Main Engine Cut Off - T+12: The Competition of Reusability Between Falcon 9, Vulcan, and Ariane 6

Episode Date: July 13, 2016

Ted Cruz called a hearing on NASA’s space exploration policy in the next president’s administration. The president of France’s CNES discussed some policy statements, and I went on a rant about his thoughts on Ariane 6 and its competition. Cruz Calls Hearing on Future of Space Under New Administration - Main Engine Cut Off Cruz Calls Hearing on Future of Space Under New Administration - Press Releases - U.S. Senate Committee On Commerce, Science, & Transportation U.S. Senate Committee On Commerce, Science, & Transportation France’s CNES Backs Space Station, Hedges Bets on Reusable Rockets - Main Engine Cut Off France’s CNES backs space station, hedges bets on reusable rockets - SpaceNews.com Meet Adeline, Airbus’ Answer To SpaceX Reusability - SpaceNews.com Email feedback to [e-mail] Follow @WeHaveMECO Support Main Engine Cut Off on Patreon

We had a bit of a slow week this week in terms of spaceflight news and events and things that are going on that are interesting enough to bring up on the show. We do have a bit of France news regarding their space policy, which we'll talk about at the end of this show, or at least the second half of this show. But I do want to bring up something that's happening this week and kind of foreshadow what might happen in that event. So on Wednesday, July 13th, which is the day that this show will be posted live, this is happening in the afternoon. I post these shows in the morning, so unfortunately I can't get this in to this week's show, but I'm sure it'll come up on next week's show. But Ted Cruz called a hearing in the U.S. Senate regarding NASA's space exploration initiatives in the future, specifically in

the next administration. And I posted about this earlier this week on the blog over at mainenginecutoff.com, but let me just read a piece from the press release about the hearing to let you know what this will be like. The hearing will focus on the importance of ensuring consistency in policy to best leverage investments made in human space exploration. The hearing will also explore questions facing the agency related to the upcoming presidential transition. Now I'm going to get back to the description in a second after you hear who are the witnesses that are going to be at this hearing so you understand who's going to be there talking about these topics. And there are four listed in the

press release. The first one is William H. Gerstenmaier, who is the Associate Administrator for Human Space Exploration and Operations at NASA. Dr. Mary Lynn Dittmar, who is the Executive Director for the Coalition for Deep Space Exploration. Mike Gold, who is the Vice President of Washington Operations of Space Systems Laurel, and Mike Sarangelo, who we talked about last week, who is the Vice President of Space Systems at Sierra Nevada. So really, this is just vested interests all the way down in this hearing. These are four representatives who are deeply tied into the current roadmap for NASA, people that have very long-lasting ties to the old space way of thinking. You know,

you've got William Gerstenmaier, who's been leading that group at NASA, who's working on the SLS and Orion programs. Mary Lynn Dittmar runs the Coalition for Deep Space Exploration, which is a lobbying group. Their founding members are Aerojet Rocketdyne, Orbital ATK, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and Northrop Grumman. So just from that list alone, you can kind of get a sense for what she might say in this hearing coming up. Mike Gold, who I said is a vice president at Spacesystem Laurel, they actually received a NASA contract to study using one of their own satellite buses as the base for the asteroid redirect mission. So they have a vested interest in making sure that that mission happens, even though it's completely irrelevant to getting to Mars, especially on a tight timeline.

And Mark Serangelo, who is the vice president of space systems at Sierra Nevada, that's a very old space type company. They have a lot of ties throughout the industry. The Dream Chaser division is a little bit different since that was something they acquired separately. So that's kind of got its own way of thinking. But the rest of Sierra Nevada is very much an old way of thinking about spaceflight. So just to go back to that description, now that we understand, you know, the witnesses here are all people from these vested interests, no one from outside that box, no one that would bring a different perspective on NASA's current plans. Reading that description again, all you can hear is, you know, this hearing

is about maintaining the status quo. You know, the hearing will focus on the importance of ensuring consistency in policy to best leverage investments made. So it's really about, you know, in honesty, sunk cost fallacy, which is, well, we've already spent this many billion dollars on this program that's in a lot of ways kind of faltering for its future. So this to me reads like it's going to be a hearing filled with spin and politicking to kind of convince the next Congress and the next president that these programs should stick around and that we should have consistency. And really it's to avoid another Augustine committee-like incident where the new president comes in, they get a transition team who assesses all of NASA programs. They look at this one in particular, they decide that that's not going in the best direction. So let's cancel it and start over. And then the cycle repeats.

And that's kind of where we've been at for a couple decades now at this point. We've kind of just been on this hamster wheel, repeating the same mistakes over and over again. So it'll be interesting what this hearing shakes out to be. I can't really see this subcommittee putting these people on blast and talking about, you know, issues in these programs. I think it'll more be them doing politicking to reassure, you know, everybody that this is the program we want, especially considering that the Senate and the Congress as a whole is the one who kind of rammed through the SLS program and things related to that. So this will be interesting to watch for sure. We'll break it down next week on the show, because I'm sure there'll be some things that come out of it that are interesting enough. But

just kind of wanted to give you a heads up that this is going on. So if you're hearing this on Wednesday morning, the hearing will take place on Wednesday afternoon at 2.30 Eastern, and you can watch it on senate.gov or something like that. I'll post the live stream link in the show notes. I would keep an eye on this for sure, and we will talk about it more in the future. Switching over to that news out of France that I mentioned at the beginning of the show, and this is something else that I did post about on the blog this past week. So if you haven't checked out the blog yet and you are listening to this show, I would highly recommend going over to mainenginecutoff.com. I think you'll really enjoy what I'm posting on the blog every day.

But this news out of France is regarding their space policy. So CNES, which is the space agency of France, updated their policy statements back on July 8th. And their president gave a bit of a press conference to talk about some of the things that they updated in that policy. The first bit that I don't really have much to say about just kind of updating and following up on what we've talked about in the past regarding the International Space Station is that France itself, they've decided that they are willing to support the ISS to 2024, which ESA as a whole has not committed to yet. They are committed to 2020, even though there's a little bit of wrangling around that and kind

of a little bit of wrestling over that policy itself. But they haven't yet approved the extension to 2024 like the US and Russia have. And Canada has done the same. We're still waiting on ESA and JAXA. Other than that, everyone's all in for 2024. And France has said that they are in as well. They wanted to be synced up with what Germany felt about this since they are two big players in Issa. But France has went ahead and said that they're going to go into 2024. I'm not sure if that means, you know, if Issa's out, if they're still in, or how that works, really. They haven't really made that part clear yet. But they themselves feel comfortable going to 2024 with the ISS, which is something we talked about over the past few weeks, where the ESA seemed up in the air about ISS first projects

towards the moon or with China or whatever else may come about. But at least on the France side of things, they are committed to that and they are willing to do that. So that's pretty interesting to see that bit of politicking happen on their side. And then you continue to go on about Ariane 6, which is the next generation launch vehicle that they're working on that would replace the Ariane 5 that's flying right now. This is something that they expect to bring about a lot of cost savings over the expensive Ariane 5 right now. So as of right now, Ariane 6 is set to fly in 2020. The cost targets for the bigger version of Ariane 6 would be about 90 million euros per launch. The smaller version of Ariane 6 would be about 75 million euros. And just to give you a

bit of idea of what that cost is like in, is like in relation to the other launch vehicles we've been talking about for a while, that's anywhere between $82 million and $100 million US dollars. So that's in the upper ranges of SpaceX's prices. The Falcon Heavy is going to go for around $90 million before reusability kicks in at all. The Vulcan from ULA is shooting to hit $100 million per launch. We're not sure how they're going to get there yet or what their initial launches are going to be, but that is their cost target is $100 million. So that sort of seems to be the target for these older thinking companies to hit about $100 million per launch, even though companies like SpaceX and we haven't

heard yet what Blue Origin would offer, but these newer companies that are thinking about reusability and cost, they're dropping the price much, much lower than that. So it's interesting to see how each of these players are pricing themselves in the 2020s decade to battle over launches in that decade. In particular, what he went in to talk about with the ARane 6 was how it would fit into the market that it's going to be entering when it does enter service. Right now, it's targeted for 2020. So very similar timelines here in the case of Vulcan and Ariane 6. And in a lot of ways, even technically, which we'll talk about in a second, these rockets and launch vehicles as a

whole are very similar, both in how they're going to first operate and how they're going to incorporate cost savings in the future. But at least for now, he was talking about what it would be like when it enters service in 2020 and how it would compete. And, you know, this is a market that I expect to be pretty filled with reusable launch vehicles by the 2020s. But people from the Arianne players and U ULA players, people like that, are throwing a lot of shade, if you will, towards the reusable idea and saying that reusable launch vehicles haven't really achieved their goal yet. They're not really here yet. There's still a ways off to actually achieving those cost-saving goals, which is true. But to

me, that's fighting against the current a bit. So let's dive into what he said. From the Space News article on his press conference, I just want to read an excerpt here to give you some background on what was happening there. LeGault said it was not yet clear whether reusable launch vehicles would achieve their goal of further cutting launch costs. He suggested there was no urgency in developing a reusable rocket, and that the current state of Ariane 6 development has given designers more confidence that it will meet its design to cost goals. Quote, today, given the objectives for Ariane 6, it seems the vehicle will be well placed in the market. And if there is a further series of cost cuts in the market, we'll evaluate that when we see it. Now, there's a handful of things I take issue with in these

types of statements. And the first is that he's still talking about reusable launch vehicles as not yet being a thing. They're not really here yet. They haven't achieved their launch cost goals yet. They haven't completed their mission yet. And that is so true. But this is something he's been saying, you know, him and others, you know, related in a similar kind of mindset, have been saying for five years or more now where they're saying reusable launch vehicles aren't here yet because they haven't done insert the next step of the process here. Every time that SpaceX or Blue Origin or other people that are on this mission have achieved something in particular, they say, well, they've done that, but they haven't done the next part yet. And they've been saying that for so many years now

that it's starting to look pretty silly when you line up the list of things that they've been saying. Well, they haven't done that. Come back and talk to me when they've done that. And then SpaceX goes and lands a rocket stage on a barge and they come back and say, what do you think about that? And they say, well, that's great, but they haven't brought it back to their hangar yet. And then they bring it back to the hangar and they say, well, they haven't put it back on the launch pad yet. And then they've done that. Well, they haven't test fired it on the launch pad. You get my point is that this is a trend where we keep hearing from these people about they haven't done that part yet. So I think the whole thing's silly. But when you look at it, is the technical hurdle of going from recovering a full first stage to relaunching it, is that a bigger technical

hurdle than building a first stage that is capable of launching, reentering the atmosphere, guiding itself back within a meter or less of its landing target, successfully landing on an engine that is actually incapable of hovering because its thrust to weight is so high. There's just so many technical hurdles that they've already done that it's, to me, pretty silly to think they're not going to hit that next one. And in a lot of ways, just hoping that your competitors, and in this case, it's not even one competitor. You've got multiple people working on this. You've got SpaceX and Blue Origin and all these other parties working on this. And to sit there and say, well, I don't think their thing's going to work out. And I kind of hope

that it doesn't. So for now, I think we're good. That is not a valuable strategy for success to just hope that your competitor's strategy is not going to work out. You can't just put your fingers in your ear and say, la la la la la la, and hope that, you know, they're not gonna, they're not gonna do the next step like you think they are, especially after all these times where you've kind of been in the same position. So, I'm gonna get down off my soapbox now to talk about the rest of what he said, but it's just really looking silly at this point to continually be saying these things as they prove out every step of the process. And hopefully, you know, we're mere months away from the point when he relaunches, he being Elon Musk and SpaceX, relaunches one of the first stage, specifically the CRS-8 mission, first stage from that mission is going to be the one to relaunch

first. So hopefully we're going to see that in the fall. And then, you know, I'll probably go on another rant like this when LeGault goes on another rant like that that he did in the press conference. Now, to continue past my rant there for a second, he says that the vehicle itself is going to be in a good place when it enters the market. And, you know, let's give him the benefit of the doubt and say that by 2020, when Ariane 6 hopefully enters service, and the same goes for Vulcan, you can kind of interchange these launch vehicles from here forward because really the pressures that I'm talking about exist on both sides of this. Let's say that the reusability hasn't gotten there yet. They're not reflying cores yet. They haven't dropped that launch cost incredibly. You know, SpaceX has said that they want to go from $62 million for Falcon 9 launch down to $40 million or something in that range

when they start reflying cores. So let's say that hasn't happened yet by 2020. Maybe Ariane 6 is competitive at that point. You know, at the price point, that's still going to be a bit higher than Falcon 9s and should be right around Vulcans. Who knows what Blue Origin is going to do yet. But you can imagine that they'll probably be in the SpaceX range of cost since they're largely operating the same way as SpaceX. They might not be as low yet because they'll have less experience, but they're doing the same type of vertical integration, full core usability, all that kind of stuff. They have shared very similarly with SpaceX, so you can kind of assume they'll be in a

similar range. Maybe at that point, Ariane 6 and Vulcan are going to be competitive, but maybe only five years or so. You know, how long does it take for the reusability to kick in? If that hasn't kicked in by 2025 yet, something is drastically wrong in my view. So let's say that Ariane 6 has five years of competitiveness. Is that enough to support the rocket into the future? Have they given themselves a design that they can build on and that they continue cutting costs on, you know, specifically in regards to reusability? Last summer, Airbus talked about a project called Adeline, which in a lot of ways looks like the idea for Vulcan to reuse the engine block on an Ariane 6. And this is a little bit different

than Vulcan's model, but largely the same idea, where you're just going to reuse the bottom, you know, 10% of height of the rocket, which is the main engine and some of the more expensive hardware down there. In this case, the Adeline project would recover about 80% of the economic value of the first stage. So they're, again, kind of the same Vulcan idea, where they're just recovering the first stage engine because that's where the bulk of the money is. You know, there's not a lot of money in the fuel tank. It's mostly just in that engine. Now, where it differs a bit is how it works.

So the Vulcan is going to detach the engine block, and then it's going to use a HIAD, a hypersonic inflatable atmospheric decelerator. And that's kind of like a hard heat shield nose cone type of thing that flies back through the atmosphere. Once it's back through the atmosphere, pops a parachute out. The parachute on the way down gets caught by a giant helicopter, which brings it back to shore, or at least back to a barge near shore since it doesn't have enough range to get all the way back to shore. So it's going to air capture the engines and then drop it on a barge, which takes it back in, and the engines would get reused in the future. Now in the Ariane 6 case, in the case of this Adeline project, the engine block would pop off, and then it's got two little wings that it would actually fly back through the atmosphere with.

And it doesn't even have just two little wings, it has two little turboprop engines outside on the wings itself that would help fly it through the atmosphere. So kind of the same thing, but it's flying itself back to a runway, which if you ask me, that sounds like a better plan than the air capture of Vulcan's case, just because it seems like, you know, quite a big load to be slung onto a helicopter, especially, you know, something that's going to be air captured and kind of off balance. There seems to be a lot of potential issues there with that. And I'll be interested when they start testing components for that itself. But this Adeline project would fly back the engine block on two little wings and two little turbo prop engines would fly back and land

on the runway itself. So this is an idea that they've said wouldn't kick in until 2025 or 2030. So again, you can start to see how this sounds a lot like Vulcan, where it's like, you know, we're going to launch with this right now. That's liquid fuel main stage with some solid rocket boosters. It cuts our costs because we're doing things better, but we don't really get any giant cost savings until 2025, 2030, and things like that. And that is where I start to really have some issues with this approach. Because in the case of Vulcan, in the case of Ariane 6, what they're saying is, we're fine right now. We don't have enough energy to focus on reusability starting now, even though we may already be five to 10 years behind our competitors. But we do have

this plan. Here's our plan. Doesn't it sound good? It sounds like it would work out, right? It's mostly lip service at this point from what we can see on the outside. It's mostly lip service about, you know, here's what we would do to cut costs in the 2025 to 2030 range. But the issue becomes, you know, how are you going to get there from here? In SpaceX's case, you know, they live by that mantra, fly as you test, test as you fly. They're doing things on every mission. So they've got a mission to launch something up to Leo. They were doing re-entry tests and landing on the ocean tests way, way early on before they started trying to come back to land or come back to a barge.

They're doing these tests as they fly. And they're building up this expertise, technical expertise and operational expertise as they fly. And they're building up this expertise, technical expertise and operational expertise as they fly. They're kind of doing these missions that are not the primary critical mission. They're doing these sub missions to test out different components that they would need in the future. So what you really need to see from Ariane 6 and Vulcan, if these things are going to come about ever, they need to start flying these tests on the earliest missions of these rockets. So if the first couple missions of Vulcan do not include any bit of component test for the eventual reusability, and the same goes for Ariane 6, if those early test flights or even early operational flights don't include any components

of the things that we need for reusability, I start to not really believe that they're ever going to work on that. The reason I say that is, how are they going to stay competitive through that critical five to 10 year phase where they need to be testing these components and flying the components and getting themselves to reusability? How are they going to stay competitive over that course of a couple years as SpaceX is implementing reusability? Again, let's say that the reusability of SpaceX and Blue Origin don't kick in until 2023, 2024, sometime in there. Then those cost savings come. You know, Ariane 6 and Vulcan would sign their first couple contracts for launches from 2020 to 2025, and that's fine. But then SpaceX or Blue Origin kicks in reusability, and launch costs come way down,

and Ariane 6 and Vulcan are not able to compete at the point in time when they would start building in that reusability into their launch vehicle. So if you get what I'm saying here, they're kind of putting themselves in an odd spot where they need to be able to maintain competitiveness through their development and test program of their reusability ideas before they can even introduce those costs. So they're putting themselves in a bit of a pickle where they have to get through a very critical five to 10 year phase where they're developing and testing these components. But I'm not sure they're going to be able to do that when you have so much pressure from SpaceX, Blue Origin, you know, who knows what

Rocket Lab or Firefly is going to do in the future in terms of what kind of payloads are getting flown. So it's just putting themselves in quite a tough spot 10 years from now where they just are going to need a different kind of flight rate and different kind of flight rate to test components and prove out components of this reusability plan if they want to even see that light of day for their reusability plans and their cost savings eventually. even see that light of day for their reusability plans and their cost savings eventually. So this might be my rantiest episode yet, but really this is something that I care a lot about where, you know, I don't like just hearing this lip service towards reusability or cost savings or things like that when you don't really have a viable plan to get it into the things that you're doing day to day. And I'm much more in favor of the side of SpaceX and Blue Origin where they're saying, you know, we're going to fly, we're going to test, we're going to do it all at the same time, and we're going to build up to our ultimate vision,

rather than saying, let's do this thing now and then focus on the next thing, when you really haven't thought out how you're going to maintain competitiveness and relevance through that whole program. If you've got any feedback on any of what I've been talking about today, if you want to talk about the economics of reusability or the roadmap for Ariane 6 or Vulcan or Falcon 9 or any of these things, I would love to hear your feedback. Anthony at mainenginecutoff.com is the email address if you've got longer form content. If you've got shorter form content, I would love to hear it on Twitter at WeHaveMiko. And I would suggest following up that Twitter account since I've been posting a lot there, specifically from the blog content over at

MainEngineCutoff.com. And lastly, I just want to mention Patreon real quick, which I talked about last week, but I want to bring it up again here to remind you. Over at Patreon.com slash Miko, and the link will be in the show notes, you can help support the blog and the podcast over on Patreon. I'm doing this direct support model where you support me if you get enough value out of the show. You can throw a little back my way. And this is an attempt to keep the show independent because I've seen too many spaceflight blogs or podcasts get advertising from a contractor or a company, which then taints their opinion and their ability to say anything about that company. So, you know, if Arianne Space kicked in some advertising for the show, I don't know

that I would have went on such a long rant about Arianne Six there. Or if ULA sponsored the show, I don't know if I would say that the Vulcan Rocket looks like an Evel Knievel terrible outfit. So, you know, I want to be able to say those things. I want to stay independent. So please help support the show over at patreon.com slash Miko. Thank you. And I will talk to you next week.