Agreement for funding from UAE fell through after Russia invaded Ukraine. //

Because it lacks the funding to modernize its most historic launch pad, Russia now instead plans to turn "Gagarin's Start" into a museum.

The pad is known as Gagarin's Start because it hosted the world's first human spaceflight in 1961, when the Vostok 1 mission carrying Yuri Gagarin blasted into orbit. Between 1961 and 2019, this workhorse pad accommodated a remarkable 520 launches, more than any other site in the world.

In my view, the mission was much less a scientific one than a political one. The target was the lunar south pole, a previously unexplored area. The mission was scaled back from including a lunar rover because of Western sanctions after Putin's War in Ukraine began. It is speculated that it went ahead to prove to the world that sanctions would not affect Russia's ability to lead the world. The landing coinciding with BRICS would also be a political thumb in the eye of the West over the ICC kerfuffle, and it would bolster Russia's image in that group, particularly by one-upping India by two days. This is not just an egg in the face. This is Putin being held down and letting the henhouse drop their product on him.

I still expect to see the Russians taking a page of Irish history and using the Red Hand of the O'Neills rule to claim it arrived first at the south pole area of the moon.

A key lesson in unintended consequences that would-be #ClimateCrisis heroes may wish to be mindful of as they endeavor to save the planet from us humans. //

NotCoach | August 13, 2023 at 8:49 pm
Typically anything smaller than 25m in diameter will burn up in our atmosphere, depending on density, and considering these rocks were dislodged from the surface they are likely not very dense (mostly rock, little metal).

NotCoach in reply to NotCoach. | August 13, 2023 at 9:05 pm
As an example the Chelyabinsk meteor was estimated to be about 59 feet in diameter. It did not reach the surface of Earth. It exploded over Chelyabinsk Oblast with the force of 26 to 33 Hiroshimas, but the damage to Chelyabinsk Oblast was minimal because the blast was high up in the atmosphere. A 15 foot boulder is not a concern.

DovePig Ars Centurion
1y
6,274
mknelson said:
I was thinking gyroscopes, but see those stopped working in 2016.

Wikipedia notes: "Thrusters are supplied by a single 70-centimetre (28 in) diameter spherical titanium tank. It contained 100 kilograms (220 lb) of hydrazine at launch, providing enough fuel until 2034."
I am even much more in awe of the RCS mechanical valves, as even a hydrazine (or similar) propellent would probably still need some, as while you can apparently just run it over a rare metal catalyst screen to get it to decompose in a very exothermal reaction (these nitrogens really wanna go free!), you still have to push it through into the nozzle exactly when needed (and stop it when needed).

Come on, fifty years with a mechanical valve system in space? That still sounds awesome to me, even if IANARS! //

Needleroozer Smack-Fu Master, in training
10m
11
Subscriptor
Siosphere said:
How does Voyager 2 know where the earth is? Like how does it re-orient itself to earth?

What is it using as a reference point?
It appears to lock onto Canopus using a star-tracking system that rolls the spacecraft until a star of the appropriate intensity is detected, then maneuvers to stay centered on that star.

https://hackaday.com/2023/07/31/just-how-is-voyager-2-going-to-sort-out-its-dish-then/

When did spaceflight begin? There is no single answer.

For newcomers to space, the beginning of time can be traced to as recently as December 2015. That's when SpaceX landed its Falcon 9 rocket successfully for the first time, opening the modern era of rapid, reusable spaceflight. Increasingly, anything that came before feels anachronistic.

But for those with a bit more perspective, the dawn of spaceflight can be pushed back further back into time, to the 1957 launch of the Soviet Sputnik satellite that shocked the world. This small orbiting spacecraft kicked off the frenetic space race that culminated with NASA's Apollo 11 Moon landing just a dozen years later.

Yet in a new book, From the Earth to Mars, space entrepreneur Jeffrey Manber takes us back much further into the murk of history to divine the origins of spaceflight. His story goes back a century and a half, telling the tales of some figures who are fairly well known, such as Konstantin Tsiolkovsky and Hermann Oberth, and others a bit less so, including Thea von Harbou and Robert Esnault-Pelterie. //

Manber's book is subtitled "Before the Governments were Involved." The second book in the series, he says, will tackle Russian rocket builders. I look forward to it.

paw Ars Tribunus Militum 21y 1,984

dj__jg said:
I guess ESA has a shot at being a role model at de-orbiting stuff, since they sure aren't being a role model at putting stuff into orbit considering the delays and expendable nature of Ariane 6.

Let's not dump on ESA too much re being a role model. Ariane 5's outstanding launch of JWST, doubling its lifetime, should not be overlooked.

Honest question: have any NASA launches exceeded expectations by that much? //

Cloudgazer Ars Tribunus Angusticlavius 8y 15,517

paw said:
Let's not dump on ESA too much re being a role model. Ariane 5's outstanding launch of JWST, doubling its lifetime, should not be overlooked.

Honest question: have any NASA launches exceeded expectations by that much?

I'd love to know what the private opinion of the NASA team was about that launch. One way to view it is that ESA doubled the lifespan of JWST. Another is that they came within 30 m/s of disaster. //

Cloudgazer Ars Tribunus Angusticlavius 8y 15,517

Shiranui said:
How do you mean? How do you turn overdelivering on estimates into pessimistic relief?

Either I'm missing something about Arianespace having taken unnecessary risks to achieve this feat (which I have not heard of so far), or that's a very "glass half empty" perspective.

NASA had an estimated life based on ESA delivering JWST into the expected trajectory, JWST would then need to use its on board thrusters to get the perfect insertion into L2. There was never any doubt that Ariane had the grunt to get JWST into that orbit, or indeed beyond that orbit, but it was imperative that they not overshoot, because if they did JWST was lost.

The targeted trajectory NASA requested from Ariane left room at the top because of that. ESA ate into that margin which delivered a 'better' outcome, but the final adjustments by the JWST were a mere 23 m/s. Had they 'over delivered' by another 23m/s which they were quite capable of doing there would be no JWST.

Publically this was all praised as a great success, but I can't imagine it was quite the same story behind the scenes.

Think of it like shooting the proverbial apple off your wife's head. More points if you hit lower on the apple. This doesn't mean if you aimed for the middle and hit right at the bottom then your wife is going to be entirely happy, because a little lower and you're not a hero - you're William S Burroughs. //

Cloudgazer Ars Tribunus Angusticlavius 8y 15,517

Dan Homerick said:
While reading this, I was thinking "But couldn't JWST have rotated around and burned retrograde to correct a small overshoot?" And to answer that thought, I presume the answer is no, because then it'd be flying through it's own thruster plume, which would fog up the mirrors.

That right?

Kinda, that's half the story ..

More Than You Wanted to Know About Webb’s Mid-Course Corrections! – James Webb Space Telescope
https://blogs.nasa.gov/webb/2021/12/27/more-than-you-wanted-to-know-about-webbs-mid-course-corrections/

Webb has thrusters only on the warm, Sun-facing side of the observatory. We would not want the hot thrusters to contaminate the cold side of the observatory with unwanted heat or with rocket exhaust that could condense on the cold optics

So you're right about not wanting to fly through the plume, and that (along with other considerations) resulted in thrusters only on one side of the vehicle. But as a result of that design decision it's even worse than just contaminating the instrument

Webb’s Journey to L2 Is Nearly Complete – James Webb Space Telescope
https://blogs.nasa.gov/webb/2022/01/21/webbs-journey-to-l2-is-nearly-complete/

“So, why did the Ariane not give Webb more energy and why did Webb need course correction? If the Ariane had given Webb even a little bit too much energy than needed to get it to L2, it would be going too fast when it got there and would overshoot its desired science orbit. Webb would have to do a significant braking maneuver by thrusting toward the Sun to slow down. Not only would that big burn cost a lot of propellant, it would be impossible because it would require Webb to turn 180 degrees in order to thrust toward the Sun, which would have exposed its telescope optics and instruments directly to the Sun, thus overheating their structures and literally melting the glue that holds them together.

Like the enterprise in star trekkin the JWST is always going forwards 'cause they can't find reverse.

Now leaving Earth.

Kármán line

India took the first step toward its second attempt to land on the Moon on Friday with the launch of its Chandrayaan-3 mission from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre in the southeastern part of the country. //

To date, only the Soviet Union, the United States, and China have made soft landings on the Moon. India will attempt to become the fourth country to do so and is the first of as many as half a dozen missions that will attempt to land on the Moon during the next six months.

India has developed the Chandrayaan-3 mission on a shoestring budget, about $90 million. But it is important for the Indian space agency to demonstrate competence with this second attempt—especially as its neighbor China has flown a series of increasingly complex and successful lunar missions, including landing on the far side of the Moon and returning regolith samples to Earth. If successful, the Vikram lander would touch down further south than any previous lunar mission.

Wickwick Ars Legatus Legionis
13y
30,072
Terakh said:

let's see the promises actually get delivered on "near" agreed upon time and cost given that some of the stuff don't even exist.

As long as Congress funds the programs on the agreed-upon schedules, I think both landers will be ready before their respective Artemis missions are flown.

Unfortunately, Congress has a history of reducing funding levels below what the delivery time requires then complaining that the programs are delayed. But those sorts of shenanigans only seem to happen to fixed-price contracts where they have no control over where and how the money is spent. The cost-plus rocket contracts seem immune to any sorts of cuts. //

EricBerger Ars Scholae Palatinae
7y
1,067
ARS STAFF
pipe13 said:

...and a large source of energy. You know, to mine the water, collect the CO2, and put the proverbial toothpaste back in the tube.

The numbers are pretty sobering: Approximately 750 kilowatts of continuous energy, for two years, to produce 1,000 tons of liquid oxygen and methane. //

RichyRoo Wise, Aged Ars Veteran
5y
113
Subscriptor
Hopefully Smarter said:

I love seeing the enthusiasm about spreading the toxic virus of humanity throughout the universe.

without us there is no point to the rest of the universe //

abie Ars Scholae Palatinae
5y
719
Hopefully Smarter said:

I love seeing the enthusiasm about spreading the toxic virus of humanity throughout the universe.

What you call a toxic virus, I call the light of consciousness. We've found no signs of life anywhere in the universe. Life might be incredibly rare, intelligent life rarer still. Taking the first hesitant steps to establishing life off Earth should be a cause for celebration, not miserable cynicism such as yours.

Last Friday, NASA awarded a $3.4 billion contract to a team led by Blue Origin for the design and construction of a second Human Landing System to fly astronauts down to the Moon.

The announcement capped a furious two-year lobbying campaign by Blue Origin owner Jeff Bezos to obtain a coveted piece of NASA's Artemis program. NASA also notched a big win, gaining the competition with SpaceX it sought for landing services. But there is a more profound takeaway from this.

After losing the initial lander contract to SpaceX two years ago, Blue Origin did not just bid a lower price this time around. Instead, it radically transformed the means by which it would put humans on the Moon. The Blue Moon lander is now completely reusable; it will remain in lunar orbit, going up and down to the surface. It will be serviced by a transport vehicle that will be fueled in low-Earth orbit and then deliver propellant to the Moon. This transporter, in turn, will be refilled by multiple launches of the reusable New Glenn rocket.

To be sure, that is a lot of hardware that has yet to be built and tested. But when we step back, there is one inescapable fact. With SpaceX's fully reusable Starship, and now Blue Moon, NASA has selected two vehicles based around the concept of many launches and the capability to store and transfer propellant in space.

This is a remarkable transformation in the way humans will explore outer space—potentially the biggest change in spaceflight since the Soviet Union launched the Sputnik satellite in 1957. It has been a long time coming. //

The German physicist Max Planck is credited with the notion that science advances only when older practitioners die off, leaving room for new ideas. The philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn more pithily summarized the sentiment by writing, "Science advances one funeral at a time."

Goff offered a variation on this idea for spaceflight: "Space policy seems to progress one congressional retirement at a time," he said.

Like Sowers, he welcomed NASA's entry into an era of reusable spaceflight. But Goff noted that it is really only happening because two billionaires, Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, are aggressively pushing the idea forward.

NASA has spent so much over the last decade on the development of the SLS rocket—north of $40 billion, including ground systems—that there has been little money left over for exploration payloads to fly on them. Therefore, when it came time to fund the lunar landers, NASA had to go with the least expensive options. Both Starship and Blue Moon are, roughly, at least $10 billion development programs. But because it can purchase them with fixed-price contracts, NASA is only paying about a third of the overall cost for both, $6.3 billion.

"The only way NASA could really afford to do this was by not doing business as usual," Goff said.

Q:

I am curious what aspects of the Apollo program were impressive/advanced from an engineering perspective, in the 1960s and 1970s. That is, what would have made an educated engineer say, “Wow, they solved that problem?”

I ask the question because I know that as an engineering layperson I know I have very poor intuitions about what is technically difficult in spaceflight. For instance, I only learned from this website that maintaining 1 atm of pressure in a spacecraft isn't very difficult. Also, some technologies like pressure suits and rocket engines had already been developed. So it is not obvious (to me) what the actual innovations and engineering achievements of the program were.

A:

There was no one breakthrough that made it possible. The "big deal", in the mind of the world, was just that an obviously very hard thing was accomplished. And, if you doubted how hard it was, people can point out that no one has done it again in more than fifty years.

However, there are some good examples of challenging problems that had to be solved.

Problem 1: Rocket Size. Before Apollo, everyone thought we would send the top of a multi-stage rocket to the moon, it would land on its tail and launch again to return to earth. When you run the numbers on that, you end up with a pretty big lander requiring a lot of fuel, and a huge launcher to send it on its way; much larger than Saturn. The trick ended up being to only send down a little bug, and even leave part of that behind on the moon. If we had stuck with the giant lander we would never have been ready in time.

Problem 2: Rendezvous. The new method required being good at approaching and docking with another spacecraft. That's a hard enough problem that, even though the physics was well understood, they didn't really see the issues until they actually tried it. (I always get annoyed when characters in science fiction stories fail to foresee problems that the science should have told them beforehand, but sometimes that's how it works.) Wisely they tried it in Gemini in low earth orbit and had the hang of it by Apollo.

Problem 3: Rocket Size (Again). Even with the trick (called Lunar Orbit Rendezvous) used to solve Problem 1, they needed a much bigger rocket than anyone had built before. And so they built it. To get it to the launch pad, they built the crawler transporters, some of the largest land vehicles built up to that time, and to have a protected place to stack the stages, they built the Vehicle Assembly Building, one of the largest buildings by open volume in the world. I think seeing a tower the size of a 36-story skyscraper rise into the sky made a lot of people say, "Wow, they solved that problem?" I was too young at the time, but it was the initial uncrewed Apollo 4 launch of the Saturn V that made my dad think, "Huh, they might actually pull this off!"

There are many many more, but it was really the cumulative effect of solving thousands of hard problems that was the big deal. //

Number 2 is a small example of the large original research involved. A guy, later known as "Doctor Rendezvous", did his Ph.D. thesis at MIT on it in 1963. His next job was to fly it! Here's Buzz Aldrin's thesis: dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/12652 –
Adam
May 19 at 1:38

The "slow down to catch up, speed up to slow down" stuff of orbital rendezvous was reportedly very confusing to the non-engineer test pilots and required someone like Buzz Aldrin to truly figure out. It's one thing to draw the equations out on paper but a whole other thing to actually do it in the cockpit. –
Jörg W Mittag
May 17 at 19:48

@JörgWMittag I think its still confusing to a lot of people today, mainly because of the terms "slow down" and "speed up" in that phrase are ... wrong, but appropriate? –
Moo
May 17 at 21:32

@Moo - If you go faster, you also go higher. Now that you're higher, you've got farther to go, so you're actually going slower –
Richard
May 18 at 18:36 //

A:

what has ALWAYS impressed the heck out of me is the sheer magnitude of scale involved... not physical size (although its size was truly impressive) but rather the huge number of complex problems that needed to be all solved in a complex optimization matrix to arrive at a suitable overall solution. This was the largest systems integration project ever to date and on a tight timeline. Project management on an unheard of scale and scope. That to me was the "Wow... they solved THAT problem" thing.

Yes. Apollo was a triumph of project management as much as, or maybe even more than, it was a technological feat. –
Wayne Conrad
May 18 at 2:40

I would argue that project management was born within the Apollo program. I don't think it even had a name beforehand. –
Vladimir Cravero
May 18 at 8:18 //

A:

It was fractally hard.

Everything they did was Voltroning hard problems together to solve other hard problems. And this was all done in a coordinated way on an incredibly tight timescale.

The long answer would fill a series of books. E.g. for a high level overview of the effort involved in the LEM alone, you can look at Tom Kelly's Moon Lander (and you should; it's great).

But to put a quick gloss on top of it, Apollo was not an aerospace engineering triumph, Apollo was a systems engineering triumph. Everyone solved hard problems in every field, but the real accomplishment was orchestrating those solutions in a way that led a seven-year program from zero to the moon.

Apollo systems engineering built upon Polaris (see en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UGM-27_Polaris). –
Jon Custer
May 18 at 20:42

@JonCuster Sort of, but it's more complicated than that. I'm not putting a history of SE in this answer though. Recommend Morris' "Management of Projects" from 1990 or so if you want an overview of the most relevant thread for Apollo/ –
fectin
May 19 at 0:55

Thought Icelandic glacier water was rare? How about chugging down some Moon water. //

Scientists in China have found glass beads contained in lunar soil might hold enough water to provide a resource for future lunar missions.

The results, published in Nature Geoscience this week, stem from data collected by China's Chang'e-5 mission, and suggest the Moon's surface holds much more trapped water than previously thought and the liquid compound vital to continuing life could be relatively easy to extract.

Small glass beads created when meteorites smash into the lunar surface have long been considered a candidate for water storage. Using samples from the Apollo 11 mission, a US study published in 2012 found between 200 and 300 parts per million of water and hydroxyl (OH) in the glass beads they contained. //

Water made it into the beads via the solar winds, the reasoning goes. Solar winds are a plasma emitted from the sun containing hydrogen ions. On earth, they cause the aurora borealis and aurora australis, owing to an interaction with the Earth's magnetic field in the upper atmosphere. As the Moon has no magnetic field, the solar winds can reach its surface and interact with minerals in the soils containing oxygen. Because the solar wind is always, erm, blowing, the water in the beads is replenished.

NASA’s plan to spend up to $1 billion on a tug to deorbit the International Space Station is a missed opportunity to instead repurpose or recycle the station, some in industry argue.

NASA announced plans as part of its fiscal year 2024 budget proposal this month to develop the tug to help deorbit the station at the end of its life in 2030. NASA is seeking $180 million in 2024 to start work on the tug, and anticipates spending as much as $1 billion to build it.

The agency had made clear that it and the other partners would deorbit the station at the end of its life, ensuring that debris that survives reentry falls in an uninhabited region of the South Pacific Ocean to avoid the risk of damage or casualties. NASA previously expected that it would use multiple Progress cargo spacecraft to handle the deorbiting, but said at a March 13 event about the budget proposal it chose to develop the tug to provide redundancy in those plans.

Most of the orbital change came from the momentum carried away by debris. //

When the NASA DART mission slammed into a small asteroid, we knew with great precision how much the spacecraft weighed and how fast it traveled. If you combine that with our estimates of the motion and mass of its target asteroid, Dimorphos, then you could easily do the math and estimate how much momentum would be lost by the asteroid and what that would mean for its orbit. That bit of math would suggest that Dimorphos' orbit should end up roughly seven minutes shorter.

Instead, the orbit was shortened by a half hour—over four times that number. //

Today's issue of Nature contains five articles that collectively reconstruct the impact and its aftermath to explain how DART's collision had an outsized effect. And, in the process, the articles indicate that impactors like DART could be a viable means of protecting the planet from small asteroids. //

This shows that we currently have the technology needed to run an interception on a small asteroid without requiring elaborate reconnaissance in advance. And, as we've known for some time, the impact of the spacecraft can significantly shift the orbit of the asteroid. So, from the planetary-defense perspective, DART was a major validation.

Most of the remaining new information focuses on why the orbital shift was so much larger than a simple calculation might suggest. //

Eject!
Potential impact models had already indicated that there was an additional way that DART could influence the orbital momentum of Dimorphos. Because the asteroid is likely to be a "rubble pile" of material loosely held together by gravity, any impact was likely to send some of that material shooting off the surface of the asteroid. And all of that material would carry momentum of its own, directed away from the site of impact—which was located on the surface that faced toward Dimorphos' direction of orbit. So, the equal and opposite reaction to the ejecta would be a slowing down of the asteroid's orbit, which would be added to the effect of DART's impact.

The maximum expected change in the orbital period in these models was 40 minutes. Since the orbit changed by 30 minutes, this suggests that the amount of material sent off by DART's impact was on the high side of potential scenarios.

JPL's Exoplanet Travel Bureau presents: Visions of the Future
Imagination is our window into the future. At NASA/JPL we strive to be bold in advancing the edge of possibility so that someday, with the help of new generations of innovators and explorers, these visions of the future can become a reality. As you look through these images of imaginative travel destinations, remember that you can be an architect of the future.

She calculated the trajectory for Alan Shepard, the first American in space. Even after NASA began using electronic computers, John Glenn requested that she personally recheck the calculations made by the new electronic computers before his flight aboard Friendship 7 – the mission on which he became the first American to orbit the Earth. She continued to work at NASA until 1986, combining her math talent with electronic computer skills. Her calculations proved critical to the success of the Apollo Moon landing program and the start of the Space Shuttle program. //

https://youtu.be/E4j_LpKzcZQ //

A wonderful interview with Johnson where she gets to tell you her story. The interview is 22 minutes and well worth the time.

https://youtu.be/r8gJqKyIGhE

On Friday, in a blog post not even promoted by the company's Twitter account or a news release, Blue Origin quietly said its "Blue Alchemist" program has been working on this very topic for the last two years. The company, founded by Jeff Bezos, has made both solar cells and electricity transmission wires from simulated lunar soil—a material that is chemically and mineralogically equivalent to lunar regolith.

The engineering work is based on a process known as "molten regolith electrolysis," and Blue Origin has advanced the state of the art for solar cell manufacturing. In this process, a direct electric current is applied to the simulated regolith at a high temperature, above 1,600° Celsius. Through this electrolysis process, iron, silicon, and aluminum can be extracted from the lunar regolith. Blue Origin says it has produced silicon to more than 99.999 percent purity through molten regolith electrolysis.

The key advance made by Blue Alchemist is that its engineers and scientists have taken the byproducts of this reaction—and these materials alone—to fabricate solar cells as well as the protective glass cover that would allow them to survive a decade or longer on the lunar surface. //

For decades scientists and engineers have talked about using the dusty lunar surface to manufacture solar panels. All of the key ingredients for solar cells are present in this rocky and dusty regolith on the surface of the Moon—silicon, iron, magnesium, aluminum, and more.

The abundance of these ingredients has led to hundreds of research papers exploring this idea since lunar soil was returned to Earth during the Apollo program but relatively little engineering development. In other words, we don't know whether covering the Moon with solar panels is simply a great science fiction idea, or if it would actually work. //

Although our vision is technically ambitious, our technology is real now," the company said in its blog post. "Blue Origin’s goal of producing solar power using only lunar resources is aligned with NASA’s highest priority Moon-to-Mars infrastructure development objective."

This is a notable research breakthrough, as the same electrolysis process could also be used to produce metals for building habitats and other structures, as well as oxygen. These are all important for "living off the land" if humans are to avoid the expense of needing to bring everything from Earth to live and work in space. While it is a long way from lab experiments to manufacturing on the Moon, these experiments are a critical first step.

Using film from U.S. spy balloons to take pictures of the Moon

"THERE WILL BE LAUGHTER IF THIS PIECE WORKS ...".

Article from the newspaper "St. Petersburg Vedomosti" of April 10, 1993. by Igor Borisovich Lisochkin.

Russian text reference provided by Alexander Dzhuly. Subsection headers inserted by Sven Grahn //

And the fact that we "photographed" the opposite side of the Moon with an American film that was sent to our country with purely spying goals, I told my closest associates only many years later, long after the untimely death of Sergei Pavlovich Korolev. In fifteen years. The abbreviation “AB”, I think, is not necessary to decipher. Of course, this is the "American Balloons". Odessites never lose their sense of humor. Starting with "Vostok" I acted as the chief designer of space television systems. Of course, I perfectly remember the immortal flight of Yuri Alekseevich Gagarin, and everything that followed. But this is another story and completely different adventures.”

Communication Commission (FCC), True Anomaly is now gearing up for its first orbital mission. In October, True Anomaly hopes to launch two Jackal “orbital pursuit” spacecraft aboard a SpaceX rocket to low earth orbit. The Jackals will not house guns, warheads, or laser blasters, but they will be capable of rendezvous proximity operations (RPO)—the ability to maneuver close to other satellites and train a battery of sensors upon them. This could reveal their rivals’ surveillance and weapons systems or help intercept communications.

The chief of Arianespace could not be more clear: He does not want any competition for Vega C and Ariane 6, nor does he believe any commercial European company should have a chance to compete for the development of a next-generation reusable rocket.

However, what Israël did not say is also important. With a lift capacity of about 2 metric tons to low-Earth orbit but a price of nearly $40 million, the Vega rocket is not price-competitive with commercial rockets nor India's Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle. Moreover, this Italian-made rocket has failed in three out of its last eight flights. Also, while Israël touts Ariane 6, this rocket does not yet exist. Europe has spent nearly $5 billion developing this booster, which may not fly until 2024 and will be four years late. //

MMarsh Ars Praefectus
7y
3,013
Subscriptor
Arianespace has always existed at the awkward intersection of the private and public sectors. As a commercial launch provider — indeed, the first such provider — it must continually prove its viability in the marketplace. As a symbol of European Union pride, backed by multiple governments, it is obliged to spread its operations out in inefficient ways and to make design and management decisions that stem more from politics than from engineering.

It's a structure and business model that, although inefficient, worked reasonably well for many years.

Until now.

If Europe wants to piss away a few billion euros on a vanity piece to say "hey look, we can still launch our own five birds a year from French Guiana" then they are welcome to do so. But I can think of much better ways to spend that money and those engineer-hours.