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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?
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."
"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.