In addition to this week’s Launch Roundup, we thought we would look at how China’s leading launch provider is facing competition while SpaceX has consolidated its hold on the US market.
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SpaceX’s first attempt to launch its Starship (the company’s Super Heavy launch vehicle) ended with a spectacular explosion over the Gulf of Mexico last month. While the enormous worldwide attention that the Starship project and its recent test launch garnered might have rendered Starship synonymous with the concept of a Super Heavy in the minds of some, a small startup in the Pacific Northwest named Stoke Space is also pursuing a fully reusable launch vehicle designed for rapid turnaround, but with a different design.
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Most rockets take about nine minutes to put their payloads into low Earth orbit, going from a dead stop on terra firma to 17,500 miles per hour.
In the case of India’s GSLV rocket, it takes several years longer. That’s the typical interval between launch attempts. You then have to add on a couple of more years to account for all of the GSLV’s launch failures. Of seven launches over nearly 12 years, India’s largest rocket has notched only two successes and one partial success. The last fully successful flight occurred in September 2004.
But, ISRO is, if nothing else,doggedly persistent. In April, the Indian space agency will attempt to launch a GSLV rocket fitted with its second domestically produced cryogenic upper stage. The launch will take place exactly three years after the turbo pump on the first homemade cryogenic engine malfunctioned, sending the GSAT-4 communications satellite into the Bay of Bengal. That failure came after 17 years of work on cryogenic technology.
The U.S. Air Force’s reusable booster program has been canceled due to a lack of funding:
Due to “unexpected funding reductions,” the U.S. Air Force is discontinuing work on a prototype reusable rocket design effort that the U.S. National Research Council recently cited as a key steppingstone to an operational system.
Soyuz launch complex in Kourou. (Credit: ESA – S. Corvaja, 2011)
PARIS (ESA PR) — Today, Europe enjoys autonomous access to space, while holding a leading position in the world launch services market. ESA has begun work on a new strategy to ensure that both can be maintained sustainably in future.
ESA has begun investigating the feasibility of a new approach for European access to space, aimed at making Europe’s launch services fully self-sufficient over the long haul.
The idea behind this New European Launch Service – NELS – is to deliver competitive launch services to both governmental and private European customers while keeping pace with the rapidly changing worldwide launch market.
U.S. orbital launch vehicles, operational and in development. (Credit: Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University/Parabolicarc.com)
Stratolaunch Systems’ announcement last week has required me to revise the old launch vehicle charts. I couldn’t quite get the Stratolaunch graphic I wanted, but I think this is pretty close to scale. It certainly is on the wingspan. As you can see, it doesn’t quite fit in; if Stratolaunch were a reindeer, it would definitely be named Rudolph.
Despite its massive size, the Stratolaunch system is far down on the table because rockets on this graphic are arranged according to lifting capacity to low Earth orbit. Stratolaunch’s 6,100 kg. capacity is equal to the Delta II to its left. Unlike the Delta II, its first stage is reusable. (more…)
Roscosmos and ESA have agreed to pursue missions aimed at returning soil samples from the south pole of the moon and landing a spacecraft on Jupiter’s moon Ganymede, according to a Roscosmos press statement.
The decision was made during a Dec. 19 meeting between Roscosmos Head Vladimir Popovkin and ESA Director-General Jean-Jacques Dordain. The space agency chiefs also discussed the potential involvement of Russia in the U.S.-European ExoMars program and collaboration in developing new launch vehicles.
Texus 48 launch on 27 November 2011. (Credits: Thilo Kranz/DLR)
ESA PR — ESA and the DLR German Space Center fired a Texus rocket 263 km into space on 27 November to test a new way of handling propellants on Europe’s future rockets.
Texus 48 lifted off at 10:10 GMT (11:10 CET) from the Esrange Space Centre near Kiruna in northern Sweden on its 13-minute flight.
During the six minutes of weightlessness – mimicking the different stages of a full spaceflight – two new devices were tested for handling super-cold liquid hydrogen and oxygen propellants and then recovered for analysis.
Argentina is looking to join the exclusive club of nations with the capacity to launch its own satellites by 2013. Engineers are now working on the new Tronador II (Thunderer II) , a two-stage rocket that will be capable of launch a 200 kg payload into low-Earth orbit. According to El Argentino, engineering faculty at the Universidad Nacional de La Plata will begin tests on a Tronador prototype next year […]
ESA PR — The first elements of Europe’s new Vega small launcher left Italy last Thursday to begin their long journey to Europe’s Spaceport in French Guiana, marking the final step towards its inaugural flight in January. After several intense weeks of checking the hardware and equipment – and the shipping paperwork – Vega’s Zefiro-23 and Zefiro-9 motors and the AVUM fourth stage were carefully packed and left Avio’s facility […]