How to Catch a Rocket With a Helicopter Boeing-Lockheed venture proposes alterna
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How to Catch a Rocket With a Helicopter
Boeing-Lockheed venture proposes alternative to SpaceX
SpaceX launched a rocket on Tuesday but it failed to land safely on an ocean barge. Photo: scott audette/Reuters By Doug Cameron WSJ April 14, 2015 7:48 p.m. ET
To bring down high costs, the Pentagon’s main space-launch provider is proposing a technique that sounds like a mixture of science fiction and circus act: catching rockets as they fall back to earth with an airborne hook so they can be reused.
United Launch Alliance LLC surprised many in the rocket industry this week with its plan, which would involve large helicopters with extendible booms to snare spent engines as they parachute down from the edge of space after delivering their payload.
ULA, a joint venture between Boeing Co. BA -0.66 % and Lockheed Martin Corp. LMT -0.48 % , is competing with Elon Musk’s rocket venture, Space Exploration Technology Corp., which has shaken up the launch industry over the past five years with its low-cost rockets.
SpaceX already is testing its own plan to reuse the first stage of its Falcon 9 rocket, by using the engines to bring the first stage back to a gentle landing on floating barge in the Atlantic Ocean.
On Tuesday, however, it narrowly failed in its latest test of that system, with the rocket stage reaching the barge but landing too hard to survive, according to a message on Mr. Musk’s official Twitter account.
The competing efforts are designed to solve the toughest challenge facing rocket scientists: cutting stubbornly high costs with reusable rockets. Currently, there are no reusable big rockets, as their first stages, packed with sophisticated electronics and guidance hardware, typically burn up while falling back to earth or return too damaged to be used again.
ULA started evaluating ways a decade ago to land rocket stages softly on a pad or parachute them into the sea for recovery. It decided the cost was outweighed by potential damage if they landed in the sea or heavily on the pad, making them more costly to refurbish than building a new one.
But SpaceX’s efforts suggested the technical and economic barriers are now more surmountable.
ULA’s new plan, announced on Monday, represents a change of heart, though its approach is less ambitious and won’t be ready until 2024. It is focusing on retrieving only the two main engines of its planned new Vulcan rocket, which account for 65% of its total cost—$100 million to $200 million, depending on the load being carried. The rest of the first stage, including the fuel tanks, would continue to be jettisoned into the sea.
The joint venture says it has tested its system with smaller objects, using a helicopter to snare first a sky diver and then a 750-pound weight. Now it needs to scale this up to handle the combined 25,000-pound weight of the Vulcan’s two engines.
Under ULA’s plan, those boosters would separate from the rest of the stage at a height of 750,000 feet, slowed from hypersonic speed by an inflatable heat shield. They would then be steered toward the waiting helicopter by special parachutes equipped with GPS trackers.
Tuesday’s outcome for SpaceX underscores the technical challenges facing reusable rockets, and the fact that success of such efforts may take longer than proponents have projected.
And catching the used engines is only part of the battle. Space experts said the tougher issue will be refurbishing them, persuading customers they are ready to fly again and harvesting a whole rocket.
“Reusing the first stage is a good first step, but for major savings the question is how many times can the engines be reused,” said George Torres, a former industry executive and author of two space books. “For instance, the space shuttle reused its engines 10 times.”
SpaceX says its Merlin engines can be used up to 40 times, though without a surge in demand for launches, the cost of building each one would soar as it lost economies of scale.
ULA is confident its new Vulcan engine could be used several times, though its chief executive, Tory Bruno, has said he’s reluctant to push for a model where each is used for a dozen or more launches.
Early designs for the space shuttle also included recovering more of the rocket after launch, and efforts to recover and refurbish engines designed to be used as many as 55 times proved problematic, and only managed 10 launches.
France and Germany this year said they’d revived research previously conducted with Russia on retrieving and reusing rocket stages, but it won’t be employed on the planned new Ariane 6 rocket due to fly in 2020. Similarly, the Boeing-built Space Launch System, a huge rocket designed for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration to ultimately send manned missions beyond the moon into deep space, isn’t being designed with reusability in mind.
Question: “Innovation often happens around so-called bottlenecks. What is one of the key bottlenecks of aeronautics discussed in the article? In what sense is it a bottleneck? Who is proposing to solve this bottleneck? What are the characteristics of their proposed solution? In other words, how exactly is this innovation supposed to work?”
Explanation / Answer
Bottleneck in this situation is safe landing of the rockets after delivering the payload. It is a bottleneck because it limits the reuse of the engine thus causing increase of cost as it leads to creation of the new engine from scratch. ULA is proposing to solve this bottleneck.
Characteristics of ULA proposed solutions are:
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