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?
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
No, it wasn't the first, no matter how many capitals you use, Elon.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M...
You weren't even the first private developer of space vehicles.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
You're a few decades late to that party.
And this is so insane I wouldn't be surprised you're collecting your urine in jars and getting the help to order cases of peanut butter.
http://www.spacex.com/news/201...
Yes, a reusable tin can that blows its load getting a few pounds of Tang to Low Earth Orbit is the "key to making human life interplanetary".
Yup. Uh huh.
Aircraft technology isn't stagnant by any means: a modern 777-ER can carry the same number of passengers 50% farther for a third less fuel than the original 747-100. But that just proves your point, that breathless Moore's Law comparisons are moronic when talking about airplanes, cars, rockets, and bridges.
There's plenty of aircraft that have folding propellers, as long as you're willing to include rotors. Most naval helicopters have them, as do the V-22 Osprey. You don't see more of them, because propellors aren't nearly as big a space hog as the wings, which often fold. If you're willing to include motor gliders than there's also plenty of aircraft that deploy the folding propellor during flight.
I don't do this for a living, so don't take me too seriously. The smaller you make the first stage, the more work must be done by the second stage, which means *it* must be bigger, increasing the useless mass that makes it into orbit. Also, the smaller the first stage is, the less it costs, so it's less valuable to recover...
You're absolutely right that there's an optimization problem to be solved here, and that a rocket optimized for first stage recovery might look very different from a stock Ariane 5 with wings on the bottom. But this rocket *does* look like a stock Ariane 5 with wings on the bottom, which makes me worry that they haven't done the math.