ESA Unveils Re-Entry Module

bmcage writes "The ESA unveiled the Intermediate eXperimental Vehicle, a real re-entry vehicle. Although it will not be reused, it has a better geometry than NASA's Orion or the Russian Soyuz, giving better lift, and control. This is not done by the addition of useless wings, but by using two brakes. Finally a departure from the Apollo design that is actually better?"

Looks like a penguin

Also penguins rely on better geometry and not on useless wings!

Re:Looks like a penguin

So, it's like Yet Another Tuxracer fork, but in space?

FYI

> it has a better geometry than NASA's Orion or the Russian Soyuz, giving better lift, and control. This is not done by the addition of useless wings, but by using two brakes.

In case you're interested: The brakes are controlled separately. One applies to the front directing cilindrical sustainer, the other to the rear main power.

The optimal braking is then executed applying the force in a 3/7 proportion, to avoid unnecessary drifting.

Further investigations are studying the possibility of changing the current power source. So the astronauts don't get so tired.

It's a lifting body

Bmcage needs to look into what lifting bodies are -- they do not need wings.

Wings were added to the shuttle to respond to the the USAF's crossrange requirements & some of the early shuttle plans looked a lot like this.

Re:It's a lifting body

Pretty much. And frankly wings are not that heavy. The shuttle didn't just have a very large crossrange requirement but also a huge bring back capability.
The Shuttle is capable of bringing the Hubble back to be worked on if needed. In fact the plan was for the Shuttle to bring back the Hubble so it could sit in a museum when it's life is over.
It is a capability that has never really been used except for the SpaceLab flights.
Frankly the Shuttle was an attempt to jump from the Wright Flyer to a 707. We really needed to build a Ford Trimotor and a DC-3 first.

Re:It's a lifting body

Frankly the Shuttle was an attempt to jump from the Wright Flyer to a 707. We really needed to build a Ford Trimotor and a DC-3 first.

apt summary. Now that we have the Shuttle experience, however, can we skip the Trimotor and go for the DC-3. They were pretty damn reliable and some are still in use today...

Re:

[Shuttle bring back] is a capability that has never really been used except for the SpaceLab flights.

Also, there was the Long Duration Exposure Facility. [wikipedia.org] It taught us a lot of what we know about how materials react to the space environment.

Regardless of what I think of the shuttle, LDEF was Good Science.

Re:

Bmcage needs to look into what lifting bodies are

Those things that almost killed Steve Austin?

Thoughts

I know it's an experimental craft, but there doesn't seem to be much room left over for a crew. It looks like the parachutes take up one third of the vehicle.

It kinda reminds me of a cross between an X-37 [wikipedia.org] and an X-38. [wikipedia.org] Mostly the X-38.

It doesn't seem to have enough control surfaces or reaction control devices.

Re:Thoughts

Mostly it is a testbed of the design and aeronautical controls. Looking at the movie's many exploded and shaded CAD views (nice touch, guys), it appears to have no cargo space whatsoever. It doesn't look to me like that's what they have in mind - they just want to show that the flight fundamentals of the design are sound. They can work on building a larger one for cargo and/or humans if they manage this first significant milestone.

Re:

There also doesn't appear to be any redundancy, which has long been a design contention in the US and Russian schools of thoughts. I don't know where the ESA is, philosophically, on this issue. But, the absense of thrusters in the nose leaves few options if the brakes fail or are damaged.

Re:Thoughts

There also doesn't appear to be any redundancy, which has long been a design contention in the US and Russian schools of thoughts. I don't know where the ESA is, philosophically, on this issue.

This is easy: ESA has designed and is building and flying the most redundant and fault-tolerant unmanned spacecraft ever seen on this small planet: the ATV [esa.int].

In an extreme case these things are able of successfully completing their missions with half of the solar panels and fuel tanks and 2/3 of everything else (including computers, antennas, sensors, fuel lines, thrusters, actuators, electrical lines, etc...) completely damaged. Of course this is theoretical, since they would abort the mission in these circumstances, to keep the ISS safe. But still as demonstrated by the first ATV, the Jules Verne, they can successfully complete a mission with any single failure in any subsystem except the main fuel tanks.

But, the absense of thrusters in the nose leaves few options if the brakes fail or are damaged.

Hmm... I'm not a rocket scientist, but you seem to know even less than me about this. Anyway this is only a technology demonstrator and one-time test.

Re:

It appears to be a scaled down test bed. The "full size" manned version will undoubtedly be much larger.

Finally?

"A REAL re-entry vehicle" (that exists only on paper)? "Finally?" "Useless wings?"

Good grief, who writes this stuff anymore? I'm sure ESA's ideas are interesting and innovative, but making this out to be the savior of the manned space program is a bit facetious to say the least.

Is it not essentially a lifting body (in spite of some new ideas)? NASA pioneered this concept, which was intended to be applied to reentry vehicles at some point. The concept was most recently expressed in the X38B crew return v

ESA?

Re-entry vehicle? Getting a little far away from our core competencies are we, the ESA? Oh... we're not talking about videogames. [theesa.com]

Gemini

looks like they are taking a step backwards to a more Gemini/lifting body approach.
i've always thought that was a better configuration, but it's hardly new.

i like it.
i think they should have taken that path with Orion.

Re-entrant?

So that means it's thread safe?

Re:Trollish Summary

By doing things like using useless wings to get up to altitude before launch thus requiring less propellant.

No, that doesn't work. The cheapest part of a spacecraft is its propellants, second cheapest is the propellant tanks, third cheapest is to buy or design a bigger engine at the start of the design process (kind of difficult later on in the development cycle). The most expensive part of a spacecraft is systems integration, and adding wings and horizontal flight is hard to integrate. The aerodynamics of ultra high speed wings is a huge pain, and simply isn't needed, so why bother.

You are probably not aware of the 666 rule... Not to keep you in suspense, mach 6 at 60,000 feet (thats 20 kilometers in the civilized world) is a whopping 6% of total orbital energy. An impossible speed at an impossible altitude provides practically no advantage over a simpler ballistic design with tanks that are about 1/20th bigger. Most people have the peculiar idea that a civilian airliner at cruise is "almost in orbit" and the slightest push is all that is needed for a 747 to reach the ISS, and that couldn't be further from the truth.

Making an airplane that flies at mach 6 and 60Kft is no laughing matter, and then making it also a spacecraft is simply unrealistic. On the other hand making the fuel tanks a bit larger is no big deal.

There are three advantages to air launch that apply in almost no situations. One is the obvious lack of ground support, don't need to license a "spaceport" just another airport, however the EPA, FAA, USAF, NORAD, BATF, etc are going to harass you just the same anyway so this is again another way to get a small advantage at a huge cost. I guess Rutan and friends thought it was worth it, but thats a regulation and political decision not a technological decision. The other advantage is for military purposes you can assume a large fleet of aircraft could simultaneously launch an even larger number of rocket vehicles from anywhere an airplane can fly, possibly at great surprise to the enemy, this is the nuclear tipped cruise missile idea applied to a suborbital ballistic trajectory, which isn't such a bad idea but never got much traction, at least in the USA. Maybe Rutan daydreamed of selling hundreds of his vehicles to the USAF for recon purposes or something. There is a third reason to airlaunch, if you're basically making a circus carnival ride as opposed to a real vehicle, then air launch makes the roller coaster ride even more spectacular.

Re:

You should also add that air launch is inherently reusable, that its cost is dramatically lower, that the carrier vehicle does not degrade in operation and could be ready for the next launch immediately, that in the event of post-detach launch failure the carrier provides observer and pursuit capability without extra air deployments, and possibly most important, that most of the dense atmospheric stresses are bypassed so everything can be lighter.

None of these things are proven, and most of them depend on the details of the system chosen.

Air launch does have some significant advantages, though; most notably in the way of range safety: you don't light the rocket until you're in a clear space, well away from ground assets.

Re:

I am also concerned about the total reliance on one big honker parachute, and wonder what the vehicle's speed will be (slowed by pure air drag alone?) when that main has to deploy.

Watch the video, there's three drogues before the main cute is popped.

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You need the control to make sure your "lander" doesn't roll. You only have one side of the vehicle protected via tiles, if you expose the other side you get fried astronaut with your fire work.
In regards to the chute, weight is everything at the orbiter stage, and landing gear adds a lot of weight. And if the main chute fails, I doubt you could manually exit the vehicle in a supersonic slip stream without ejection seats (which again are way to heavy).

Re:

I must disagree. The ESA programme is designed to improve spaceflight in small steps. They try to be very cost effective. And this path has brought them the biggest market share in space cargo delivery (in form of Ariane Space).

ESA has also a Mars programme called Aurora, which includes the delivery and return of humans. But before going there, technologies have to developed which can transport objects into space and safely return them. And because the Europeans do not think they are participators in a race

Re:Too little, too late

China has launched men into space since 2003 (again in 2005 and September this year). ESA's plans for it's own manned space launches are little more than concepts at this time and would require much more funding from the European governments unless they want to cut all the robotic missions. ESA does have it's own astronauts who ride on American or Russian launchers, and ESA built and owns parts of the ISS.

IXV that this article is about is a small testing platform, not a manned spacecraft.

Re:ultimate symbol of our throw away culture

SpaceShipOne and SpaceShipTwo were purely sub-orbital; they were glorified rocket planes that didn't carry anywhere near the fuel necessary to reach orbital velocity. SpaceShipThree, on the other hand, will reach orbit, but it will almost certainly be a multi-stage craft.

And while discarding empty fuel tanks may be wasteful, it would be far more wasteful to expend the enormous amount of fuel required to carry the entire craft to orbit.

Until we find a better means of propulsion than rocket fuel, multi-stage craft are the most resource-efficient means of attaining orbit.

Re:Idle questions for in-the-know Rocket Scientist

Since it's not reusable, the fragile heat resistant tiles are not a problem. The shroud is for aerodynamic control during launch, you can see in the video that the vehicle is a lifting body; have it sit exposed on top of the rocket would give you huge off-axis forces due to drag/lift.
Single stage to orbit doesn't make sense from a fuel economy point, you need a lot of big engine at the beginning, why accelerate all that mass into orbit? Ditto on reentry, you have to bleed off all that additional energy you put in, requiring lots more of those fragile heat shield tiles.