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Space

Europe's Major New Rocket, the Ariane 6, Is Delayed Again (arstechnica.com) 71

Posted by BeauHD from the another-day-another-delay dept.
schwit1 shares a report from Ars Technica: Europe's much-anticipated next-generation rocket, which has a roughly comparable lift capacity to SpaceX's Falcon 9 booster, was originally due to launch before the end of 2020. The Ariane 6 rocket has subsequently been delayed a few times, but before this week the European Space Agency had been holding to a debut launch date before the end of this year. However, during a BBC interview on Monday, European Space Agency Director General Josef Aschbacher said the rocket would not fly until sometime in 2023.

The source said an issue with the "cryogenic connection system" had been a critical item requiring a lot of focus for development efforts and a driver of delays. However, that test was recently completed, with the cryogenic lines carrying liquefied hydrogen and oxygen to the Ariane 6 rocket right up until liftoff, demonstrating a successful release at the correct moment. Due to development issues, other critical tests have been long-delayed as well, such as a hot-fire test of the rocket's second stage, which features a single Vinci engine. The official said he expected the second stage test to occur soon at Lampoldshausen, Germany.

As is often the case, European Space Agency officials and the rocket's developer, Ariane Group, are also struggling to complete ground systems and flight software. "It's the ground systems coming together with the launcher, and they need to talk to each other in a very accurate way," the official said. "This is a source of challenge in every launcher development." The official declined to provide a new, specific launch target for Ariane 6's debut flight. (A separate source has told Ars the working date is no earlier than April 2023). The new launch target is expected to be revealed on July 13 during a joint news conference with European space officials. Meanwhile, SpaceX set a new reuse record after one of its Falcon 9 rockets launched for the 13th time today.
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Europe's Major New Rocket, the Ariane 6, Is Delayed Again More

Europe's Major New Rocket, the Ariane 6, Is Delayed Again

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  • Dam! (Score:3)

    by oldgraybeard ( 2939809 ) on Saturday June 18, 2022 @02:03AM (#62630630)
    but good luck to them, we need all the launch capacity we can get.

  • Always the way with research (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    It's always "it should be available in five years."

  • Before the SpaceX fanbois start bleating (Score:5, Informative)

    by 93 Escort Wagon ( 326346 ) on Saturday June 18, 2022 @02:23AM (#62630654)

    Their current Ariane 5 was the vehicle for that great James Webb Space Telescope launch.

    • So? My great-great grandpa traveled around in a horse-drawn carriage. I shouldn't use a car?

      • A little respect for your grandfather please. Thanks to his patience and hard work with a horse and carriage he made it possible for you to buy a car. If the guy wants to buy one last carriage, let it be. Donâ(TM)t make fun of him for not buying a tesla. Go on a roadtrip together. Learn his ways. Youâ(TM)ll be surprised how applicable this is in modern times.

        • A little respect for your grandfather please. Thanks to his patience and hard work with a horse and carriage he made it possible for you to buy a car.

          Nah, he was a layabout who won the carriage in a poker game, and he only used it to visit lonely widows on alternate sundays.

    • Webb was designed to launch on Ariane 5 from the start as a strategy to secure European funding. Your statement is irrelevant to the merits or demerits of Ariane launchers.

    • Interesting though that all of the EU's governments and combined efforts struggle to compete with a privately owned company. Ariane 6 will likely be obsolete/outclassed either by the time it launches or very soon after.

      https://www.inverse.com/innova... [inverse.com]

  • Resue (Score:5, Interesting)

    by EnsilZah ( 575600 ) <EnsilZahNO@SPAMGmail.com> on Saturday June 18, 2022 @02:27AM (#62630658)

    And they're not even thinking about reuse yet.
    They're just going to build one for each flight and then dump it in the ocean while SpaceX already has rockets that have been reflown 12-13 times with minimal refurbishment, and they have like 16 of them waiting to be paired with a payload.
    What are they going to launch other than payloads subsidized by the EU to justify the rocket's development costs?

    • Re:Resue (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Richard_at_work ( 517087 ) on Saturday June 18, 2022 @06:04AM (#62630922)

      When you are building a space launch capability for the main reason of having an independent capability, reuse and commercial cost arent high on the overall considerations.

      SpaceX is American, and is ultimately controlled by proven-to-be fickle American politicians, and its not in the EUs interest to suddenly lose access to space because of that.

      So beating the drum about reuse and making comparisons to SpaceX is largely pointless because competing with SpaceX on a commercial basis is so very low down on the priority list for Ariane that it doesnt matter.

      • When you are building a space launch capability for the main reason of having an independent capability, reuse and commercial cost arent high on the overall considerations.

        I still have the question of just how much money is saved by refurbishing and reusing rockets.

        Not to mention, the landing of one of these things demands severe restrictions on the launch envelope. Unless we pepper the planet with landing sites, those restrictions hold.

        Spacex has an entire fleet of retrieval ships and barges, and the people required to staff them. Is that cost included in the cost of refurbishing rockets?

        I dunno. I keep asking, and it just seems to piss off the cult.

        • I still have the question of just how much money is saved by refurbishing and reusing rockets.

          Prepare to have your Cheerios pissed in:

          The company has also started attempting to recover the protective fairing that protects the satellite during launch. SpaceX first successfully recovered a fairing in 2019, and it successfully recovered 13 in 2021.

          The Ariane 6 is not reusable. It stems back to a design decision in 2014, when the space agency chose to stick with expendability. Franceâ(TM)s economy minister, Bruno Le Maire, admitted at a 2020 conference that âoein 2014 there was a fork in the road, and we didnâ(TM)t take the right path.â

          âoeWe should have made the choice of the reusable launcher,â Le Maire said. âoeWe should have had this audacity.â

          https://www.inverse.com/innova... [inverse.com]

          But that's not all:

          In January 2021, Politico reported that the Ariane 6 could launch for as little as $77 million. Thatâ(TM)s a steep discount from the $177 million price tag for the Ariane 5.

          SpaceXâ(TM)s website previously listed the cost of a Falcon 9 launch at $62 million. But CNBC noted in 2020 that the United States Air Force contracts paid around $95 million per Falcon 9 launch. SpaceX estimated the costs for each launch at around $30 million each.

          In November 2019, Musk suggested that a Starship could launch for around $2 million each. If it reaches that price point, it will be impressively competitive.

          By the way, the reason the air force (and also NASA) launches cost more is because military launches push a lot of additional requirements not asked of the typical civilian launches. So yeah, they'll be priced higher.

          Is $2 million realistic? I don't know, but considering the rocket will be completely reusable, I really doubt it would be over $10 million per launch. Actually a lot of the SpaceX offshore platforms are

          • I still have the question of just how much money is saved by refurbishing and reusing rockets.

            Prepare to have your Cheerios pissed in:

            I prefer oatmeal.

            It is amazing that the cult members cannot understand. I am not in any way, shape or form asking about how much Muskie is charging the places. I'll say this slowly.

            How

            Much

            Does

            it cost

            Spacex

            Y'all summer children have to understand that the cost to the company, is not necessarily what they are charging. It is a fairly common paractice to undercut in order to keep others out of the game until the outfit doing the undercutting is the only one left.

            Is Spacex doing this? Dunno. But

            • It is amazing that the cult members cannot understand. I am not in any way, shape or form asking about how much Muskie is charging the places. I'll say this slowly.

              It's even more amazing how you can't read, because I quoted what they said it costs them. So instead of typing slowly, just read slowly.

              Y'all summer children have to understand that the cost to the company, is not necessarily what they are charging.

              So it's a good thing I posted both then, isn't it?

              The big question is why people aren't just all shutting their operations down as the best rocket evah will be able to launch all the payloads anyone could need

              Because we've already seen this movie before:

              https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

              Although you might have already been there and back, since we've been landing on Mars in crew dragons since 2016

              No, though the ESA has yet to even get anything there besides orbiters. Or rather, they've tried a few times, but have a 0% success rate.

        • Oh and one thing I forgot:

          Spacex has an entire fleet of retrieval ships and barges, and the people required to staff them. Is that cost included in the cost of refurbishing rockets?

          Those landing ships are automated. There's nobody on board. Think about it, do you want to be anywhere near that thing when a multi-ton rocket carrying highly explosive material attempts to land on it? Yeah, neither does anybody else.

          Maybe the Europeans would like to in the name of job creation, but we don't do that here.

          • Oh and one thing I forgot:

            Spacex has an entire fleet of retrieval ships and barges, and the people required to staff them. Is that cost included in the cost of refurbishing rockets?

            Those landing ships are automated. There's nobody on board. Think about it, do you want to be anywhere near that thing when a multi-ton rocket carrying highly explosive material attempts to land on it?

            There is no human presence on the barges, the retrieval ships, and that no human is involved at all in bringing the rocket back to shore? Why isn't Musk showing everyone that technique? You would think that they'd have a video of it. I know - as a private company they don't have to. 100 percent unmanned process?

            Just pulling yer leg - I think.

            • Actually the barge itself has to be automated, even if they wanted to put somebody on board. There's no way in hell that somebody on the ship would be able to figure out where it needs to move in order to compensate for any drift that the rocket itself can't compensate for.

              Besides, I think the $30 million per launch figure has taken all of that into account already, in addition to the cost of the second stage, which they don't currently reuse. What you're talking about here would fall under the cost to refu

              • Actually the barge itself has to be automated, even if they wanted to put somebody on board. There's no way in hell that somebody on the ship would be able to figure out where it needs to move in order to compensate for any drift that the rocket itself can't compensate for.

                Besides, I think the $30 million per launch figure has taken all of that into account already, in addition to the cost of the second stage, which they don't currently reuse. What you're talking about here would fall under the cost to refurbish it.

                If they are charging 30 million for either barge or return to launch site, that should be looked into. It has to cost a lot more to send the ships out, secure the first stage and return than the other method.

      • I never said anything about EU losing access to space, I was talking about them being competitive.
        SpaceX had 31 launches (admittedly many of them were for internal use) in 2021, Ariane had 3.

        Having more, reusable, launches is advantageous in every way.
        The rocket costs are cheaper, the fixed costs of maintaining launch pads and readiness are cheaper.
        Someone still has to pay for these launches, even if it's the tax payer the cost comes out of a budget and if your rocket costs 5x to launch it means fewer launc

      • SpaceX is American, and is ultimately controlled by proven-to-be fickle American politicians, and its not in the EUs interest to suddenly lose access to space because of that.

        Wait, what happened to this mantra about how American corporations aren't accountable to anybody that Europeans and communists keep complaining about?

      • So beating the drum about reuse and making comparisons to SpaceX is largely pointless because competing with SpaceX on a commercial basis is so very low down on the priority list for Ariane that it doesnt matter.

        So they're making it both deliberately expensive and weak? Starship will not only cost way less per launch than Ariane 6, but it will also have a larger lift capacity both in terms of weight and volume.

    • And they're not even thinking about reuse yet. They're just going to build one for each flight and then dump it in the ocean while SpaceX already has rockets that have been reflown 12-13 times with minimal refurbishment, and they have like 16 of them waiting to be paired with a payload. What are they going to launch other than payloads subsidized by the EU to justify the rocket's development costs?

      So? What is the cost of refurbing a Falcon 9. Nothing? Just reload it on it's launchpad, and you can use it infinitely?

      There is a curious silence about questions of the cost. If you don't have a return to site, you have a barge in the ocean, ships to retrieve and return, and then the refurbishment costs. What do they want to be, a launch facility, or a tugboat salvage operation

      We don't use Condoms more than once.

      • As far as I know, essentially yes.
        I remember them saying a while back that they designed the rocket for minimal to no refurbishment for the first 10 flights, and I remember a comment made more recently about the rockets holding up better than they expected.
        They are privately held company so they have no obligation to report their costs to anyone, and they have no reason to.
        When they just started doing reuse they gave their customers a discount, I think it was somewhere around 40%, but now that the situation

    • ESA is mostly a jobs program. They're creating work by avoiding reuse. More employed Europeans.

      Does anybody know how they're planning on F9 lift with hydrogen? Kerosene is much more energy dense.

    • They reusable version called Ariane Next is planned for 2030. The current version Ariane 6 is supposed to work for half the cost of Ariane 5, already a great improvement, though more expensive than Falcon until Ariane Next is here.

      An annoying feature of /. is it's always we need more innovation and regulations are preventing innovation, except when it's SpaceX then it's no we don't need more innovation and competition, we need the whole world to use The One Rocket the god-on-earth Elon has made, there certa

      • And that's exactly my point.
        When Ariane 6 finally flies it won't even be competitive with the Falcon 9 of a decade ago, and maybe a decade (optimistically) from now they'll be somewhere in the ballpark of where Falcon 9 is today, when SpaceX has moved on to, and iterated on the Starship design and cut the cost by an order of magnitude.
        So the EU is letting its space program rot because they can't even take the 'risky' decision to copy what SpaceX accomplished in 2015 (Which China seems to be eager to attempt

        • But I also think it might be a good idea for Ariane to be managed by someone who doesn't think taking a decade long development cycle to try to be competitive with decade old capabilities is a reasonable expectation.
          ESA is a government agency, just like NASA.
          Obviously they have decade long cycles. No idea about what you are complaining.

      • 2030s, and being only partially reusable, will be totally obsolete by then. It is competing with the Falcon 9 which is 20 years old than it. By the 2030s Starship will be dominating. Any low end scraps will be going to Electron and Astra. And that's ignoring the fact that the Chinese will be in the reusable game by then too.

      • But in reality even assuming USA people always elect presidents friendly to EU (which we now know is not always the case, and the forecasts for next time don't look too good), there always could be disruption supply chains limiting the available capacity, and USA politicians would certainly prioritize national needs.

        Even setting national politics aside - "free speech absolutist" Musk has cancelled Tesla orders and fired workers when the people involved said things he didn't like. He is certainly fickle enough to wonder if he'd cancel a SpaceX deal over some perceived slight.

      • Yes we do need competition, which why they need to scrap both Ariane 6 and Ariane Next and work on a fully re-usable rapid-turnaround system.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by BigZee ( 769371 )
      It is worth remembering that SLS is not reusable either, despite being made up from components that were previously reusable.

  • How are these other launch providers still able to produce "new" launch systems without reuse in mind?

  • Stop making non-reusable rockets you idiots!!!

  • Clicking that annoying box is very annoying. Marginally more annoying than the slash dot lameness filter--this post triggered the warning

  • At this rate it’s going to be a hot race between Ariane 6 and SLS, so see which one gets launched first. At the same time Ariane 6 still feels more relevant than SLS.

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