It’s been a dead rocket walking for many months, but with the new merger in Europe, it’s almost certainly in for a design change.
But they’re still betting that SpaceX won’t get reusability, which I think is a bad bet.
[Update a few minutes later]
Here’s more from ExtremeTech:
Curiously, despite Airbus and Safran announcing a partnership to develop a new line of launch vehicles, there’s no explicit mention that these launchers will be reusable. It’s also worth noting that Airbus/Arianespace is already fairly far down the path towards developing its next-gen Ariane 6 launcher, which will be smaller than Ariane 5 (and thus cheaper), but still eschewing any reusable elements. SpaceX has a sizable lead in the field of cheap, reusable space launch vehicles, and in the next few years we will hopefully see it drive that advantage home.
Yup. Looks to me like it’s still too much of a jobs program to be competitive.
Like most bloated, obsolete corporations they are in denial and want to maake the least amount of change possible and still believe that it will work. You see it in every industry, and it’s not until the profits dry up that hard reality hits and old companies either die or make big changes. Just look at the newspaper industry as example. First they thought they could survive the online age unchanged, then they thought that all they needed was an online presence and a few tweaks. Only now is it really sinking in for them that the sorts of news entities that can be successful in the 21st century are often hugely different than the sorts which could be successful in the mid-20th.
That same dramatic change will be true for rocket companies as well, but it’ll take a while to sink in. The difference between a traditional rocket company (like ULA, Aerojet/Rocket$yne, or Arianespace) and a company capable of competing with SpaceX isn’t just one small change, nor is it even a bigger change like vertical integration. It’s down in the bones of the company. SpaceX is the way they are because they’re innovative, and they are always developing. At a company like ULA they spend most of their time in production mode, they do almost no innovating and no development. But at SpaceX that’s the bread and butter of day to day life. Right now there are multiple projects under development there: Falcon Heavy, Dragon v2, Falcon 9-R, Raptor/MCT, in addition to building a new launch complex/factory in Texas. And that’s supported by several ongoing test programs: test stand engine firings, drop tests, grasshopper flights, F-9R-Dev 1 and 2 flights, DragonFly flights, first stage hover tests during operational launches, Dragon v2 abort tests, and so on.
That’s how you develop next generation technology. And what it means for SpaceX’s competitors is that if they just aim at some point and execute as they’ve done traditionally even if they succeed in a reasonable period of time, which would be an achievement, they’re still hitting a target which SpaceX will have passed by by then.
Nicely put. Shorter version; SpaceX has already put rounds through the skulls of ILS, Arianespace and ULA. We’re all just waiting for the bodies to hit the floor.
Precisely. Only new companies working in new ways on new designs will be competitive in the launch market a decade from now, but that’s a tough pill to swallow. And without that fact being made immediately and abundantly clear (i.e. through massive loss of revenue) it’s too easy to live in denial and too hard to fight against bureaucratic and corporate inertia.
But the fact is that we are likely on the tarmac to a massive runup in launch and spaceflight innovation that will play out over decades. That’s great for spaceflight but it’s bad for aerospace corporations who want to wallow in complacency.
Just consider the potential waiting out there. Right now there’s basic reusability as SpaceX is doing, retrieving a plain-jane first stage that is basically dual use and can fly in an expendable stack in a conventional launch configuration. That’s the easiest and most direct way to get into the reusability space with the lowest risk and least cost, but it won’t be the end of development. Next obvious steps are figuring out how to reuse the upper stage as well (which in SpaceX’s case will probably require a revision of the whole vehicle to adjust for payload capacity changes). Then switching to better fuels for reusability (like Methane). And improving various aspects of vehicle design in general (like Helium pressurization). Then once you start to have longer lived components it makes sense to switch to lighter structures and composites and so forth. Then you get into things like how staging works, interstage connections, and so on, all of which can be improved to aid reusability and processing times. Of course there’s improvements in thermal shielding reusability. Then there’s the SSTO idea, which may or may not prove feasible. And all of that is just super obvious stuff. Likely real-world experience will bring up even more areas for design improvements and highlight operational issues that we’re not even aware of today.
Then you have to factor in all the on orbit innovations that will follow. Not just orbital habitats but new structures, new vehicles, and new ways of doing things. Manufacturing and maintenance on orbit (welding, printing, machining, and so on). Living and working on orbit. Orbital tugs. Orbital propellant depots. And on and on and on.
Companies that will do well in that future market will be companies that move fast and develop iteratively. Not big dinosaurs who spend half a decade or more just building one fairly conventionally designed product. That status quo isn’t good enough anymore.
Shorter Robin; the future belongs to those who can walk and chew gum at the same time.
The term used in business strategy is Marketing Myopia, and dates to a classic 1960 article by Theodore Levitt.
http://hbr.org/2004/07/marketing-myopia/ar/1
Marketing Myopia
by Theodore Levitt
Firms like Arianespace, Boeing and Lockheed-Martin see themselves as government contractors or launch contractors to the Comsat industry, not as being in the space transportation business. Once you shake yourself free of being a government/private contractor to being a transportation firm your perspective and approach changes.
Newspapers were the same, seeing themselves as newspapers instead of seeing themselves as being in the news business. So they lagged in making the adjustment to online, just as they lagged in their responses to Radio, TV and Cable. And they are just beginning to realize that the mobile age is even different than the Internet age.
But old management, raised under the old perspective usually doesn’t recognize the change fast enough to adapt which creates a window of opportunity for new entrants.
Not long before I left Rockwell (over two decades ago now) I told them that they thought they were in the space business, but that they were actually in the government-contracting business. It would have been much easier for them to switch to an entirely different technological industry with big-government contracts than to do commercial space.
Robin Goodfellow, above, gets to the heart of the matter, so I’ll focus on a tangent; I don’t think Ariane is betting against SpaceX achieving reusability. A bet implies a choice. What I think they are doing is ignoring it because they have no choice. I also think SpaceX achieving reusability wouldn’t have that big an impact on Ariane, because that’s not the biggest threat to them;
At the moment, SpaceX is, without reusability, taking a big chunk of their business. The only thing stopping SpaceX from taking more (it’s already far cheaper) is that currently, SpaceX has yet to solve its launch rate issue; they can’t, so far, launch often enough. If they solve that issue, they’ll take a far bigger chunk of Ariane’s business, and that’s without reusability. So, reusability wouldn’t be a huge game changer, because Airiane is already facing disaster without it (It’d just make the disaster worse.).
Ariane has basically no choice but to ignore the oncoming disaster; their buisness model (heavily government-involved and funded, and like NASA infected with the rot of jobs programs) cannot survive something like SpaceX’s model, and they can’t admit that the Ariane model is flawed, so that leaves doing nothing. Thus, they will take the course so common amongst government and quasi-government agencies, and ignore the problem.
My guess; SpaceX will one day have serious competition (which would be good for everyone), but it will come from a Newspace firms, not the old dinosaurs.
Right now, my take is that the big barrier to SpaceX taking over a huge part of Ariane’s (and other launch providers) business is launch rate, not reusability.
I fervently hope SpaceX can solve their launch rate issue.
Reusability addresses the production rate issue, presuming it’s real reuse and not shuttle style refurbishment.
The plan at a time was to do a reusable TSTO with a LOX/Methane first stage and a LOX/LH2 second stage using staged combustion. However the founding nations are not interested in investing the many euros needed to develop such engines. Most ESA investment money comes from France, Germany, and Italy. France and Italy are in an economic slump right now. Their major imperative is to reduce launch costs quickly over those of Ariane 5 so they decided to go for this little monstrosity. Well that and the fact that ESA itself seems to try to slavishly copy NASA program lines. The TSTO was proposed when SLI was in vogue and now they are copying the stick i.e. Ares I.
The Germans want to continue doing the exact same thing they are doing right now because it does not add more costs or change the workshare agreement.
What is this talk about Airbus anyway? The launcher integration used to be done at EADS Astrium which is also part of the same EADS group as Airbus but was not a part of Airbus per se.
Oh I see they merged Airbus Military, EADS Astrium and Cassidian into Airbus Defense and Space. Great.