Ariane-5ME (Mid Life Evolution)

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Ignoring Call for Strategic Pause, ESA Intends To Stay the Course on Ariane 6
By Peter B. de Selding | Jun. 7, 2013


ESA Launch Vehicle Director Antonio Fabrizi said the current Ariane 6 design, using two solid-fueled stages topped by a cryogenic upper stage, received the specific endorsement of ESA's governments last November and cannot simply be set aside. Credit: ESA photo
 

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PARIS — The European Space Agency (ESA) has no intention of changing course for its future Ariane 6 rocket despite pointed criticism of the sel ected design by former ESA and European industry launch-vehicle experts, ESA Launch Vehicle Director Antonio Fabrizi said June 7.
Fabrizi said the current design, using two solid-fueled stages topped by a cryogenic upper stage, received the specific endorsement of ESA's governments last November and cannot simply be set aside. He said the vehicle's final design — both a single-block first stage and a multiblock cluster are being discussed — will be settled by early July.
Once ESA and the French space agency, CNES, freeze the Ariane 6 specifications, they will issue requests for information to European industry and then more-formal requests for bids on the Ariane 6 components.
These bids will be evaluated by the end of the year. ESA then will start the delicate procedure of asking governments where the winning bidders are located to invest in the Ariane 6 in proportion to the participation of their domestic industry. A final decision on the vehicle's development would then be made at a late-2014 conference of ESA government ministers.
Europe's Air & Space Academy in May wrote to ESA Director-General Jean-Jacques Dordain urging ESA to refrain from committing to the solid-fueled Ariane 6. The academy urged ESA to take four years to craft a more-powerful liquid-fueled alternative, and in the meantime to fund the 1.5 billion euros ($2 billion) needed to complete work on an upgrade of the current Ariane 5.
The upgrade, called Ariane 5 ME, would increase the current Ariane 5's payload-carrying power with a new, reignitable upper stage.
In an interview, Fabrizi specifically rejected the academy's conclusion that a solid-fueled Ariane 6 is a dead-end technology incapable of adapting to future market conditions.
"I remember working on the Ariane 5 rocket's solid-fueled boosters in 1985 when they were 170,000 kilograms of propellant," Fabrizi said. "Then they grew to 210,000, then 230,000 and now they are 245,000 kilograms. Solid-fuel technology can evolve with the market."
Backers of the Ariane 6 solid-fueled version say the Ariane program has never had issues with its solid-propellant stages. In addition, the synergies between the solid-fueled Vega small-satellite launcher, which ESA has flown twice, and the future Ariane 6 solid-fueled design will result in economies for both vehicles.
"We have done these trade offs over the past year or so and we went to our ministers [last November] with a specific design that they approved," Fabrizi said. "We are now refining the specifics of it, but we cannot go against a design that has the endorsement of our ministers. We are moving according to plan and we are no more than a couple of weeks behind the schedule we set last November."
The Air & Space Academy's critique of the Ariane 6 as conceived by ESA and CNES included a second element: the role of Germany in Ariane 6. According to the academy, Ariane 6 will result in an upheaval of Europe's rocket-industry landscape and create fractures among ESA governments that will not be easily healed.
The academy said that, to maintain its goal of building and operating the vehicle for 70 million euros per launch, the Ariane 6 design will have to rely on only a few ESA member governments, meaning the future Ariane program will lose its broad support in Europe.
Fabrizi said Germany's likely leadership of the Ariane 6 cryogenic upper stage, plus work on the lower stages borrowing on what OHB AG's MT Aerospace does for today's Ariane 5, will enable the Ariane 6 program to promise 20-25 percent of its industrial share to Germany and ensure German backing.
Up to now, the German government and German industry have been skeptical about Ariane 6 and have focused their support on Ariane 5 ME.
Fabrizi said that 500 million to 600 million euros spent developing the Ariane 5 ME's upper stage will be directly applicable to Ariane 6 because both will use the same Vinci restartable engine and share other components even if they do not use the same fuel tanks.
As to whether ESA governments in late 2014 will have a strong enough appetite for launch vehicle development to fund both Ariane 5 ME, scheduled to fly in 2017-2018, and a 10-year, 4 billion euro Ariane 6 development program, Fabrizi said it is too soon to tell.
"For both Ariane 5 ME and Ariane 6 we still need to receive final proposals," Fabrizi said. "We will see what results from a real competition among bidders."
More immediately, he said, ESA will ask its launcher program board the week of June 17 to consider improvements to the current Ariane 5 design to permit the vehicle to maintain its ability to find pairs of telecommunications satellites to launch at the same time.
Finding a smaller commercial telecommunications satellite to fit in the Sylda compartment of Ariane 5 ECA is becoming more difficult for the Arianespace commercial launch consortium.
Fabrizi said several options, both inside the Sylda and outside it under the Ariane 5 fairing, are being considered. One is a longer fairing, which Fabrizi said is an alternative that would take a couple of years to develop and qualify. Another is an enlarged Sylda structure to house the smaller of the two satellites Ariane 5 ECA carries into orbit with each flight.
Depending on the choice made, the governments whose industry stands to benefit fr om the work will be asked to finance it.

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Europe's Rocket Designers Crafting a SpaceX Defense
By Peter B. de Selding | Jun. 19, 2013

LE BOURGET, France – Designers of Europe's Ariane 5 rocket are crafting a defense against U.S. startup rocket builder Space Exploration Technologies Corp. (SpaceX) even before the next-generation Ariane 6 rocket – itself spurred in part by SpaceX – has been approved for production.

The first line of defense is the Ariane 5 Midlife Evolution vehicle, whose new upper stage is halfway completed and awaits final approval, in late 2014, of European governments.

Ariane 5 ME will increase the current Ariane 5 ECA's payload-carrying power by about 20 percent, meaning it will carry two satellites weighing a combined 11,000 kilograms.

Alain Charmeau, president of Ariane 5 prime contractor Astrium Space Transportation, outlined Ariane 5 ME's two-pronged defense – one aimed at Russia's heavy-lift Proton rocket, Ariane 5's biggest competitor, the second aimed at SpaceX's Falcon 9 vehicle – during a June 18 briefing here at the Paris Air Show.

The upper position under the Ariane 5 ME fairing is occupied by a satellite weighing around 6,500 kilograms, which is what the current Proton vehicle carries solo into orbit on its commercial flights. Because most commercial satellite fleet operators tailor their satellites to be compatible with at least two launch vehicles, there is little incentive for rocket builders to get too far ahead of the competition in terms of satellite mass.

With the upper position in the Ariane 5 ME competing with Proton, marketed by International Launch Services of Reston, Va., it is up to the lower position to compete with Hawthorne, Calif.-based SpaceX and the upgraded Falcon 9 v1.1 rocket scheduled to make its debut this year.

The upgraded Falcon 9 is capable of carrying a 4,500-kilogram satellite into geostationary transfer orbit.

One of the Falcon 9's most potent arguments is that it is capable of carrying two all-electric-propulsion satellites at a time into geostationary transfer orbit. But according to the first customer of Boeing Space and Intelligence Systems' all-electric 702SP platform, Satmex of Mexico, it will take the Satmex satellite about eight months to reach its final orbital position and begin generating revenue.

Charmeau said Ariane 5 ME will use its re-ignitable upper stage to place an all-electric satellite into a higher orbit than what is offered by the Falcon 9, reducing the time to arrival by around two months.

Jacques Breton, commercial director of the Arianespace launch consortium of Evry, France, which operates the Ariane 5, said it is too soon to say how much closer to its final operating slot Ariane 5 ME can place a satellite compared to Falcon 9. But the idea, he said, is to take maximum use of Ariane 5 ME's extra power to minimize the amount of time needed for operators to start earning a return on their investment.

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SPACEFLIGHT Magazine VOLUME 183 NUMBER 5396, 25 JUNE-1 JULY 2013 Page 

Critical Ariane design decision looms
ESA committee considers configuration options for successful launcher's sixth incarnation, set to be revealed at end of June

The shape of Europe's next launcher will be revealed as soon as end-June, with the selection of the configuration of the Ariane 6 rocket.
The European Space Agency's industrial policy committee is choosing between a variety of solid-fuel stage arrangements, in a bid to replace the Ariane 5 heavy lifter with a less-expensive and more flexible – but equally reliable – alternative for flight from the early 2020s.
Speaking at the Paris air show, ESA director general Jean-Jacques Dordain said the move to solid fuel – rather than the liquid hydrogen and oxygen liquid motors that power Ariane 5 – represents a 10-year technology selection process.
Ariane 6, approved for development by ESA member state space and industry ministers in a five-year budget deal set in November 2012, is a bid to maintain Europe's leading position in 
launches of big telecommunications satellites and other heavy payloads with a modular rocket system that allows components to be built in advance, stored and assembled as needed. Today,
each Ariane 5 must be tailormade for a specific payload.
Separately, Alain Charmeau, chief executive of Ariane 5 and 6 prime contractor Astrium Space Transportation, says his key challenge is to reorganise the European space industry to develop
and deliver Ariane 6 to a target launch price of about €75 million ($100 million) – that is, to be organised to work backwards from a market-competitive price rather than set a launch price
based largely on the cost of manufacturing and development.
NASA, said Charmeau, is the inspiration for this bold bid to reconfigure the European industry.
By setting objectives rather than specifications, NASA is starting to benefit from private sector innovation. SpaceX and its Falcon 9 rocket is the most visible example.                                     
Cutting costs, adds Charmeau, is going to mean delivering vehicles with fewer people working in the supply chain. "This is the challenge," he says.

Meanwhile, Ariane 5 is being upgraded to add about a fifth to its payload capacity – to 12t. ESA's industrial policy committee will next week sign contracts to see that work through to 2017, when the so-called Midlife Extension variant is due to fly, says Dordain.
He hopes ESA member states – particularly France and Switzerland, who lead development of Ariane 5 and its payload fairing – will approve "a fairly small amount of money", about €30 million, to engineer a slightly enlarged fairing volume, to accommodate electric propulsion units for satellites inside. These represent a significant advance in satellite control, and reduce the mass of fuel that must be launched to orbit.