Update on ESA’s much delayed Space Rider X-37B copy
Link here. Space Rider is essentially aiming to be another re-usable mini-shuttle like the X-37B and the unnamed classified version from China. While all three are government-owned and government-run, the X-37B and China’s both were built expressly to do military classified missions. There has been no effort in either case to make them available for commercial flights.
The European Space Agency (ESA) however is developing Space Rider instead for commercial customers. It also appears the government-owned and government-run nature of Space Rider is one of the main reasons it will not fly its maiden mission this year, and won’t fly until late 2025, at the earliest.
“As an outcome of the previous ministerial council of 2019, the Space Rider received quite significant financial support to cope with Phase C and D activities. However, the participating states contributed in a way that was not possible — due to the need to comply with the Geo-return mechanism — to keep the industrial consortium as it was operating up to that moment [end-2019],” Galli said.
ESA’s Geo-return mechanism was established to boost fairness among member states, ensuring that the nations that invest in the agency will generate a “fair return.” In a nutshell, participating states in an optional development program should receive industrial contracts in a proportional way with respect to their contribution to that program to ensure that money invested benefits the countries that actually contributed to that program. That is to say for example, if you put 30% of the funds into the program, you are expected to receive as close as possible to industrial contracts accounting for 30% of the overall program.
As the program must abide by the Geo-return mechanism, Galli explained that the initial consortium involved was required to significantly be rebuilt “in compliance with the available funds and their member state relevant origin. … This caused first a not negligible delay in setting up the new industrial consortium… that was finally concluded only in late 2020 with the signature of the new contract with the prime contractors. And then, a so-called bridging design phase was needed on the subsystems affected by the change of industrial supplier, resulting in a longer-than-expected completion of the design phase.
In other words, Space Rider can’t just sell payload space to anyone. Only private businesses in those nations who help finance it can bid, and the customers don’t match well with the ESA’s nations that had been doling up the money. The consequence apparently has been a lot of complex negotiations and jury-rigging to make the two match, all of which has nothing to do with producing a viable product that makes money.
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
Link here. Space Rider is essentially aiming to be another re-usable mini-shuttle like the X-37B and the unnamed classified version from China. While all three are government-owned and government-run, the X-37B and China’s both were built expressly to do military classified missions. There has been no effort in either case to make them available for commercial flights.
The European Space Agency (ESA) however is developing Space Rider instead for commercial customers. It also appears the government-owned and government-run nature of Space Rider is one of the main reasons it will not fly its maiden mission this year, and won’t fly until late 2025, at the earliest.
“As an outcome of the previous ministerial council of 2019, the Space Rider received quite significant financial support to cope with Phase C and D activities. However, the participating states contributed in a way that was not possible — due to the need to comply with the Geo-return mechanism — to keep the industrial consortium as it was operating up to that moment [end-2019],” Galli said.
ESA’s Geo-return mechanism was established to boost fairness among member states, ensuring that the nations that invest in the agency will generate a “fair return.” In a nutshell, participating states in an optional development program should receive industrial contracts in a proportional way with respect to their contribution to that program to ensure that money invested benefits the countries that actually contributed to that program. That is to say for example, if you put 30% of the funds into the program, you are expected to receive as close as possible to industrial contracts accounting for 30% of the overall program.
As the program must abide by the Geo-return mechanism, Galli explained that the initial consortium involved was required to significantly be rebuilt “in compliance with the available funds and their member state relevant origin. … This caused first a not negligible delay in setting up the new industrial consortium… that was finally concluded only in late 2020 with the signature of the new contract with the prime contractors. And then, a so-called bridging design phase was needed on the subsystems affected by the change of industrial supplier, resulting in a longer-than-expected completion of the design phase.
In other words, Space Rider can’t just sell payload space to anyone. Only private businesses in those nations who help finance it can bid, and the customers don’t match well with the ESA’s nations that had been doling up the money. The consequence apparently has been a lot of complex negotiations and jury-rigging to make the two match, all of which has nothing to do with producing a viable product that makes money.
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
I read this differently. I believe the complexity is in doling out the vehicle design and manufacturing contracts, not the operational payload allocation. Of course that is probably tangled up in such a “collective” effort designed I expect more to keep bureaucrats employed than the workers in the industrial base.
Seems like a complex and expensive stop-gap measure that does not do much more than you can do already with capsules and ISS. When commercial space stations and competing capsules become available the available privacy and flexibility will be even greater. Could a space station be totally robotic and operationally unmanned? I dont see why not.
I believe that the primary utility of a mini-shuttle is naturally military, as it puts a premium on the ability to launch on-demand, overfly and scan a specific Earth (/moon) location, and quickly return the results to a secure airport-type location. For radio security, there is no need to transmit results – they can be returned physically in a storage device.
But for scientific work, most of these attributes are not of high value, and once a number of stations are available, experiments can be launched, performed, and re-enter on any schedule. A specially designed SLSS (Single Launch Space Station) could be designed and built around this particular business model, serving the needs of many agencies and institutions.
Only in the short run would a mini-shuttle be useful for civil purposes, i.e., prior to one or more shared SLSS being available. But the ESA shuttle is unlikely to be available in the short run.
Ray Van Dune: The market disagrees with you. There are several companies (both Varda and Sierra Space) developing reusable capsules designed to do manufacturing in space and to return the product to Earth for sale, especially with pharmaceuticals.
In the case of Sierra, the company said (in 2014) that it will build an X-37B-type version of Dream Chaser. Since the thing hasn’t yet flown, we can’t take that promise very seriously. Varda however already has a capsule in orbit and is simply stalled because the FAA is refusing to issue a license to allow its return.
Space Rider is a bit more fashioned after ASSET
https://www.flickr.com/photos/rocbolt/8183616787
Perhaps I made my argument too convoluted.
1. I doubt that a mini-shuttle can be economically viable for anything but cost-no-object military payloads.
2. I also doubt that a capsule-based system can be economical for anything but an ultra-high value payload – the overhead costs of crew and recovery are going to be horrific.
3. Space manufacturing is going to have to wait for SLSS shared facilities, which we should have within 3-5 years, or about as long as it would take to put up a civil mini-shuttle.
4. I’ll concede that the Sierra Dreamchaser might be far enough along already to have a short period of civil viability, but the ESA Space Rider is a wild goose chase. By the time it’s ready SLSS shared facilities will be a workable reality.
YMMV
Ray Van Dune: But you left out Varda, which has already launched a returnable capsule, for a customer, with its produced drug payload ready for return with the expectations of profits from its sale.
There are viable possibilities for profit, now, for such basic capsules. Once we have operating space stations then I agree their profitability will go down, but that hasn’t happened yet.
This is why I wanted a simpler, Buran type Shuttle 2…something that can return tons of space made goods. Large single shot factories serviced by orbiter.
Right now…it’s all about comsats.
If big pharma or other outfits are to invest… they need a wow moment
I forgot about Varda even though I had seen coverage of them on BehindTheBlack. Some web searching finds the Varda capsule test drop from 13000 feet over Arizona and many other details including this curious item aboit doing hypersonic military work https://twitter.com/VardaSpace/status/1636003065156313091
Hope the FAA gets its act together soon on the permit..
From the article:
This is a good start for reusability. I’m glad that ESA is seeing the light. Refurbishment is still a little expensive, and a total of six flights does not amortize the construction costs over enough flights, but it is a good start.
Refurbishment is why the Space Shuttle cost so much to operate. Refurbishment of the Shuttle cost too much and took too long.
I would prefer low-cost operations over the large down mass that Jeff Wright desires.
Buran was patterned after the expensive, low-cadence Shuttle, and we already know that Buran was too expensive for the Soviet Union to afford to fly a second time. Unlike the Space Shuttle, we don’t know much about the performance of the Buran, as it flew without payload or crew, and it was never refurbished for a second flight, so we do not know what that would cost or how long that would take.
Space Rider was clearly designed from scratch for a specific mission, is small enough that is may not have the same thermal protection problem that the Shuttle had and that Starship is trying to solve, and may not need nearly as much engine refurbishment time as the RS-25 had.
Space Rider’s per kilogram price is similar to the Cargo Dragon, which can also return down mass, such as pharmaceuticals, like Space Rider will.
Edward: Jeff Wright wants a lot of things, none of which have the slightest connection to actual engineering or real world cost. His detachment from these things and his apparent attachment to the NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center gives a very clear window into why that center and NASA have spent so much and achieved so little for the last four decades in trying to produce a follow-on to the shuttle.
Robert,
I know, but we can all dream.
Marshall Space Flight Center is also the one that rejected Robert Zubrin’s idea for getting to Mars and favored the large Mars transport, similar to the one in the book and movie The Martian. The reality is starting to look more like Zubrin’s idea, where SpaceX will send a much larger and possibly less expensive version to Mars, not just to do a little exploration but to find a suitable location for a first martial colony. Zubrin didn’t have a colony as a near-term goal, but SpaceX has managed to drop the cost of launch so much that this is now a real possibility.
Well, less possibility at this point, but a real dream that could happen in less than a couple of decades.
By the way, I am about to respond to another of Jeff’s dreams. I just wanted to get this note off so that you knew that I saw your response before hitting “send” on the other comment.