Years of Failures Haunt Russian Space Program
Proton rocket falls to Earth at Baikonur in July 2013. (Credit: Tsenki TV)
Sixteen botched launches in six years.
That’s the Russian space program’s sad record since May 2009. The failure of a Proton rocket earlier today with the loss of a Mexican communications satellite was yet another sign of the prolonged crisis affecting Russia’s once powerful space program.
The crash came less than three weeks after a botched launch left a Progress supply freighter spinning end over end like an extra point before it burned up in Earth atmosphere. There was also news today that another Progress cargo ship attached to the International Space Station failed to fire its engine as planned to boost the station’s orbit.
The list of Russian launch accidents over the last six years includes:
- 13 complete failures resulting in the loss of all payloads;
- 3 partial failures that left spacecraft in the wrong orbits;
- complete loss of 20 spacecraft;
- 6 Russian GLONASS navigation satellites destroyed; and,
- an ambitious Mars mission left stranded in Earth orbit.
The table below shows the full extent of the damage.
| RUSSIAN LAUNCH FAILURES, 2009 — 2015 | ||||
| DATE | LAUNCH VEHICLE |
PAYLOAD(S) |
RESULT | CAUSE |
| May 21, 2009 | Soyuz-2.1a/ Fregat | Meridian 2 | Failure | Second stage shut down early, Fregat upper stage ran out of fuel trying to compensate. Satellite left in useless orbit, declared a loss by Russian military. |
| Dec. 5, 2010 | Proton-M/ Blok-DM-3 | Uragan-M #739 Uragan-M #740 Uragan-M #741 |
Failure | Rocket failed to reach orbital velocity after upper stage overfilled with propellant. |
| Feb. 1, 2011 | Rokot/Briz-KM | Geo-IK-2 No. 11 | Failure | Upper stage malfunction. |
| Aug. 17, 2011 | Proton-M/ Briz-M | Ekspress AM4 |
Failure | Briz-M upper stage suffered failure of attitude control. |
| Aug. 24, 2011 | Soyuz-U | Progress M-12 | Failure | Third stage failure due to turbo-pump duct blockage. |
| Nov. 8, 2011 | Zenit-2SB/ Fregat | Phobos-Grunt Yinghuo-1 |
Failure | Spacecraft stranded in Earth orbit after upper stage failed to fire. |
| Dec. 23, 2011 | Soyuz-2.1b/ Fregat | Meridian 5 | Failure | Third stage failure. |
| Aug. 6, 2012 | Proton-M/ Briz-M | Telkom-3 Ekspress MD2 |
Failure | Briz-M upper stage failed 7 seconds into its third burn. |
| Dec. 8, 2012 | Proton-M/ Briz-M | Yamal-402 | Partial Failure | Briz-M upper stage shut down 4 minutes earlier than planned on fourth burn. Spacecraft reached intended orbit under own power. |
| Jan. 15, 2013 | Rokot/Briz-KM | Kosmos 2482 Kosmos 2483 Kosmos 2484 | Partial Failure | Upper stage failed near time of spacecraft separation; one satellite destroyed. |
| Feb. 1, 2013 | Zenit-3SL |
Intelsat 27 | Failure | First stage failure. |
| July 2, 2013 | Proton-M/DM-03 | Uragan-M #748 Uragan-M #749 Uragan-M #750 |
Failure | First stage failure. |
| May 15, 2014 | Proton-M/Briz-M | Ekspress AM4R | Failure | Proton third stage vernier engine failure due to turbo-pump leak. |
| Aug. 14, 2014 | Soyuz-STB/ Fregat | Galileo FOC-1 Galileo FOC-2 |
Partial Failure | Satellites placed in wrong orbits due to freezing of hydrazine in Fregat upper stage. |
| April 28, 2015 | Soyuz-2.1a | Progress 59P | Failure | Third stage failure. |
| May 16, 2015 | Proton/Briz-M | MexSat-1 | Failure | Third stage failure suspected. |
Proton has been the most troubled of the Russian boosters, with six failures, 1 partial failure and 11 spacecraft lost. One spacecraft was able to reach its intended orbit using on-board propulsion after the Proton rocket’s upper stage shut down prematurely.
Different variants of the venerable Soyuz booster have failed completely on four occasions, taking with them two Progress freighters and a pair of Meridian military communications satellites. Another Soyuz rocket stranded two European Galileo navigational satellites in the wrong orbits.
Russia’s Rokot launch vehicle suffered anomalies on two flights. In 2011, the Geo-IK-2 No.11 satellite was declared unusable after it was placed in the wrong orbit. Two years later, one of three satellites launched aboard a Rokot was lost due to a malfunction of the upper stage booster.
The trouble-plagued Zenit booster, which is a joint program with Ukraine, suffered two failures during the past six years. In 2011, Russia’s ambitious Phobos-Grunt mission to Mars was left trapped in Earth orbit after the failure of its upper stage to fire. A failure of the Zenit’s Ukrainian-built first stage destroyed the Intelsat 27 communications satellite in 2013.
If there is a common thread in the accidents, it involves the failure of upper stages to either fire or to finish their burns as planned. The Briz-M, Briz-KM and Fregat upper stages have all been implicated in failures. Third stages of various boosters also have failed.
By contrast, the U.S. launch record has been much cleaner over the last six years. The nation has suffered three catastrophic launch failures, all involving Orbital ATK launch vehicles. Tauraus XL rockets failed in 2009 and 2011, destroying a pair of NASA environmental satellites. Last October, an Antares rocket exploded shortly after launch, destroying a Cygnus cargo ship bound for the International Space Station.
The Atlas V and Delta IV launch vehicles, which are operated by United Launch Alliance, have suffered no catastrophic failures since they began operations in 2002. Each rocket has experienced a partial failure, but they have otherwise proven to be extremely reliable. The highly reliable Delta II launch vehicle has not suffered a catastrophic failure in 18 years.
SpaceX has successfully launched variants of its Falcon 9 rocket 18 times without the loss of primary payloads. In October 2012, an Orbcomm OG2 test satellite was stranded in the wrong orbit when it flew as a secondary payload on a Dragon supply mission to the space station.
Europe’s Arianespace has not experienced a failure of its Ariane 5 booster since 2002. All four flights of its new Vega launch vehicle have been successful.
76 responses to “Years of Failures Haunt Russian Space Program”
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According to the website, ESA ExoMars orbiter and EDL is launching on a Proton rocket January 2016. Khrunichev and ILS better get a move on to figuring out cause of failures and fixing Proton ASAP.
After huge layoffs and zero improvement, this is probably the end of Khrunichev, at least for commercial launches. The heads will roll, and Kalinovsky will be the first.
Also, there’s not much of an actual program, сhaos would be more appropriate here. That’s what you get for selecting managers by loyalty instead of competence.
The beatings will continue until morale improves.
Krunichev still runs Angara, and it’s first two test flights were successful.minsuspect their top people are assigned to that project, so I would not write obituaries for Krunichev yet. They could be taken over by the state, though.
Angara is a dead end for commercial launches anyway.
> They could be taken over by the state, though.
They _are_ run and owned by the government. They are unitary enterprise, just like Lavochkin and unlike Energia, Makeyev and other companies (government owns a decent share of their stock though). Unitary enterprise are “not allowed to fail” in Russia, so the government will be pumping money trying to galvanize the corpse anyway.
Angara will use the Briz-M upper stage for GTO launches, and the Briz-M is the main cause of failures on the Proton. It may also use a new cryogenic upper stage (called KVTK) but it doesn’t even exist yet and does not have any flight heritage.
Proton and Angara will never be able to compete for commercial launches.
Angara has taken far to long to get to where it is now, it needed to be coming into service 10 years ago. It’s just not ready to replace Proton any time soon. It is limited flying from Plesetsk and Vostochny is a total gong show right now just trying to get the soyuz pad up and running.
Their space program is coming apart at the seams. I’m just really really glad that we (the US) are so close to having our own people carrying capsules. The ULA is doing a good job, Space X is doing phenomenal at pushing the boundaries, and NASA is…well, ok, 2 outta 3 ain’t bad. lol
There are at least a half dozen crewed Soyuz launches between now and the first operational commercial flight. That’s a half dozen too many, if you ask me.
I agree, however the knee-jerk reaction is to blame the government for underfunding Commercial Crew. These being commercial enterprises, however, there is an awful lot of private money available that both SpaceX and ULA could borrow – at competitive rates – to speed up development and deployment of their vehicles. While I’m sure that more cash now (from any source) would speed development, a slowdown based on cash flow cannot honestly be laid solely at the government’s doorstep.
So, u and listener prefer that we give a great deal more money to the Russians, than simply back our own development, even though it is much cheaper?
Where did you concoct that from? I can feel your knee jerking from hundreds of miles away. I’d love to see commercial crew funded at the requested level. To blame the Federal government for the fact that neither SpaceX nor ULA can build their own vehicles without a sufficiently large government subsidy is ludicrous. There is money out there to be had if they need more to speed development. After all, there are enormous profits to be made ferrying thousands of tourists and university researchers to the 10’s of private space stations that Mr. Bigelow plans to build. You would think that both SpaceX and ULA would want to be the first to field a commercial taxi and get all that profit for themselves. Then again, maybe they’re really just interested in securing the contracted-for amounts, no matter how long it takes.
I’m not a big fan of paying the Russians for what we should be doing ourselves and if you want to rail at Congress for prolonging the problem I will agree. I will, however, return to my original contention that the Federal government is not the only source of funds and not solely to blame for cash-related slowdowns in the development process.
Oh, I suspect that once SpaceX has the in-flight abort, along with the unmanned flight to space (which is by dec 2015), that SpaceX will accelerate things, assuming that Bigelow goes well.
The reason is that BA will be likely to push forward on starting to launch their space station within a year. And yes, the money is there to do it.
However, NASA, and O want to fund this because they want it done LONG AGO. It is actually CHEAPER for us to fund this, then to continue paying the money to Russia.
So, you can carp all you want and come up with your own knee jerk reaction, BUT, the fact is, that new private space in SpaceX, even when being helped along, is MUCH CHEAPER than the current situation.
I will say that OSC should not be funded anymore.
Likewise, I still have issues with Boeing winning out over SNC, but that is what happens when politics wins out.
Windbourne> SpaceX … unmanned flight to space (which is by dec 2015), …
Did you really mean 2015? Didn’t Shotwell say December 2016 back at the 26 January NASA / Boeing / SpaceX news conference? I understand that after the pad abort test Musk made some remark about no longer being sure if they would conduct the in-flight abort test before or after the first unmanned orbital flight, but they haven’t announced new dates for that flight, have they?
Windbourne, if we are going to argue a point, it has to be the same point. Although I am not a huge fan of spending public money to help establish a private, commercial enterprise, that is the path that the decisionmakers have chosen and I am not quibbling with it. I also agree that, having chosen that path, it is cheaper to subsidize development than to keep paying the Russians. My only point was that there is money available for these companies to continue and even accelerate development in the face of budget cuts foisted off on us by the same neo-cons that you so consistently rail against. The question is whether they are committed enough to their projects to take it. Everybody will take a gift but the calculus changes when the money comes in the form of a loan.
The U.S. space program is in really good shape. NASA and the Air Force have problems, but they’re manageable and fixes are in the works.
So what about Angara family? Why it isn’t being used yet?
It’s being phased in slowly. Everything about Angara is being phased in slowly. The program’s been going on for 20 years. Two launches so far, only one to orbit.
One one to orbit, yes, but the other one was not intended to be – it was a suborbital test flight. They do need to accelerate that program, however, and keep their top people on it.
Moot point, in my opinion. A new launcher line isn’t going to fix this problem. Russian launch failures are the product of an aging and underappreciated engineering force, lapses in quality control due to poor (if any!) compensation, threats of fixing failures with firing or criminal prosecution, and rampant corruption.
That was the question Mr. Shoygu had too. That is why Angara’s test program is being accelerated and live payloads manifested on test vehicles.
This is getting a bit scary, and is probably what “nudged” Sarah Brightman to back out of her flight.
I am sure NASA is starting to get on the edge of their seat, also. I know that there are Russian return capsules attached to the ISS, but I suspect that NASA might be having SpaceX outfit either a Dragon 1 or 2 as a last ditch, no other option rescue vehicle. True, no testing, but desperate times call for desperate measures.
ULA might also have re-direction on one or more of their non-ISS flights, at least for supply missions.
Hmm, I haven’t thought of it that way. It seems completely plausible to me.
By the way, did anybody notice that the Spaceport America website is non-existent with the domain name up for grabs?
What is going on there?
Dragon 1 requires somebody to manually unlatch it from inside the ISS, and Dragon 2 requires a docking adapter that simply isn’t on the ISS yet. Either would likely be far less safe than Soyuz in their untested state, even with recent failures-especially as the most recent failures don’t actually involve the company that produces Soyuz spacecraft.
True. Also, can the Cargo Dragon hatch be opened from the *inside*?
No, the CBM used by cargo spacecraft has a passive and active side. Berthing can’t be done from within Dragon 1 on the passive side. Dragon 2 will use NDS which is androgynous and can be managed from either side.
Good info to know.
Can the Dragon 1 hatch be modified to to be active from both sides?
LDA-1 docking adaptor for Dragon 2 and Boeing’s capsule scheduled to go up on next Dragon resupply mission in June. Place your bets.
There wouldn’t be any point. Merely putting an active hatch on Dragon 1 doesn’t make it ready to carry people. Just to serve as a lifeboat, It would still need life support systems, proper seating for reentry, communications equipment, etc. To be useful for taking crew to orbit, it would need to become Dragon 2.
Shotwell has mentioned in the past that they will probably continue operating Dragon 1 and 2 in tandem for a few years and then eventually transition to a cargo variant of Dragon 2. Using the same vehicle variant for crew and cargo is possible, however the CBM hatch is square-ish and somewhat larger than the circular NDS hatch, and there are some payloads that don’t fit through the NDS.
Seats and life support mentioned further below.
The fact that we are discussing this scenario now usually means that NASA and SpaceX probably went through this a looong time ago, and may or may not actually have a contingency plan in place.
We will just have to see how this entire situation shakes out.
The Progress launch vehicle is launched by a rocket that shares a huge amount of parts etc with Soyuz.
It’s been two years; do you really have to pull out that proton photo for every Roscosmos story?
I like that photo. It reminds me how comically bad that failure was. The rocket literally did a 180 and flew itself into the ground. It’s like something Wiley Coyote planned.
(For my non-US audience, Wiley Coyote was an cartoon character who was always trying capture a roadrunner. His plans were exceedingly elaborate and frequently thwarted by his own incompetence)
Agree.
Don’t worry I watched a lot of Coyote (and consorts) when I was young here in Europe 🙂
Wiley Coyote and the roadrunner are international stars, no need to explain who they are.
I apologize; I wasn’t trying to be xenophobic or jingoist. My New Year’s resolution is to avoid analogies that are not clear to the entire audience and I (mistakenly and naively) thought Wiley Coyote would only be understood by US readers.
No worries 🙂
Pedantically, it’s Wile E. Coyote.
http://castabigger.net/wp-c…
How could I forget that business card? 🙂 Thank you, Paul.
Many outside the US have seen Road Runner but not everyone so it is a good idea to explain local references to those outside.
Better to be safe than sorry.
I find it interesting that the new Angara variant went up without a hiccup, Soyuz lately no scary ballistic re-entries like in 2006, but these commercial Protons are failing frequently. Maybe Russian industrial/aerospace capacity is maxed out. Also look what happened to Orbital when they scraped the bottom of the barrel using 40 year old Russian engines. At least ULA pays for shiny new Russian engines that don’t blow up.
That only goes to show that there’s no such entity as “Russian Space Industry”, or perhaps there wasn’t until recently. Some enterprises were successful, some less so.
That list is worringly (is that even a word? :)) long. How many launches has Russia done in total in that time period? Like a list of lauch vehicles and their success rate.
In that period they had 195 successful flights, four partial failures, and twelve complete failures; a 92% success rate.
Breakdown by LV;
LV Successes/Partial failures/Failures
Krunichev;
Kosmos-3M 1/0/0
Proton-K/DM-2 2/0/0
Proton-M/DM-2 2/0/0
Proton-M/DM-03 0/0/2
Proton-M/Briz/M 51/2/4
Rokot/Briz-KM 10/1/1
Progress;
Soyuz-2.1a 5/0/1
Soyuz-2.1a/Fregat 12/0/1
Soyuz-2.1b 4/0/0
Soyuz-2.1b/Fregat 14/1/1
Soyuz-U 33/0/1
Soyuz-FG 25/0/0
Soyuz-FG/Fregat 1/0/0
Soyuz-2.1v/Volga 1/0/0
Yuznoye/Yuzmash;
Zenit-2M 1/0/0
Zenit-3F 2/0/0
Zenit-3SL 6/0/1
Zenit-3SLB 3/0/0
Dnepr-1 9/0/0
Tsyklon-3 1/0/0
NPO Mash;
Strela 2/0/0
I concur, considering the mission of SpaceX was crew missions from the very beginning.
The cargo Dragon still needs seats and life support installed of which there may be a capsule sitting in the back of the factory somewhere.
No, someone would have to stay behind to unlatch and detach Dragon.
First off, if a number of ppl are taking the dragon down, then you have a major failures going on.
Secondly, if one of the russian ships are still usable, then somebody can cut lose the dragon and then go in the russian ship.
Third, if you need to go, and dragon is the only one available, then better to save 6, and lose 1, then save none at all.
There’s always the Chinese & their Soyuz copy. It has more interior space than the Russian Soyuz. The Russians will sort it out. Looks like the age of the Soyuz & Progress isn’t as bright as Rogozin once thought.
If the crew is using a dragon v1, it implies that a catastrophe has struck the iss and destroyed the Soyuz, and the crew needs to escape now.
Iow, China can not help.
And in less than 2 Years, it will not matter.
I missed this. What is your position on commercial crew vs. Buying Soyuz flights?
An aside, what’s the proper way to address a lawyer in written/spoken conversation? I’ve heard people say “counselor” on TV.
Not to step on Michael’s reply, but I do not believe that he expressed a position on commercial crew vs buying Soyuz flights. As to form of address, any polite form that you would use with another person is fine. First names work well since we usually like to keep the conversations friendly even when we disagree. Since attorneys are also described as “counselors at law,” we will sometimes address each other as “counselor” the same way two physicians will call each other “doctor.”
You know what’s amazing? Even with the awful track record of late, Proton is still above such rockets as Zenit, GSLV, and Taurus. Better than Antares, even. It’s even got better success rate than Delta IV Heavy! That’s how many they launched.
Another funny thing is, Russian conspiracy mongers made a lot of yarn from observing that most Proton failures happened when it was boosting government payloads, while ILS-managed commertical payloads were seemingly immune. Well so much for that theory now.
launching rockets isn’t ‘easy” just ask nasa about their crew loss on the 2 shuttles compared to crew loss by russians
Please keep in mind that russian space industry is in much worse shape than US one was even at the time of Challenger disaster. Negative selection of professionals did a lot of damage which is showing today.
if I had a buck for every time somebody mentions shuttle losses when another launcher fails, I’d be rich
if I had a buck for every time somebody mentions ‘if i had a buck’ comment….well you get the idea!
tell me again what STS and Proton have in common?
AFAIR Khrunichev doesn’t rely on anything produced in Yuzhnoye or other Ukrainian companies for making 8K82M/8K82KM (Proton-M) or 14С43 (Briz-M) upper stages. And the parts for this launcher (which failed yesterday) were produced in 2013, mostly.
Please be nice, my friend. I take your point but we often have to converse with zealots here. Sometimes I feel like an atheist at a Holy Roller convention. Windbourne is a more moderate type even when we disagree.
The reasons for the systematic failures are well known within the Russian space industry workforce. First, кувалда’s are not made to strict ГОСТ standards anymore, and the market value of ёб твою мать is far below the historical average.
Expanding on your theme about always asking for more, I have seen sentiment in this forum that NASA should abandon the ISS and rent space on a Bigelow station – as a way to help foster the industry. There may come a day when that is advisable but first we have to see how Bigelow does as landlord. It is one thing to build the commercial space(station) but any landlord will tell you that your problems are only beginning once you start leasing out space. There’s no way Congress will subsidize maintenance at a privately-owned station and including the cost in the lease rate may make it financially unattractive compared with actually owning the station.
It is really a shame that we don’t have a semi-permanent forum on this site where we can have a real discussion about all aspects of commercial space. There is too much of a “if you build it, they will come attitude” instead of “we have an important need that must be addressed and we can only address it in space.”
They could have built Constellation. If they’d done that we may not have had any commercial space taxis but at least we wouldn’t have Orion and SLS to kick around.
Ares/Constellation schedule was slipping more than a year every year.
As much as I dislike the waste inherent in SLS/Orion, the program is at least being better managed than under Griffin. (At least it’s only slipped one year every two or three.)
(It makes me wonder what NASA could have done without the SLS noose around their necks, had Congress backed the 2010 Obama proposals: Tech development push, next gen engine program, commercial crew, and Orion-lite EELV.)
I’m fuzzy on the timeline so I will ask, if the entire Constellation program had been built as envisioned by the Bush Administration, would there have been any commercial manned space project?
Yes, but it depends which version you mean.
The original Bush-proposed VSE under Sean O’Keefe included COTS, which included the proposed COTS-D (commercial manned spaceflight) as it’s next step. And the plan was meant to avoid any new large scale launchers (although there were factions pushing for a larger launcher.) If that program had continued, there would likely have been COTS manned systems in place by now.
After O’Keefe left and Mike Griffin took over, he killed off COTS-D and diverted Constellation/VSE to his own Ares launcher, apparently believing that if he could get the President to back the unaffordable program, it would force Congress to increase NASA’s funding. Turns out Congress has seen that trick before.
So with Griffin’s version of Constellation, there’d have been no Commercial Crew, and the program would still be slipping backward. (Although I suspect the sheer realities of Griffin’s failure would have sunk in by now, regardless of who was President.)
VSE itself wasn’t a bad concept, had Bush kept NASA disciplined. But he let Griffin run wild, and bam!, business as usual.
To my knowledge, Phobos-grunt was not due to a failure of the launch vehicle. In that case, the Zenit performed perfectly, but the payload itself was unable to accomplish its mission. That probably had less to do with decaying infrastructure and more to do with the fact that that project was very rushed. But I suppose it’s relevant to mention, at least as long as the context is clear!
It may also be worth mentioning the issues they have had with the MLM. After Khrunichev delivered the module to Energiya, Energiya had to send it back due to a number of defects they found on it.
The spacecraft never got out of orbit. Upper stage failed to fire.
It wasn’t an upper stage, the launcher did its job. It was the spacecraft integrated propulsion system controlled by the on-board computer which failed to issue the departing burn command.
Based on a Fregat. Does it matter whether upper stage was separate or integrated with spacecraft? It still failed to get it out of earth orbit. It still crashed back to earth. The mission was still a colossal failure.
Yes, it does if you want to be factually accurate in an article about launcher failures. It doesn’t if you want an article on (completely or partially) failed missions, but in that case it’s incomplete.
> Based on a Fregat.
It’s a totally different system which shares a little bit in common with Fregat (namely, main thruster and most of the tank design). Anyway, it doesn’t matter, it’s just a minor nitpick.
That is very possible. I’m afraid that we have put the cart before the horse regarding manned commercial flight. We need to first and foremost reduce the cost per pound of lifting people (and things) into orbit to make it commercially viable without subsidies. The rich cannot carry this industry and the middle and working classes cannot afford to either use or subsidize it.
If you want a unique capability you pay for its development. COTS originally had an option for carrying crew back when it started (2007?) but was never funded. If it had been SpaceX at least would have a manned craft available now and for a couple of years.
As to funds being available, they may be now (but probably not without de-valuing the business) but when they were required several years ago SpaceX was still unproven so funds would not have been available for a speculative proposition of crew transport when the only existing customer was not part of the deal. Musk has already invested a lot of his own money into SpaceX and developing Falcon and Dragon (which he came close to going bust and abandoning with Falcon 1 initial failures) and much of his worth is the portion of SpaceX he owns so saying he should invest more is not realistic.
There is not a major transport mode that the US government has not been involved in subsiding to get (or keep) US industry involved in so why should space transport be different?
BTW, this article is the authoritative source of American viewpoint now, Doug scores – http://zelenyikot.livejourn…
It is an educated guess.
1) Bigelow has 2 prototype space stations that are almost 10 years old.
2) Bigelow has said that he will spend 500 million, and is certainly over 300 million now.
3) BEAM is going up in less than 4 months for a 2 year mission.
4) it will take 3 launches using FH to get his station up there.
5) BA is STILL bleeding money.
Now, how soon do you think that he will set a date to send up his first BA330?
Do you think that he is going to wait another 2 years to start, with another year or so to build it before his first customer?
Nope.
I am guessing that as soon as the unmanned dragon has flown to space and back (which is later this year), that he will want to start launching his units and have it ready in 1-2 years. That means that he will need to start launch in 2016, say fall/winter of 2016 for the first module.
BTW, I just went to the BA website (I have not been over there for about 6 months, give or take).
Go look at the first page:
http://bigelowaerospace.com/
which leads to this page:
http://bigelowaerospace.com…
This guy has LIMITED money. As such, he has to hold off until he is ready to start building. And it appears, that he is hiring just that. Builders.
I am still wondering how they are going to launch.
The FH is suppose to have the hammerhead fairings from the F9. If so, than it is less than 13M long. BA330 is 13.7M long. So, either FH has a different fairing, which allows BA to launch at say 100 million or so, OR, they will have to use the DIVH, which will cost some 300+ million / launch.
Regardless, it means that in the next 12 months, we are going to see Bigelow come very much alive, or die.