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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 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.