Slashdot Mirror
Airbus Unveils Its First Stage Reuseability Concept
schwit1 writes: The competition heats up: Airbus unveiled Friday its prototype design to recover and reuse the engines and avionics of its Ariane rockets. From the article: "The Airbus team concluded that SpaceX's design of returning the full stage to Earth could be simplified by separating the propulsion bay from the rest of the stage, protecting the motor on reentry and, using the winglets and turbofans, return horizontally to a conventional air strip. "We are using an aerodynamic shield so that the motor is not subjected to such high stress on reentry," [technical director Herve] Gilibert said. "We need very little fuel for the turbofans and the performance penalty we pay for the Ariane 6 launcher is far less than the 30 percent or more performance penalty that SpaceX pays for the reusable Falcon 9 first stage." Gee, for decades Arianespace and Boeing and Lockheed Martin and everyone else in the launch industry insisted it made no economic sense to try to recover and reuse the first stage of their rockets. Then SpaceX comes along and makes an effort to do so, without as yet even coming close, and suddenly everyone agrees it is economically essential to do it as well. Isn't competition wonderful?
Why reuse something when you can trick governments to pay for it again. That make perfect economic sense until someone reveals the fraud.
Silence is a state of mime.
If you just want to see how it works, scroll down to the video at the end. They don't really explain it very well in the text.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, you're not using enough of it. --AC
The idea that SpaceX "did not even come close" is ridiculous. It was the FIRST to operate on the principle that it was practical, and has twice now come very close to getting it done. In only... what... 4 tries? On a target far smaller than the continents aimed at by Russia and EU?
I find this whole announcement to be saying: "Yeah, us too! Maybe a few years from now."
This is getting to be an interesting horse race.
Two questions
First, how much extra weight does Airbus need at takeoff including the extra fuel, structures, and engines?
In the article, Airbus seemed to only want to talk about fuel weight.
Not sure if the purpose is focused on building something, or getting more funding.
Second, if X launches from Texas, is there a nice place to land the first stage?
How far downrange was the barge, and what is that far from TX.
Traditional space companies will certainly have to adjust their business models away from public funding dependance or be left behind.
64 bit CPU:s
IPv6
Fuel-efficient cars
and probably many more where all, at best, considered "unnessessary" when new.
So its basically the Vulcan concept, a detachable avionics/engine package at the back and an expendable everything else. I suppose its an improvement from what we currently have but not by much. The only real difference from Vulcan is that instead of being snagged out of the air by a helicopter it glides back to some location under some power. I suppose I can see why Airbus and ULA are going for such concepts, they should be pretty cheap to develop (though I am sure they'll try to squeeze every dollar they can out of their respective benefactors), are relatively low risk and will still let them justify big launch bills with tank/upper stage replacement. But if SpaceX can pull off a Falcon first stage recovery even a majority of the time they'll blow this and Vulcan out of the water. Fuel is cheap, replacing tanks and stages is expensive.
everyone else in the launch industry insisted it made no economic sense to try to recover and reuse the first stage of their rockets.
Yes, that was then - long ago. Things are different now. For instance, who in the 90s, knew you could get 8GB of computer storage at less than $15 those days? It's reality now.
It's a very small market. You mean "oneupmanship" and prestige, yes?
This has the look of a paper concept that nobody's put any engineering work into yet. Some possibly show-stopping engineering challenges:
1) The air-breathing engines are dead weight dragged most of the way to orbit. And turboprops and turbofans are pretty damned heavy compared to rocket engines: for many applications, the weight of fuel and tankage is so much greater than the engines that engine mass is irrelevant, but that's not the case here. SpaceX's design makes use of engines that need to go to space anyway.
2) Looking at the videos, the design relies on folding propellers that deploy in flight. This is ... not an easy thing to do. I'm not aware of any aircraft larger than a duck that uses this technique, even on carrier-based aircraft where space is at a premium.
3) While rocket engines are pretty lightweight compared to turbine engines, it's still a lot of weight to fly back home. The video shows a flyback aircraft with very short stubby wings. In addition, the wings can't be asymmetric lifting airfoils or they'd push the rocket sideways during lauch: the have to be flat boards. The return vehicle is likely to have a very high stall speed, making landing a challenge.
4) The video shows no details on how this propulsion module is attached to the fuel tank above it. This is difficult: enormous fuel and oxidizer pipes need to pass through the nose of the propulsion module, along with gigantic clamps attaching it to the fuel tank... but this surface is exposed to re-entry heating on the flight back. How do you route plumbing and avionics through your heat shield?
"The Airbus team concluded that SpaceX's design of returning the full stage to Earth could be simplified by separating the propulsion bay from the rest of the stage, protecting the motor on reentry and, using the winglets and turbofans, return horizontally to a conventional air strip."
Interesting definition of "simplified" they're using. They're not even recovering the entire first stage, and they're basically bolting a jet airplane onto it to achieve that much. Propellant is as cheap as dirt, they're avoiding paying tens of thousands of dollars in propellant by instead paying for jet aircraft maintenance and operations and an entirely new set of cryogenic tankage and a substantial amount of aerospace vehicle structure for each flight. SpaceX is just making the first stage a bit bigger (and looking at things like additional propellant chilling to increase density) so it has the extra capacity required.
"We are using an aerodynamic shield so that the motor is not subjected to such high stress on reentry"
Thus solving an issue that SpaceX has already shown isn't actually a major problem...they have been regularly bringing entire intact first stages through reentry and down to sea level for some time now.
As for SpaceX not "coming close"...their second attempt actually brought the vehicle to a halt on the landing pad, though with mangled landing gear, and the reasons for the control issues during the final burn are well understood. They are extremely close...odds are quite good that their third attempt (in a bit under 2 weeks) will be a success.
30% launch cost reduction is a huge deal. It is considered good ROI in many areas, so things which previously could only break even become financially viable, and in fact a risk worth taking.
Here's to hoping they keep true to the 30%!
All rites reversed 2010
Is the airbus project worth anything? I have no idea. But the more money thrown at this issue the happier I am really.
We need to get into space and we've allowed our space programs to atrophy.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
So they bolt on a pair of wings, add some propellers that have to be deployed from a casing that protects them during launch, oh and another stage separation event, a mechanism for separating the fuel tank from the engine.
And that's supposed to be simpler than some hydraulic landing legs and grid fins?
And carrying all those additions to space doesn't cost them any extra fuel?
SpaceX has been able to bring their rockets down without any special turbofans or shields or whatnot. Granted, they haven't (yet) managed to land them upright, but 99.9% of the hardest part has already been accomplished without resorting to gimmicks. Why do ULA and Airbus insist it's impossible when a quick Google search pulls up a list videos of SpaceX doing exactly that?
They're right that reusability doesn't make much economic sense at current flight rates. NASA and Boeing looked at recovering Saturn V stages in the 60s, and determined that they'd need about 60 launches for the development and operational cost of recovering and refurbishing the stages to become lower than just throwing them away. This would probably require less, as they wouldn't be dumping the stage into the sea and trying to clean it up, but it will still probably require quite a few years at current launch rates to pay for itself.
SpaceX seems to be trying to get around that by cutting costs so low that the market grows exponentially. But there's a big gap between rockets a government can afford to launch a satellite on and rockets Joe Sixpack can afford to fly on for a space vacation where there's no clear and proven market.
Large government contractors live or die suckling the tits of taxpayers... and their internal goal is NOT to solve the problems they're brought in to solve (the paperless initiative to reduce costs and ALSO as a side effect make all government records indexable and searchable for example) but to maximize billable hours.
It makes perfect sense to say it isn't economically feasible to make the first stage of spacecraft reusable; because for them it ISN'T an economically sound business model. It would reduce their total revenue for these projects. For new players, it absolutely makes perfect sense because it is a new market which established players will not touch with a ten foot/3m (notice the inaccurate conversion of english to metric, quite appropriate for aerospace contractors ;) ) but new players who want to break into the market are seizing as an opportunity to get established in the industry.... so of course now that practical designs, even if flawed, are proving to be achievable they are absolutely terrified of being forced to unlatched from the teat. That has them scared so they will of course now begin in earnest to develop more reusable spacecraft because they work on such a large scale that losing just a couple of contracts where they have designed their business model to be as inefficient as possible in order to maximize net profits could bankrupt them very quickly.
This business model will also make affordable space tourism and arriving at next generation, more efficient spacecraft to be developed sooner.
Consider this: what if Scaled Composites were to get into the strategic fighter game? What if they were to go head-to-head against Lockheed's Skunk Works, and reduced the cost of stealth interceptor/fighter/bombers and spy planes to tens of millions per unit rather than a blllion per unit, and made them more efficient and faster to boot? Given their immense investment in conventional tooling and methodologies, I don't think they could change their ways and remain profitable... taxpayers would save money, we'd see more capable military aircraft, and as a side effect we would probably see variable geometry airfoils with the ability to reduce or even cancel out audible sonic booms become reality and over-land supersonic airliners become a practical reality.
The goal of a large government contractor is not to reduce costs (even if that is a requirement laid out in the RFQ/RFP), but to maximize net profits. Cost-cutting measures are always impractical until a new emerging player proves that it is possible.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
primary trick: selling "best-in-the-world" defense technology to their governments "to protect against enemies" of course, then insisting on permission to export the tech "only to our best allies", then teaching others to manufacture it "to save taxpayer money", then selling to less-reputable countries "to support national foreign policy objectives"......... then pointing out that a whole NEW generation of super expensive innovative defense tech is needed because everybody else has the current generation of defense tech.....
Bingo! Yahtzee! Cha-CHING! Watch that government money pour in!
There are so many examples..... but let me point out that ISIS is now driving around in US Abrams tanks, LockMart has licensed the Italians to manufacture the F-35 (something middle-America might object to as lost good-paying jobs IF they were aware of it) which is not yet even in active service with the US military, and Turkey (which has turned its back on secularism and NATO and has now pivoted towards Iran and Hijabs) is on the list to get F-35s? The LockMart lobbying for a "next generation" fighter should be starting-up soon, and the heavy vehicle manufacturers should start insisting that the US needs a new tank...
It's all good..... Boeing and LockMart will, on the one hand, tell US that Russia is a big evil threat that means we need a new strategic bomber program..... while they walk confidently into hearings on capitol hill to insist that they need to import more Russian rocket engines to use to launch US military satellites.... which they assure congress is a good idea because the Russians are "our trusted friends" and even "partners"...... these same big firms will also tell us we need new high-tech defense systems to deter China, while insisting that they should be allowed to outsource parts and labor to Chinese firms.....
"For the price of a single launch, you could fly at least 2 or 3 Falcon Heavies..."
This argument keeps arising, but it is as flawed as the argument that you can use 9 women to produce a baby in only one month... SOME things just cannot be split-up and paralleled. This is something the everybody in tech was SUPPOSED to have awakened to, if they had not already thought it through, when the "Mythical" book came out.
Yes, you CAN chop up the cubic footage of a large habitation module into smaller modules and assemble on-orbit, BUT there is a big price to pay. Skylab for example went up on ONE Saturn V launch on ONE DAY. ISS required a huge number of launches over a DECADE with all the hazardous space walks for assembly added-on as program risks. Plus, the resulting habitation VOLUME might be less versatile chopped up into smaller modules instead of a big module.
Yes you CAN build a fuel depot in orbit from smaller parts launched on several small rocket flights and then fill it with small quantities launched on a bunch of smaller launches, or you can save yourself a huge number of launch operations and a bunch of rendezvous ops, proximity ops, dockings, undockings, fuel transfers, etc and simply launch a large fully-fuelled "Earth Departure" stage on one launch on one day.
Space is VERY risky and unforgiving both because of the environmental extremes and because of the huge amounts of energy involved in getting there and getting back - so by nature any responsible program is sufficiently risk-averse that it does not choose lots of additional complexity and many more operations without very solid justification.
What do we lose by allowing ESA to try this out? Would you have launched this same barrage of criticism at SpaceX?
We benefit greatly from having different launch systems. Even if one is provably more efficient than another, safety and other factors mean that every space launch vehicle has impaired availability from time to time. The Russian space program was threatened by political and economic issues. The Space Shuttle was interrupted by 2 total systems failures. There are lots of other examples.
Let ESA do their thing. Maybe they'll come up with something great. The ESA has had several major successes in recent years and they deserve the room to try or fail, on their own terms.
The sky was blue today and people died today.... so I guess you think blue skies kill people????
Challenger was caused by management launching her in weather that violated her design constraints - and sure enough, when solid rockets fired at temps their designers said would be unsafe, the designers were proven right and management proven wrong, as usual.
Columbia was caused by management "normalizing deviancy". From day one, shuttles were coming home with tile damage and management concluded (without actually having the engineers actually prove it) that this was [a] mostly caused by debris kicked-up on the runway at landing and [b] obviously survivable; they gradually came to accept the damage as "in-family" and "normal" rather than remembering that it had originally been feared. Over time as they saw tiles damaged on ascent by insulation being shed from the ET and the SRBs, they were already so used to the tile damage that they did not act appropriately to get to the bottom of ET insulation shedding and solve it (as they did finally for the post-Columbia flights). There is no evidence that any other mechanical cause than a chunk of ice-laden insulation falling from the NEW external tank, caused the loss.
In summary: You have posted a correlation-causation fallacy.