ULA Paper on Mid-Air Recovery for the Atlas-V First Stage Propulsion Section

[jongoff]

I'm not sure whether this is in the right part of the forum or not, but I wanted to mention that there was an interesting Space 2008 paper presented by some friends of mine at ULA.  It discusses using mid-air recovery techniques that they've been developing with Vertigo, Inc to reuse the RD-180/propulsion section of the Atlas-V.

I have a link to the paper and a review on Selenian Boondocks:
http://selenianboondocks.com/2008/09/partial-rocket-reuse-using-mid-air-recovery-a-review/

~Jon

PS If this should go in the US Launchers, Advanced Concepts, or Alternative Architectures sections, could someone move the thread?

[pippin]

Interesting paper.

One thing that comes to my mind, though, is whether that flight rate issue is really one.

I mean, 10-15 engines a year... what is Atlas' flight rate right now? Or Atlas+Delta IV combined flight rate?

OK, if you think about an Atlas Heavy as an Ares replacement... but other than that I don't buy this rationale.

[josh_simonson]

Looks mostly like FUD to make the Russians doubt their pricing power to me...

[pippin]

another thing: Regarding the part about the upper stage recovery:

Does anybody know what happened to the project to recover Fregat upper stages? IIRC that was even flown once?

[jongoff]

Pippin, Josh,
Yeah, as I said in the review, at current flight rate this isn't economically justified.  Which is why they're mostly doing only the proof-of-concept work with IRAD.  It's mostly to show that there's a way that they could up the flight rate substantially (while decreasing the per-flight cost substantially) if they needed to replace Ares-1, or if Bigelow gave them a contract.  It's not something that I think they're actually going to field at current flight rates.  Now, if they were able to sign a big contract with someone for enough flights, they could justify spending the money to finish fielding the capability.

And yes, it's a way of letting the Russians know that they don't necessarily have ULA over the barrel for the RD-180s.

As for Fregat reuse, I don't know if that was ever pursued much further.  Lots of people have discussed the idea, but it still needs some work. 

~Jon