NASA Administrator Bill Nelson and US Senator Maria Cantwell (D-WA) talk with Boeing officials at the Washington Space Summit
NASA’s administrator paid a visit to Kent’s Blue Origin, where Northwest Newsradio asked him about a troubled space program at another local company.
The space agency’s administrator, Bill Nelson, was here for the Washington Space summit which brought together top minds in the local space industry, which employs more than 13,000 people and generates nearly 5 billion a year.
Putting the first crew on Boeing’s Starliner capsule is delayed, for now, because of an issue with the re-entry parachutes and tape that’s potentially flammable throughout the capsule. So we asked Nelson how he would gauge Starliner’s potential versus the need to rely solely on SpaceX, and Nelson tells us, “First of all, we don’t fly until it’s ready. I’m anticipating that it will be toward the end of the year that Starliner would fly with the crew of two, and I think that we will have what we had asked for to begin with: two spacecraft, commercial spacecraft, to go to and from the International Space Station.”
Boeing has stated publicly that safety is always its top priority, that it is working through the issues and it has had no serious discussions about abandoning the costly Starliner program.
Several local companies in our state’s nearly multi-billion dollar space industry also got to show off their work at the summit.
We can’t exactly go to the Moon to test drive a new lunar rover, so Everett’s Off Planet Research simulates the rock, sand and dust we’ll find there. Melissa Roth, one of Off Planet’s co-owners and lead researchers tells me they can do everything from testing rovers and other equipment to agriculture. “How are we going to be able to feed the people that are going to be staying on other planetary bodies?” Roth asks, “Also looking at space suits, how can our astronauts go out and explore the lunar surface and accomplish their goals and still be able to come inside and not bring all that dust with them?”
Sarah Shark, an analyst with Redmond’s Aerojet Rocketdyne, says they’re not only excited about their engines on the Artemis moon rockets, but they’re also using an electric propulsion maneuvering system, which is often used to keep satellites in place, to move the lunar gateway, “the power and the propulsion element and the halo element that they decided to stack together, into their orbit around the Moon,” Shark says, “So, without the electric propulsion system, they wouldn’t be able to move both of those elements together into their orbit.” Shark explained that electric propulsion uses magnets to help move the fuel so that they can make more efficient use of the fuel they have.
According to NASA, “The Gateway, a vital component of NASA’s Artemis program, will serve as a multi-purpose outpost orbiting the Moon that provides essential support for long-term human return to the lunar surface and serves as a staging points for deep space exploration. NASA is working with commercial and international partners to establish the Gateway.”
The importance of space workforce training was also a big part of the discussion since most of the companies represented said they need workers of all skill levels. Blue Origin’s CEO, Bob Smith, also talked about the need to increase the space equipment and material manufacturing rates so the industry can keep up with the growing demand, making the comparison to the way car makers are able to roll hundreds of cars off their assembly lines.
