Wow. Am I unimpressed with ESA’s plans for a new rocket:
Multiple designs for a two- or three-stage rocket with cryogenic, solid-fueled and methane/oxygen main stages will be studied not only for their performance, but also for their long-term operating costs.
While no decision has been made, the early design work will focus on a vehicle that would add or subtract strap-on boosters to lift satellites weighing as little as 3,000 kilograms and as much as 7,500 kilograms into geostationary transfer orbit, the destination of most telecommunications satellites.
Unlike the current Ariane 5, the next-generation launcher would, under the preliminary designs being investigated, launch one satellite at a time into geostationary orbit, not two as typically is the case with the current Ariane 5.
And this huge breakthrough in launch technology will be available in only fifteen years.
Between 1945 and 1960, we went from the DC-3 to the 7407. Between 1955 and 1970, we went from Aerobees to moon landings. And between now and 2025, the Europeans want to develop yet another expendable rocket. I guess they learned the lesson of the Shuttle. It was the wrong lesson, but at least they learned a lesson, right?
Um, DC-3 maiden flight… 1935. Sorry. But the DC-3 was the work horse in moving troops through most of WWII. By 1945, Boeing was working on the Strato-Cruiser (first flight in 1947, but based on B-29 that flew first in 1942) that would provided pressurized transport. Technology wise, it wasn’t a giant leap from the Strato-Cruiser with a pressurized compartment to adding already available jet engines. After that, its a scaling problem.
Actually, they want to make Ariane 5 cheaper and more EELV-like, which seems like a good idea. Whether it is worth the investment is another matter, which is why the Germans don’t like the idea. The long development schedule must have to do with the low level of yearly funding.
I didn’t meant to imply maiden flight. I just meant that at the end of the war our most advanced passenger transport was DC-3s, and fifteen years later, we had large jet transports.
Actually, they want to make Ariane 5 cheaper and more EELV-like, which seems like a good idea.
Yeah, they can’t count on ITAR forever.
But they also run the risk of developing a vehicle that’s obsolete before its first launch, if the suborbital people make good progress.
When I say low level, I mean low for dinosaurs. 🙂
But they also run the risk of developing a vehicle that’s obsolete before its first launch, if the suborbital people make good progress.
It need not be obsolete for EU government and military payloads, even if it could no longer compete on the international market. But I think they need to think long and hard about the future, and I’m not seeing very many encouraging signals. On the other hand, Dordain said the other day that ESA should draw lessons from the success of Falcon 9. The failure of Ares is another fertile source of lessons.
At the same time, the EU is trying to complete their Galileo satellite fleet but launch costs have them saying
“One cost-cutting measure, Engeln said, could be for the commission to seek a more affordable launch option for the rest of the Galileo satellites. “
Enter Falcon 9
When people write that there isn’t a market for SpaceX, I wonder what planet they’re living on.
Don’t know why you are getting so bent out of shape Rand. They have only let a small contract to study lots of options – nothing more. It’s good to survey the field and see what might be possible every so often. Maybe they won’t find any horses they like and do nothing. Better than getting half way through a project and then realizing it won’t work.
Absent any breakthrough motors etc that will get you to orbit on half a kilo of treacle you have to stay with what you have and see if there are any other benefits that can be realized in terms of structure, avionics etc.
As far as ITAR is concerned; it’s not just ITAR; of course ITAR forces development elsewhere but there are also long memories of the 70’s, the OTS and GEOS debacles. Not to mention the US arbitrarily pulling out of the Ulysses program as a spacecraft provider. Trust in NASA and its ability to pursue things it signed up to was severely dented; ISS and Spacelab have at least partially restored that trust
The development of ARIANE started because the US had anti-competitive rules about launching foreign competitive satellites on US Launch Vehicles for money. The Europeans are not going to relinquish there home grown launch capabilities. Nor should they, would the US do the same?
They do face a dilemma: they want to reduce operating costs but they don’t want to spend a lot of money on R&D and their current launcher is expensive. They’re not going to want a gap either.
Jesus Rand! Don’t you see?!?!!1 Now that we’ve “given up” space, we’re going to lose this new space race to the Europeans! They’re racing headlong into creating a revolutionary new rocket that is slightly, incrementally different from existing launch vehicles. And they’re going to do it at the breakneck pace of a decade and a half!
Meanwhile, China is continuing their participation in the space race with their “launch a man into space every 3 years or so, give or take” program!
How can private enterprise even compete? They’d have to develop clean sheet vehicles and bring them to fruition at a 10th the cost and much less than half the time. And that’s just ridiculous to even consider.
Jesus Rand! Don’t you see?!?!!1 Now that we’ve “given up” space, we’re going to lose this new space race to the Europeans!
Yes, that was the terrifying thought that ran through my mind as I was reading the article, too.
“It’s good to survey the field and see what might be possible every so often.”
This field has been exhaustively surveyed every two or three years since 1957. Things haven’t changed that much, except for the weight and cost of the guidance and control systems. Going back and doing again just looks like the definition of insanity.
But then, Astrium is leading the charge — the same outfit that came out with a “suborbital tourist RLV” that appeared to be a business jet with bigger windows. According to their press, they had done all of the engineering, but the pictures they put out were of a science fiction rocket. It clearly had no room for enough propellant to perform the mission for which it was allegedly designed. Maybe they DO need to survey the field, to learn how rockets really work…
Between 1945 and 1960, we went from the DC-3 to the 747.
Actually, in 1945 there were a lot of DC-3s in service but also DC-4s and Lockheed Constellations (once they were freed from military use). The 747 didn’t come into service until about 1970. It was the 707 that was operational in 1960.
Perhaps a more dramatic example what that in 1945, our first operational jet fighter, the Lockheed P-80, was in very limited service. It had a top speed of about 600 MPH. By 1960, early model F4H Phantom IIs were flying with a top speed of Mach 2.5. We also went from the B-45 Tornado (our first operational jet bomber) to the B-52G.
OK, here’s a challenge: is it possible to incrementally evolve Ariane 5 into something cost effective, without assuming there is going to be exploration or commercial manned spaceflight? I think they’re in a better starting position than the Shuttle, but essentially what they have is a cryogenic Titan IV and Titan wasn’t a cheap vehicle. Let’s be generous and allow for reuse of old Ariane 4 components, so they could start with a hypergolic Titan IV instead if that turns out to be easier.
D’oh! I meant 707.
To me, it would seem the logical upgrade path would be to replace the SRB’s with liquid fly-back boosters on the Arianne V.
Would not fly-back boosters be a good tech for EELV’s on the road to full reusability?
They could also be clustered on a heavy lift vehicle and share them with the EELV fleet. Perhaps throw in a shiny new kerelox engine for the FB Boosters?
Flyback boosters are probably too expensive in the near term. ESA appears to have two strategies right now: to reduce the cost of the SRBs and to capture the smaller segments of the launch market. HLV proponents take note: Ariane 5 is too large not too small.
For the smaller segment they would need single core launchers (like Ariane 4…).
If you leave off the solids, the Ariane core doesn’t have enough thrust, so you would need either a more powerful core engine, or two engines. I’m not sure that would fit.
Or you could go to a kerolox first stage using existing tooling, in which case you’d still need a new engine, either a very large one or clustered smaller ones. As an intermediate step they could go back to the old hypergolic Vikings and use two of them. They did manage to mass produce those in the past.
Or they could go with the solids as is their plan with Vega. An intermediate size vehicle could be based on the Ariane SRBs and the Vega solid first stage.
I’m starting to think they should have gone with a three body Ariane 4 variant for Ariane 5 and upgraded it to kerolox. But of course, they wanted to build their own mini Shuttle with Hermes…
This is an Ariane 4 replacement. ESA’s issue is they need to launch Galileo like satellite constellations and Ariane 5 is too expensive to do it. Their launcher “gap” was bad enough that they funded the Soyuz launch site at Kourou, in order to have a cheap launcher for that purpose.
You also have to consider that ESA is extremely conservative. There is some minor funding into RLV R&D, but it is being considered for the generation *after* the one mentioned in the article.
After the French went through the Hermes boondoggle, where they spent several billion on a paper spaceplane, there is no great rush into investing in such technology.
There has been some work done since Hermes in components which could be used for an RLV. The Germans participated into X-38 where they worked on C/C-SiC hot structures). ESA also worked on TPS for ARD and Huygens.
I have read several studies on liquid flyback boosters for Ariane 5 but AFAIK these were dead ends which never got funded.
I suppose there are two, maybe three main possibilities for the launcher in the news piece: one is to make a simplified Ariane 5 rocket (think HL-IIA vs HL-II), the second is to make a new rocket based on possibly partially reusable stages using new staged combustion engines, the third possibility is to use the P230 and P80 solid stages from Ariane 5 and Vega, together with a new LOX/LH2 third stage using the Vinci engine, to make a mid-sized launcher.
This is an Ariane 4 replacement.
What do you mean? Are you saying they’ve come to the conclusion Ariane 5 was a mistake?
simplified Ariane 5
You mean an Ariane 5 core with P80 strap ons?
to make a mid-sized launcher
It still has to be able to lift ATV to ISS orbit.
Martin:
Many studies I have read on next generation launch architectures out of ESA claim the Ariane 5 rocket has two main issues:
1) second stage is not restartable. This limits the types of missions possible with Ariane 5. For this the Vinci engine was developed.
2) 10 metric ton payload it is too large, while a 4 ton payload, similar to Ariane 4 or Soyuz would be preferable. It is not always possible to do a dual launch due to payload specific considerations. In that case the extra space is wasted. It is better to have a launcher sized for one payload only.
So yes basically ESA, or some people in ESA at least, claim Ariane 5 was a mistake and that it is too big. Most payloads would be better suited by a medium launcher instead.
They do have one problem if they go for a 4 ton payload launcher however. Several comsats today have more than 4 metric tons (e.g. TerreStar-1 had 6910 kg). ESA’s recent publications on launchers usually employ optional extra solid boosters to cater for these payloads.
One simplified Ariane 5 derived design I have seen had smaller solid boosters (I think they were the Ariane 4 solids) and a simplified main Vulcain engine. Lately they seem to be calling this engine research “Vulcain X”.
There is a CNES presentation named “Future Launchers Preparation” (which you can find using google) which has some more details about these concepts.
This particular press release is talking about what ESA usually calls the New Generation Launcher or NGL. You can find more details about NGL in a paper called “Status of next generation expendable launchers concepts within the FLPP programme”.
ATV doesn’t matter because by 2025 the ISS will have de-orbited.
Do you agree a three body Ariane 4 would have been better than Ariane 5, or does it have redeeming features?
ATV doesn’t matter because by 2025 the ISS will have de-orbited.
There’s still Bigelow. ESA was looking at cooperation with Bigelow in case the ISS was deorbited in 2015. I doubt they want to give up manned spaceflight altogether. Of course, they do not need 21mT to LEO for that.
“ATV doesn’t matter because by 2025 the ISS will have de-orbited.”
I bet you a Coke is hasn’t. Even if there are ten Bigelow stations in orbit.
I think that the comparison between aerospace planes, those planes that fly humans from place to place on the earth to enable commerce and recreation with launching people to space is an incorrect one.
Flying people from place to place on the Earth accelerates commerce and in the recreational market caters to people’s desire and ability to pay to travel faster than on water or rail. In flying to space, at least until the advent of the ISS there was really no point, and it is still the case now, to fly for reasons other than recreation (private sector), except back before challenger when the shuttle was flying a lot (9 times a year seems a lot now).
We need to focus the deployment of investment capital (from both the government and the private sector), to developing further space applications that would support human and robotic spaceflight. With all of the tens to hundreds of billions pissed away to the automotive industry and the banking industry, there is a concrete argument to be made that now is the time to develop in space activities that can drive commerce, which can help drive a privately funded cost lowering activity for the transportation of humans to and from space destinations.
Without a way to make money at the destination, the market for human spaceflight will always necessarily be extremely limited.
$12.6M is not a small contract. I fully believe that at least 3 American companies could and would put a human being in space for that amount. Two of them are in Mojave, and the other one rhymes with “marmadillo.” $12.6M for some powerpoints and excel files is a joke. Saying such a study is a positive-value move for any organization is a slap in the face to what is possible with the engineers and technology we have right now. 12.6 million! At that rate plus options a frugal company could employ 20 good engineers for 5 years, and that is enough to make amazing things happen. Instead it will get sucked into the same bureaucratic blackhole that gets all the rest.
ESA is extremely conservative these days due to a both a lack of money and a commitment to maintain the existing industry base, which only knows about ELVs.
ESA’s studies of RLV essentially stopped when NASA killed X-33 and so removed any need to “compete” along these lines. Moreover, due to the entrepreneurial approach taken by NewSpace, which is the most likely route by which RLVs will be developed, ESA has great difficulty seeing a threat and, therefore, any pressure to “compete”.
Note that CNES also studied RLVs about a decade ago, doing joint work with the Russians, but considered the development cost too high with respect to the perceived needs, both civil and military.
It appears that Roga does not understand the difference between Apples and Oranges! $12.6m is NOT a large contract. It was awarded to a European company with its roots in oldspace not newspace, (Apples). Certainly people in Mojave and Texas, (Oranges) could do a lot with that funding but they haven’t got it and until they demonstrate a closing business case they won’t get it.
The other thing about the companies in both Mojave and Texas is that no third parties outside those companies (with the exception of their Accountants and Auditors etc) actually knows how much investment has already been made. So, we have no real way of knowing if they are efficient or not – we can only speculate on the basis of the work they acknowledge and publish.
we have no real way of knowing if they are efficient or not
Audits are nice to have, but when you’re ten times plus more efficient that’s knowable without it.
@Andy Clark –
No, we don’t have open access to the books at small NewSpace firms, but we can glean enough to know that $12.6M is enough to get great things done in the industry. For instance, we can:
– Make reasonable assumptions about engineering firms’ cash cost per employee during the startup phase, and extrapolate, which I did.
– Look at reports from those figures we do have. The best ones are probably Rocketplane (~$30M, no flying hardware), Armadillo (no exact numbers, but I recall John Carmack saying something in the range of a few single millions to do the LLC flights), Masten ($1.5M put them in a good cash situation as of a few months ago), XCOR (developed a large methane-LOX rocket for a $3.3M contract with ATK), Scaled ($20-30M for two brand new vehicles, a new rocket propulsion system, a test flight program, and 3 suborbital flights).
The point is this: when you are throwing around cash, there are no apples and oranges. Cash is cash. And $12.6M is an amount of cash that could almost certainly make great, inspiring things happen in the right hands. Only, it is not being put in the right hands. The only apples and oranges here are the results, which are more like apples and pictures of oranges.
I agree; $12.6m is enough to get a great deal done in the US Newspace industry. However, Astrium is OLDSPACE and much larger than any of the US Newspace companies including Scaled. To them and to ESA $12.6m is nice to have but it ain’t a huge amount of money at all.
BTW, I run a Newspace business and guess what; I’d give arms and maybe legs for that sort of cash. Would a $12.6m contract to Lockmart or Boeing be big? No, might buy a 747 wing but that’s about all – and maybe not the whole wing.
I doubt that newspace is 10 times as efficient as old space but hey they may be. Nice if they are. They should be more efficient simply because they do not have the overhead structure that larger companies do. That will probabably change as they grow.
A larger company has more issues than just overhead. It is easier to camouflage incompetence when there are many layers between the management on top and the people actually doing the work below.
Larger companies also tend to become increasingly bureaucratic to maintain some semblance of order. This means many high-risk/high-payoff solutions or markets are disregarded along the way. Eventually this may lead to the demise of the company.
On the other hand a larger company usually has more success in lobbying (too big to fail), or market manipulation, plus they usually have more substantial capital reserves which can be used as a war chest. In markets which require a large initial capital investment, being too small may be an obstacle in itself.
One of the main achievements of “NewSpace” companies is that they proved, or are proving, that the required initial capital investment to enter the space business is much smaller than previously considered.
What is necessary next is to create an actual launch market with several private operators, then to provide more applications for it.
After a little reading I’m starting to think the political decision making process in the space field over here is very similar to that in the US, i.e. dominated by concerns over pork. A crucial difference is that the ESA member states each pay for their own pork, under the “principle of geographic return”.
There is agreement that the current Ariane upper stage needs to be upgraded and that it needs a restartable engine. This would be the Ariane 5 ME or Midlife Evolution, which should be available somewhere around 2015.
In addition, there is a need for smaller versions to serve different markets. The big question seems to be which elements would be used for that, the solids or the liquid core.
Vega is based on the solids and is aimed at the low end of the market. It has limited commonality with the Ariane SRBs, it uses a modified single segment of the A5 SRB as a first stage and two smaller solid stages and a kick stage on top. The program scope had to be changed to make it serve as an Ariane SRB improvement program as well. They are doing some nice things with filament wound casings, electromechanical actuators for TVC and cost reduction attempts and the intention is for these changes to make it back into the A5 SRBs.
The Italians are keen on the solids since they make many of the components, and they would like to see a medium size solid launcher too, bigger than Vega and using an upgraded full Ariane SRB as a first stage and the single segment Vega first stage as a second stage. The A5 ME upper stage might be nice as a third stage. This would lead to a Soyuz class vehicle but this option has apparently lost some support since the decision was made to strike a deal with the Russians.
The French may like the upgrades to the A5 SRBs, but they seem to prefer to develop an all-liquid solution, perhaps because they want to develop a staged combustion engine. They’d rather skip the A5 ME, while keeping its restartable Vinci engine, and get to work on the Next Generation Launcher immediately.
The Germans seem to prefer Ariane 5 ME + Vega and perhaps a slightly bigger Vega.
Some more thoughts on the off chance someone will read this: Vega may lead to an amount of competition between mostly French and mostly Italian ESA launchers. The French would like a smaller all or mostly liquid version of Ariane and the Italians want a larger mixed solid liquid version of Vega, which is itself a much smaller mostly solid Ariane derivative. The Italians are working on their own LOX/CH4 upper stage for Vega.
Martijn – It sounds very similar to what we have in the states, except minus the layer of nationalist pride you get in Europe between countries. One difference is your explanation of the Arianespace needs. There are a lot of pork considerations, just like in the US, but you also mention things like the need for a smaller launcher to serve different markets, which is a purely market-based need. In the US, especially with NASA, ITAR got rid of that check and balance. We almost have only political markets left. It’s depressing.