4H · 2014-04-30 19:07:13

The largest solid rocket I've ever flown had maybe 50 grams of fuel in it, so I'm more than willing to take your word for it

To be fair, Ares I was attractive to me from an aesthetic sense more than a practical one. I have no idea if it was a better idea than, say, liquid two-stage (My feeling is no).

Actually, starting from 2004, the best course of action would probably have been to build on the Delta IV Heavy technology rather than the Space Shuttle technology. I may be coming around to the standpoint that H2/LOX is the way of the future.

SpaceNut · 2014-04-30 19:33:57

Orbital Chairman and CEO David Thompson says his company is considering an ATK proposal to develop a solid-rocket propulsion system to replace the modified Russian NK-33 engines that power the Antares rocket's Ukrainian-built first stage.

With strained relations with the Russian area nations continue making a switch would not be all that bad.

A large solid rocket first stage would also boost Antares' current 5,000-kg lift capacity to low Earth orbit by “20-25%, depending on the orbit in question,” Thompson says.
The increase would give Antares a lift capacity comparable to the SpaceX Falcon 9 v1.1 for small- to mid-sized payloads launched to supersynchronous orbit.

Real competition is not a bad thing....

The company needs three years to develop a new Antares first stage, though a demonstration flight for the rocket might not be necessary.

But why so long to design?

SpaceNut · 2014-04-30 20:12:42

We did have lots of discussion on the RS68 engine which powers the first stage of the Delta rocket and even of the Altlas expanded line of products but the main question raised was about man rating of a system not designed to protect man and what would be necessary to make it safe enough for manned use. Nasa did do work to the Delta engine but I am not sure that it met the man rating monique. Atlas did do the design study and it seemed to make the grade. Such riders as Bigelow and Seirra groups dream chaser are some of the potential clients.

The grop did feel that a clean slate was the best approach to a new heavy lift rocket and that any other was a frankenstine creation.

RobertDyck · 2014-05-01 06:12:53

I'm very concerned. "Old Space" went through a series of mergers, reducing the many space companies of the 1960s down to just a few giants. The result was all contracts were slow, over priced, and always had cost overruns. Innovation by engineers was squashed. Since the turn of the millennium we have several "New Space" companies to re-invigorate American space industry. Orbital has existed for some time, but they became a major player with Cygnus and Antares. Now an "Old Space" company is merging with "New Space"? Expect "Old Space" will dominate, will squash innovation and increase prices.

Josh: pretty much all space fans knew "The Stick" would have those problems. We knew when it was first proposed, before they started any development. If not oscillation, there was extreme vibration that would not be damped by Shuttle's orbiter's mass and huge external tank. And there was the problem with torque. Two engines with torque issues will cancel out, but one? And you can't trottle a solid; once ignited, you're going. Major abort issues.

JoshNH4H · 2014-05-01 09:19:18

In 2004, I was ten years old. I don't think anyone can fault me for not knowing much physics

GW Johnson · 2014-05-01 10:13:13

Long ago I worked for Hercules Aerospace before ATK bought them up, like it did our competitor Thiokol. I worked at a tactical motor plant, where propellant weights were usually 100's to a 1000 pounds. Our sister plant in Utah built the big motors comparable to the SRB's. Thiokol did build the SRB's, just across the valley.

We tactical guys had to do the full design analysis suite, and the full development testing suite, to assure that we would produce motors that burned stably and smoothly, and could withstand all the shake, rattle, and roll, and abuse testing, typical of military battle equipment. 1-in-a-million failure rates, in production lots of thousands to hundreds of thousands of motors.

Our colleagues at the big motor plant in Utah, and their competitors across the valley in Utah (and elsewhere), didn't do all that. It was "customary" in the big motor business to design things the same way they designed the Titanic: skip all the design analysis and development testing. Just scale up something you did before, and hope it works OK. They built 1's and 2's, to 10's and 20's, in their production lots.

That lazy big-motor process is exactly why Thiokol killed the Challenger crew with a bad joint design approved by an ignorant NASA (who remained blissfully ignorant of good solid motor joint design to the end of the shuttle program, even down to today), it is why Hercules had to take a billion-dollar write-off for blowing up an AFRPL test stand with an SRB-class strap-on motor, and it is why the 5-segment ATK SRB motor "sings" unstably at a low frequency, with an amplitude that could destroy the vehicle, or kill the crew even if the vehicle survives.

If the engineering were done with the due diligence typical of the tactical business, the big solids would have been way more reliable from the beginning, and all these issues would not have cropped up. But you don't make enormous windfalls off your business if you do your job correctly like that. And THAT was, is, and will always be, the real problem in the "big solid rocket business".

GW

JoshNH4H · 2014-05-01 14:41:48

I've got a guess! Nobody thinks that the CST-100 has any part to play in the future of space exploration anyway >:)

Seriously, it's too heavy and too expensive, while having no more capability than the alternatives. Like much of the rest of our currently unfocused manned space exploration program, it's a waste of money and talent

GW Johnson · 2014-05-01 15:41:27

Awww, ya just don't understand!

Outfits like Boeing and Lock-Mart view government contracts, especially R&D contracts as nothing but a very lucrative gravy train, and in the case of R&D, nothing ever has to really fly.

Uncle Sam's pig has a lot of juicy tits they've been sucking on, for a lot of decades. With all the consolidation, down to nothing but ULA, no one else is ever allowed a tit to suck on. That's because they bought the pig, and all the farmers and county agents overseeing it.

THAT'S why outfits like Spacex, Orbital, XCOR, and all the rest, have such a difficult time breaking into the business. It's very seriously rigged against them.

But, that being said, I am really cheering-on Spacex with its manned Dragon, and Sierra Nevada with its Dreamchaser. And I'm hoping that more enter the launch-men-to-LEO field soon.

As for large launch vehicles, Falcon-Heavy is the only thing I see on the horizon. SLS will never be anything but a single-purpose and very expensive government toy. If it ever actually flies at all.

SLS uses that same 5-segment SRB as its strap-ons, the same design I criticized roundly just above. If you thought a shuttle explosion was bad, wait till they trigger off an entire SLS with another SRB joint failure! Or that unaddressed 5-segment combustion instability.

GW

Last edited by GW Johnson (2014-05-01 15:43:48)

RobertDyck · 2014-05-01 15:51:10

As I understand it, the SRB is basically a pipe from a pipe organ. Could the length of one segment be adjusted to correct overall length, making it no longer a harmonic?

GW Johnson · 2014-05-01 21:00:40

Their thinking was that they wanted more length for more impulse, but wanted to use the same hardware and stacking techniques. One extra segment got them the impulse they wanted. Nobody thought about anything more than that.

As far as I know, or can tell, no one ever ran an acoustic stability analysis on it. There are programs available for that. We used them 20-30 years ago on the tactical motors. Stability was a real problem with reduced smoke propellants; usually the aluminized propellants gave us very little trouble. Adding aluminum cured the "singing" at the cost of smoke, quite often. SRB-type propellant is aluminized. Their problem is so bad that the aluminum doesn't help. But, it's still fundamentally unaddressed.

I'm not sure that a change in the length of one segment would help. I'm also not sure that it wouldn't. But, I'm also not sure that the first longitudinal mode is the source of the "singing" in the 5-segment SRB. Quite often in small motors, it was the first tangential mode. Sometimes a radial mode would offend. Neither of those responds to length changes.

Slots in the propellant can help with those other modes, sometimes. Just do not slot a forward segment. Always slot the aftmost. There's a whole sad story about that. No tactical motor guy would ever design forward slots, we all knew better from our design analyses and the testing and development experiences that confirmed them.

But the old big-motor Hercules guys did, and that's how they blew up AFRPL's biggest thrust stand. That was the billion-dollar write-off I wrote about somewhere just above.

GW

"HA >>> H"

Last edited by GW Johnson (2014-05-01 21:04:43)

RobertDyck · 2014-05-02 00:07:09

I seem to remember reading something about that. The 4-segment SRBs used by Shuttle had slots all the way up, but they tapered the slots. Larger exit at the aft end. One issue was to get the fuel to burn quickly. Another is the ignitor is right at the top. It burns a flame down the centre of the top hole in the solid fuel.

GW Johnson · 2014-05-02 08:13:36

The igniter for the SRB was essentially a "small" rocket motor about the size of a Phoenix missile motor. I doubt they changed that for the 5 segment motor.

Slots or not at which end, and wide vs narrow slots facing which way, are questions that involve compressible flow, stress-strain in propellant, and erosive-burning effects on the basic burn rate equation. If you squeeze-down on the flow by dumping too much into the stream too far down the motor, you get a huge velocity increase and a huge pressure drop at the aft end of the grain bore.

That pressure drop deforms the propellant charge such that it tries to move downstream, too. Typically, this acts to close off the available bore area downstream, aggravating the problem as strong positive feedback. The same squeeze-down conditions cause erosive burning, too, which is a second unstable but very strong positive feedback. The inevitable result is an overpressurization explosion. It happens very suddenly, on a scale of milliseconds. The net effect is effectively "plugging the nozzle with too much massflow", which converts your solid motor to a pipe bomb.

You have to analyze your design with more than standard ballistics to prevent this. It takes a combined compressible flow, solid ballistics, erosive burning effects, and grain deformation analysis, not to mention acoustic stability analysis. That process it usually quite iterative, and employs a team of engineering specialists to carry out. Been there and done that in the tactical motor business. We usually did the acoustic stability only if our first development experimental motor "sang". The other stuff was completely routine design for us, what the lawyers call due diligence.

Our colleagues in the big motor plant had engineers who knew what these things were, but they traditionally did not analyze their motors this way, as it is "expensive in terms of labor". However, blowing up AFRPL's stand was a lot more expensive, as Hercules found to its chagrin. They're now ATK, as is Thiokol across the valley. Because of the instability in the 5 segment motor, I see no signs that proper design analysis (due diligence) is being done as ATK, anymore than it was as Hercules or Thiokol.

BTW, I'd bet they're still doing that 3-O-ring joint on the 5-segment motor, that was the supposed "fix" for the 2-O-ring joint that failed and killed Challenger and its crew. Multiple O-rings might be a good design for a clean-gas system, but when mobilized solids are involved, that's a very bad design. That joint should have one and only one O-ring. Two or more is an invitation to failure. So is putting "pooky" of any kind in the insulation joint at the segment joint. Those two bad decisions, acting together with a cold-stiffened O-ring, are what really killed Challenger. It hasn't re-occurred, largely because they've never flown sub-freezing soaked-out again. The bad joint design risk is still there.

GW

Last edited by GW Johnson (2014-05-02 13:09:36)

Excelsior · 2014-10-28 16:59:03

The newly merged entity and NASA now has to deal with a lost payload and a questionable rocket...

Orbital’s Antares fails seconds into flight

Excelsior · 2014-10-28 19:43:09

Clearly a first stage engine blowout. What surprises me is the amount of the first stage that survived the engine explosion, only to fall back and explode on the pad. That is not going to be cheap to fix.

Video

Last edited by Excelsior (2014-10-28 19:49:05)

Terraformer · 2014-10-29 04:21:43

It's what happens when you use a 40+ year old engine that's not been used on any successful rockets...

GW Johnson · 2014-10-29 10:03:03

The yellow "fireball" at the base of the rocket was too big. It wasn't just image "bloom" on the camera. Something apparently cracked open on the combustion chamber or nozzle entrance at ignition. The hot gas leak apparently destroyed the rear of the vehicle within seconds.

Suspicion: that re-engineered Russian engine is still not a good design. The test track record is spotty enough to support that contention.

GW

RobertDyck · 2014-10-29 14:38:18

In August we had a new member join the Winnipeg chapter of the Mars Society. A university student, foreign student from Kyiv, Ukraine. She warned us about those engines. Her message today:

>Hate being the "I told you" person but... I told you I mean, about the engines that are used in this rocket.
>
>They are the ones that were hidden for 30 years in Siberian forest before being sold to Aerojet Rocketdyne.
>IMO, it was only a matter of time, when they fail to notice the engine that was too damaged by inappropriate
>storage conditions...
>
>Maryna

Excelsior · 2014-10-29 14:55:17

Was there ever a diagnosis on the May test failure?

If its the same issue someone is going to be in the doghouse.

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#1 2014-04-30 11:59:26

Orbital-ATK Merger: A logistical juggernaut?

#2 2014-04-30 12:26:15

Re: Orbital-ATK Merger: A logistical juggernaut?

#3 2014-04-30 13:49:02

Re: Orbital-ATK Merger: A logistical juggernaut?

#4 2014-04-30 15:12:55

Re: Orbital-ATK Merger: A logistical juggernaut?

#5 2014-04-30 19:07:13

Re: Orbital-ATK Merger: A logistical juggernaut?

#6 2014-04-30 19:33:57

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#7 2014-04-30 20:12:42

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#8 2014-05-01 06:12:53

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#9 2014-05-01 09:19:18

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#10 2014-05-01 10:13:13

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#15 2014-05-02 00:07:09

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#16 2014-05-02 08:13:36

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#17 2014-10-28 16:59:03

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#18 2014-10-28 19:43:09

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#19 2014-10-29 04:21:43

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#20 2014-10-29 10:03:03

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#21 2014-10-29 14:38:18

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#22 2014-10-29 14:55:17

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