NASA announced today the names of four astronauts it has selected to be the first to fly on the commercial crew systems under development by Boeing and SpaceX.   The three men and one woman all are spaceflight veterans.  NASA hopes Boeing’s CST-100 and SpaceX’s crew version of Dragon (“Crew Dragon”) will be ready to send astronauts to the International Space Station (ISS) by 2017.

The four NASA astronauts are:

• Robert Behnken, who flew on two space shuttle missions:  STS-123 in 2008 and STS-130 in 2010.  He has a total of 29 days in space, including 37 hours on six spacewalks.
• Eric Boe flew on STS-126 in 2008 and STS-133 in 2011.  He has more than 28 days in space.
• Douglas Hurley flew on STS-127 in 2009 and STS-135 (the final shuttle mission) in 2011.  He has more than 28 days in space.
• Sunita Williams, a veteran of two long-duration ISS missions (December 2006-June 2007 and July-November 2012) totaling 322 days in space.  On her second mission, she was the commander of the ISS.  She holds the record for total cumulative spacewalk time for a woman — 50 hours 40 minutes — over seven spacewalks.

They will train to fly on both commercial spacecraft, which are being developed under a public private partnership (PPP) between the companies and the government.  Boeing and SpaceX were selected for the final phase of the program, Commercial Crew Transportation Capability (CCtCAP), last fall.   Their contracts with NASA require them to fly at least one crewed flight test with at least one NASA astronaut to the ISS to verify that the system can launch, maneuver in orbit, and dock to the ISS.  To meet that requirement, the companies must provide the requisite training for the crews.

SpaceX founder, CEO and lead designer Elon Musk said last summer that SpaceX does not plan to have any astronauts of its own and only astronauts selected by NASA will fly to the ISS on Crew Dragon. (NASA is responsible for getting not only its own astronauts, but those of the non-Russian ISS partners — Japan, Canada and Europe — to and from the ISS under the Intergovernmental Agreement that governs the program.)  Boeing’s John Elbon, vice president and general manager for space exploration, said in April that Boeing plans to fly one NASA astronaut and one Boeing test pilot on its test flight.

NASA continues to try to convince Congress to provide full funding for the commercial crew program so American companies can launch American astronauts on American systems from American soil by 2017.  The United States has not been able to launch anyone into space since it terminated the space shuttle program in 2011.  It pays Russia to launch crews to the ISS and bring them home.  NASA Administrator Charlie Bolden repeatedly says that if Congress had fully funded the program in the past, the systems would be flying this year instead of 2017.

NASA is requesting $1.244 billion for commercial crew in the FY2016 budget now before Congress.  The House approved $1.000 billion and the Senate Appropriations Committee recommended $900 million, so they clearly are not yet convinced.  While there is broad agreement that the United States should be able to launch its own astronauts and should spend its money supporting the U.S., not Russian, economy, many in Congress remain skeptical that the market for sending people into space is sufficiently substantial to keep two companies in business without significant ongoing government support.  The idea is that the government should be a customer, but not the only customer, of these systems.  Some also argue that NASA should fund only one company, not two, but NASA insists that it needs competition to keep prices down and redundancy in case one of the systems suffers a major failure.

The failure of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket on June 28 may buttress NASA’s redundancy argument.  How SpaceX recovers from the accident, and whether the government is expected to pay any of the recovery costs, may factor into the skeptics’ argument.   The Falcon 9 was launching a cargo mission to the ISS that day — no people were aboard — when the rocket failed 139 seconds after launch.   SpaceX is still trying to determine what went wrong.

The SpaceX and Boeing capsules will allow NASA to send four people to the ISS at a time.  Added to three that can travel to the ISS on Russia’s Soyuz spacecraft, the typical ISS crew complement could increase from six to seven. NASA emphasizes that the extra crew person can devote his or her time to research rather than maintenance tasks that currently occupy a large part of the crew’s time.   Research is the raison d’être of the ISS, so additional crew time for research is considered very valuable.

A three-day conference in Boston this week organized by the American Astronautical Society (AAS) in cooperation with NASA and the Center for the Advancement of Science in Space (CASIS) focused on ISS research — results from experiments already conducted and what’s coming up in the future.  

NASA has consistently said for the past several years that it hopes commercial crew will be operational by 2017, but at the AAS conference on Tuesday, NASA ISS Program Manager Mike Suffredini said NASA looks forward to adding a fourth crew member to the ISS complement in 2018, not 2017, suggesting a delay. 

The ISS partners — the United States, Russia, Japan, Canada, and 11 European countries working through the European Space Agency — are currently planning to operate the ISS through 2020, though NASA is trying to convince them to extend it to 2024.  How many NASA astronauts will have a chance to fly to ISS on the commercial crew vehicles is an open question.

SpaceX is still trying to find a theory that fits the data transmitted back to Earth on June 28 as its Falcon 9 rocket failed 139 seconds after launch.   It hopes to have preliminary findings by the end of this week as it works to establish an extremely detailed timeline of events.

SpaceX founder, CEO and lead designer Elon Musk spoke at the 4th International Space Station R&D conference in Boston this morning.  The conference is organized by the American Astronautical Society (AAS) in cooperation with NASA and the Center for the Advancement of Science in Space (CASIS).  It continues through Thursday.  He participated as part of an on-stage  “conversation” with NASA ISS Program Manager Mike Suffredini

Musk’s message this morning repeated what the company said last week — there was an overpressure event in the upper stage (or second stage) liquid oxygen tank, but apart from that, the data do not fit any known theories of what could have happened.

Calling the failure a “huge blow to SpaceX,” he emphasized that “whatever happened is totally not simple or straightforward.”   A “super detailed timeline” at the millisecond level is being generated to determine precisely what happened.  They are comparing video taken during the launch with data that was received.  The timeline must account for each millisecond between when a sensor took a reading, the data got encoded to a data packet, the packet was transmitted to the ground, and received on the ground.  Because the data do not fit any known theories so far, they are also considering whether there might be data measurement errors.

Suffredini asked whether there were any hints yet, but Musk declined to answer because there was media in the room and he did not want to say anything that “turns out to be a misunderstanding of the situation.”

SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket failed while attempting to send a Dragon capsule full of supplies and equipment to the International Space Station (ISS) under its Commercial Resupply Services (CRS) contract with NASA.  This was the seventh mission in that series — CRS-7 or SpX-7.   It was the third failure of cargo missions to the ISS over 8 months:  an Orbital Sciences Corporation (now Orbital ATK) Antares launch of a Cygnus capsule on October 28, 2014; the Russian Soyuz launch of the Progress M-27M spacecraft on April 28, 2015; and this Falcon 9 launch of a Dragon capsule on June 28.

The conference is for the community that conducts research aboard the ISS and Suffredini reassured them that the ISS itself is healthy and still open for business.  However, he acknowledged that the failure has a “big impact to us,” and while the ISS program “always assumed we’d lose one or two” cargo flights, “never in my wildest dreams” did he think three would fail in such a short period of time.

Nonetheless, one must play the hand that is dealt, he continued, and the program is resilient.  The Russians now have launched the next in the Progress series, Progress M-28M, which successfully docked with the ISS on Sunday.  Japan’s HTV cargo vehicle is being readied for launch on August 16.  Suffredini said NASA did make changes to the supplies that HTV will deliver because of the CRS-7 failure, but the research component is relatively unchanged.  Orbital ATK plans to launch a Cygnus spacecraft on a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket in December while updating its Antares rocket with a different engine.

Suffredini conveyed optimism and enthusiasm for the potential of the ISS for research that will benefit people on Earth, calling it the “next dot com” that is worthy of the challenges it presents.

In a panel discussion following the Suffredini-Musk conversation, Bill Gerstenmaier,  NASA Associate Administrator for Human Exploration and Operations, similarly praised the potential of ISS, but also stressed a theme he often expresses these days — that ISS has a finite lifetime and the key question is how to prepare for the next step since he does not anticipate that the U.S. government, at least, will build another ISS.

Russia’s Progress M-28M robotic cargo spacecraft docked with the International Space Station at 3:11 am Eastern Daylight Time (EDT) this morning (July 5), a little over two days after it was launched early Friday morning EDT.

The cargo vehicle, called Progress 60 or 60P by NASA, is delivering 1,940 pounds of propellant, 106 pounds of water, 106 pounds of oxygen, and 3,133 pounds of food, parts, supplies and experimental hardware.

NASA calls it 60P because it is the 60th Progress mission launched to support ISS, an indication of how often these spacecraft take supplies to the ISS crew.  They are so routine that they often get little notice, but the previous Russian flight, Progress M-27M, failed.  Two U.S. cargo spacecraft also failed over the past eight months:  Orbital Sciences Corporation’s (now Orbital ATK) Orb-3 mission on October 28, 2014 and SpaceX’s CRS-7 last Sunday (June 28). 

Although there were four successful cargo flights over that 8-month span (two Russian, two SpaceX) and NASA said the crew has plenty of supplies through October, the failure of three of the four ISS cargo systems in such a short period of time was worrying.  

The fourth system is Japan’s HTV and the fifth in that series, HTV-5, is scheduled for launch next month.

The successful docking gives everyone a sigh of relief.   One of the crew exclaimed that it was like “Christmas in July.”

SpaceX is still trying to determine what went wrong 139 seconds into the launch of its seventh operational Commercial Resupply Services (CRS-7) mission to ISS on June 28.  Orbital ATK found that a problem with the NK33/AJ26 engine of its Antares rocket caused the Orb-3 failure last October and is switching to a completely different engine (RD-181).  While waiting for the re-engined Antares to enter service in the first quarter of 2016, it will launch its next Cygnus cargo craft on a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket later this year.

UPDATE, JULY 5, 2015:   Progress M-28M successfully docked with the ISS this morning.

ORIGINAL STORY, JULY 3, 2015: Russia’s Progress M-28M robotic cargo spacecraft lifted off on time at 12:55:48 am Eastern Daylight Time (EDT) this morning (July 3) and is successfully on its way to the International Space Station (ISS).  The successful launch is good news, though with two cargo launch failures in the past 8 months, many are waiting for docking on Sunday before breathing a sign of relief.

The last Progress launch, Progress M-27M on April 28, failed due to a “design peculiarity” that affected third stage separation between the Soyuz rocket and the Progress spacecraft.  The spacecraft reached orbit, but the wrong orbit, and was spinning. It reentered over the Pacific Ocean on May 7.

That was just over two months ago, so this is a quick return-to-flight.  The Russians used a different version of the Soyuz rocket today, a Soyuz-U instead of a Soyuz 2.1a. 

The Progress M-27M failure was the middle of three failed cargo flights to the ISS over 8 months.  First was the October 28, 2014 failure of Orbital Sciences Corporation’s (now Orbital ATK) Orb-3 launch (Antares/Cygnus), then Progress M-27M (Soyuz/Progress), and most recently the SpaceX CRS-7 failure (Falcon 9/Dragon) on Sunday, June 28.  

There were four successful cargo missions in between — Progress M-25M on October 29, 2014; SpaceX CRS-5 on January 10, 2015; Progress M-26M on February 17, 2015; and SpaceX CRS-6 on April 14 — but the cadence of missions demonstrates the need for constant resupply of the crew.  Another cargo mission, Japan’s HTV-5, is scheduled for August 16 EDT.

Progress M-28M is taking about 3 tons of supplies to the crew, including fuel needed to periodically boost the ISS orbit, oxygen, water, food and other items.  The spacecraft reached orbit and deployed its solar panels and navigation antenna about 9 minutes after liftoff.  It is on a 34-orbit rendezvous trajectory with docking set for 3:13 am EDT on Sunday morning, July 5.  NASA TV coverage of docking will begin at 2:30 am EDT.  NASA refers to this as Progress 60 or 60P because it is the 60th Progress launched to the ISS.  Progress has been in use since 1977, supporting the Soviet/Russian space stations Salyut 6, Salyut 7 and Mir before ISS.

Three men are aboard the ISS right now:  NASA’s Scott Kelly and Russia’s Gennady Padalka and Mikhail Kornienko.  Usually there are six people on board, but they are in the middle of a crew changeover, waiting for three colleagues to arrive later this month.

There are several Soyuz rocket variants and the one used for launching crews is the Soyuz FG.   The next crew launch, Soyuz TMA-17M, is scheduled for 5:02 pm July 22 EDT, although NASA apparently wants more details about the Progress M-27M failure before signing off.  NASA Associate Administrator for Human Exploration and Operations, Bill Gerstenmaier, indicated on Sunday at a press conference following the SpaceX failure that NASA wants to “fully understand” the April 28 Progress incident and for the Flight Readiness Review to take place before committing to the TMA-17M launch date.  The crew includes Kjell Lindgren from NASA, Kimiya Yui from the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), and Oleg Kononenko from Roscosmos.

The successful launch this morning is one step towards restoring confidence in the Russian systems.   Russia is the only ISS partner capable of launching people to the space station.  The United States has not been able to launch crews since it discontinued the space shuttle program in 2011.  It hopes to have two commercial crew systems in place by 2017 — the crew version of SpaceX’s Dragon and Boeing’s CST-100.  How Sunday’s failure of the cargo version of Dragon will affect SpaceX’s commercial crew schedule will not be known until it determines and fixes the problem.

SpaceX continues to sort through reams of data to determine what happened on June 28 to its Falcon 9 rocket that was to deliver cargo to the International Space Station (ISS).  A SpaceX spokesman said there is “no one theory yet that is consistent with the data” they have looked at so far.   Meanwhile, Russia plans to launch its next cargo mission to the ISS, Progress M-28M, in less than 24 hours.  The launch comes just over two months after the previous mission, Progress M-27M, failed.

SpaceX’s Falcon 9, carrying a Dragon capsule full of supplies for the ISS, failed 139 seconds into flight on Sunday, June 28.  It was the 19th Falcon 9 launch after 18 consecutive successes.  SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell said shortly thereafter that “there were pressurization indications in the second stage” and the first stage is not suspect.

SpaceX spokesman John Taylor said via email late yesterday that the company’s engineering teams are “reviewing every piece of flight data as we work through a thorough fault tree analysis in order to identify root cause.”  After that is completed, it will know more about rescheduled launch dates.  Although some debris has been recovered from the ocean, the flight data is expected to hold the key to the cause.

Among the first launches affected by the failure is that of Jason-3 from Vandenberg Air Force Base, CA.  The ocean altimetry satellite had been scheduled
for launch on August 8 after several delays.  NOAA and the European
Organisation for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites
(EUMETSAT) are the lead agencies for Jason-3, partnered with NASA and
its French counterpart, CNES, who were responsible for Jason-1 and
Jason-2, as well as the original satellite in the series,
Topex-Poseidon.  Jason-2, launched in
2008, continues to function nominally.

Sunday’s launch was SpaceX’s seventh robotic ISS cargo resupply mission under its Commercial Resupply Services (CRS) contract with NASA — CRS-7 or SpX-7.  About two tons of crew supplies, scientific experiments and equipment was lost, including the first of two International Docking Adapters needed for the crew version of Dragon and Boeing’s CST-100 spacecraft to dock with the ISS.  They were the winners of the final phase of the commercial crew program and NASA hopes that the systems will be operational by the end of 2017.  The crew version of Dragon incorporates an abort system that can carry a crew to safety if the rocket fails, but it is not in the cargo version of Dragon used on Sunday.  No one was aboard Sunday’s launch.

This was the third failure in 8 months of systems that take cargo to the ISS:  Orbital Sciences Corporation’s (now Oribtal ATK) Antares rocket with a Cygnus spacecraft on October 28, 2014; Russia’s Soyuz rocket with the Progress M-27M capsule on April 28; and now SpaceX’s Falcon 9/Dragon combination.

Russia plans to launch the next Progress resupply mission tomorrow, July 3, at 12:55 am Eastern Daylight Time.  Although NASA insists that the ISS crew has plenty of supplies to take them through to October, at least, a lot is riding on the success of the Progress M-28M flight (which NASA calls Progress 60 or 60P because it is the 60th Progress intended to supply the ISS).   The Russians concluded the April failure was due to a “design peculiarity” related to frequency-dynamic characteristics between the third stage of the Soyuz 2.1a rocket and the Progress spacecraft.

One advantage of the ISS program is that it is an international partnership among the United States, Russia, Japan, Europe, and Canada.   Europe has discontinued its ATV cargo spacecraft, but there still are four systems to take cargo to the crew:  the U.S. Antares/Cygnus and Falcon 9/Dragon, Russia’s Soyuz/Progress, and Japan’s H2B/HTV.  It is extremely unusual that three of the four systems should fail over such a short span of months.

Fortunately, should anything go awry with Progress M-28M, Japan’s HTV cargo spacecraft is scheduled for launch next month.