Quote from: Rik ISS-fan on 09/27/2022 04:05 pmEurope isn't tying anything. Arianegroup made a proposal so they can waist billions of taxpayer money.Apologies. Arainegroup. Question still stands... Monetary waistlines aside... Lol
Europe isn't tying anything. Arianegroup made a proposal so they can waist billions of taxpayer money.
Quote from: AstroWare on 09/27/2022 04:26 pmQuote from: Rik ISS-fan on 09/27/2022 04:05 pmEurope isn't tying anything. Arianegroup made a proposal so they can waist billions of taxpayer money.Apologies. Arainegroup. Question still stands... Monetary waistlines aside... LolIf you say Europe, you mean a political will (and thus the required budgets). If you talk about Ariane's proposal, that's just a company asking for a lot of money. Talk is cheap, but if actual money is invested, then you have an actual decision. A huge government contractor asking for billions to develops "the next big thing" is just another Thursday.
Quote from: baldusi on 09/27/2022 04:31 pmQuote from: AstroWare on 09/27/2022 04:26 pmQuote from: Rik ISS-fan on 09/27/2022 04:05 pmEurope isn't tying anything. Arianegroup made a proposal so they can waist billions of taxpayer money.Apologies. Arainegroup. Question still stands... Monetary waistlines aside... LolIf you say Europe, you mean a political will (and thus the required budgets). If you talk about Ariane's proposal, that's just a company asking for a lot of money. Talk is cheap, but if actual money is invested, then you have an actual decision. A huge government contractor asking for billions to develops "the next big thing" is just another Thursday.The question is neither. Please forgive this engineer... I'm asking technically - why would this proposal suggest* to develop a vertical landing crew vehicle for Europe's** first crewed vehicle?
Some people thought that 2020's Ariane 6 was too little too late. 2023 is too little really late. But compare that to the four solids proposal that CNES was pushing, and ArianeGroup got their act together saving the whole Ariane program from the French unexplainable love for solids. Now, they should have been at least four years into an F9 like reusable launcher, and they are just proposing Maļa. So again very late.With SUSIE they finally are trying to match Starship recoverable upper stage AND getting a crewed spaceship (again, quite like a mini Starship concept) and we say they are too early. I personally think they are trying to fish for study money, but have to give them props for actually trying to actually think how to get ahead of the competition instead of replicating last decade systems.
I personally see another reason for this. Say it frankly Ariane 6 is a launcher without payload. Even though it is cheaper than Ariane 5, the advances in reusable rockets make it obsolete for commercial missions. This is a rocket, destined to be retired soon after the start of the program.To keep it alive they need a reason, and human space flight with a sexy space craft might work to make a flag ship program, that will keep running even though it is economically unsound.Europe want independent access to space. That is a political goal. But if they do, they have either carry the high cost of using an commercially obsolete system, create a commercially viable system or buy one.I for one, would start to get into discussions with SpaceX to buy a launch tower and 6 Starships.
The french wanted continuing large scale solid use to exercise their SLBM military industrial base. People sometimes forget France is a nuclear power operating missile submarines. Ariane 5 P80 solids share some commonality with France's currently deployed M51 SLBM's. Of note, the new wider P120 solids for Ariane 6 and Vega probably won't fit in the missile tubes of the french SNLE 3G SSBN submarine that will start construction soon.
I for one, would start to get into discussions with SpaceX to buy a launch tower and 6 Starships.
With SUSIE they finally are trying to match Starship recoverable upper stage AND getting a crewed spaceship (again, quite like a mini Starship concept) and we say they are too early. I personally think they are trying to fish for study money, but have to give them props for actually trying to actually think how to get ahead of the competition instead of replicating last decade systems.
If they never start to work on this, at least in a serious way, they will again go about doing a thousand studies about "how to copy SpaceX without it being too obvious". The Californian company will have done trades on Starship for ten years by the time they start work on something similar. Of course they will have to copy if they don't put years of effort on designing, testing, redesigning, etc. As much as I think SUSIE as proposed is a bad design, with imaginary numbers of margin, it is their design. I would rather have Europe think out their own solution for a reusable upperstage/spaceship to get something different.Not unlike how RocketLab designed Neutron: a one for one competitor with F9 with absolutely different technological solutions in every possible way. Europe needs to do something like that. So I think SUSIE is a good place to start the thinking. But for God's sake, don't try to deliver as presented.
I would dare to suggest that "P120" by name means "120 tons of solid fuel" - that's how the french have named their rocket stages since 1960 at least. "H" stands for "Hydrogen" "P" for "poudre" - closest english word is "powder" but "solid fuel" is a far better translation"L" for "liquid" - as in storable / hypergolics (little love for kerolox on the french side). And the number is for the propellant mass. "L17" was for Diamant, 17 tons of storables. "L140" was Ariane similar but much bigger stage. Rinse, repeat. From "P120" a wild guess could be made related to specific impulse and mass fraction, for example 290 seconds and 0.95 but I can understand "official" numbers are much preferable than wild guesses...