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US Air Force awards SpaceX $20m contract to support its biggest spy satellites

Eric Ralph
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Slipping beneath the watchful eye of many skilled defense journalists, the government contracting database FPDS.gov indicates that the US Air Force awarded SpaceX more than $20 million in November 2017 to conduct a design study of vertical integration capabilities (VIC). Describing what exactly this means first requires some background.

Vertical whaaaat?

The flood of acronyms and technical terminology that often follow activities of the Federal government should not detract from the significance of this contract award. First and foremost, what exactly is “vertical integration” and why is significant for SpaceX? Not to be confused with more abstract descriptions of corporate organization (vertical integration describes one such style), integration here describes the literal process of attaching satellite and spacecraft payloads to the rockets tasked with ferrying them to orbit.

Likely as a result of its relative simplicity, SpaceX has used a system of horizontal integration for as long as they have been in the business of launching rockets, be it Falcon 1, Falcon 9, or Falcon Heavy. In order to integrate payloads to the rocket horizontally, SpaceX has a number of horizontal integration facilities (HIF) directly beside each of their three launch pads – two in Florida, one in California. After being transported from the company’s Hawthorne, CA rocket factory, Falcon 9 and Heavy boosters, second stages, payload fairings, and other miscellaneous components are all brought into a HIF, where they are craned off of their transporters (a semi-trailer in most cases) and placed on horizontal stands inside the building.

The large, white crawler underneath Falcon 9 is one of several methods of transportation SpaceX uses. (Instagram /u/robhubar)
This photo shows the inside of 39A’s integration facilities, and the aforementioned crane can be seen in action moving one of Falcon Heavy’s side cores. (SpaceX)
The fully-integrated Falcon Heavy rolls out to Pad 39A. For vertical integration, think of this… but vertical. (SpaceX)

While in the HIF, all three main components are eventually attached together (integrated). The booster or first stage (S1) has its landing legs and grid fins installed soon after arrival at the launch site, followed by the mating of the first and second stages. Once these two primary components of the rocket are attached, the entire stack – as the mated vehicle is called – is once again lifted up by cranes inside the facility and placed atop what SpaceX calls the strongback (also known as the Transporter/Launcher/Erector, or TEL). A truly massive steel structure, the TEL is tasked with carrying the rocket to the launch pad, typically a short quarter mile trek from the integration facility. Once it reaches the pad, the TEL uses a powerful hydraulic lift system to rotate itself and its rocket payload from horizontal to vertical. It may look underwhelming, but it serves to remember that a complete Falcon 9/Heavy and its TEL are both considerably more than twice as tall as a basketball court is long.

Once at the pad, the TEL serves as the rocket’s connection to the pad’s many different ground systems. Crucially, it is tasked with loading the rocket with at least four different fuels, fluids, and gases at a broad range of temperatures, as well as holding the rocket down with giant clamps at its base, providing connection points to transmit a flood of data back to SpaceX launch control. SpaceX’s relatively unique TEL technology is to some extent the foundation of the company’s horizontal integration capabilities – such a practice would be impossible without reliable systems and methods that allow the rocket to be easily transported about and connected to pad systems.

Still, after the Amos-6 mishap in September 2016, which saw a customer’s payload entirely destroyed by a launch vehicle anomaly ahead of a static fire test, SpaceX has since changed their procedures, and now conducts those static fire tests with just the first and second stages – the payload is no longer attached until after the test is completed. For such a significant decrease in risk, the tradeoff of an additional day or so of work is minimal to SpaceX and its customers. Once completed, the rocket is brought horizontal and rolled back into the HIF, where the rocket’s payload fairing is finally attached to the vehicle while technicians ensure that the rocket is in good health after a routine test-ignition of its first stage engines.

Elon Musk’s Roadster seen before being encapsulated in Falcon Heavy’s massive payload fairing. Below the Tesla is the payload adapter, which connects it to the rocket. (SpaceX)
Imagine this building-sized fairing traveling approximately TWO MILES PER SECOND. (USAF)
Finally, the fairing is transported vertically to the HIF, where it can be flipped horizontal and attached to its rocket. (Reddit /u/St-Jed-of-Calumet)

Before being connected to the rocket, the payload itself must also go through its own integration process. Recently demonstrated by a flurry of SpaceX images of Falcon Heavy and its Roadster payload, this involves attaching the payload to a payload adapter, tasked with both securing the payload and fairing to the launch vehicle. Thankfully, the fairing is far smaller than the rocket itself, and this means it can be vertically integrated with the payload and adapter. The final act of joining and bolting together the two fairing halves is known as encapsulation – at which point the payload is now snug inside the fairing and ready for launch. Finally, the integrated payload and fairing are lifted up by cranes, rotated horizontally, and connected to the top of the rocket’s second stage, marking the completion of the integration process.

A different way to integrate

Here lies the point at which the Air Force’s $20m contract with SpaceX comes into play. As a result of certain (highly classified) aspects of some of the largest military satellites, the Department of Defense (DoD) and National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) prefer or sometimes outright require that their payloads remain vertical while being attached to a given rocket. The United Launch Alliance (ULA), SpaceX’s only competition for military launches, almost exclusively utilizes vertical integration for all of their launches, signified by the immense buildings (often themselves capable of rolling on tracks) present at their launch pads. SpaceX has no such capability, at present, and this means that they are effectively prevented from competing for certain military launch contracts – contracts that are often the most demanding and thus lucrative.

It’s clear that the Air Force itself is the main impetus pushing SpaceX to develop vertical integration capabilities, a reasonable continuation of the military’s general desire for assured access to orbit in the event of a vehicle failure grounding flights for the indefinite future. For example, if ULA or SpaceX were to suffer a failure and be forced to ground their rockets for months while investigating the incident, the DoD could choose to transfer time-sensitive payload(s) to the unaffected company for the time being. With vertical integration, this rationale could extend to all military satellites, not simply those that support horizontal integration.

A hop and a skip south of 39A is SpaceX’s LC-40 pad. (SpaceX)
Like all SpaceX pads, horizontal integration is a central feature. (SpaceX)
LC-40’s brand new TEL carries a flight-proven Falcon 9 and Dragon out to the pad. (SpaceX)

Fittingly, the ability to vertically integrate satellites is likely a necessity if SpaceX hopes to derive the greatest possible value from its recently and successfully introduced Falcon Heavy rocket, a highly capable vehicle that the government is likely very interested in. Although the specific Air Force contract blandly labels it a “Design Study,” (FPDS.gov account required) its hefty $21 million award may well be far more money than SpaceX needs to design a solution. In fact, knowing SpaceX’s famous ability to develop and operate technologies with exceptional cost efficiency, it would not be shocking to discover that the intrepid launch company has accepted the design study grant and instead jumped head-first into prototyping, if not the construction of an operational solution. More likely than not, SpaceX would choose to take advantage of the fixed tower (known as the Fixed Service Structure, FSS) currently present at Pad 39A, atop which a crane and work platforms could presumably be attached

Intriguingly, it is a real possibility that Fairing 2.0 – its first launch scheduled to occur as early as Feb. 21 – could have been upgraded in part to support present and future needs of the Department of Defense, among numerous other benefits. Fairing 2.0’s larger size may have even been precipitated by physical requirements for competing for and dealing with the largest spysats operating by the DoD and NRO, although CEO Elon Musk’s characterization of that change as a “slightly larger diameter” could suggest otherwise. On the other hand, Musk’s offhand mention of the possibility of significantly lengthening the payload fairing is likely aimed directly at government customers in both the civil and military spheres of space utilization. Time will tell, and it certainly will not hurt SpaceX or its customers if Fairing 2.0 is also considerably easier to recover and reuse.

Ultimately, it should come as no surprise that SpaceX would attempt to leverage this contract and the DoD’s interest in ways that might also facilitate the development of the company’s futuristic BFR rocket, intended to eventually take humans to the Moon, Mars, and beyond. As shown by both 2016 and 2017 iterations of the vehicle, it appears that SpaceX intends to use vertical integration to attach the spaceship (BFS) to the booster (BFR). While it’s unlikely that this Air Force contract will result in the creation of a vertical integration system that could immediately be applied to or replicated for BFS testing, the experience SpaceX would gain in the process of building something similar for the Air Force would be invaluable and essentially kill two birds with one stone.

While now outdated, SpaceX’s 2016 Mars rocket featured a giant crane used for vertical integration. BFR appears to use the same approach. (SpaceX)

Follow along live as I and launch photographers Tom Cross and Pauline Acalin cover these exciting proceedings live and in person.

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Tom Cross – Twitter

Pauline Acalin – Twitter

Eric Ralph – Twitter

US Air Force awards SpaceX $20m contract to support its biggest spy satellites

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     0 likes  3 months ago
Unfortunately this makes it impossible to quickly roll back to the horizontal integration building. Once integrated, the rocket will be stuck on the pad. It would be much cheaper int he long run for DOD to require its payloads be capable of horizontal integration.
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     0 likes  3 months ago
Looks like SpaceX is now being taken ever more seriously by Nasa & DoD mission planning teams.
The billions that ULA receives for "capability provision " (basically a free money giveaway) is getting very very hard to justify.
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     0 likes  3 months ago
Eric:

Absolutely first rate! I know a lot about rocketry, but you dumped a TON of very specific knowledge with this article.



Thank you, sir!
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     0 likes  3 months ago
I seem to remember that the prediction markets had Musk successfully testing the BFR 
by 2025 at 55%—basically a coin flip. But, in light of the last couple weeks, I think there's good reason for bullishness.
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     0 likes  3 months ago
Are these comments working? [test]
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     0 likes  3 months ago
Are these comments working? [test]

Yup.
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     0 likes  3 months ago
Why not launch from a hole in the ground, silo -style, rather than a pad? With an elevator set in the bottom, you've got your 'vertical integration' without the wind-shear. Set each stage in one at a time and lower the elevator for the next piece of the stack. You put the assembly building on a track and when it's launch time,  just roll it away. The lift-off would get a boost from the narrow confines of the tube.  Dragon could sit at ground level so astronauts could walk right in.
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     0 likes  3 months ago
Why not launch from a hole in the ground, silo -style, rather than a pad? With an elevator set in the bottom, you've got your 'vertical integration' without the wind-shear. Set each stage in one at a time and lower the elevator for the next piece of the stack. You put the assembly building on a track and when it's launch time, just roll it away. The lift-off would get a boost from the narrow confines of the tube. Dragon could sit at ground level so astronauts could walk right in.

I like the outside-the-box thinking in your question! But I think there are several major disadvantages that would outweigh the potential "vertical integration" advantage:

1) Construction and maintenance cost for a silo is almost certainly higher than a gantry
Construction above ground is nearly always less expensive to build and maintain than underground structures...especially complex ones with multiple power, chemical, data, access, monitoring, and exhaust support systems required for a rocket launch site. To have most of the rocket below ground, you'd need a silo structure buried 20+ stories underground! (And not to mention that in Florida, I bet that would add pretty serious water encroachment concerns!)

2) Nearly all advantages of horizontal integration are lost
The initial, easier "Horizontal integration" components currently in use such as the "crawler" and the strongback (aka the "Transporter/Erector/Launcher" or "TEL") would no longer be sufficient to move the rocket from the Horizontal Integration Facility (aka the "HIF") to the "silo" without some additional massive underground tunnel complex or a serious crane or elevator apparatus to then lower the rocket into the silo, adding extra cost, extra risk, and likely resulting in additional above-ground hardware anyway (e.g., if a crane is needed to move the rocket from the upright strongback down into the silo). In addition, the cost and maintenance of the HIL facility is almost certainly much lower and less complex than NASA's "largest single-story building in the world" and very vertical Vehicle Assembly Building (aka "VAB")...so you'd incur additional costs and risks to dump primary usage of the HIF and go with a VAB-type structure. Ergo, if horizontal assembly and delivery is "fine" for 90% of your missions, and it's cheaper and less risky, that's a major reason to avoid adding the additional complexities of a "silo" pad compared to a gantry.

3) It's relatively easy to modify a gantry to support larger, wider, differently shaped rockets...whereas making a silo bigger or changing it's shape is a huge deal
Just consider how much easier it would be to modify the gantry platform that can launch the "lone" Falcon 9 core to accommodate the triple-wide Falcon Heavy than it would be to take a "Falcon 9-sized silo" and make it large enough to support a triple-wide FH. Now consider something similar if they were going to add 4 additional cores to the central booster for a Falcon Super Heavy instead of just 2 (something SpaceX considered, but then discarded due to the desire to just skip to the BFR). A silo's dimensions are pretty much set once you dig it, whereas a gantry has a lot of surrounding open space to more easily accommodate different shaped craft. (That's an oversimplification, but I think you get the idea.)

4) Excessive additional stress and potential damage to all of the rocket's stages upon liftoff
The energy released by these rockets when taking off is astronomical (no pun intended). While a silo would also have flame trenches for the exhaust, the walls of the silo would still suffer from a massive and relatively prolonged and proximal dump of that energy during liftoff if there were walls surrounding the rocket. And even if the additional heat energy the silo would have to survive wasn't enough to do it in...the added acoustical energy would almost certainly be the true "silo rocket killer". Since sound is just a pressure wave in atmosphere, that amount of atmospheric overpressure being generated by the controlled explosions of 9 or 27 or however many nozzles is one of the primary reasons that spectators are forced to be at a standoff distance of something like 2+ kilometers away (I have no idea what the exact distance is, btw) to avoid hearing loss, with rockets probably generating 200-230 decibels of prolonged sound! And if you get even closer, that overpressure energy could easily liquify your internal organs after having immediately shredded your tympanic membranes. So now imagine completely surrounding that energy by 20+ story-tall silo walls...it's almost certainly enough combined heat and acoustic overpressure to liquify a surrounding concrete silo. I think they would have to be made of some sort of super-alloy to even survive a single launch...again creating additional cost. And if the walls don't ablate from that energy, then the sound is going to bounce off those silo walls and impact the entire length of the rocket which is now only a few meters away from those walls as it tries to lift off. You think re-entry and MaxQ is tough?...those additional launch forces would probably wreck the entire thing before it could ever get to experience the already dangerous MaxQ phase of ascension. And if even a small percentage of that additional energy made it all the way up to the payload, that would be very, very bad...especially for manned missions. In a gantry scenario, that nozzle energy is mostly allowed to escape down and out to the sides rather than being confined right around the launch vehicle.


Now, I freely admit that these are merely hypotheses and I'm no rocket scientist, but I think the above disadvantages are grounded in enough basic physics to be reasonable guesses as to why they might want to go with a modified gantry/crane scenario rather than a silo option.

Great question, though! For the first few minutes before I broke it all down I thought that might be a super-easy option, exactly as you stated. But I think the additional constraints, costs, and risks pretty much point to the current above-ground option as superior, even for a launch with a vertical integration requirement.
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     0 likes  3 months ago
Why not launch from a hole in the ground, silo -style, rather than a pad? With an elevator set in the bottom, you've got your 'vertical integration' without the wind-shear. Set each stage in one at a time and lower the elevator for the next piece of the stack. You put the assembly building on a track and when it's launch time, just roll it away. The lift-off would get a boost from the narrow confines of the tube. Dragon could sit at ground level so astronauts could walk right in.


Jules Vern thought of that idea. His rocket launched from a large gun barrel. Problem is, a gun style first stage is incompatible with a rocket second stage.
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     0 likes  3 months ago
Eric:

Absolutely first rate! I know a lot about rocketry, but you dumped a TON of very specific knowledge with this article.



Thank you, sir!


Apologies, I somehow never saw this! :( Thank you so much, I appreciate the kind words. It was fun to write as my first true breaking news story :D
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