Armchair engineering

Postage stamp sized picture of what some dude on NSF thinks the BFR family might possibly look like.  Some time ago, I drew up some napkin level concepts to look at what a SpaceX super heavy lift vehicle could look like. These concepts were based on what we knew about Raptor (1 million pounds of thrust, 380s vac isp) as well as Falcon 9 figures. However, in the meantime, new figures have been coming out further expanding on what we know about Raptor. Also, the original scratchings did not assume reusability, even though that is undoubtedly something this BFR will have to be capable of being, if they ever wish to colonize Mars without government support. Disclaimer: All "tons" are metric tons in here. Also, all these figures are estimates. While the figures are given as specific, one should take them with a grain of salt, and remember they're estimates. Creating a "reference vehicle" First, a starting point from which we can expand on the concept. As a...

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...