France’s Prometheus reusable engine becomes ESA project, gets funding boost | Hacker News Reader

France’s Prometheus reusable engine becomes ESA project, gets funding boost

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41 pointsnolok22 comments

What cycle is this? So far as I know ESA never developed staged cycle but I can't find any information. A methane engine that is open-cycle will have hard time being the bases of a reusable booster.

SpaceX is of course building a full-flow stage cycle, while BlueOrigin is building a ox-rich stage cycle.

BlueOrigin will have the biggest, but SpaceX is building the most advanced engine.

it's pretty crazy to think that the ESA is so far behind SpaceX that they are starting research on a 'me-too' reusable engine while SpaceX has tested, deployed, and proven theirs for over a year. SpaceX was working on this engine 10 years ago; in the time that it may take ESA to deploy the engine (let's give them 5 years opportunistically assuming they can learn from SpaceX, and cut through bureaucracy) SpaceX will have done 1000 launches of the same class of engine.

What's crazier is that they are following up with their "next gen" launcher (Ariane 6).

The fact that they can't swallow their pride and start focusing 100% on re-usable rockets is going to cost europeans billions.

it's distressingly easy to spend other peoples' money on an exercise in saving face.

Or maybe having been working on rockets for decades they have good insights about what is valuable or not. And reusable stages still has to prove to be worth it and not just a gimmick. As you like to say, market will solve it all.

To address the argument from authority, the presumption there is that the existing expertise has been self selected by a rational and efficient market, which in the government contracting sphere is very much not necessarily rational, and I think you'd have a hard time finding an efficient market anywhere.

It's pretty clear that from first principles, reusable rockets are a win[0]. The question of actualizing those principles can only be assessed by actually doing it, and is likely to be highly empirical. Unless there have been secret launches we don't know about, the ESA cannot possibly have good insight about whether or not it's valuable.

[0] then why haven't they done it yet? As a constrained market, none of the contractors who normally build rockets have had to yet. Moreover, I presume a lot of the computational engineering would not have been so easy 10-20 years ago, much less in a large contracting company with established folkways.

I agree with what you're saying and I'd also like to add that SpaceX could have failed. Based on the evidence available in 2002 there was no reason to think that reusable rockets were necessarily going to work.

Musk is a gambler, and this time he won, but other times he has failed. The reason he can gamble is because SpaceX is funded by private money.

So you are saying there is no proof that blowing up a super expensive rocket booster is less affordable than reusing it?

I was going to drive my car to work tomorrow, but now I’m thinking of setting it on fire and buying a new one. You know, to save money.

ESA had a slower pace of innovation, somehow on purpose. They chose risk avoidance above anything else. Now for sure Musk and his friends kicked the tree quite hard .. but it's not really a sad thing that ESA was lagging behind.

The argument that 'reusable is not proven' simply does not fly anymore. Multiple commercial reuses, no indication of any plan chances, NASA and Air force have looked at it and find no issue with it.

Markets will only solve it if government does not stop it. If Ariane had to compete on the commercial market only they could already not compete. If Ariane 6 had to actually earn its own development cost they could not even build it.

That's the joy of multinational bureaucraties where old people will do anything to stop young people's ideas to keep their cushy place.

They will absolutely not deploy it in 5 years. They need a rocket to fly an engine and the Ariane 6 will only use it. The next rocket after the Ariane 6 is many, many years away.

> The Prometheus program is making extensive use of new technologies and production methods, including 3-D printing [...]

Mmmh... Since when is 3D printing a production method instead of a prototyping one? I'm kind of annoyed that people feel the need that something is MADE WITH 3D PRINTERS!!! in everything nowadays. I can't see how cheap ABS / PLA plastic would fit in a rocket engine.

Industrial 3D metal printing is a real thing. SpaceX is using it for parts of their Super Draco engines.

> Since when is 3D printing a production method instead of a prototyping one?

When you have horrifically expensive, complicated, low-volume parts.

In addition, 3D printing can do some amazing things for things that have weird liquid flows (like rocket engines) because they don't have any seams when printed vs machined/stamped/cast.

Airbus 3d prints titanium parts for its production aircraft [0]. It's cheaper than subtractive manufacturing, as there's no material wastage. You can 3d print metal, ceramics, or plastic. You can 3d print practically anything, not just plastic.

[0]: http://www.airbus.com/newsroom/press-releases/en/2017/09/fir...

You can print parts with geometries that would be very expensive or even impossible to machine.

What's really a shame is SpaceX is going to have to compete with these massive government programs while SpaceX created their own program from scratch with private investors.

How is this fair? Sure DOD and NASA are customers but SpaceX financed their advancements and had to convince the US government to use their platform with successful launches.

This sounds similar to Airbus's support. Why is this allowed. US intelligence should be sabotaging these free market cheaters. Europe is acting like China, where the government is financially supporting major industries competing with the US. I will call it what it is. Economic Warfare. Maybe more aptly Economic Welfare Warfare.

If the EU wants to subsidize US satellite companies by paying part of the launch cost (which is what you are accusing them of) I don't see why the US should consider that a negative, let alone sabotage them.

You may want to learn about Boeing and how the US intelligence agencies are used for US industrial interests. And have been for decades.

SpaceX got money from the US taxpayer. It wasn't a lot by the standard of rocket development, and Musk put in a lot of his own money, but SpaceX wouldn't have survived without the government. Elon Musk is very up front about that.

Boeing gets a lot of support from various levels of government as well. They get cushy tax deals at the state and local level. And what is a virtually-guaranteed military contract for cargo and tanker aircraft worth when you're developing a new air frame?

SpaceX was awarded $1.6 billion for 12 cargo missions 10 years ago. Given their current pricing, that sounds a lot like public investment...

The model is simply different in Europe where public money funds most of the development costs: market size is smaller in Europe (compared to US institutional market for example), geographic return makes things more complicated and it is of course all about independent space access.

Finally, all US institutional satellites must be launched on American launchers ("Buy American Act"), which is not the case in Europe. Free market, were you saying?

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