51 thoughts on “Ariane”

  1. They’re competitive with EELVs too, though that won’t help them much. And there really aren’t many payloads they can get for political reasons, as Ariane 5 is far too large for them. Vega and Ariane 6 are far more suitable for that.

    Also, the ATV-derived Orion SM is facing substantial delays and cost overruns…

    1. Also, the ATV-derived Orion SM is facing substantial delays and cost overruns…

      As best as I recall, the ESA-provided SM idea just sort of appeared a year ago. I figured at the time it was because NASA couldn’t afford to build its own, plus the international tie-in makes the whole SLS/Orion harder to cancel.

      But in 2012, it was announced (ref below) that ESA couldn’t build new ATV’s without some redesign due to a number of obsolescent parts. And lo! One year after being announced, the ATV-derived SM is late and over-budget. Makes me wonder if the idea was properly thought out, or if it was more of a napkin-drawing (cough).

      Ref:
      http://www.spaceflightnow.com/news/n1204/02atvfuture/

  2. If they go with that solid-fueled nonsense for Ariane 6, they might as well let Elon pick out the furniture for his office of conquest now. Talk about fighting the last war.

    That design is a dead end right out of the starting gate.

    1. They painted themselves into a corner with Ariane 5. Neither the solids alone nor the central core alone make for a good first stage and together they are too expensive. A two or three engine core could work, as could a solid first stage. Given synergies with Vega (for which they do have European payloads) and French nuclear missiles, solids are probably the better choice.

      1. They are not going to do it with giant, throw-away firecrackers.

        The design can’t be significantly upgraded when the payloads grow beyond 6.5 tons and reusability? Fuggedaboutit!

        If they go thru with this, they will have painted themselves into a dead-end corner.

  3. I recently saw a Twitter mention of a fascinating panel discussion from the June, 2013 Singapore Satellite Industry Forum.

    The Arianespace representative was openly dismissive of SpaceX, describing their reusability plans as a dream. At another point he said that the SpaceX engineers aren’t “supermen”, that if SpaceX did manage to pull off reusability then Ariane could do the same thing.

    At that point SpaceX hadn’t yet launched the Falcon 9 1.1 or put a satellite into GTO. I’m guessing the Arianespace rep wouldn’t be quite as contemptuous today.

    1. The look on their face when the 1st stage returns to the Launch Site and lands is going to be positively delicious.

      I am sure they will find some way to arm-wave it away and go on like nothing has changed.

    2. All they have to do for first stage re-usability is get the Vulcain 2 LH2/LOX engine, which currently isn’t even throttled (and uses a shower head injector instead of a pintle), to throttle down to 10% of rated thrust. They’ll have fun with that.

      1. George,
        To be fair to them, there are other ways they could solve the problem. For instance, they might be able to do four shortened nozzle versions of the Vinci upper stage engines (sort of like DC-X) for the landing. You don’t have to use the main engine for that job.

        All that said, while I think SpaceX will take a while to prove out their reusability, I think Ariane is in serious trouble in the medium term…

        ~Jon

      2. That would be one approach, but the Vinci is still years away from its first flight, and even if they start re-using their core sometime in the 2020’s, they’ve still got the two expensive solids that will probably keep them from being competitive.

        In the long term they’re a government organization which will come up with something, but I agree about the medium term.

        Meanwhile I was looking at the map and Suriname might be a better option for re-usable booster GEO launches than French Guinna. It’s got about 200 miles of east-west coastline that runs from Venezuela to French Guinna, so a coastal launch could stay out over the ocean while heading east, and then the first stage could re-enter and descend over the ocean and make a very short translation back to a coastal landing site, and since multiple landing sites could be very conveniently built anywhere along the coast, it wouldn’t lock in a particular flight profile or vehicle configuration.

        1. A point that everyone seems to be missing in this discussion is that reusable vehicles don’t have to launch from a coast. They can utilize inland spaceports.

        2. Well, depending on what the reliability is, I figure liability insurance would be quite a bit lower flying over water, at least until the vehicle proves no more dangerous than other aircraft passing overhead. My main concern would probably be a relight failure for first stage braking, although it might be pretty easy to pick an eastern launch site where braking brings the stage down over land and a relight failure leaves it going out over water, such as launching from near the Appalachians toward Wallops Island.

          I suppose the coast is in many ways one of the worst places to fly a booster because coasts tend to be heavily populated, as compared to New Mexico, Wyoming,,or large swaths of Russia.

          1. Any reusable vehicle that isn’t reliable enough to overfly isn’t reliable enough to be economical, a point I made in the book. We didn’t cancel Shuttle because it killed people; we did it because we couldn’t afford to keep losing orbiters.

          2. Part of my reasoning is undoubtedly coming from thinking about a re-usable Ariane in particular. Attempts to make it re-usable will probably result in a lot of spectacular failures. Yet unlike a true commercial enterprise, it’s ESA and doesn’t have to be economical to operate, it only has to be potentially economical – sometime in the far future when all the bugs are worked out – for European governments to continue to foot the bill.

            (If I lived under a Falcon 9H flightpath I’d buy a lawn recliner, a pair of binoculars, and a beer cooler, but under an Ariane flightpath I’d probably pour a concrete shelter in the basement.)

            And of course overland flights probably rule out the use of SRB’s which can’t be economically recovered except by parachute and are so heavy that they’d still smash anything they came down on. Of course SRB’s would make the launch uneconomical anyway, so it’s not a real possibility to worry about.

            I suppose I’m thinking that if I was going to try and re-use an Ariane 5 for equatorial launches, the coast of Suriname might have advantages over French Guinna because the SRB’s can still be dumped in the ocean without having to fly the core all the way back to the launch site.

        3. I think Ariane is in serious trouble in the medium term…

          I agree about the medium term.

          Agree about the trouble. About the medium term – there might not be one. Arianespace plans a dozen flight ops for 2014; maybe 14 if they luck out on satellite availability. Only six launches are to be Ariane 5’s. This is the equivalent of 10 Falcon 9’s because five of these missions are the doubled-up geosync comsat missions they specialize in and the sixth is launch of the last ATV to the ISS.

          SpaceX has already done one op this year and has 14 more on their public manifest for 2014. Given that this manifest is based on arrival at launch site rather than actual launch date, we can probably knock off the last four items plus the two that are to launch from V’berg, then put in the two Dragonrider abort tests, which don’t show on the manifest, and still see that SpaceX plans to be roughly as busy at its one Canaveral pad as Arianespace intends to be with all of its pads at Kourou.

          I expect the pending LC-39A lease agreement to finalize any minute now, so allowing a scientific wild-ass guess of 18 months to make 39A Falcon-compatible, SpaceX has a second Florida pad by 3Q 2015. I also expect the final red tape on the Brownsville, TX spaceport site to clear shortly. Assuming two years to build at least one pad and prep facility there, SpaceX will have at least three East-facing pads in service by 1Q 2016.

          On this schedule, SpaceX can accelerate its launch tempo in 2015 over that of 2014 by using the newly available LC-39A for Dragonrider tests and CRS missions leaving the Canaveral pad exclusively available for non-NASA missions. SpaceX should be able to routinely match or exceed Arianespace’s best single pad turnaround mark of 25 days by the end of 2014, so 2015 might well see 15 – 18 SpaceX flight ops out of Canaveral/Kennedy alone. As Brownsville comes on-line in 2016, SpaceX’s annual ops capability should rise into the 30 – 40 range.

          As SpaceX works down its current backlog and simultaneously builds out its ops infrastructure the lead time for new payloads added to the far end of their manifest should shrink. At some point – 2017 at the outside – a preference cascade will trigger and a bunch of missions currently booked for Proton and Ariane 5 will slide over from the tail ends of ILS’s and Arianespace’s manifests onto the tail end of SpaceX’s. Poof! ILS is toast and Arianespace is a croque-monsieur.

  4. I’ve noticed that many people are contemptuous of ideas that are not there own. To avoid internal conflict, when they do come around, they just assume the idea was theirs all along.

    In today’s environment of the continuous big lie and no consequences what should happen gets delayed past anyone caring.

  5. This is the life cycle of technology companies. They are locked into legacy product that they must continue to push to remain in business while the innovative start-ups do not have this limitation. Think IBM PC vs. Compac (if you are old enough). IBM had to limit the clock speed of their PCs as to prevent it from competing with their minicomputer product line. (I also believe that they deliberately designed the keyboard to be as ergonomically flawed as possible so as not to compete with (at the time) their highly desirable Selectric typewriter keyboard). Compact didn’t have these limitations and (along with the other clones) their clock speeds (and superior 101-keyboard that we use today) far exceeded IBM’s. IBM was stuck like a Mammoth in the tar pits and ultimately went out of the PC business. Same will go for every other company that can’t find a graceful way to transition to the next generation, especially when the technology is disruptive.

    One of the things I admire about SpaceX is that they don’t sit still. Even though they have a very successful product, they continue to innovate and pursue bold goals that the establishment is happy (forced) to pooh-pooh. But the moral of the story is that when you pooh-pooh the new, you get poo-poo on you.

    1. It’s a classic case of the innovator’s dilemma.

      Though IBM’s keyboard could have been even more ergonomically flawed than it was. My recollection was that the placement of the left shift key was its biggest problem.

      1. About CPUs and memory you’re correct, but the PC keyboards were pretty good; this is the first I’ve heard of that one.

        Layout aside, the construction of the IBM keyboards was better than most of what came before and anything produced in mass volume since. There are plenty of IBM Model M keyboards from the 80’s still in use today, and a community that will tell you at great length of their superiority if you should happen to ask.

    2. I’ve worked with a lot of IBM keyboard engineers (and programmed a variety of keyboard testers for IBM). One of them told me that when the PC first came out, he needed a copy of the keyboard controller program for some particular project, but had absolutely no luck getting a hold of the source code through channels. So he patiently disassembled what was burned onto the chip, figured out what it did, and thoroughly commented it. But there was a big block of data that he couldn’t decipher and wasn’t obviously referenced anywhere in the code, so he wrote a note to the original keyboard team asking what that block of data was. Their immediate response was “You have a copy of the code, and you documented it?! Can you please send that to us?!” Apparently their copy was a hand scrawled mess and a hex file. Oh, and the data he couldn’t decipher was the IBM copyright notice in EBCDIC.

  7. I have made my position on this perfectly clear a long time ago. I think they should have funded the ESC-B upper stage for Ariane 5 and worked on something like the Vega enlargement proposals some time back that gave it performance similar to Soyuz. However they take so much time do to anything, because they underfund everything, that IMO now they should:

    – Develop Ariane 5 ME. Vinci needs to go in Ariane 5 or it makes it unusable for multiple Galileo satellite launches.
    – Develop a new LOX/Hydrocarbon staged combustion engine. The French were working on this in partnership with the Russians and did some pump and injector tests I think. It was only stopped because the funding stopped. Once that engine is available development of a new launch vehicle can start. It can even be reusable.

    Going all solid is nonsense in the long term, especially because solids suck for launching commercial payloads, but less stupid than one might think going from an US centric perspective. This is not like the ATK Thiokol SRBMs. They have a solid rocket casting facility at the Kourou launch center itself. So it would not be nearly as cost prohibitive as ATK.

  9. Delusional is the only possible description of this behavior. $4 billion to develop a new launch vehicle that won’t see service until 2021. If we were to rewind time so that the Ariane 6 would be coming out in 2014 then it would be 2007 and SpaceX would be about to run the 2nd test launch of the Falcon 1. In 7 years SpaceX went from test flights of the Falcon 1 to developing the Falcon 9, F9 v1.1, FH, and the Dragon. All on a shoestring budget and while scaling up from practically nothing. Meanwhile, Arianespace already has a huge engineering team, they have tons of revenue, yet they need 7 years to bring a competitive rocket to market.

    And let’s keep in mind how much money $4 billion is. Let’s say they want to compete head to head with current Falcon 9 launches, which is what the Ariane 6 is scaled for. To reach a level of amortization of development costs equivalent to the current F9 price they’d need over 80 launches. Realistically you need some room for manufacturing and overhead costs so push that out to maybe 160 launches. Keeping in mind that the Ariane 5 has only had about 70 launches over its 20 year lifetime. So you’re talking about a vehicle which won’t get out of the red until sometime in the 2040s or 2050s. And then that’s assuming the launch market grows substantially and Arianespace keeps a huge marketshare of the launch business. And these are the guys who don’t think the launch market *will* grow much either.

    Meanwhile, they’ll be bringing a rocket to market in 2021 designed to service the launch market of 2014 or 2015. SpaceX et al aren’t a stationary target. Even if the price of a Falcon 9 drops by a mere 1/3 or 1/2 relative to where it is today due to reusability it will be almost impossible for Arianespace to keep pace. Keep in mind that Gwynne Shotwell, SpaceX’s President/COO, thinks they can offer Falcon 9 launches for $7 million with just first stage reusability. How in the hell do you amortize $4 billion in development costs over a $7 million per flight price? That would take a thousand flights, or more. And there’s no way Arianespace is going to be able to launch a thousand Ariane 6’s between now and 2050, or ever.

    They’re doomed. Worse, they don’t realize it yet. They’re going to end up like the Japanese launchers, too expensive to be competitive but still surviving based on local government missions. Maybe they can convince the Russians to let them fly the Angara from Kourou.

  10. The only real chance they have IMO is to go hard with Alan Bond and that combined cycle spaceplane of his.

    It might not work but the path they have chosen is guarenteed to fail.

    1. It might not be a bad idea, but the last I saw, the development costs for Skylon were expected to be at least $15,000,000,000, and the launch costs similar to a reusable Falcon.

      That huge stack of Euros required to reach first flight has always been Skylon’s biggest problem. SpaceX could bring in income from non-reusable Falcons before they invested the money required to build a full-reusable Falcon Heavy. Skylon can’t make $1 before spending billions.

      1. Well, they presented the UK Parliament with an estimated launch cost of about $480/lb after all the development costs were paid off. Their intended payload is about the same as a Falcon 9 v1.1, (and with an SSTO in the early design stages, payload is wildly variable), so that would be about $16 million a flight compared to the current Falcon’s roughly $50 million, so they’d be paying off $15 billion in $34 million dollar increments, which would take 440 flights, not counting the time value of money. And of course SpaceX intends to further lower launch prices.

  11. I’m in general agreement with everyone else here as I think my comments to Rand’s Commercial Space 2014 post last week made clear.

    I made a few predictions there about the expansion of SpaceX physical facilities. Let me make a few more prognostications.

    1) SpaceX will launch at least 10 missions in calendar 2014. None will fail.

    2) SpaceX will succeed in at least one 1st-stage RTLS recovery attempt in 2014.

    3) SpaceX will refurbish and relaunch the first recovered stage no later than the end of 1Q 2015.

    4) SpaceX will launch its first crewed Dragonrider test mission to orbit in 2015 and will do so from a freshly refurbished LC-39A. Elon is a man with a keen sense of history as well as of vision for the future. The first manned moon landing mission and the first Space Shuttle mission launched from LC-39A. Elon will want to add first manned orbital mission by a private company to that list of firsts.

    5) 2014 is the year SpaceX begins to eat the lunch of every other launch services provider in a significant way. ILS and Sea Launch are both too unreliable and too expensive. Arianespace and ULA are merely too expensive. All will be toast as soon as SpaceX’s pads and other ops infrastructure are sufficiently expanded to cover the transferred launch contracts on a reasonable lead-time basis. Elon may well be pushing himself away from this particular lunch table, leaving nothing but a pile of well-picked-over bones on the platter, in as little as three more years.

    Mars will need women, but first it will need money. Dominating the launch services business is where SpaceX can get that needed cash. Gutting the largely mercantilist incumbent providers and rendering their carcasses for fat will also do the taxpayers of Europe and the U.S. a service.

    2. SpaceX is currently operating with a substantial profit margin, their costs are much lower than their prices. Also keep in mind that they are new, so they haven’t yet fully amortized development costs yet, though they will do so sometime this year most likely. From various things that SpaceX officials have said the actual hardware costs of the Falcon 9 are maybe $30 million or so.

      Also, their current prices are pretty low for what they offer. $50 million for a large GEO comsat launch is hard to compete with, and there really isn’t much competition in that specific niche. Atlas V and Ariane 5 are much more expensive, Proton is a bit more expensive, Soyuz is not quite in the same payload range, etc.

  13. Answer me this.

    The acme of low-cost-access-to-space is the ever unattainable reusable SSTO? Space-X (and a bunch of others, in one form or another) are offering, however, an expendable TSTO (to low Earth orbit).

    Now, if you are already considering a TSTO, you have two stages, and you can devote effort (i.e. considerable money) to making the booster stage, the upper stage, or both stages reusable. There are pros and cons on whether the booster or the upper stage is the priority. The upper stage is smaller, but the thermal demands of reentry are higher, and any thermal protection is carried to (near-Earth) orbit and back. The booster is much bigger (typically factor of 5) but the thermal demands can still be challenging. Not only that, for whatever reason, the smaller upper stage was always historically a lot more expensive than the bulkier booster.

    So maybe, just maybe, the best use of resources would be a reusable upper stage?

    OK, the famous saying, “Low-Earth orbit is halfway to anywhere.” That’s the thing — it is not really the interesting destination, it is only halfway to the interesting places — geosynchronous orbit, Earth-Moon Lagrange points.

    So you need a booster, an upper stage, and also a transfer stage. In many reusable SSTO scenarios, especially of the DC-X type, the transfer stage is the SSTO vehicle. You use a pair of your SSTOs that tank each other on the “buddy system” in low-Earth orbit.

    But what about committing resources to an on-orbit refuelable aero-braking transfer stage? Wasn’t such a thing — the Space Tug — originally part of the Space Shuttle plans but got forgotten along the way?

    So maybe, just maybe, and as Rand has been saying all along, the enabling technology of ambitious space exploration and space resource exploitation is in on-orbit fuel transfer? Whether this is for on-orbit fuel caching, “buddy system” spacecraft tanking, or refueling the “Space Tug” aerobraking transfer stage, or all of the above?

    On-orbit engine restart was an enabling tech in the early days of space — think of the Agena upper stage and Discoverer/Corona, a 60’s black program that was “light years” ahead in capability in relation to the early “space probes.” And zero-G restart, by the way, took some serious engineering thinking — it isn’t like turning an ignition key.

    On-orbit fuel transfer is the enabling tech of the next wave, but it too is not as simple as learning how to swipe your credit card at the U-Pump and figuring out which button to push for the grade of gas you want. Instead of worrying about a fly-back booster, I think that space advocates should be advocating that the technological challenge of on-orbit refueling get priority for the limited development money.

    1. Not only that, for whatever reason, the smaller upper stage was always historically a lot more expensive than the bulkier booster.

      I haven’t looked into the history of this, but I’m willing to grant you the point. Most U.S. upper stages have been IUS or Centaur derivatives. These started pricey and, despite long production histories, have stayed pricey. I wouldn’t be surprised if the pattern has held for the upper stages of SpaceX’s foreign-based competitors as well.

      But the Falcon 9 second stage doesn’t have these economics and that was by deliberate design. The Falcon 9 upper stage’s tanks and structure are made on the same tooling as those of the first stage. It uses almost entirely the same Merlin 1D engine. There are definitely some unique bits and pieces on the F9 stage two not found on stage one, such as the vacuum-optimized engine bell, but the economics of the second stage are dominated by components that are just incremental extensions of production needed for the first stage. With most of the capital cost in the first stage, it makes complete sense for SpaceX to make it the initial reusability target.

    2. For the Falcon 9 at least the upper stage is 1/3 the cost of the first stage. This makes sense due to engine count and size alone as both stages use the same propellant. Maybe with a LOX/LH2 stage things would be different, which is understandable given the costs of LH2 rocketry (a good reason to avoid it usually). SpaceX seems to believe that they can offer a reusable Falcon 9 for about $7 million per launch. Given some reasonable values of the cost of the stages and moderate reusability figures (less than 10 flights for the lower stage) those numbers actually add up.

      As for enabling beyond LEO exploration and colonization, orbital propellant depots are the obvious near-term choice. There is just so much they make easier and the tech is not that difficult (micro/milli-g ullage operations) it’s insane not to pursue.

    3. If upper stages are more expensive as you state, it might be because of the additional systems it carries that the first stages don’t. A restartable upper stage needs an attitude control system to orient the stage when the rocket isn’t firing. To drive that, it needs a TT&C system, guidance system, an electrical system, etc. that guidance system can control the first stage so it doesn’t need one. Today, those systems are relatively inexpensive compared to what they cost 20 years ago but they still represent a significant R&D cost, perhaps most of all for software development.

      One interesting thing about SpaceX’s attempts to recover their first stages is that they now require all of those systems that used to be only required on upper stages. It’s almost certain they’re using the same systems that they use in their second stages.

    4. The acme of low cost access to space is not the ever-unattainable SSTO. It’s the ever-unattainable Space Elevator.

      I agree about or-orbit fuel transfer, one of the key technological stepping stones to a space economy.

    5. I think there might be multiple drivers of the upper stage cost relative to the lower stage. If you’re pushing the design, you’ll want a higher ISP for the upper stage, which generally means LOX/LH2 which is going to be more expensive than most other options. There’s also a high premium on ISP which favors staged combustion cycle engines, adding expense, or expander cycles. If I recall correctly, the little RL-10 costs about $60 million, which is more than the price of an entire Falcon 9.

      Another factor might be that since each pound shaved off an upper stage saves you many pounds on the lower stage, people are willing to spend a lot more time and money optimizing an upper stage. This is related to an idea I’ve encountered that says the satellite will cost as much as the launch because of economics. If launch is cheap (in $/lb) then it doesn’t pay to spend a lot of money shaving weight, but if launch is hideously expensive then it definitely does. So cheap launch would produce heavy but cheap steel and aluminum satellites, welded together by a guy named Leeroy, while expensive launch produces satellites made out of exotic materials built in a vacuum chamber by Dr. Bunsen Honeydew and his assistant, Beaker.

      Paul, as an aside I also have a notion about compensating for the pressure-stiffness of space suit joints by canceling out the force/displacement curve with a torsion spring turning a set of cams, which serves as the sheaves for wires that run to the joint, much like tendons, thus giving you a negative spring constant. My thought is that instead of working to make a constant-volume joint, you just see what the force displacement curve is on a simple joint and cancel it out with spring driven mechanisms. You could probably replace the spring with a piston and make the joint’s force/displacement profile zero at all pressures.

      It seems very simple yet I’ve never heard of it even being suggested, which makes me wonder if there’s something I’m not seeing. Anyone want to weigh in on this?

      1. We have not yet begun to design space suits. Which is why they cost so much. George, your idea needs a champion (a business concept I read about once.) Before that happens I expect we will need thousands of martians.

  14. Not only that, for whatever reason, the smaller upper stage was always historically a lot more expensive than the bulkier booster.

    Is that really true? I can see it making sense in some cases, where the first stage is a heavy clunker using relatively simple engines while the upper stage is as light as possible with LOX/LH2 engines, but the Falcon Heavy has 27 engines on the ‘first stage’ (i.e. all three boosters) and 1 engine on the second, all very similar. I have a hard time imagining the upper stage is the most expensive part.

    A reusable transfer stage makes a lot of sense, though, particularly if it can use more efficient propulsion than LOX/LH2. The cost of bringing it back from GEO and transferring fuel/payload just has to be less than the cost of launching a new one each time.

  15. “Not only that, for whatever reason, the smaller upper stage was always historically a lot more expensive than the bulkier booster.”

    Space X (Mr. Musk?) has said that their first stage is 3/4th their total cost for the entire launch system!

  18. Airbus Defence and Space is the new division for space in the new Airbus Group. Being primarily a defense contractor are they not the same as here with pork being shoveled their way?

    I would think if they want a shot at competing with SpaceX they will have to do a open bid with their commercial aerospace sector and compete that way. I just can not image a big government contractor solution is going to win them anything but government contracts.

  19. I’m sure that in coming years Arianespace will no longer dominate the commercial launch market the way it has in the past couple of decades, because the subsidy require against the likes of SpaceX would be more than the EU would be wiling to bear. On the other hand, I doubt Arianespace is going away. It will continue to launch EU-funded payloads. That’s a bit of a comedown from where it’s been, but Boeing and Lockheed Martin have seem to have been pretty happy in that role for twenty years or more. From a corporate point of view, the Ariane 6 makes a lot of sense.

  20. We can stick a fork in Arianespace. Some company we’ve never heard of will license tech. from SpaceX to become number two.

    1. I am thinking if it is possible to stretch the 1st stage of the Falcon X/MCT/Whatever into a SSTO reusable tanker for residual propellants to a depot, that could be a possible business case and it would give synergy to his heavy lifter, share infrastructure, ground support and costs.

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