Arianespace Ready for Liftoff

stuckinarut writes to tell us Arianespace is reporting that their newest Ariane dual-satellite ECA mission rolled out of the assembly building and is set for a launch today (Nov 12) at 2345 GMT. This flight is set to demonstrate the massive lift capacity of nearly 10,000 kg and is currently the "only commercial vehicle that can launch two mainstream telecommunications satellite payloads on the same mission."

Comments

I do not want to sound cruel...

[aepervius]

But also at least when ariane explode you only lose 2 com sat, not 3-4 lives. And probably only a few milliard not a dozen.

Furthermore let us see how much payload was put by all classic rocket booster in orbit (EU/russian/china), shall we, and how much the shuttle did ? Adn at WHAT price per kilogram ?

Don't get me wrong I think the shuttle is a wonderful advancement, but let us be honest. When it comes for payload... It don't comes to the ankle of conventional rocket for price, simplicity, frequency, and risk (read:human lives)...

Re:Been there, done that

[eclectro]

They made countless promises about what the shuttle could do while it was been built, in order to get funding.

Non of those promises ever panned out, except for hubble servicing, which they are no longer doing because it's "too dangerous".

As a launch platform that had specific design goals, it has failed miserably.

Unmanned rockets/satellites/probes such as the Ariane is where true space exploration lies. If something goes wrong it doesn't take lives with it. It is inherently more practical.

Re:Is the flight any cheaper per pound...

[khallow]

I've seen claims that the Arianne 5 is $6,700 per kg to LEO while the space shuttle is $19,000. Note that the shuttle, if it were launched in volume (eg, 40 trips per year), would be under $10,000 per kg (the marginal cost per launch is on the order of 200 to 250 million per launch), and presumably we'd see similar savings in an Arianne program as well.

Re:Commercial space race

[sznupi]

Not only. Also science stuff.

You'd know that for a long time already, but Slashdot editors never accepted my entry or any of the few others (from few people I know - one finishes studying English philology, so their poor grammar wasn't the cause).
Namely: in less than 2 years ESA launches Herschell Space Observatory, which recently was assembled and completed important part of testing. It will be put around L2 (yep, like JWST), operate in infrared (yep), but of course will be put at least 5 years earlier than JWST. so Hubble can soon go without much damage.

Of course Slashot editors like to hysterize about the lack of American replacement for Hubble and disregard stories telling that soon we _will_ have replacement...and much better.

Re:More important than it seems

[Rei]

You have to pay people even when you do not launch

You have to pay your people. You don't have to pay your vast network of contractors, and you don't have to increase your labor force to support a higher launch rate.

With government-funded rocket systems the world over, development costs are not factored into launch costs. Launch costs on the Ariane 5 EC-A are over 10k$/kg, with a full payload at that. Yes, the more frequently you launch, the cheaper the price per kg; however, it doesn't come close to justifying not putting two payloads on one rocket if you're capable of it. The fact is that these are inherently massive, complex vehicles which always require a lot of careful assembly and inspection work.

By the way, one of the big advantages of the shuttle was just that - multiple launches of large payloads per mission. It lets you more efficiently utilize your payload capacity with such heavy sats, so while the shuttle was expensive per kilogram, it wasn't as bad as it could have been. Of course, for now the shuttle is out for the count. Seing Europe's large-payload workhorse place multiple sizable payloads on a single mission is a very nice thing :)

Re:Been there, done that

[TheHawke]

The shuttle is a bulky, overpriced Delta IV booster when they used it to fire satellites into orbit.

What needed to be done is to utilize the shuttle in building the Large Communications Arrays that they had been planning on ever since the inception of the RLV programs.

But noo, NASA had to use the shuttles in their PR campaign by blowing taxpayer dollars in putting itty bitty commo and recon birds into orbit.

Pretty much the only birds that actually were worth the E-Ticket were the Magellan Probe and Hubble Telescope. Pulling regular scheduled maitainence on the HST was where the shuttle really came into it's element by doing what it was designed for; in-space repair and upgrades to large ailing satellites that are too expensive or time-consuming to replace.

Maybe 20, 30 years down the line we can start looking into another series of RLVs that can do what the original SST program's goals had in mind, but for now, we'll settle for the Son of the Saturn V family to loft us back to the good ole moon to stay.

Re:Been there, done that

[roystgnr]

Unmanned rockets/satellites/probes such as the Ariane is where true space exploration lies. If something goes wrong it doesn't take lives with it. It is inherently more practical.

How much would you have to be paid for a job on which you had a 2% chance of dying? I'd do it for $400K even if it didn't let me go to orbit. Even if you assume for some reason that high performance vehicle pilots are more risk-averse than I am, you're still not going to come up with a cost to life that exceeds the cost of the most expensive satellites and the launch vehicles themselves.

Unmanned flights aren't inherently more practical, they're just inherently safer PR. If every company risked losing hundreds of billions of dollars of funding any time an employee died, we wouldn't have any bridges or skyscrapers until we could build them with robots.

Re:I try to remmember (offtopic)

[psicic]

(O/T) As a native English speaker, I was delighted to see you use the term milliard simply because I was always taught by school teachers and 'educated' people that a billion should be defined as 10^12(1,000,000,000,000) but that, as a sop to the overwhelming influence of the American economy and cultural might, billion should be regarded as 10^9(1,000,000,000).

So, for instance, in Business Studies class, we strictly meant 10^9 if we used the word billion, but in English class, the meaning was much more ambiguous.

Since the mid-seventies, officially a billion has meant 10^9 in government documents in Britain, Ireland and elsewhere, but its old meaning as 10^12 has remained colloquially. (I left secondary school in 1999, which is fairly recent and it was still possible to use the 10^12 form then).

My point? Long-scale convention for naming numbers is just as valid as short-scale(see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_and_short_scales ) but if you want the vast majority of people to understand, use the word 'Billion'