“It was the best of times, it was the blurst of times?” Perhaps not anymore, if this Ig Nobel-worthy analysis of the infinite monkey theorem is to be believed. For the uninitiated, the idea is that if you had an infinite number of monkeys randomly typing on an infinite number of keyboards, eventually the complete works of Shakespeare or some other famous writer would appear. It’s always been meant to be taken figuratively as a demonstration of the power of time and randomness, but some people just can’t leave well enough alone. The research, which we hope was undertaken with tongue firmly planted in cheek, reveals that it would take longer than the amount of time left before the heat death of the universe for either a single monkey or even all 200,000 chimpanzees in the world today to type the 884,647 words of Shakespeare’s complete works in the proper order.

We feel like they missed the point completely, since this is supposed to be about an infinite number of monkeys. But if they insist on sticking with real-world force monkey labor, what would really be interesting is an economic analysis of project. How much space would 200,000 chimps need? What would the energy requirements be in terms of food in and waste out? What about electricity so the monkeys can see what they’re doing? If we’re using typewriters, how much paper do we need, and how much land will be deforested for it? Seems like you’ll need replacement chimps as they age out, so how do you make sure the chimps “mix and mingle,” so to speak? And how do you account for maternity and presumably paternity leave? Also, who’s checking the output? Seems like we’d have to employ humans to do this, so what are the economic factors associated with that? Inquiring minds want to know.

Speaking of ridiculous calculations, when your company racks up a fine that only makes sense in exponential notation, you know we’ve reached new levels of stupidity. But here we are, as a Russian court has imposed a two-undecillion rouble fine on Google for blocking access to Russian state media channels. That’s 2×10³⁶ roubles, or about 2×10³³ US dollars at current exchange rates. If you’re British and think a billion is a million million, then undecillion means something different entirely, but we don’t have the energy to work that out right now. Regardless, it’s a lot, and given that the total GPD of the entire planet was estimated to be about 100×10¹² dollars in 2022, Google better get busy raising the money. We’d prefer they don’t do it the totally-not-evil way they usually do, so it might be best to seek alternate methods. Maybe a bake sale?

A couple of weeks back we sang the praises of SpaceX after they managed to absolutely nail the landing of the Starship Heavy booster after its fifth test flight by managing to pluck it from the air while it floated back to the launch pad. But the amazing engineering success was very close to disaster according to Elon Musk himself, who discussed the details online. Apparently SpaceX engineers shared with him that they were scared about the “spin gas abort” configuration on Heavy prior to launch, and that they were one second away from aborting the “chopsticks” landing in favor of crashing the booster into the ground in front of the launch pad. They also expressed fears about spot welds on a chine on the booster, which actually did rip off during descent and could have fouled on the tower during the catch. But success is a hell of a deodorant, as they say, and it’s hard to argue with how good the landing looked despite the risks.

We saw a couple of interesting stories on humanoid robots this week, including one about a robot with a “human-like gait.” The bot is from China’s EnginAI Robotics and while its gait looks pretty good, there’s still a significant uncanny valley thing going on there, at least for us. And really, what’s the point? Especially when you look at something like this new Atlas demo, which really leans into its inhuman gait to get work done efficiently. You be the judge.

And finally, we’ve always been amazed by Liberty ships, the class of rapidly produced cargo ships produced by the United States to support the British war effort during WWII. Simple in design though they were, the fact that US shipbuilders were able to ramp up production of these vessels to the point where they were building a ship every eight hours has always been fascinating to us. But it’s often true that speed kills, and this video shows the fatal flaw in Liberty ship design that led to the loss of some of the early ships in the class. The short video details the all-welded construction of the ships, a significant advancement at the time but which wasn’t the cause of the hull cracks that led to the loss of some ships. We won’t spoil the story, though. Enjoy.

Do humanoid robots dream of electric retirement? Who knows, but maybe we can ask Boston Dynamics’ Atlas HD, which was officially retired this week. The humanoid robot, notable for its warehouse Parkour and sweet dance moves, never went into production, at least not as far as we know. Atlas always seemed like it was intended to be an R&D platform, to see what was possible for a humanoid robot, and in that way it had a heck of a career. But it’s probably a good thing that fleets of Atlas robots aren’t wandering around shop floors or serving drinks, especially given the number of hydraulic blowouts the robot suffered. That also seems to be one of the lessons Boston Dynamics learned, since Atlas’ younger, nimbler replacement is said to be all-electric. From the thumbnail, the new kid already seems pretty scarred and battered, so here’s hoping we get to see some all-electric robot fails soon.

“Enhance… enhance… no, wait — un-enhance.” A Washington state judge has ruled that AI-enhanced video can’t be used as evidence in a murder trial, a ruling that’s certain to raise legal eyebrows. King County Superior Court Judge Leroy McCullogh issued the first-in-the-nation ruling in the case of a man accused of shooting three people outside a Seattle bar in 2021. The defendant’s lawyers tried to submit into evidence cell phone video that had been processed through a machine learning system, in an apparent attempt to make visible details they say are exculpatory. The choice of company to perform the enhancement may have been a mistake, though, since they market themselves mainly to film studios looking to “supercharge” their productions. The prosection objected to the evidence on the grounds that the AI only predicted missing information in the video, rather than enhancing and clarifying existing details in the images. Given the tendency for chat bots to hallucinate, we’d tend to agree with the prosecution, but then again, our future doesn’t ride on a shakey, blurry cell phone video. It was probably even in vertical format.

It’s official — Florida man Alejandro Otero won the cosmic lottery last month as NASA confirms the object that crashed through his roof in March was indeed from the ISS. Granted, there wasn’t much left of the 2,360 kg battery pack by the time it hit the Otero residence in the Gulf Coast town of Naples — just a 0.7-kg metal cylinder. NASA had expected the entire nickel hydride pack, tossed overboard in March of 2021 in favor of lithium batteries, would burn up upon reentry. That ended up being optimistic, and perhaps foreseeable since the surviving fragment was made from inconel, an alloy specifically used in applications involving high temperatures — perhaps not reentry hot, but still. It seems like Otero just wants to get NASA to pay for the repairs to his house, but honestly, if something like that crashes through our roof, we’re just going to fix it ourselves and shut up so we can keep the thing.

A couple of months back we featured a video that showed a drone that had been specially modified to not only fly near high-tension power lines, but to latch onto them and recharge its batteries (last item). It gave us the willies then for some reason, but now that the full research paper that covers the development of the drone is available — nah, it still creeps us out. It’s an impressive bit of kit, to be sure, about which the paper goes into great detail. We speculated about the power transfer method when the video dropped, and it turns out that there is indeed a split-core current transformer that wraps around the cable when the gripper closes. The paper also has a photo of a clamp meter around a conductor (Figure 11) that shows 288 amperes flowing through the cable while the drone is docked, which creeps us out even more since someone had to get uncomfortably close to that cable to get that shot.

We’re just going to leave this video of a gearless right-angle drive here. You’re welcome.

And finally, if you’ve never heard of Oliver Heaviside — and you really should have — you’ll want to watch this video on the story of the “Telegrapher’s Equation.” Aside from having an awesome name and looking like a Victorian version of Wolverine, Heaviside was absolutely brilliant, to the point of understanding Maxwell’s equations enough to simplify them and use them to explain the skin effect mathematically. He also invented coaxial cable as well as the loading coils that still adorn telephone poles to this day. The video is a deep dive into why the first transatlantic telegraph cables were so terrible, and how Fourier, Lord Kelvin, and the study of thermodynamics informed Heaviside’s explanations of how to improve them. Good stuff.

The Atlas family of rockets have been a mainstay of America’s space program since the dawn of the Space Age, when unused SM-65 Atlas intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) were refurbished and assigned more peaceful pursuits. Rather than lobbing thermonuclear warheads towards the Soviets, these former weapons of war carried the first American astronauts into orbit, helped build the satellite constellations that our modern way of life depends on, and expanded our knowledge of the solar system and beyond.

Naturally, the Atlas V that’s flying today looks nothing like the squat stainless steel rocket that carried John Glenn to orbit in 1962. Aerospace technology has evolved by leaps and bounds over the last 60 years, but by carrying over the lessons learned from each generation, the modern Atlas has become one of the most reliable orbital boosters ever flown. Since its introduction in 2002, the Atlas V has maintained an impeccable 100% success rate over 85 missions.

But as they say, all good things must come to an end. After more than 600 launches, United Launch Alliance (ULA) has announced that the final mission to fly on an Atlas has been booked. Between now and the end of the decade, ULA will fly 28 more missions on this legendary booster. By the time the last one leaves the pad the company plans to have fully transitioned to their new Vulcan booster, with the first flights of this next-generation vehicle currently scheduled for 2022.

An Impressive Dance Card

Over the years, the Atlas V has lofted some particularly notable payloads. It sent the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter on the path towards the Red Planet in 2005, and provided the initial kick that sent New Horizons on its decade-long trip to Pluto a year later. It launched the OSIRIS-REx mission in 2016, which resulted in the first NASA vehicle to successfully collect a surface sample from an asteroid.

The venerable booster has also carried the autonomous X-37B spaceplane into orbit on all but one of its missions, which do double duty as both shadowy military affairs and opportunities to perform commercial scientific research. In 2019 the Atlas V even demonstrated its crewed aspirations by carrying the first Boeing Starliner into orbit, and although the spacecraft itself failed to achieve its mission goals, the rocket performed flawlessly. Finally, it had the honor of carrying both the Curiosity and Perseverance Mars rovers.

While you could argue that most of the Atlas V’s future flights won’t have quite the historic gravitas as its previous missions, there’s certainly some very important launches in the pipeline. For example, the booster is currently manifested to carry no less than five Boeing Starliner capsules to the International Space Station by the end of 2023, with most of them being operational crew missions.

In 2022 it’s slated to launch an exciting NASA project to demonstrate reentering the atmosphere with an inflatable heat shield, and in October of this year it will launch the agency’s Lucy spacecraft that’s designed to study six so-called “Trojan” asteroids that share an orbit with Jupiter over a twelve year period.

There’s also a whole slew of communication and Earth-observation satellites it’s scheduled to carry into orbit, including at least one that’s currently classified by the National Reconnaissance Office. Amazon has also contracted nine Atlas V launches from ULA to help build out their Project Kuiper satellite constellation, which will eventually consist of thousands of satellites, and is designed to compete with Starlink from SpaceX.

A Change in the Wind

With a perfect safety record, a long list of historic accomplishments, and plenty of customers still eager to put their payload onboard, why sunset the Atlas V? The most obvious reason is cost, as the expendable booster simply can’t compete with the new generation of vehicles from commercial launch providers like SpaceX. ULA has reduced their prices in an effort to stay relevant, but a flight on the expendable rocket still costs at least $100 million. The reusable Falcon 9 on the other hand, can put nearly as much payload into the same orbit for roughly half the price.

But the price tag is only part of the problem. After all, customers like NASA are far more concerned with making sure the mission goes off without a hitch than they are in saving a few million dollars. The final nail in the Atlas V’s coffin has nothing to do with how much money it takes to put a payload into orbit, but everything to do with the engines the rocket uses to do it.

Since the introduction of the Atlas III in 2000, the Atlas family of rockets have been powered by the RD-180. This extremely efficient staged combustion engine burns liquid oxygen and kerosene, and in many respects, is considered one of the finest rocket engines ever flown. Unfortunately, it’s also made in Russia.

Politically, this is simply no longer sustainable. At various points in time Russia has threatened to stop shipping the engines to the United States, and for its part, the US Congress has imposed limitations on how many RD-180s can be imported. In 2016, partly in response to the Russian annexation of Crimea, a bipartisan agreement banned the use of Russian-made rocket engines for any national security missions beyond 2022.

Vulcan to the Rescue

Facing the loss of the extremely lucrative national security flights in 2022, United Launch Alliance had to come up with a solution. The company had considered swapping out the Russian RD-180s for a domestically produced engine, but in the end, it made more sense to create a whole new vehicle that would be more price competitive against newer rockets like the Falcon 9.

Vulcan’s BE-4 engines are being built by Blue Origin, and the relatively comparable temperatures of its liquid oxygen and liquid methane propellants has allowed the use of lighter orthogrid tanks and reduced bulkhead insulation, improving the overall mass ratio of the fuselage. While the first stage of Vulcan is projected to be only a few meters taller than that of the Atlas V, the fact that it’s considerably wider at 5.4 m (18 ft) compared to its predecessor’s diameter of 3.81 m (12.5 ft) means that the newer rocket to carry approximately 50% more propellant.

Like the Atlas V, the Vulcan supports optional solid rocket boosters (SRBs) that are attached radially around the first stage. The Vulcan will use larger versions of the GEM-63 SRBs currently flying on the Atlas V, mounted in symmetrical pairs; a departure from the unique asymmetrical booster arrangement used previously. The Vulcan will also include an upgraded version of the Atlas V’s Centaur upper stage, which ULA’s CEO Tony Bruno says will be more than twice as powerful as the current configuration.

Unfortunately, Vulcan missed the planned July 2021 date for its first launch. Construction of the vehicle itself and its associated ground support equipment has progressed well, with a prototype booster rolled out to the launch pad in August for fit and tanking tests, but flight-ready engines have yet to be delivered by Blue Origin. With the development of Vulcan’s main engine now four years behind schedule, and the 2022 cutoff date for the RD-180 fast approaching, United Launch Alliance may soon find itself even farther behind its New Space rivals.

You know that feeling when your previously niche hobby goes mainstream, and suddenly you’re not interested in it anymore because it was once quirky and weird but now it’s trendy and all the newcomers are going to come in and ruin it? That just happened to retrocomputing. The article is pretty standard New York Times fare, and gives a bit of attention to the usual suspects of retrocomputing, like Amiga, Atari, and the Holy Grail search for an original Apple I. There’s little technically interesting in it, but we figured that we should probably note it since prices for retrocomputing gear are likely to go up soon. Buy ’em while you can.

Remember the video of the dancing Boston Dynamics robots? We actually had intended to cover that in Links last week, but Editor-in-Chief Mike Szczys beat us to the punch, in an article that garnered a host of surprisingly negative comments. Yes, we understand that this was just showboating, and that the robots were just following a set of preprogrammed routines. Some commenters derided that as not dancing, which we find confusing since human dancing is just following preprogrammed routines. Nevertheless, IEEE Spectrum had an interview this week with Boston Dynamics’ VP of Engineering talking about how the robot dance was put together. There’s a fair amount of doublespeak and couched terms, likely to protect BD’s intellectual property, but it’s still an interesting read. The take-home message is that despite some commenters’ assertions, the routines were apparently not just motion-captured from human dancers, but put together from a suite of moves Atlas, Spot, and Handle had already been trained on. That and the fact that BD worked with a human choreographer to work out the routines.

Looks like 2021 is already trying to give 2020 a run for its money, at least in the marketplace of crazy ideas. The story, released in Guitar World of all places, goes that some conspiracy-minded people in Italy started sharing around a schematic of what they purported to be the “5G chip” that’s supposedly included in the SARS-CoV-2 vaccine. The reason Guitar World picked it up is that eagle-eyed guitar gear collectors noticed that the schematic was actually that of the Boss MetalZone-2 effects pedal, complete with a section labeled “5G Freq.” That was apparently enough to trigger someone, and to ignore the op-amps, potentiometers, and 1/4″ phone jacks on the rest of the schematic. All of which would certainly smart going into the arm, no doubt, but seriously, if it could make us shred like this, we wouldn’t mind getting shot up with it.

Remember the first time you saw a Kindle with an e-ink display? The thing was amazing — the clarity and fine detail of the characters were unlike anything possible with an LCD or CRT display, and the fact that the display stayed on while the reader was off was a little mind-blowing at the time. Since then, e-ink technology has come considerably down market, commoditized to the point where they can be used for price tags on store shelves. But now it looks like they’re scaling up to desktop display sizes, with the announcement of a 25.3″ desktop e-ink monitor by Dasung. Dubbed the Paperlike 253, the 3200 x 1800 pixel display will be able to show 16 shades of gray with no backlighting. The videos of the monitor in action are pretty low resolution, so it’s hard to say what the refresh rate will be, but given the technology it’s going to be limited. This might be a great option as a second or third monitor for those who can work with the low refresh rate and don’t want an LCD monitor backlight blasting them in the face all day.

And finally, if it feels like time has been flying lately, you’re right. The Earth’s rotation on its axis has been shortening lately, such that days are spinning by not in a glacial 24 hours, but at a frenetic pace of 23 hours, 59 minutes, and 59.9998927 seconds. Laugh if you will, but those microseconds add up over the year. Leap seconds have been applied at least 27 times in the last 50 years to correct for Earth’s slowing rotation, but we’re now in a regime that may require a “negative leap second” be applied. Scientists will be studying the trends in Earth’s rotation and make a decision at the World Radiocommunication Conference in 2023, so our 24-hour day is safe until then.

How do you get people to love you and sidestep existential fear of robots eclipsing humans as the solar system’s most advanced thinking machines? You put on a dance routine to the music of Berry Gordy.

The video published by Boston Dynamics shows off a range of their advanced robots moving as if they were humans, greyhounds, and ostriches made of actual flesh. But of course they aren’t, which explains the safety barriers surrounding the dance floor and that lack of actual audio from the scene. After picking our jaws up off the floor we began to wonder what it sounds like in the room as the whine of motors must certainly be quite impressive — check out the Handle video from 2017 for an earful of that. We also wonder how long a dance-off of this magnitude can be maintained between battery swaps.

Anthropomorphism (or would it be canine-pomorphism?) is trending this year. We saw the Spot robot as part of a dance routine in an empty baseball stadium back in July. It’s a great marketing move, and this most recent volley from BD shows off some insane stunts like the en pointe work from the dog robot while the Atlas humanoids indulge in some one-footed yoga poses. Seeing this it’s easy to forget that these machines lack the innate compassion and empathy that save humans from injury when bumping into one another. While our robotic future looks bright, we’re not in a rush to share the dance floor anytime soon.

Still, it’s an incredible tribute to the state of the art in robotics — congratulations to the roboticists that have brought use here. Looking back eleven and a half years to the first time we covered these robots here on Hackaday, this seems more like CGI movie footage than real life. What’s more amazing? Hobby builds that are keeping up with this level of accomplishment.

In a sure sign that we’ve arrived in the future, news from off-world is more interesting this week than Earth news. When the InSight probe landed on Mars last year, it placed the first operating magnetometer on the Red Planet. Since then, the sensitive instrument has been logging data about the planet’s magnetic field, and now there are reports that researchers have discovered a chain of pulsations in the magnetic field. Pulsations in planetary magnetic fields aren’t all that strange; pulse trains that occur only at Martian midnight are, though. Researchers haven’t got a clue yet about what this means. We assume they’ve eliminated artifacts like something on the lander being turned on at local midnight, so when they figure it out it should be fascinating.

In more news from the future, Boston Dynamics is trolling us again. We covered the announcement early this week that they’re putting their Spot quadruped robot on sale – sort of. Turns out you need to be selected to qualify based on the application you have in mind, plus have several Ferraris full of cash to spend. While everyone was watching the adorable antics of Spot as it wandered through improbably industrial vignettes, Boston Dynamics also released this slightly terrifying video of their Atlas robot running through a gymnastics routine.  It starts with a headstand and a front roll and ends with a slipt leap and whatever the gymnastics equivalent of a figure skating axel jump is. Yes, it has a special roll cage attached to make the tumbles a bit smoother, but it’s still some remarkable stuff.

How are your RF design skills? If they’re good enough to design an RF power amp, you might want to check out this homebrew RF design challenge. Put on by NXP Semiconductors, the design must use one of their new LDMOS RF power transistors. They’ll send you samples so you can build your design, and you stand to win up to $3000 plus $1000 worth of NXP products. The contest opened back in May but is running through the middle of November, so you’d better hurry.

Speaking of RF, wouldn’t it be interesting to see a snapshot of the RF spectrum over the entire planet? ElectroSense thinks so, and they’re working on a crowdsourcing model to set up a globe-spanning network of connected RF sensors. The idea is similar to what FlightAware does for monitoring the locations of aircraft with a distributed network of ADS-B receivers. But where FlightAware only monitors a narrow slice of spectrum, ElectroSense wants it all – DC to 6 GHz. You can build a sensor from an SDR and a Raspberry Pi and start contributing to the effort, which only has a handful of sensors at the moment.

Has affordable metal 3D-printing finally arrived? For certain values of affordability, it soon will, when One Click Metal launches their new selective laser melting printer. Thomas Sanladerer did a video with the principals, and the prototype looks promising. SLM is not a new process, but patents on the core process recently ran out, so startups like One Click Metal are jumping into the market. Their printer won’t be cheap — you’ll still need to write a check with many zeroes — but with more players, the price should come down.

And finally, what’s this world coming to when a startup specializing in building giant fighting robots can’t make a go of it? MegaBots is shutting down, and while that’s certainly bad news for its founders and employees, it’s great news for anyone in the market for used battle bots. The company’s flagship bot, the 15-ton Eagle Prime, is currently up for auction on eBay. Bidding started at $1 with no reserve, but if you were looking for a steal, you’re a bit late. The high bid is currently $100,100, which is still an incredible buy considering it cost $2.5 million to build. You’ll have to pay for shipping, but you’ll have a super-destructive mecha of your own to drive around. And think how cool you’ll look rolling into some kid’s backyard birthday party. Presumably one you’ve been invited to.

You’ve got to admit, things have been going exceptionally well for SpaceX. In the sixteen years they’ve been in operation, they’ve managed to tick off enough space “firsts” to make even established aerospace players blush. They’re the first privately owned company to not only design and launch their own orbital-class rocket, but to send a spacecraft to the International Space Station. The first stage of their Falcon 9 rocket is the world’s only orbital booster capable of autonomous landing and reuse, and their Falcon Heavy has the highest payload capacity of any operational launch system. All of which they’ve managed to do at a significantly lower cost than their competition.

So it might come as a surprise to hear that SpaceX recently lost out on a lucrative NASA launch contract to the same entrenched aerospace corporations they’ve been running circles around for the last decade. It certainly seems to have come as a surprise to SpaceX, at least. Their bid to launch NASA’s Lucy mission on the Falcon 9 was so much lower than the nearly $150 million awarded to United Launch Alliance (ULA) for a flight on their Atlas V that the company has decided to formally protest the decision. Publicly questioning a NASA contract marks another “first” for the company, and a sign that SpaceX’s confidence in their abilities has reached the point that they’re no longer content to be treated as a minor player compared to heavyweights like Boeing and Lockheed Martin.

But this isn’t the first time NASA has opted to side with more established partners, even in the face of significantly lower bids by “New Space” companies. Their decision not to select Sierra Nevada Corporation’s Dream Chaser spaceplane for the Commercial Crew program in 2014, despite it being far cheaper than Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner, triggered a similar protest to the US Government Accountability Office (GAO). In the end, the GAO determined that Boeing’s experience and long history justified the higher sticker price of their spacecraft compared to the relative newcomer.

NASA has yet to officially explain their decision to go with ULA over SpaceX for the Lucy mission, but in light of what we know about the contract, it seems a safe bet they’ll tell SpaceX the same thing they told Sierra Nevada in 2014. The SpaceX bid might be lower, but in the end, NASA’s is willing to pay more to know it will get done right. Which begs the question: at what point are the cost savings not compelling enough to trust an important scientific mission (or human lives) to these rapidly emerging commercial space companies?

Lucy in the Sky with Asteroids

To be sure, SpaceX has been on an absolute roll. They suffered a few losses early on, which is hardly outside of the norm for a completely newly developed engine and rocket combination, but beyond that its been more or less a continuous steam of successes for the Hawthorne, California company. Even the first flight of their highly ambitious Falcon Heavy ended up being nearly flawless, despite Elon Musk himself expressing some pessimistic expectations in the days leading up to launch.

Given their success rate, it’s unlikely NASA was concerned about SpaceX losing the Lucy spacecraft. After all, by the time Lucy’s October 2021 launch date rolls around, American astronauts should be riding to the International Space Station on the same Falcon 9 rocket that would be carrying it to orbit. There’s also no question that the Falcon 9 is physically capable of lofting Lucy and giving it the necessary energy to send it on its tour of the Trojan Asteroids which share the Jupiter’s orbit; though SpaceX did concede that the rocket wouldn’t have enough energy in reserve to perform the now customary booster landing, and as such it would fly in an expendable configuration.

The sticking point was almost certainly the extremely narrow launch window required for Lucy’s complicated flight path, which relies on precisely timed gravity assists to visit all seven asteroids the team is hoping to target during the mission. The alignment of these targets allows for a window of just 20 days in which Lucy can leave Earth and accomplish all of its goals. If it can’t lift off within that time period, the mission would have to be launched on a more powerful rocket that could give Lucy enough of a kick to make up for its late start. Wait long enough, and the opportunity to capitalize on the alignment of these asteroids will simply disappear. At that point, the mission would need to either select new targets or perhaps be scrapped altogether.

In a press release acknowledging their selection for the Lucy mission, ULA President Tory Bruno was quick to point out the stellar record of the Atlas V, and how its reliability factored into the tight perimeters of the mission.

This mission has a once-in-a-lifetime planetary launch window, and Atlas V’s world-leading schedule certainty, coupled with our reliability and performance provided the optimal vehicle for this mission. Our Atlas V rocket has launched 79 times achieving 100 percent mission success, and we look forward to working again with our mission partners to explore our universe.

The Curse of Elon Time

When Elon Musk says he’s going to do something, it usually happens. But when it will become a reality is another story entirely. For Tesla and SpaceX, deadlines are best identified by the whooshing noise they make as they go by. Milestones are perpetually claimed to be six months to a year out from completion, and delays are often announced with nothing more than an off the cuff Tweet.

As an example, SpaceX originally claimed the Falcon Heavy would enter active service by 2013. In reality its first flight didn’t take place until February 2018, and even then, it was only a demonstration mission without a paying customer. Among those in the industry, this tendency for the tech entrepreneur’s companies to vastly underestimate how long it will take to complete their publicized goals is referred to as “Elon Time”.

One doesn’t need to look into the distant past to find an example of this tendency causing serious delays. SpaceX was tasked with launching the classified “Zuma” satellite for the United States Government in November 2017, but in the end it didn’t launch until January 2018. The Zuma satellite was ready to go, but it ended up waiting on the ground because of tasks SpaceX was performing in parallel, such as modifying their launch pad for Falcon Heavy. For most payloads these unnecessary delays are a minor annoyance, and generally worth the trouble given the significant cost reduction when flying with SpaceX; but a two month delay for Lucy could irreparably jeopardize the mission.

Risk Versus Reward

With the United States Government recently burned by SpaceX’s occasional bouts of Elon Time, compounded by the fact the company will likely be even busier in 2021, it’s not hard to see why NASA would look to a more traditional provider like ULA for a mission that quite simply can’t afford to be delayed. When the InSight Mars lander missed its launch window due to a defective instrument, it cost NASA an additional $150 million to get the project back on track. With delays that expensive, the cost savings offered by SpaceX might not look nearly as compelling.

We likely won’t know what SpaceX was offering to launch Lucy for until the GAO releases their report on the bidding process, but we have enough data to make some guesses. Given the nominal $62 million cost of a Falcon 9 launch plus the additional checks and requirements for a science mission of this nature, a bid in the neighborhood of $90 million seems likely. For reference, last year SpaceX launched NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) for $87 million. Is a cost savings of $60 million worth risking the fate of a spacecraft that’s been engineered to last over a decade at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars? According to NASA, the math just doesn’t add up.