ESA partners with French company to build space plane “demonstrator”
The European Space Agency (ESA) and the French company Dassault Aviation yesterday announced a partnership for building a space plane “demonstrator” that will lay the groundwork for developing a family of such spacecraft dubbed Vortex.
The ESA press release is here. Both this release and the Dassault release linked to above provided little detailed information, other than the demonstrator will be a small scale suborbital testbed for eventually developing the full scale orbital vehicle. Neither a budget nor time schedule were even hinted at.
ESA has funded a number of these demonstrators in the past decade — Themis and Calisto come to mind — all of which are behind schedule and have as yet not flown. It will be interesting to see if this project fares better, as it seems it is being led by a single commercial company rather than the government run mishmashes of the other projects.
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The European Space Agency (ESA) and the French company Dassault Aviation yesterday announced a partnership for building a space plane “demonstrator” that will lay the groundwork for developing a family of such spacecraft dubbed Vortex.
The ESA press release is here. Both this release and the Dassault release linked to above provided little detailed information, other than the demonstrator will be a small scale suborbital testbed for eventually developing the full scale orbital vehicle. Neither a budget nor time schedule were even hinted at.
ESA has funded a number of these demonstrators in the past decade — Themis and Calisto come to mind — all of which are behind schedule and have as yet not flown. It will be interesting to see if this project fares better, as it seems it is being led by a single commercial company rather than the government run mishmashes of the other projects.
Readers!
My annual February birthday fund-raising drive for Behind the Black is now over. Thank you to everyone who donated or subscribed. While not a record-setter, the donations were more than sufficient and slightly above average.
As I have said many times before, I can’t express what it means to me to get such support, especially as no one is required to pay anything to read my work. Thank you all again!
For those readers who like my work here at Behind the Black and haven't contributed so far, please consider donating or subscribing. My analysis of space, politics, and culture, taken from the perspective of an historian, is almost always on the money and ahead of the game. For example, in 2020 I correctly predicted that the COVID panic was unnecessary, that the virus was apparently simply a variation of the flu, that masks were not simply pointless but if worn incorrectly were a health threat, that the lockdowns were a disaster and did nothing to stop the spread of COVID. Every one of those 2020 conclusions has turned out right.
Your help allows me to do this kind of intelligent analysis. I take no advertising or sponsors, so my reporting isn't influenced by donations by established space or drug companies. Instead, I rely entirely on donations and subscriptions from my readers, which gives me the freedom to write what I think, unencumbered by outside influences.
You can support me either by giving a one-time contribution or a regular subscription. There are four ways of doing so:
1. Zelle: This is the only internet method that charges no fees. All you have to do is use the Zelle link at your internet bank and give my name and email address (zimmerman at nasw dot org). What you donate is what I get.
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3. A Paypal Donation or subscription:
4. Donate by check, payable to Robert Zimmerman and mailed to
Behind The Black
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Cortaro, AZ 85652
You can also support me by buying one of my books, as noted in the boxes interspersed throughout the webpage or shown in the menu above.
Sub-scale, sub-orbital. Everything is sub-real, sub-useful in Europe these days.
I am reminded of a scene from Battle of the Bulge in which Robert Shaw’s Col. Hessler character is being shown a scale model of the King Tiger tank by a rear-echelon Nazi general. “It’s a very beautiful model, General. It proves that the Germans are still the world’s best… toymakers.
I don’t think it was a toy that could hole two Shermans in a row with 88’s
Vortex is just Hermes/Hope warmed over.
I am hoping folks will give this all rocket winged TSTO some love:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceLiner
But this is what interests me:
https://www.chemistryworld.com/news/most-energetic-molecule-ever-made-is-stable-in-liquid-nitrogen/4021662.article
One (smaller) cryogenic tank. An all chemical version of Zubrin’s NSWR.
Here, I think a hexanitrogen monopropellant would demand Starship to use even heavier steel—be built more like the PLUTO/SLAM concept called “The Flying Crowbar.”
Neutral hexanitogen’s exhaust is just nitrogen gas.
Yes, there is an explosion risk—but that we see anyway.
N6 has twice the energy as RDX.
Remember, Sprint also used explosives as propellant: