As with everything European there’s a bewildering number of acronyms, national, and pan-national agencies involved. The French space agency CNES is leading this, though all ESA member states pool resources, and the Ariane rockets.
Confusingly, there is another ESA reusable rocket initiative centered around building a brand new rocket with a new type of engine, though it doesn’t start launch testing until 2026.
Europe is behind the US and China on reusable rockets, but its space program will benefit from the world’s move towards protectionist economic policies. It has always been helped by the ‘buy European’ policies of European governments, & geo-political changes make this approach likely to become stronger.
I did a masters on composites manufacturing while working at Airbus. One day I was talking to one of the lecturers after the class (a very senior engineer in Airbus Defence and Space), and I asked them what she thought about the SpaceX attempts (back then on their very early stages) at reusing rockets.
She ensured me that reusable rockets could never work. Just the cost of inspecting the rockets to ensure they hadn’t gotten damaged would outweigh any savings from reusing them.
People have a habit of getting their predictions horribly wrong, so I’m not implying that she was a bad or short sighted engineer, even if she hyperfixated on one of the industry challenges at the time. My point here is that that anecdote illustrates pretty well what was the mindset in Airbus (and by extension, the European space programme) back then, and explains perfectly why Europe is behind on this.
Airbus has a history of making good or very good aircraft but they usually happen after Boeing has taken a leap. The A350 is great but it arrived almost a decade after the Dreamliner. Its development was reactionary, not visionary.
Although the A380 was a visionary solution for problem there wasn’t a business case for. Not sure if that’s any better…
I wonder if that’s what Musk is good at (he must be good at something to be in the position he is in) – good at leading engineers to try, or maybe selecting engineers willing to try
Electric cars sucked before Tesla. Now several brands make good electrics. No one thought rocket boost stages could be recovered and reused, smart people were saying it was impossible, until SpaceX did it. No one has considered recovering and reusing the upper stage since Space Shuttle, until SpaceX announced they were going to
Well, be it because he is good, or because he got lucky, SpaceX has been doing things right. It’s refreshed the space industry like nobody ever has before.
I struggle giving that clown any credit whatsoever but the end result of Space X is undeniably successful, regardless of how they got there.
The agency explained that the ultimate goal is to develop a reusable upper stage for a two-stage rocket that can deliver 20 tonnes to low Earth orbit, a similar payload capacity to Ariane 6.
So do they want to make the Ariane 6 upper stage reusable, or do they want to make a new reusable upper stage that is comparable to Ariane 6?
It is confusingly written, though my interpretation of this is that they are talking about a future variant of Ariane 6. I could be wrong, there are plans for something called Ariane Next in the 2030s, that will also be fully reusable, but this sounds like they intend it to happen this decade for the upper stage at least.
Thanks!
