SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Airbus, which leads production of the Ariane rocket, has a new re-usable rocket concept called Adeline.
The firm's engineers believe the basic Adeline idea could be incorporated into any liquid-fuelled launcher, however big or small.
It takes the form of a winged module that goes on the bottom of the rocket stack.
Inside are the main engines and the avionics - the high-value parts on all rockets.
The module would be integral to the job of lifting the mission off the pad in the normal way, but then detach itself from the upper-stages of the rocket once the propellants in the tanks above it were exhausted.
The Adeline module's next step would be re-entry into the Earth's atmosphere. For this, it would have a protective heat shield on its bulbous nose.
At a certain point in the descent, Adeline would pull up using its small winglets, and steer itself towards a runway.
Small deployable propellers would aid control as it essentially operated like a drone to find its way home.
Herve Gilibert, technical director for Airbus’ Space Systems division, said the Adeline propulsion unit — engine and avionics — is where lies most of the value of the first stage. 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,” 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.
It sounds like they're planning on modifying the Ariane 6 (set to fly for the first time in 2020) to use this technology at some point, but not right away. They expect it will reduce launch costs by a projected 20 to 30 percent.
Original Submission
(Score: 2) by jdccdevel on Tuesday June 09 2015, @08:12PM
Labor can definitely be a high financial cost, but environmentally? I just don't see it. (Even if you count CO2 from people breathing...). Any environmental cost from aerospace labor is going to be absolutely dwarfed by the manufacturing process for new parts and the launching of the rocket itself. (Some types of rocket fuel are really nasty.)
Your suggestion that re-building from scratch is somehow better environmentally is absurd. All components have to be inspected before they're used on a rocket, so the only additional cost for a re-used part is recovery (minimal compared to the launch itself) and disassembly (almost entirely labor). The goal is to eliminate disassembly as much as possible, by keeping units intact, and they want to learn enough about part wear through recovery and re-use cycles to be able to be able to certify entire assemblies through non-invasive inspection.
You're right about the sailboat analogy. I think a high-performance racing team (Drag racing or Formula 1) would be a better analogy. They're the only other high-performance undertaking I can think of where the vehicle is significantly disassembled, inspected, and re-assembled between events. Even there, teams are finding that disassembling and reassembling their engines is more likely to induce early failure, and a non-invasive inspection and re-use is the better way to go. That's the savings companies like SpaceX and Airbus trying for.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by VLM on Tuesday June 09 2015, @09:00PM
Labor can definitely be a high financial cost, but environmentally? I just don't see it.
Just as a thought experiment, think of a dysfunctional megacorp, lets call it Innitech. And 99% of the middle managers exist mostly to argue and have meetings with the other middle managers and fight each other over meaningless metrics. I've worked at places like that. Lets say you got 1000 workers doing basically nothing. They all get paid and spend it on cars and all kinds of BS. If you got rid of 90% of them so you got 100 workers obviously the environmental cost of commuter gasoline just dropped 90%. Even if they did something, you still cut the environmental cost by 90%, right? Now what has more environmental impact, one dinky little rocket fired once, or an entire freaking city of employees plus ten cities of upstream contractors employees? Well obviously, the employees...
I don't think this is a ridiculous analogy. It is a big old .gov dept and the .com side is all flunkies and cost-plus contracts to monopoly players.
Aside from that, another thought experiment. So you're building an engine mount. Normally you walk over to purchasing and purchasing acquires a serial numbered aero space grade tested and characterized piece of aluminum bar stock. Its been x-rayed for voids, inspected for alloy content using a neutron scattering spectrometer, all sides have been tested for metallurgical treatment/temper. An inspector weighed it, measured its volume, measured all lengths of each side. Every step of its creation from raw electrorefining at the cryolite plant onward has been documented and serial numbered and tracked thru the entire process. It is very near the most verifiable perfect statistically analyzed bar of aluminum that human kind has ever created. And now its going to be an engine mount. This is, believe it or not, pretty much how aerospace stuff is made. It is HIGHLY likely to be reliable. Which is good, because you'll be building something with a factor of safety of maybe 2... or less.
However, "to save money" the bean counters send you out to Sanford and Son's junk yard and give you an old used VW Beetle transmission case to re-use as an engine mount. Where was it refined? Damfino, you can send samples to verify its not contaminated. Hey wait Sanford, this thing sat around soaking in the ocean for hours and then the salt water sat there for days and then it sat out in the rain in your junk yard for months till you gave it to me, how do I know its not internally corroded to hell and back? Damfino, you can spend 500 mechanic hours tearing it down and inspecting the F out of it. But Sanford, economy of scale and all that shit, I can get 10 brand new traceable documented engine mounts made of new material for less than the cost of doing a research project on your old VW transmission case... can't we skip all that inspection hours? Damfino its your spaceship and you gotta re-use this old piece of shit for greenwashing reasons no matter how much it costs and you don't wanna crash so cough up the dough.
Its like those nutcases who get auction fever and bit up something used on ebay to a higher price than a new one from amazon, WTF greenwashers?
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Absolutely.Geek on Tuesday June 09 2015, @11:16PM
You know SpaceX is goint to be landing the rockets on a floating platform / landing pad. The components are not gonig to get wet / salty.
They are going to spend a shit pile of money on the first few rockets they recover successfully; analysing the fuck out of them to get an idea how the material stands up to the stresses of the reentry and recovery. This exercise will lead to data; and probably easier / cheaper ways to analyse these parts. In 10 years the data will be in and SpaceX will be able to provide a probility of failuer on successive launches. The cost of launching on those successive launches will reflect that probability; and the value of the cargo will also reflect that probability.
Expensive satellites and humans will always be sent on the lowest risk launches; which may well end up being launch #2. Non-critical resupply; food stuffs and water will go on the latter launches. There will be a massive market for cheaper launches; currently the value of the cargo is independent of the cost of launch; this will change in the future.
Your strawman is made of straw.
Don't trust the police or the government - Shihad: My mind's sedate.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday June 10 2015, @11:34AM
The components are not gonig to get wet / salty.
Something tells me you've never been out on the ocean... Regardless the point stands, you simply can't compare something thats had serial number certification and tracking for its entire lifespan and beyond with something that kinda "sat around out there in the uncontrolled weather for awhile".
Think about it from a different tangent. If control and and care and assembly environment didn't matter, they'd scrap all that serial number certification and assembly cleanrooms and aerospace work would resemble something like a weird episode of "junkyard wars" aka "scrapheap challenge"
It's possible by expending enormous amounts of energy, materials, labor, and environmental damage to make a re-usable spacecraft, it'll just be cheaper and cause less environmental damage to go disposable.
I guess its a fundamental misunderstanding of how aerospace works. The primary goal of, say, a shipyard, is to make an immense and heavy ship as economically as possible, and environmental issues are a serious topic for a shipyard. The primary goal of an aerospace project is to produce papers with the right peoples names on them that CYA all possible failure modes away from those individuals and as a side effect flight hardware is sometimes produced, yet plenty of cancelled projects are "successful" from the point of view of career managers if all the paperwork was good enough.
If an ocean ship motor mount takes one dude a bunch of filthy cutting oil dripped into the ocean and some aluminum, the primary environment effect comes from the cutting oil and the embedded energy of the aluminum. If a spacecraft motor mount takes months of meetings of 15 people to design and document and inspect and report, and also a dude mills it out in a cleanroom and properly disposes of the cleanroom waste, the primary environmental effect is no longer the chunk of aluminum but dozens of person-months of commuter gasoline and endless printouts of certification documents and dozens of gallons of imported coffee and all of this times a thousand other parts is why the metal on the pad really isn't the primary environmental effect of a rocket.
(Score: 1) by Absolutely.Geek on Monday June 15 2015, @09:56PM
Something tells me you've never been out on the ocean...
I live in New Zealand...
I have worked in marine environments; there is a major difference between landing on a barge and being towed back to shore within a few hours and spending months or years off shore.
My point stands; oh crap we just blew up a $200M 2 ton satellite vs we just blew up 2 ton of water valued at all of $5. Obviously in both cases you have also lost the launch vehicle; but if that is the 5th launch for that vehicle....well you are probably not too precious about it.
Don't trust the police or the government - Shihad: My mind's sedate.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday June 16 2015, @11:26AM
I admit you have an interesting idea that at some point, they'll be enough cargo shipped that it'll be worthwhile to segregate by value and put humans and animals on the best launcher and bulk storage tanks on the used up POS.
That'll throw a wrench in the simplistic "$10000/kg to orbit" or whatever figures because a human ticket will be quite a bit more expensive per pound than a giant shipment of granola bars.
(Score: 1) by Absolutely.Geek on Tuesday June 16 2015, @09:31PM
Agreed but I beleve they are aiming for $500US / kg; and I always assumed that was an average. But the max / best probability of getting to orbit would be 2 - 3 times that amount. And the class 5 scooby snacks trip at $100US / kg.
Don't trust the police or the government - Shihad: My mind's sedate.