Wouldn't ESA attempt to get a heavy lift rocket flying TTL? As that seems to be where everyone is going with the N1, Vulkan and Shuttle-C.
Basically what is happening currently.
Basically what is happening currently.
A Sound of Thunder: The Rise of the Soviet Superbooster
- Thread starter nixonshead
- Start date
As there is a clear direction towards the need of a heavy lift vehicle currently and in the future? In the form of space stations and moon bases? There's no reason for ESA to suspect that the Soviet Union will fall or that the cadence of N1 launches will decrease at this point in time. And I assume ESA (or rather France) would want to participate in any future moon exploration hence the need of a more powerful rocket.
It was explicitly noted in the ESA update that everyone at the agency recognizes that they have no shot at flying people to the Moon on their own soon. They know that funding wise they're not quite up there with the superpowers.
They are focusing on gaining manned access to orbit. Their attempt to seek even ground with the top dogs runs through acquiring a reusable shuttle and a space station. That's already costing them billions and years of development time. No shot they could afford an HLV, they have no clear mission that requires one, and developing independent crew launch capability and a reusable spaceplane is an impressive enough undertaking.
Even if after the get Hermes and Columbus up and running there is a flush of investment out of sheer pride that Europe is catching up to the rest of the world, by that point it will be the mid/late 90s, and the USSR will have collapsed. Any ESA path to beyond LEO exploration missions at that point (a time period which saw budgets for space exploration cut all around the world mind you) will likely be in the form of collaboration with the US or Russia.
I'm sure that there are some engineers in Europe dreaming up some "Super-Ariane". But no one is going to stick their neck out (and risk annoying the politicians who are already funding their expensive manned program) to advocate for a probably even more expensive HLV with no clear purpose at the moment. Focus on the task at hand.
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All that, and you have to herd a dozen cats just to sign off on every funding decision. Or at the very least, three or four very big cats. As far as I can see, that basic dynamic has not really changed in this timeline.
That looks like the kind of quasi-aerospike that Stoke is building. The article says five engines on the first stage, but the diagram appears to show eight in an octagonal arrangement around the perimeter of the vehicle and one in the center. VTVL and air relight of a GG hydrolox motor would have been very technically aggressive in 1981. The HM60 was defined as a 900 kN GG motor, and it looks like the program eventually became Vulcain. Aft diameter is 14.2 meters (46.5 feet), which is comparable to the width of a Shuttle stack. Ariane 5 undoubtedly did more to sustain the French solid motor industry, just like Shuttle did for the US.If the debut of Hermes is successful, ESA may think about moving forward, so they may want to continue the vision of recovering the rockets.
If work on Arienna-X begins in the 1980s, as in the case of DC-X, any debut of rockets based on this project will be sometime in 2010. Although I see the possibility of a slow evolution somewhere towards a large recoverable stage and a smaller upper stage similar to Susie and thus provide 8 tons to LEO.
You can still create smaller launchers for SRB needs and military projects. You can always transfer some of the technology to third countries, e.g. Poland (which had to withdraw ballistic missiles at that time). in the period after 2000, thus maintaining a number of technologies and purchasing certain elements at lower costs.
If the debut of Hermes is successful, ESA may think about moving forward, so they may want to continue the vision of recovering the rockets.
Ups, there is TL were ELGO GmbH is testing this under ELGO-X in 1990s
Yeah... Proton is a tough one.
Curiously it's almost entirely the upper stages that are a problem, S1 failed in 2013 due to a very stupid reversed sensor, then before that the previous failure due to S1 was in 1982! I don't think it's a hopeless launcher... The first reliabilisation after the infamous 1969 failure already helped a lot, I think that a reliabilisation effort caused by the need to properly man rate it for Slava could help it at least sustain its peak reliability of the mid 80s (40+ successes in a row, not amazing, but it's probably enough for commercial launches... maybe.
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Commercial GEO launches alongside the occasional ESA/national launch were enough to sustain Ariane through the high point of the late 80s and 90s (Ariane was significantly subsidised at its start, it was reduced when the American complained, but challenger's disaster ensured AS would keep growing its market share), The temporary, planned temporary decline in GEO launches in the early-mid 2000s, the simulateous decline in satellite industry after the dot com bubble burst, the competition from the Russo-ukrainians, and the repeated failures of early Ariane 5 caused a first sustainability crisis that was solved by the ESA largely subsidising Ariane by 1 billion euro from 2004 to 2010 (called EGAS program); from that point on subsidised reduced a bit, but never went back to their 90s level.
Such subsidies weren't always well received, not from competitors, not from some governments and agencies, starting in 2009 CNES (+ French Military) started to conceive an Ariane 6 - PPH - that would be less powerful (unable to do dual launches), more tailored for institutional launches, optimised for lower launch cadence, sustain the most important solid propulsion, kourou jobs, and not need subsidies for continuous operations; effectively forfeiting Arianespace's GEO launch market share, since that launcher would only be able to launch a few of such satellites per year, instead of the dozen of Ariane 5's. This was decently well received by ESA, who conceived their own version and preliminarily accepted it in 2012, until well, the industrials (led by Astrium and Safran*, now Arianegroup) succesfuly lobbied to make the current Ariane 6**, and promised to make a launcher that wouldn't need subsidies yet merge the functions of Soyuz and Ariane 5, at a lower cost, in exchange for the direction of the program... now 10 years later they've begged for launch subsidies, and got over 1 billion of it.
GSO launches were for the longest time 20-30 payloads a year, by that point, in the early-mid 2000s, Arianespace, through 5-6 dual launches of A5 and then some Soyuz, managed to launch 10-14 of them a year, effectively keeping a near majority of the market. that was after Sea launch and when customers started divesting from Proton. With a ULA centered on DoD launches, chinese which had been targeted by restrictive american sanctions for launchers, and Japanese which had still failed to turn HII into a commercial launcher.
Now in this timeline, if you've got, beside Arianespace, say alt-Khrunichev, Yuzhnoye, and then on the american side if you've got a healthier launch provider market without ULA merger or equivalent there can be two other credible competitors (pick whatever post-90s consolidation merger conglomerate between Martin-Marietta, Lockheed, McDonnel Douglas, Lockheed, Thiokol, Rockwell, Northrop...), then you've got a situation where Arianespace can't reliably get maybe more than 1/5 of that market, which means only a few of launches, and those sparser launches would be much harder to organised dual launches around, so the big and clunky Ariane 5 would become a lot harder to sustain through GSO comsat launches, and the PPH alternative - or equivalent, a launcher maybe the capability of the Ariane 62 variant - would be a lot more interesting.
Although to be honest, the most likely decision with ESA is always the lack of one, continuous indecision, continuous exploitation of subsidised Ariane 5 without any successor.
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Trying to do a suicide burn without control surface for guidance (so a ballistic reentry) and with a main engine that can only throttle down to 95% is certainly ballsy! Don't think anyone would seriously propose both today, and I can't quite see it as being feasible. The mixture of Aeroshell + Clustered tanks + low TWR engines + retropropulsive fuel also proably means a huge performance hit.If the debut of Hermes is successful, ESA may think about moving forward, so they may want to continue the vision of recovering the rockets.
HM60, and its final version the Vulcain are not suited for such propulsive recovery, they're hardly throttleable and restartable, and more refurbisheable than reuseable, can't blame them, it's from 1982-83, the engine was still in its infancy.
People like this MBB proposal because it looks cool and its retropropulsive landing hearkens back to F9, but the actual recovery methods studied, and even used (two Ariane 1 launches carried recovery equipment, one failed at launch, for the second, in 1985, the parachute didn't deploy, the recovery barge that was brought from Hamburg to the middle of the atlantic ocean only brought pieces back) were much more often Parachutes or Glide/Fly back. This was an outlier study by a company that wasn't nearly as important as ESA, CNES or Aerospatiale. A design like this one (studied concurrently by CNES, effectively a similar 1st stage made of clustered hydrolox tanks powered by clustered HM60, but without aeroshell and with parachute landing), would be much more likely to happen than that above one.
*The current Arianegroup CEO is the former Safran Vernon director from 2013 or so who led much of the lobbying effort to keep the liquid propulsion jobs.
**People easily criticise ESA's choice now, but one have to remember that back in 2014, Arianespace had effectively "won" over all the announced competitors from the 90s that were announced as Ariane killers: the russians, the chinese, the japanese, the (boeing/Lockheed) americans... Arianespace had, thanks to over a billion in subsidies, managed to overcome them all, secure a leadership position and diversify its operations, so one have to remember the mindset of the time, the GSO-dual launch method had, after all, been proven as capable of handling crisis and worth not giving up over, and the upstart SpaceX was seen as "just" another competitor that could be overcome by making a slightly better Ariane just like they had already overcome everyone else.
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I don't criticise either Ariane or ULA for designing Ariane 6 or Vulcan the way they did in 2014, after failing with parachutes SpaceX was experimenting with propulsive landing and while with hindsight we know it was the start of a successful iterative development that wasn't clear at the time. But on 21st December 2015 with the first successful landing of a booster the writing appeared on the wall, to not pause the current development programs and redesign with partial reuse at that point was deeply foolish.
The talented brickmack has done a model of this Ariane X concept. Here are some cool renders of it.If the debut of Hermes is successful, ESA may think about moving forward, so they may want to continue the vision of recovering the rockets.
As Space Shuttle has shown, reuse is much, much less interesting without good reliability, and F9 had a tendency to blow payloads up in 2015-2016, they had to overcome that, and they did so, spectacularly, but you can’t call the writing on the wall until that happened, Maybe Two years minimum after Dec 2015 . Stopping A6 dev (because it is fundamentally unsuitable for economic reuse and needs a complete redesign, entirely new engines) in late 2015 vs through 2018 are massively different choices, fallout of the latter would have been.. interesting.
Maiaspace founder (who was part of Arianegroup at the time, still kinda is , it's a subsidiary that develops a reusable launcher) recently said in Interviews something along the lines "I, plenty of other people tried to change things, but it just wasn't time yet, I believe it happened (the decision to found it) at the earliest time (~2019-2021) circumstances allowed it"
Going back at it, DC-X had a mass ratio of about 50% , using lower TWR engines (but throttleable ones),but using a composite LH2 tanks. This S1 is claimed with a mass ratio of 87.7%, but ~20 times larger, not convinced it's very realistic. This would almost be a SSTO with Closed cycle engines instead of open cycle.If the debut of Hermes is successful, ESA may think about moving forward, so they may want to continue the vision of recovering the rockets.
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Of course, Falcon 9 was already competitive on price even before they started recovering and reusing any stages: $62 million for an expendable Falcon 9 FT, versus €90 million for an Ariane 5 top slot, and €50 million for the lower slot, or €150 million for the whole launch. SpaceX had been limited in taking advantage of that pricing game, though, because of limited launch capacity (that first recovery in December 2015 was only the 20th launch of the rocket in any variation), and customers frankly waiting to see if it could establish itself reliably enough to trust (and get the insurance prices down) - they famously lost two Falcon 9's in 2015-16. Once SpaceX resolved these two issues, and started reusing boosters, the writing really was on the wall. I'd say that was around 2017-18 at the absolute latest.
This Eric Berger story from 2018 is, in this regard telling. It was by this time that some in the European space community began muttering alarmed concerns about about an impending SpaceX "steamroller." And yet you can also see that senior European space leaders Berger speaks to are still dismissive. As Giulio Ranzo of Avio put, it, “We don’t sell a Tata.”
But to bring it back to Nixonshead's timeline, the role of SpaceX is worth pondering on if he takes the timeline well into the 21st century. SpaceX *is* a steamroller, but it was anything but an inevitable one. The probability, I think, is that it brought retropropulsive recovery and reuse into being as an accepted paradigm within the launch market at least a generation early. And in that world, maybe Giulio Ranzo's smug lassitude could have sustained itself right through to his retirement.
EDIT: I see that @TheKutKu kinda ninja'd me on a couple of my points.
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DC-X was not a structural pathfinder, just an aerodynamic test and controls rig--it wasn't light-weighted, the tanks were extremely heavy and separate from the rest of the (also very heavy) structure, etc. The unbuilt follow-up DC-Y was to be the proposed structurally-optimized pathfinder. I'm also doubtful of anything like the mass ratio for reusable SSTO, but you can do a heck of a lot better than 50%.
Or a generation late, if the 90s had gone slightly different. (Or it's possible there'd been more focus on recovery and reuse in the 70s, 80s, and 90s and first stage recovery was all wings or wing-and-jets, which is....basically the same mass fraction penalty when you work it all out, but easier with pre-90s controls.)
DC-X was important, and I will always be a big fan of it, but yeah - this is one more reason why it is too easy for some people to make more of it than it actually deserved.
Oh, it's not impossible. And I remember a space timeline on this site that played convincingly with that very idea, in fact....
But I do think a scenario like that was an unlikely one, with any POD in the 60's or 70's, let alone later. Otherwise, with any reasonably plausible POD, the most likely outcome is that it becomes a real thing sometime in the mid-21st century. Other points earlier (and later!) are still possible, but less likely.
But as for my original comment you responded to, I meant even less than this. My assumed point of departure was the moment Elon Musk committed to making retropropulsive recovery work, and stick as the operational paradigm for all of his launch vehicles. At that point, I really do not think it was in the cards for at least another generation.
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All this remains....incredibly off-topic for this thread, but I would point out there were like two or three near-run RLV programs in the 90s, which only a few butterflies are needed to get to succeed. X-33 probably would have worked if they hadn't sat down and made a list of every possible boneheaded decisions from the wrong shape to the wrong engines to the wrong tank materials and so on, and it still almost flew. X-34 was perpetually "always the bridesmaid" as a result, and it was only cancelled because of an ill-timed funding crunch and fallout on other RLV programs from X-33. Minor butterflies, and that demonstrated HTHL rapid reuse of a first-stage-like vehicle. The less said about the folder of images I have of "all the parts for Kistler's rockets spread out in factories and starting to be assembled for flight" (literally being assembled, argh) the better for my sanity. Even without getting into longer-shot stuff like Roton or any of that, the number of "almosts" in RLVs make me think it's as likely to happen well before OTL as well after F9.