September 2011 Archives

On 29 September, Elon Musk, the enigmatic founder of SpaceX, took the stage at the National Press Club in Washington, DC to announce that SpaceX would develop a fully reusable rocket. SpaceX, and Musk in particular, have always been straightforward about their intention to build such a vehicle, but this marks the first official announcement.

It is no coincidence that Grasshopper, a reusable suborbital vehicle, was publically revealed only days before in a much less spectacular manner - SpaceX had to reveal certain details to the FAA for a mandatory site environmental review, and the FAA is legally obligated to publicise the results.

Though Grasshopper is suborbital, it was immediately evident that it was not a dedicated suborbital launch capability - it is evidently not much more than a Merlin 1-D engine and fuel tank with struts to keep it off the ground.

At a recent AIAA talk, Musk characterised building reusable rockets as, "super-damn hard." And he meant it.

The Space Shuttle is the closest thing to a reusable launcher ever built, but even that system barely meets the definition. The Shuttle itself, the reusable part, is for practical purposes actually a combination second stage/steerable capsule. The first stage consisted of massive solid rocket boosters, which were separated when no longer necessary. They tumbled back into the Atlantic Ocean, to be hauled in by ships and never used for flight again.

After a flight, the Space Shuttle required extensive processing to make it ready for another flight.

Musk said the first stage of a reusable Falcon will separate, then fall back down, reignite the engines, and land vertically on the launch pad. The second stage will carry the payload to orbit, fire thrusters to re-enter the atmosphere, steer through the atmosphere using its tiny lift quotient, then reignite its own engines and land vertically on the pad.

The main obstacles of a reusable spacecraft are heat and weight.

Heat is generated by the friction of moving through the atmosphere at hypersonic speeds, and dissipating heat is one of the major challenges of any spacecraft. The first stage will have to survive the flame from the second stage once it separates, and the second stage will need extensive shielding to re-enter safely, much less steer and execute a precision landing. Of course, that extensive shielding adds a whole lot of weight. SpaceX declined to comment on just how they would solve that problem, but they wouldn't spend the money if they didn't think it could be done.

Even 'disposable' launchers can only launch payloads of roughly 2-4% of their total weight. It requires an incredible amount of thrust, which requires more powerful engines, which require additional fuel, which adds more weight, which requires more thrust...

Not to say it's impossible of course, but it is, as Musk put it, "super-damn hard."

European Space Agency fingers remain crossed as the countdown continues towards its much-anticipated Soyuz launch on 20 October.

Not only will the three-stage ST-B rocket will be making its first-ever flight from ESA's launch centre at  Kourou, French Guiana, its payload will be the first two satellites for Europe's Galileo navigation constellation.

Final assembly began on 12 September, following electrical and mechanical tests in August. The horizontal integration is taking place inside a purpose-built building at the spaceport, with rollout to the launch pad and a new 45m-tall mobile gantry was built specifically for Soyuz operations, planned for 14 October.

A second Soyuz launch, carrying two more Galileo spacecraft, is to follow in December. Then, thanks to cash freed up by some €500 million ($715 million)-worth of cost savings, ESA will embark on a fast-track push to purchase and launch enough satellites to provide near-global coverage by the end of 2014 - some seven years behind the original plan, but well ahead of expectations at the beginning of this year.

Some of the new satellites may prove more capable than existing designs, so the full extent of coverage available remains to be seen. UItimately, the complete Galileo plan calls for 27 spacecraft and three orbiting spares by 2019.

European Commission vice-president for industry Antonio Tajani has been Galileo's champion in Brussels, and has described October launch as of "historical importance" as Europe seeks to match or exceed US capability in a technology that will bring significant safety, operational and economic benefits to European citizens.

 

VEGA EN ROUTE

And meanwhile, to cap off what ESA director general Jean-Jacques Dordain has called a "year of launchers", components of ESA's first Vega rocket this week left Avio's factory in Colleferro, near Rome, for sea transport to Kourou in anticipation of the type's maiden flight in December or January.

The medium-lift Soyus and light category Vega will complement ESA's heavylift Ariane 5s to provide a fully flexible range of launch options at Kourou. Vega, whose first stage is one of the world's biggest carbon fibre single-piece structures, is designed to launch satellites up to 1.5 tonnes into 700km polar orbits. As French Guiana is much closer to the equator than Soyuz's normal launch site at Baikonur, added boost from the Earth's spin will nearly double its maximum payload to geostationary transfer orbit (GTO) to 3 tonnes. Ariane 5 can lift 10 tonnes to GTO, though ESA member governments are thought to be moving towards approval of a mid-life upgrade to increase payload capacity.

A longer-term project is also underway, to develop a a high-thrust cryogenic engine that could form the basis of ESA's next-generation launcher. It will not fly until about 2025, but is intended to provide a medium-lift capability in a modular design, with a re-ignitable upper stage and options for strap-on solid propellant boosters offering extra thrust.

Sometimes, it's best to let things speak for themselves. Read on, friends (our highlights):

The First Vibrator in Space   
     
Los Angeles, CA - September 27, 2011 -- On October 8, 2011, online sex toy sales leader SexToy.com, will lead a team to launch the first adult sex toy vibrator into space. The space craft will be equipped with a still and video camera that will send images of its best selling vibrator back to Earth.
 
Through rigorous experimentation, the group has developed a way to send the vibrator into space. The toy will have to withstand temperatures of -75 degrees Fahrenheit and conditions 10 times over normal cosmic radiation. The vibrator will be fully exposed to the elements, reach an altitude of 100,000 feet (~20miles) above the Earth's atmosphere, which is three times the cruising altitude of a typical jet plane. The team hopes to retrieve the vibrator in fully functioning order.
 
SexToy Dave, CEO of CNV.com Inc., says of his inspiration behind the project, "I have always been into firsts and that is how I made my money. I was one of the first on the web selling sex toys, first to have an adult affiliate program, the first to make three appearances on Bravo's hit show Millionaire Matchmaker and now the first online adult business with a space program."
 
The sex toy will be carried into space by a partially solar-powered, partially helium-filled balloon 8 feet wide, armed with a 1080p HD video camera, a 10MP still camera, two consumer cell phones running tracking software, and an experimental GPS unit. The balloon and vibrating bullet will travel through Jet stream winds of up to 100 miles per hour for 1-3 hours and achieve a total distance of up to 100 miles. Sextoy.com will publish the photos on its new blog, "Chew On This" at www.sextoy.com/blog http://www.sextoy.com/blog

After a long period of dormancy, Hyperbola today rejoins the Flightglobal blogroll.

It's an exciting time to be covering spaceflight. Commercial launch providers are poised to revolutionize the way people and goods are transported to space, introducing a host of new rockets. Even as budgets are being squeezed with no relief in sight, the worlds' largest and most powerful rocket, the American Space Launch System (SLS), is being developed without a clear mission or payload in mind. Russia's Roscosmos is operating under threat of serious restructuring. Nations like China and India are ramping up their space activities as the US scales back.

The new Hyperbola is a group blog, a place where the Flight space team can share their insights and interests. There are four main contributors:

• Dan Thisdell, Flight International's business editor, who has followed spaceflight personally and professionally for decades;
• Phil Hylands and David Todd from Ascend, publishers of SpaceTrak news and curators of a formidable launch and payload database;
• Zach Rosenberg, Flight's new Washington, DC-based spaceflight editor.
  

We anticipate adding additional contributors and guest bloggers as appropriate.

Watch this space.

The 44th consecutive Ariane 5 launch went off on schedule on 21 September from the European Space Agency's Kourou, French Guiana launch facility - but nearly stayed put owing to strike action by the Trade Union of French Guiana Workers, in a dispute with Telespazio, which would have left the space centre without some measurement services.
The issue was resolved, and telecomms satellites Arabsat-5C and SES-2 made it to orbit as planned.

A delay would have been the sixth time a satellite launch was delayed by strike action. An Ariane 5 carrying the AMC-21 satellite was held up on 12 August 2008, and a Delta II carrying Cloudsat and CALIPSO fell foul of industrial action on 15 November 2005.
Before that, you have to go back to 1992, when two separate Ariane 42P launches were delayed, and 1989, when an Ariane 44LP got hit by strike action.
Ariane launches aren't as susceptible to strike delay as Air France flights, but one might wonder if there's a francophone pattern here.

It's a fantastic time to be following spaceflight. Just when much looked lost with the Obama administration's cancellation of the return-to-the-Moon Constellation programme and the end of the Space Shuttle era, the US Congress has turned around and given NASA the money to develop a rocket capable of taking astronauts and hardware into deep space, a beautiful complement to the low-Earth orbit transportation capabilities being developed by private sector firms ranging from increasingly-mighty SpaceX to tiny Xcor, with its Lynx suborbital spaceplane.

But to stop there would be to make an assumption that Americans - and many Europeans - so often make. Spaceflight is no longer an American and Russian domain; Europe is a serious player driving some of the most exciting developments we can look forward to over the next decade.

Before 2011 is out, the European Space Agency will be operating three launchers. October will see the first of many Soyuz launches from French Guiana, followed quickly by the maiden flight of ESA's Vega rocket. Those two will give ESA medium and light options alongside its super-reliable Ariane 5 heavylifter. And, Vega developments in the pipeline promise to turn it into a supremely flexible vehicle.

ESA will also this year begin launching Europe's Galileo navigation constellation, and is readying the third Automated Transfer Vehicle mission to the International Space Station - which recently took delivery of its largest-ever scientific payload, he ESA-built alpha-magnetic spectrometer, a 6.9t particle detector physicists hope will help unravel the secrets of so-called "dark matter".

Meanwhile, ESA is readying the 2014 launch of BepiColumbo, an innovative mission to Mercury, and awaiting the "return from Mars" of six astronauts who are spending 500 days in isolation in a mock-up spacecraft near Moscow; they've been simulating a mission to the red planet, to find out whether a crew can really cope with such a long expedition so far from home.

By year-end we may even find out that the world's next space shuttle could be a UK project. If testing of a radical hybrid engine project goes to plan, Oxford-based Reaction Engines is set to cut loose on development of its Skylon unmanned spaceplane concept, which promises to make single-stage-to-orbit flight a reality.

I'll be reporting from Flightglobal's London headquarters on these and other European contributions to the increasingly global and collaborative human project that is spaceflight.