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.

ESA funds construction of its own X-37B, dubbed Space Rider

The new colonial movement: The European Space Agency (ESA) has now signed the contracts to fund the construction of its first reusable mini-shuttle, dubbed Space Rider and comparable to the Air Force’s X-37B.

ESA signed two contracts with industry on 9 December at Palazzo Chigi in Rome, Italy in the presence of Italian government representatives. The first contract is for delivery of the Space Rider flight model including the reentry module and the AVUM orbital service module, by co-prime contractors: Thales Alenia Space Italy and Avio. The second contract covers the delivery of the ground segment by Italian co-prime contractors: Telespazio and Altec.

Activities are on track for the first flight of Space Rider in the third quarter of 2023 from Europe’s Spaceport in French Guiana.

Like the X-37B, Space Rider will provide Europe with a space platform for performing long term experiments in space and recovering them undamaged, though initially the flights will be no more than two months long. While it will launch on a rocket like the X-37B, and will use its body to shed velocity as it returns through the atmosphere, it will not land on a runway but will instead use parachutes to drop it to the ground.

More importantly, Space Rider will be available to the private sector. The X-37B is controlled by the U.S. military, and they have made it available for only a limited number of non-military experiments.

ESA moves forward on building its own reusable X-37B

The European Space Agency (ESA) has approved the preliminary design reviews for its reusable mini-shuttle, dubbed Space Rider, that they hope to launch by 2022.

Launched on Vega-C, Space Rider will serve as an uncrewed high-tech space laboratory operating for periods longer than two months in low orbit. It will then re-enter the Earth’s atmosphere and land, returning its valuable payload to eager engineers and scientists at the landing site. After minimal refurbishment it will be ready for its next mission with new payloads and a new mission.

Essentially this is Europe’s X-37B, but developed for commercial customers rather than the military. In fact, it suggests that Boeing, the builder of X-37B, is missing a major market by not developing its own commercial X-37B.

Europe commits $107 million for new rocket and space plane

The European Space Agency (ESA) today allocated $107 million to develop both a new larger version of its Vega rocket as well as an orbital version of the spaceplane engineering test vehicle flown in 2015.

The Vega-E will be larger and will give them another rocket capable of competing for launch business, but the space plane project is more interesting.

ESA awarded 36.7 million split between Avio and Thales Alenia Space Italy for Space Rider, an unmanned spaceplane capable of lifting 800 kilograms to LEO for missions up to two months. A single Space Rider should be capable of six missions with refurbishing, according to Thales Alenia Space.

Space Rider leverages technology from ESA’s Intermediate Experimental Vehicle (IXV), which performed a suborbital mission in February 2015, landing in the Pacific Ocean. Unlike its predecessor, Space Rider is designed for ground landings. ESA tasked Thales Alenia Space with building Space Rider’s reentry module based on the IXV.

It seems Europe wants its own version of X-37B and Dream Chaser.