Armchair engineering

Recent Ariane 6 concept. Credit: CNES The launch vehicle market is rapidly evolving. While Europe has been in a comfortable position over the past 20 years, with Ariane 4 and later 5 dominating the commercial launch market, this has been changing over the past few years. First the Russian Proton rocket took the market by storm, capturing a large part of the market, now emerging launch vehicles from China, India and new commercial ventures like SpaceX are posing a threat to Europe's lead in the commercial market. While Ariane 5 has so far had little trouble keeping up with Proton, this has always required a significant amount of government subsidies. Currently, an Ariane 5 costs about €150 millions for 10 tons to a Geostationary Transfer Orbit, and receives on average €120 million in subsidies per year. For comparison, a Proton costs less than €80 million per launch with a payload of 6.5 tons. In addition to this, Ariane 5 launches two satellites at a time, one big one (in the

If we ever want to make space exploration affordable, we'll have to get some kind of "Highway" between destinations, to make transportation between those destinations safe and affordable. One of the first destinations that might be of use here is the moon; it's an easy to reach destination, being close home, and has a lot of value scientifically, for further development of our exploration capabilities and possibly even economically (I generally consider lunar/asteroid resources to make money humbug, but still something to keep in mind). Establishing a "highway" between the Earth and the moon would be vital to make visits to the moon affordable, and lately I've been contemplating how it might be done. The main focus in this blog will be European launchers and hardware, as my original focus was designing a European lunar architecture that could be achieved with existing or near-term launch vehicles.  Like last time, the European Ariane 5 and 6  launche

With the successful landing of Chang'e 3, the attention of the world's spaceflight enthusiasts and experts alike once again turns towards the moon. These things spawn up discussions about why we should go to the moon, whether there is economical benefit to it, or about the "new space race", as well as the usual complaining about NASA's lack of productivity or that those damn commies is taking muh spaceflight. And to be honest, when these things happen, I can't help but feel a slight annoyance. Many of these things are based upon false premises, or people who live in the 1960's, or general ignorance of spaceflight that results in xenophobia, anti-americanism, armchair experts (I'm being a little bit of a hypocrite here, I'll admit that) schooling others like it's their job and nationalist slapfights.  Lunar resources Something I've seen so many times lately is that we can use lunar resources to pay off our debt, make fusion attainabl

In previous blogs of mine, I wrote about how I wish NASA would stick with Block 1 instead of continuing development of SLS after EM-1. The reasons for this are simple; development is expensive. If SLS Block 1 was to be NASA's new main launcher, it would save billions in development cost, while at the same time giving a very capable 90 ton launch vehicle that can take whatever we throw at it. However, I changed my mind somewhat. I have given the option of going straight toward Block 2 as our main exploration launcher, instead of sticking with Block 1 or 1A, a chance in my mind. There are many advantages to doing this, and I'll explain myself here. Advantages of Block 2 #1: Block 2 doesn't have to be so expensive to develop. The current path baselined by NASA is expensive, but it doesn't have to be. The current one has the following order of upgrades: 1. Develop new boosters for SLS, either advanced solid or liquid; increases payload to >105 tons.j 2. Dev

NASA's current focus is exploration, and for exploration of anything, you will need some kind of infrastructure, whether the goal is the moon, asteroids, or Mars. NASA is currently working on two vehicles that are supposed to provide the foundation of all exploration architectures for the coming decades: the Space Launch System and the Orion crew vehicle. These two vehicles are very useful for building a deep-space architecture, but they aren't guaranteed a future, especially with sequestration and other political nonsense lately putting many big NASA projects in danger. And at $1 billion and $1.4 billion annual for Orion and SLS respectively, they are some of the biggest projects around. Therefore, it's always necessary to hold some backup plan around in case Congress goes nuclear on NASA's budget. Here I present an plan that might be part of such a backup plan, that could get humans to places in a more budget constrained environment.  Delta IV launch vehicle T

Lunar exploration has always been a huge interest of mine. The moon is our closest neighbor and could teach us tremendous amounts about the history of our solar system and our planet. It could also function as a place to gather resources to explore further into the solar system. In short, there's plenty of reason to go there, but how? Many earlier plans to got there have yielded nothing but powerpoints and pretty animations. Getting there in a low-cost manner would be critical. (For info on the plan discussed, scroll to the bottom.) Constellation: How not to go there The Constellation program was initiated by NASA as part of Bush's Vision for Space Exploration policy in 2005. It had the goal to return Americans to the moon by 2020 and give America independent manned access to space by 2014 after the Shuttle's retirement in 2010. However, the way they wished to accomplish this was doomed to fail from the beginning.  The first fatal flaw of the program was the w