Failure + delay, where will Europe's launch vehicle go?

Recently, the European Space Agency announced the reasons for the failure of the Vega C rocket VV22 launch, and blamed a Ukrainian-made nozzle throat assembly. Such poor quality control, coupled with the ESA president's hint that the "Ariane 6" will not be able to be launched by the end of 2023, the decline of Europe's launch vehicles is worth thinking about: Why has Europe's launch vehicles regressed to this point?

Vega C rocket's second flight "stars sink into the sea"

Vega's third defeat

With the failures of ESA's Vega launch vehicles in 2019 and 2020, Europe's space program's record of success for more than a decade was broken. The failure of VV15 directly caused a long-established insurance company to withdraw from the aerospace insurance industry, and the failure of VV17 due to the reverse insertion of the cables of the fourth-stage rocket was also incredible. Coupled with the binding error of the "Ariane 5" launch program in 2018, which resulted in the failure to send the satellite into the predetermined orbit, three accidents in just three years can't help but make people question the reliability of ESA. At that time, the "Ariane 6" and "Vega C" rockets were still aiming for their first flight at the end of 2020, but it turned out that this was just a beautiful wish.

It was not until July 2022 that the Vega C rocket VV21 made its first successful flight. But just a few months later in December 2022, when the Vega C rocket took off for the second time, the VV22 rocket launched two Pleiades-NEO high-resolution imaging satellites. The rocket took off successfully, but a serious malfunction occurred during the second stage of flight. The two satellites only reached an altitude of 110 kilometers and eventually fell into the Atlantic Ocean.

As the lead party of "Vega C", ESA announced after a six-month investigation that the problem came from Ukraine's carbon fiber nozzle throat liner. During the flight of the rocket, the defective throat liner was burned through, resulting in loss of control of the flight attitude and launch failure. Ukraine strongly refuted this conclusion, claiming that there was no problem with its products. ESA said that it would take some time to develop new materials that could replace Ukrainian products, so the resumption of the "Vega C" rocket will be postponed to 2024, and the payload of the resumption is also the extremely important "Sentinel-1C" synthetic aperture radar satellite. ESA still has two "Vega" rockets in stock, and the "Vega" VV23 rocket will be launched in late summer 2023 to barely maintain ESA's few remaining space launch activities.

In order to maintain its reputation of "independence", the European Space Agency was even unwilling to use the Falcon 9 to launch the Sentinel-1C satellite in advance (the Sentinel-1A had been retired due to a malfunction, and 1C was very urgent), but instead required the Vega C rocket to launch the satellite. This is a very risky move. So why did Europe make such a move?

A broken situation

Due to the ongoing conflict between Russia and Ukraine, the European Space Agency refused to continue using and seized the Russian-made Soyuz ST launch vehicle. The Euclid survey telescope could not be launched and has now been chosen to be launched by the Falcon 9 rocket in July 2023. OneWeb satellites were also forced to find a new launch service provider and have already launched several batches by the Falcon 9 and Indian rockets.

Ariane 6 rocket launches first full-rocket rehearsal

The first flight of the more important large-scale launch vehicle, Ariane 6, has been postponed to 2024. The last Ariane 5ECA+ rocket is scheduled to be launched on June 21, 2023. From June to September 2023, Europe will not have any launch vehicles available; from September to the end of the year, only the almost retired Vega launch vehicle can be used for launch. Therefore, Europe can hardly rely on its own launch vehicles to enter space in the near future.

At present, ESA has four launch vehicles under development and in service, including the large launch vehicle "Ariane 5ECA+" that is about to be retired and the "Ariane 6" that has not yet made its first flight; as well as the small launch vehicle "Vega C" that is currently being troubleshooted, and the medium-sized launch vehicle "Soyuz ST" whose purchase has been suspended. These launch vehicles constitute a gradient range of 2 to 20 tons of carrying capacity. Originally scheduled for its first launch in 2020, the "Ariane 6" intends to gradually accumulate reliability and reputation in early launches. After the "Ariane 5ECA+" rocket is retired in 2022-2023, if nothing unexpected happens, it will have a record of 10 successful launches, so as to perfectly replace the previous generation of rockets and put them into commercial and government launch services. However, plans always cannot keep up with changes.

In 2016, SpaceX, a private aerospace company in the United States, successfully recovered a small rocket at sea, and swept the world's commercial space launch market in the following years, sweeping away almost 80% of the commercial launch services in the market with low costs and high contract performance. In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic swept the world, causing a significant impact on space launches in various countries. The progress of Ariane 6 was first delayed due to a large number of staff infections, and then the launch site was even closed. But as time passed, the reasons for the delay of Ariane 6 became more and more inexplicable, and it was even postponed from the first quarter of 2023 to 2024 without any reason.

So far, although Ariane 6 has completed the simulated arrow joint training, its first and second stage rockets have not completed the full module static ignition test, and the completeness is unimaginably low, which is completely unlike a launch vehicle that has been developed for nearly ten years. Of course, it is not only its progress that is lagging behind, but its intended goal has become a castle in the air.

High R&D costs

Let's guess how much the Ariane 6 has cost to develop so far. 1 billion? 2 billion? How much did it cost to develop a launch vehicle that ESA touts as a low-cost rocket?

The answer is 4 billion euros, equivalent to about 30 billion yuan. If its predecessor, the Ariane 5ME, is included, it may exceed 5 billion euros. The development cost of the Vega small solid rocket was 710 million euros, and the development cost of its first-stage P80 solid rocket was 76 million euros. The general solid rocket P120C, which is also the booster of the Ariane 6 and the first stage of the Vega C rocket, has a development cost of 1 billion euros, 13 times that of the P80!

P120C solid rocket transported to the final assembly building

Remember the low cost of Ariane 6? The 62 configuration costs $75 million per launch, and the 64 configuration costs $90 million per launch, which is half of the price of the Ariane 5ECA+ rocket. However, this price requires the rocket to reach a frequency of 6 government payload launches + 3 commercial launches per year, and the price can only be reduced to this level with government subsidies. ESA originally expected that Ariane 6 would be launched at this frequency or higher until 2040-2045 before retirement, with about 200 launches.

But it is clear that Ariane 6 is currently being killed by a powerful competitor, and the so-called expected retirement year and launch frequency have all become castles in the air. On March 23, 2023, the ESA Council pointed out that Europe's share of the global commercial launch market has dropped from nearly 50% a decade ago to "almost out of the market" now. At present, there are only 30 launch orders for Ariane 6, and only one-sixth of them come from traditional commercial launch services. The rest are all government tasks. After all, no matter how difficult it is to use its own rockets, it must ensure independence. It was the traditional European satellite manufacturers and governments who tried their best to use various patent barriers to force a transfusion to Ariane 6, and barely kept these 30 orders. With the current number of orders, the launch frequency of Ariane 6 is estimated to be maintained at about 1 to 3 per year. In contrast, it is expected that the launch volume of Falcon 9 will reach 100 this year.

The cost of conservatism

If the Europeans really wanted a stronger carrying capacity, they should have further developed the Ariane 5ME rocket in 2000, developed a lower-cost process, simplified the HM-60A hydrogen-oxygen engine, etc. to reduce costs. But in fact, the Ariane 5ECA has not been changed much since then, and it is completely relying on its old capital. Because Europe has an extremely good launch site selection, the space launch site in Kourou, French Guiana is located at 4° north latitude. Launching from here into geostationary orbit can save 20% of propellant, so the complexity of the satellite can be effectively reduced. Therefore, some satellite users would rather choose a relatively expensive European launch vehicle than some cheap but problem-prone launch models.

And the ESA doesn't seem to care about technological progress and the market. In the early 2010s, the ESA was always thinking about increasing employment and investment, and did not pay much attention to market development, crisis awareness, cost reduction and efficiency improvement. Even in 2019-2020, ESA bureaucrats were still doubting the launch efficiency of the Falcon 9, and in the report they talked about how the Falcon 9 achieved such efficiency with the massive subsidies and investment of the US government. Moreover, although Europe has a large number of commercial orders, most of them come from local corporate services and government launch services, so there is still a certain degree of internal circulation. Unlike the internal circulation of launch service providers such as the United States and Russia, only Ariane is dominant in Europe. This is why there is only one launch vehicle in each capacity range in Europe, because there is no motivation for volume. Therefore, when quality control collapses and more efficient launch services appear, a series of chain events will occur.

ESA's main liquid launch vehicle technology comes from France and Germany, and solid launch vehicle technology comes from Italy. For a long time, Germany has been promoting various pure liquid rocket solutions, but it has to allocate workload to member states such as Italy, so solid boosters cannot be avoided. France supports designs with complex configurations and long production chains in order to balance Germany's influence. This is the source of the various pure solid bundled takeoff solutions that appeared in the early days of "Ariane 6". ESA's own internal contradictions are also not small. Due to the strength of many countries and the allocation and balance of resources, the configuration design has been unable to reach the optimal level. At the same time, although countries are restraining each other, ESA has provided very little funding for emerging private aerospace, only at the level of tens of millions of euros. This is also the reason why there are still no private orbital-class rockets in Europe.

An image of the all-solid launch stage version of the Ariane 6 rocket

Why has the development of European launch vehicles stagnated in recent years? Thanks to the requirements of some governments for "independence" in space launches, they must ensure their own orbital transportation capabilities no matter how much it costs. Therefore, ESA requires government subsidies to advance the project through "appropriate postponement". And through the development cost of P120C, it can be seen that it is really difficult to determine how much of the 1 billion euros actually flowed into the project. ESA even began to promote the same 1,800 m/s geostationary transfer orbit launch service as Cape Canaveral, completely throwing away its core competitive advantage. The problem is that Kourou's orbit is a subsynchronous transfer orbit with an apogee of 23,200 kilometers. If you really want to let "Ariane 6" hit such an orbit, it is better to use a cheap, solid, large and punctual rocket like "Falcon 9" to launch.

In fact, if they really want to improve their competitiveness, they can continue to build the Ariane 5ECA+, build 100 rockets, and allocate the 4 billion euros of R&D costs to each rocket with a 40 million euros subsidy. Their commercial competitiveness is indeed stronger than that of the Falcon 9. The cost of investing a large amount of money in the Ariane 6 project is that the funding for the two flagship space observatories, Euclid and Athena, is only about 1 billion euros in total.

Reluctance and concession

Before discussing the route, it is important to first understand whether Ariane 6 has met expectations.

The first is the APU turbine generator located in the second stage of Ariane 6, which was highly praised by Europe in the past few years. The device uses hydrogen and oxygen evaporated from the second stage for combustion to drive the turbine to generate electricity to support the rocket's final stage to glide for 6 hours. The "Ariane 6" 64 configuration is expected to be able to send about 5 tons of payload into geostationary orbit. However, the performance of the gas turbine generator did not meet expectations. At the 2022 International Astronautical Congress, the appearance of the ASTRIS room temperature upper stage completely confirmed that the "Ariane 6"'s cryogenic stage direct delivery to geostationary orbit capability has been removed, and the second stage's long glide capability has also been compressed to 1.5 hours, or 1 lap.

The performance of the second stage of Ariane 6 was even lower than expected. Initially, ESA tried to use a universal 5.4-meter diameter for the entire rocket, but this would have spread the second-stage liquid oxygen tank into a "pancake", with a poor structural coefficient and troublesome propellant management. The second stage finally reduced the diameter of the liquid oxygen tank, but still retained the external shell, which caused the mass of the second stage to soar. Although the mass of Ariane 6 has soared to 860 tons, its carrying capacity is still on par with the Ariane 5ECA+ rocket. Therefore, Ariane 6 does not have much advantage over the Ariane 5 rocket in government payload and conventional commercial payload launch services, and the lack of direct delivery capability makes it more difficult to compete with new launch vehicles with reuse capabilities such as the Falcon Heavy and Vulcan.

Influenced by the low cost brought by the reuse of the Falcon 9 rocket, the European Space Agency has also begun to study reused launch vehicles in recent years. Including the use of the "Prometheus" 100-ton liquid oxygen-methane engine, the concept of the reusable "next-generation Ariane" launch vehicle has been proposed. The goal of the "next-generation Ariane" launch vehicle is to reduce the launch cost of the "Ariane 6" by half again, with each launch cost not exceeding 35 million euros, at least 17 launches a year, and a maximum of 25 launches. The mass of the 9-launch plan of the "next-generation Ariane" launch vehicle reaches 790 tons, but the one-time carrying capacity of the geostationary transfer orbit is only 6.6 tons, and the carrying capacity under reuse is 4.5 tons. The carrying efficiency is very different from that of the "Falcon 9" rocket. Moreover, its design is far from being finalized, and there is not even a general plan.

Although the Ariane 6 is outdated before its first flight, the European Space Agency is unwilling to abandon the hydrogen-oxygen takeoff stage that has been used for more than 30 years. Therefore, the European Space Agency proposed a plan to reuse methane boosters in 2022, replacing the P120C solid rocket booster with a "liquid reusable booster" using three Prometheus engines. Each booster uses three Prometheus engines, but the recovery of the three modules requires a very high thrust ratio for the engine, especially for the design of the injector. Whether Europe has the ability to develop such engines remains to be seen. In addition, the complex ground operation process brought about by launching and recovering four modules at a time will further increase the burden of each launch. Its cost-effectiveness is certainly much lower than that of the Falcon 9, not to mention the hydrogen-oxygen core stage that cannot be recovered. There is even a possibility that the cost benefits of reuse are lower than the cost.

The European space industry has been declining at a noticeable rate in the past decade, and the failure of Vega C and the continued delay of Ariane 6 are the epitome of this decline. This also warns us that technological updates and mutual competition are necessary. If we blindly use conventional technology and rely on internal circulation to paralyze ourselves, we will one day be surpassed by more efficient competitors. (Author: Zhang Chen)

This article originally appeared in Space Exploration magazine, Issue 5, 2023

Source: Space Exploration Magazine