How are non-US space agencies and companies (like ESA, Russia, Japan, China, etc) reacting to the SpaceX and Blue Origin achievements?
Are they also testing similar things but we aren't hearing? Or they aren't threatened by the advances?
Are they also testing similar things but we aren't hearing? Or they aren't threatened by the advances?
Ariane 6 is going to be built with a cost effective approach and trying to focus on market needs (3D printing of parts, reusability of the first stage, etc.)
At first, concerning SpaceX, his group of experts told him that the design of the rocket wasn't going to work and was going to explode at high altitude due to fluctuation. They also told him that the first stage would just go through the barge, sinking both the first stage and the barge. Now they are taking new entrants way more seriously.
I hope this is one of those "lost in translation" things, because otherwise I fear for that group of supposed experts.
When shot with a rocket all the air leaks out of the steel barge.
Either way, the relative masses matter. It takes a lot more effort to punch a hole through something much more massive than your projectile! It doesn't make much sense that a light, nearly spent rocket stage would punch all the way through a massive barge. And even if it did, the hole still wouldn't be big enough to sink it.
Would any "expert" really believe SpaceX didn't run the numbers millions of times, and do millions of simulations to confirm they could slow it down before actually spending the money to buy and outfit drone ships, build landing legs onto their rockets, etc. etc. ?
I mean, honestly, while the devil is in the details for an actual landing, they must have been pretty damn sure they could at least slow the thing down sufficiently.
The energy amount the rocket impacts with is dominated by its speed, not its mass. A small, fast-travelling projectile can make a hole in just about any kind of armour. The terminal velocity is quite low, but that's in part because of the way it is engineered — an ICBM would probably be able to put a hole through a ship deck with ease.
There is a lot of reasoning by analogy vs. reasoning from first principles going on, and the latter seems to be winning. But the main driver of the space industry is governmental funding, not commercial. Much of those statements were probably political; SpaceX have prevailed, and indeed found some champions of their own (John McCain is rabidly behind them, and some of the statements he comes up with are ludicrous in their own right, for example), though not before enduring some setbacks.
1/2m * v^2
While what you've said is true, in practice it isn't a problem.
If the F9 first stage is out of control and going too fast, it will almost certainly miss the barge to begin with. The barge is small, the ocean is big, and the F9 has to maneuver very precisely to reach it.
If it does reach the barge, it will likely be moving relatively slow, and thus is less likely to sink the barge, even it things go crazy at the last moment.
There are several orders of magnitude there.
Otherwise, I fear it'll be much too little, much t0o late.
(ITYM 2020)
I'm not really playing skeptic here -- SpaceX's progress has been incredible, and I'm inclined to believe them that they can do it -- but it hasn't happened yet.
http://www.wired.com/2014/10/dreamingadifferentapollo/
NASA became boring because they were ordered to become boring and were defunded.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_depth
[2] http://spaceflight101.com/spacerockets/falcon-9-v1-1-f9r/
[3] http://space.stackexchange.com/questions/8842/what-is-the-sp...
The Chinese have mentioned an effort to recover and reuse first stages by landing them with parachutes.
So far, the Russians seem to think the effort isn't worthwhile.
Closer to home, ULA's new Vulcan rocket is supposed to recover the first stage engines (but again, not the fuel tanks) using a parachute and helicopter.
It remains to be seen whether any of these schemes will work or how long they'll take. They have a lot of catching up to do in any case.
Meanwhile, SpaceX plans to launch a Mars mission in 2018.
Compared to that, Arianeespace's target of 2025 (in nine years!) for Adeline is almost ridiculous.
Just checked: Stephane Israël just raised concerned after SpaceX's latest success: http://www.lemonde.fr/economie/article/2016/05/05/face-a-spa...
Other then subsadising your own industry and for military reasons, their is no argument for making your own rockets. Both those are terrible arguments.
I mean it's not as if Ariane 6 is being built entirely by government money. It's more complicated than that. As a matter of fact, a new company Airbus Safran Launches[1] has recently been created out of the two big aerospace companies and is working mostly on Ariane 6. As I understand it, the CEO of Arianespace is calling for more initiatives like these.
It's a bit like with aerospace, when Boeing started building big airlines, European companies gathered and formed Airbus. They were not government owned but I supposed the government did intervene some way or an other considering it was a strategically crucial economic sector.
Also, whether the government funds an aerospace company is a bit blurry. SpaceX is privately owned but its major client is the government and, as Stephane Israël often complains about, they get extremely advantageous and arguably unfair contracts notably with the US military. It's kind of a government funding in disguise.
That being said, money is not the only issue here. The big thing SpaceX has is passion : since those guys think they're basically saving the world or something, they work much harder than anyone in Europe. I mean it's surely much easier for an engineer to keep working late at night when he thinks that his work will allow man to walk on mars and save the human race from extinction. That's the only way I can explain the extreme speed at which they're making progress when compared to what is done in Europe.
SpaceX actually has to do a lot of work for those government contracts, and they will lose that money if they can not diliver the capability in the required amount of time. They had to carry most devlopment cost themself and they were also always flighing comercial launches. Governemnts are 70% of the launch market, so I don't think any space company can or will live totally without government contracts.
If they can make the Ariane 6 compete within a decent price, I am not against some government contracts going to them. It makes sense not to give all contracts to one company, but Arianspace (or whoever) has to first devlop a rocket without massiv governemnt investment and show that they are in the 20% range of price. If they can not do that, their are other companies who you can go to. Sure its not fair if the rockets from china or russia are subsidised (not saying the are or ar not) but thats good for Europe because we get cheaper launches that are payed for by other governments.
I would guess that European rocket engineers are, or could be, just as passionate, and work just as hard as those in the US. But what saps the passion of engineers is bureaucracy, inefficiency and mismanagement that slows them down and interferes with their work, and by most accounts, these problems infest the aeronautical industry, on both sides of the Atlantic.
SpaceX has managed to build a company that doesn't seem to suffer from these problems. From reading Elon Musk's biography, it doesn't sound to me like the SpaceX engineers are driven by some dream of landing on Mars, even if that's Musk's goal. Rather, they just have a no-nonsense, "get stuff done" attitude. They don't spend weeks doing tests when they can get them all done in one day. They don't spend millions of dollars buying outsourced components when they can build them better and cheaper themselves. They don't thoughtlessly replicate inefficient processes because that's how it's always been done, or it's done everywhere else in the industry.
Put Elon Musk and his management staff in charge of the ESA and I bet they'd install the same no-nonsense attitude in European engineers, and it would be Ariane that was delivering reusability before everyone else. As it is, let's just hope that the example SpaceX sets eventually pays off in changes to the way NASA, the ESA, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, etc. are run.
Although I think that the big US defense contractors would rather get out of spaceflight completely than match SpaceX's costs. Because if they can, then it proves they could have done it all along, and that they've been hugely overcharging the US government for years. And if they've been overcharging for access to space, it might make congress ask questions about all the other pork-barrel military contracts they get, and why they can't deliver those cheaper as well?