5 ms·
Yeah, no one else has made any announcements wrt re-usability. It seems odd, but I guess that's why they call it "dino-space". Ariane 6 seems to be in response
by jccooper 12y ago
Yeah, no one else has made any announcements wrt re-usability. It seems odd, but I guess that's why they call it "dino-space".
Ariane 6 seems to be in response to the SpaceX challenge, at least; they aim to halve the cost per kg through cheaper and common upper/lower stage components. Which is good, but still not competitive with F9, much less a reusable version. At one point they almost made it all-solids in the first two stages, plus boosters, which would have totally doomed any future attempts at re-usability. The final design uses a F9-style common component liquid core, so they could maybe do the same thing as SpaceX later. They are still stuck with solid boosters, though, in a pork-provision move for Italy.
I've got to imagine that ULA is quietly looking into it. But it's quite possible they're just hoping SpaceX will eventually implode of its own internal contradictions and they can go back to their nice little government-launch monopoly. Or maybe they've decided they can't do it without absurd expense, based on their internal development costs. Or maybe they just hope to coast on their existing contracts for a while, and deal with it later once SpaceX has taken all the lumps.
NASA, via SLS, sure isn't looking at re-usability anymore. Lower cost to orbit via research should be their main task, if you ask me, but Congress would rather have them fly giant rockets a couple times a decade, apparently.
The Russians, well, are not much into changing things up. (They've been running Soyuz and Proton, their current launch families, since the sixties!) And their recent aerospace development programs have been less than impressive. But they have a real industry to protect, so one would hope they have a strategy.
I think that everyone's waiting for SpaceX to make it work, and then they'll get to copying. My long-term guess is that this'll kill several of the incumbents, a few will make the transition eventually, but most of SpaceX's competition will come from new entrants. In the meantime, SpaceX will be free to reap the profit from the margin between what it costs them and what their old-fashioned competitors can do. And/or capture the whole darn market. And/or grow it with lower prices. Maybe all of the above.
- Solarsail 12y ago"Dino-space" is a term I hadn't heard before... Is this a newer version of the "Old-space" that people were talking about in 2005? As for re-usability on the existing designs, there were many impressive concepts for that floating around in the 80's, before they were all killed off for the Shuttle. But more recently it's not like they're just protecting what they've always had, fending off the little guy. The EELV program was rather innovative, and rather successfully reduced costs and probably improved launch reliability using some fairly unusual approaches to vehicle design. They worked out sub-optimally, because commercial demand was weaker than predicted (and never materialized for Delta IV), and Boeing wasn't exactly about to sell at a loss to boost sales. I've heard a few people argue, since the ULA merger, that ULA as a company doesn't really have the money to try to re-do the EELV's anymore, only somewhat breaking-even while SpaceX gets actual investments. Tho that might be disgruntled greybeards complaining... Ariane 5 went expendable specifically to make it feasible to build, where Sanger and similar SSTO re-usable spaceplanes were too far-fetched to build.
- jccooper 12y agoYeah, it's just a more-aggressive synonym for "oldspace". Couldn't say where it came from. The EELV and Ariane were a reasonable approach at the time to make rockets a bit more affordable. Any way to do reusability at the time would have required a novel and exotic architecture, with a matching exotic budget. And that just wasn't in the cards. But now it's not that impossible or expensive to ask a rocket stage to drop out of the sky and sit on its tail. (The hovering rocket is a garage project at this point, though a difficult one--but mostly because of the "rocket" part and not the "hovering" part.) Any existing stage could be modified to do the same with modern avionics, with the addition of an RCS and restartable engine (if it doesn't already have those). Sure, SpaceX's choice of 9 throttlable engines makes it easier, but you can do the "hover-slam" with just one giant one. Any incumbent who can't manage to do so will rightly be done within a decade. And as hide-bound as they all seem to be, that might be most of them. They'll still have to deal with SpaceX's manufacturing efficiency, which might be even harder, as manufacturing inefficiency is part, for example, of Ariane's DNA. But at least they'll stay in the race.
- shasheene 12y agoI really like the Atlas V re-usability proposal: http://www.ulalaunch.com/uploads/docs/Published_Papers/Evolution/EELVPartialReusable2010.pdf http://www.ulalaunch.com/uploads/docs/Published_Papers/Evolu... After stage separation, it detach the entire engine block (where most of the cost is), and a helicopter captures the parachute mid-flight! (See figure 2 from the PDF)
- tankenmate 12y agoThe issue with this though is it goes most of the way back to the STS; i.e. multi-month turn around instead of days/weeks. It saves manufacturing time and materials costs (not entirely due to fatigue checking etc), but does little for integration and turn around costs.
- kirk21 12y agoAriane 6 is a joke. First launch in 2020, billion dollar budget. Compare this with what SpaceX did. Are you kidding me? This should have been more ambitious. Airbus wanted to use SpaceX but the French flipped out so they have to stick with Ariane.