Europe Retires Ariane 5 Before Ariane 6 Is Ready????

foreign Scott Manley here on Wednesday ariane's space launched the final Ariane 5 carrying a pair of satellites to geostationary Earth orbit Syracuse 4B a communication satellite for the French military and Heinrich Hertz or H2 set a German communication satellite intended to test new technologies the Ariane 5 has launched over a hundred times over two and a half decades it was the launcher of choice if you were wanting to put communication satellites in Geo into geostationary orbit because of the launch site's low air latitudes and there was a lot of talk from the presenters about Ariane 5 now passing the Baton on to Ariane 6. unfortunately if we're going to use that metaphor Ariane 6 is still in the locker rooms trying to figure out how to tie their shoelaces because as of right now Ariane 6 is probably not launching until next year and it's worse than that because Ariane spaces medium-sized launcher was the soyuz and that is no longer available because of course the whole Russia invading Ukraine problem the small launcher they had was the Vega and the Vega sea and Vega C is currently not operational after problems in the second stage now initially these problems were blamed on a nozzle that was built by a subcontractor but a test a few days ago had another problem indicating that the design itself may be deficient and so lacking European launch capabilities the European Space Agency took their Euclid satellite and recently launched it on spacex's Falcon 9. I'm sure for the European Space Agency the cost worked out to be similar because they would have had a big subsidy to help them launch on a European launch vehicle Ariane 5 was actually pretty successful in the commercial Market despite its high cost and this was really because they had this equatorial launch site that was Within in a few degrees of the Equator so any geostationary satellites when they arrived at geostatiary orbit they would have much less inclination to take out and that meant they could have more fuel for on-orbit operations and that outweighed the extra cost of launching on such a large vehicle in fact it was standard operating procedure for Ariane 5 to carry two satellites to geostationary orbits so they could share the cost the Ariane series of rockets started out in the late 1970s they used two stages with hypergolic propellants in each of those and you know through Ariane one through four they slowly ramped up the capabilities of the vehicle by stretching the stages and adding strap-on boosters either solid or liquid depending upon the needs of the mission but for Ariane 5 they had big plans at the time when Aryan 5 was really being designed the European Space Agency expected that it would have to be able to carry the Hermes space plane that is a crude space capability the would have allowed Europe independent access for its astronauts to space and so they stepped away from the hypergolic propellants and switched over to hydrogen in the core and its very large solid boosters on the site something somehow similar to what the space shuttle has and so when the Hermes space plane was canceled Europe was left with this very large and capable launch vehicle and so they made the most of it by launching two satellites at a time and Ariane 5 evolved over time gaining larger second stages and eventually switching over to hydrolux for the second stage and so now the Ariane 6 which is currently being tested shares a lot of Heritage with the Ariane 5. to start with the core of the rocket is hydrogen oxygen is almost the same dimensions it's all it's using a new version of the Vulcan engine but there's been 25 years of technological improvements in terms of the hardware and Manufacturing to reduce the costs and this means the upper stage fairing is the same dimensions which is great for those customers who have come to expect this capability the boosters on the other hand are the really obvious change on the Ariane 5 these were three segment steelcased solid boosters on Ariane 6 they can use either two or four p120 boosters now these are the same kind of boosters are used for the first stage of the Vega C rocket with the idea of course being that if you use common Hardware you're going to reduce your overall costs so these are boosters which use carbon fiber wound casings they have about 140 tons of propellant in them and generate just under 500 tons of thrust for about two minutes and I feel I should mention that while the Vega C has had some launch failures none of these have been attributed to the first stage so they're confident that these engines are going to be fine also a more powerful version has been developed already it's the the p120c plus which will increase the low earth orbit capability by about two tons and this extra booster capability will be required for Amazon's Kuiper launch contracts and finally the new second stage it's still hydrogen oxygen it's a bit bigger and it's powered by a new engine DaVinci and one of the most important features of this engine is the ability to re-light while in orbit the previous engine the hm7b wasn't able to do this and this meant that some Mission plans were not tenable because they needed relight capability there's a few missions such as juice which had to add a one-year launch away from the earth and come back and then get deflected by the Earth's gravity because they couldn't hit the Escape Vector with a single engine burn without relight but moreover this is a capability that a customer sending Hardware to geostationary orbit really want they would like their spacecraft to reach geostationary orbit and not have to use any of its onboard propellant to get there and of course developing a new rocket required developing a new launch site and new launch infrastructure including this new vertical integration facility and one of the reasons they argued that they needed this was because they didn't want to interfere with Ariane 5 launchers Well turns out that hasn't been the case I mean I'm sure there's stuff I'm missing but the Ariane 5's launch Cadence hasn't exactly been you know setting the world on fire and most people now expect Ariane 6 to launch in 2024. if only Europe hadn't canceled the Ariane 5 me where they took some of the new hardware from the Ariane 6 and back ported it to the Ariane 5 to extend its life and capabilities but there's a whole lot of Kuda shooter Woulda in the history of Ariane 6 development the real elephant in the room is the fact that they're entering a launch market where the biggest game in town is now regularly reusing Rockets a decade ago when Aryan space was laying out plans for its successor to the Ariane 5 they repeatedly dismissed reuse of rockets as a Dream well they have to deal with reality it's not like reusability is a concept that is completely unfamiliar to European Engineers if you look at the 90s you have the German Aerospace Center working on flyback boosters for the ariads these would peel off and then fly back on runways Airbus had been pitching Adeline as a partial Recovery Solution for Rockets the idea is you've got a relatively cheap fuel tank section and you have a tail section with the engines your avionics all your expensive materials this separates off and then it turns around and it flies back using propellers that it deploys conceptually this shares a lot with the ule's smart reuse concept where they just parachute and recover their engines there was actually another early variation of the Ariane 6 which we thought was going to get built for a long time this was one which used four solid rocket motors for its first two stages three in the first and they're one on the second this looked like something you would build in Kerbal Space Program right down to the cryogenic upper stage being fatter than the stages below us I'm kind of surprised it lasted as long as it did and wasn't immediately left out the door on aesthetic grounds alone but look a lot of these kind of decisions come down to the fact that Ariane is a government project and it gets a lot of money from the various member states and there have been occasions where improvements to the manufacturing process that would make the rocket Cheaper by reducing costs and simplifying things were dismissed because they would cut out some of the partners from the manufacturing process and it was seen as more important to have the various countries on board rather than trying to save the money by making the manufacturing more efficient but at this point Europe can't ignore reusability and so we've started to see some progress in that direction with uh the Prometheus engine which is a methane oxygen engine intended to be used to demonstrate a reusable rocket technology in Europe it is being developed by Ariane space it's not clear that it's going to get the Aria name and we don't honestly know how long Ariane 6 will fly for heck we still don't know when Ariane 6 is actually Gonna Fly but being a politically driven program it's unlikely that Ariane 6 will disappear overnight due to commercial pressures I'm Scott Manley fly safe [Music] foreign [Music]

Channel: Scott Manley

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Length: 9min 45sec (585 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 07 2023