A look at the reusable Space Rider project

Issue 43. Subscribers 1,379.

To my 106 new subscribers, enjoy your first issue and, as always, if you have any comments, suggestions, or tips, please reply to this email.

---

What’s happening with Space Rider?

I want to state my bias upfront. I have a huge amount of love for the Space Rider project. I acknowledge that it has seen its fair share of challenges and its delayed debut is frustrating. However, there is so much about the project to be excited about from the parafoil recovery to the robotic arm and the mission possibilities it opens up, and, of course, the name is just perfect. 

The last few months of 2022 were pivotal for the Space Rider project with the completion of a critical design review being completed and vital funding of the project approved at the ministerial meeting. Since we’re more than a month into 2023, and we still haven’t heard much from the agency about the status of the project, I thought I’d take a look. 

The length of this issue of the newsletter got away from me and the inclusion of my Q&A with programme manager Dante Galli has, as a result, been published on the European Spaceflight website. So, if you’re only looking for an update on how the programme is doing, you can read that interview here. Otherwise, let’s get into it.

First a little history 

The origins of the Space Rider project can be found in the Intermediate eXperimental Vehicle (IXV) which was launched aboard a Vega rocket on 11 February 2015 and performed a suborbital flight with an atmospheric reentry and sea landing.

Following the success of the IXV project, the Space Rider programme was initiated at the 2016 Ministerial Council meeting. The original brief called for the development of an affordable, reusable end-to-end integrated space transportation system service to provide Europe with an independent capability to routinely transport payloads for an array of applications to multiple orbit altitudes and inclinations. The original timeline called for critical design reviews to be completed between 2017 and 2019 with a maiden flight occurring in 2020. Even if Space Rider had been ready to launch by 2020, Vega C, aboard which it is designed to fly, wouldn’t debut until 2022. 

Early render of Space Rider | Credit: ESA–Jacky Huart, 2016

Interestingly, early renders of the vehicle did not include the Avio-built service module, an element of the design that makes the vehicle only partially reusable with the service module being ditched before reentry. Early specifications for the vehicle also called for an 800 kg capacity, which has since been reduced to 620 kg. Avio has surprisingly failed to update the capacity figure on its website despite the company being one of the two prime contractors for the Space Rider vehicle. ESA stated in June 2017 that it would cost $40,000 per kg to send payloads to and from low Earth orbit aboard Space Rider. However, at that time the vehicle was still being touted as capable of carrying 800 kg payloads. As a result, I would assume that the per kg cost has risen somewhat. I have not seen any more recent cost estimations.

In late 2017 ESA signed the first contract for Space Rider activities with Thales Alenia Space and Avio. The companies were awarded a €36.7 million contract for the development of the Space Rider system.

At the 2019 Ministerial meeting in Seville, Spain, the Space Rider programme achieved a major success attracting ten participating states and exceeding funding expectations, which enabled ESA to begin negotiations with industry and sign contracts up to completion. It would take the agency just over a year following that approval to sign a pair of contracts that would begin the journey to the launchpad. The first was with Thales Alenia Space and Avio for the reentry module and AVUM-based service module. This first contract was worth €167 million. The second was with Telespazio and Altec which covered the delivery of the ground segment. Interestingly, Thales owns a stake in both ALTEC and Telespazio giving the company a significant share of the Space Rider contracts. A maiden flight was, at this time, expected in 2023. Interestingly, this is well into the first year of the pandemic which would, I assume, mean that any delays caused by the global event would have been considered when projecting a 2023 debut.

A peculiar development of the project to occur in the last year is the announcement of REV1 by Space Cargo Unlimited. The vehicle is described as a "flying factory in space" and leans heavily on the work being done for Space Rider. How has Space Cargo Unlimited managed this? Well, it’s partnered with Thales Alenia Space for the project, which, as I mentioned earlier, controls a major portion of the development contracts for Space Rider. However, I haven’t really been able to get to the bottom of the mechanics of the arrangement with all parties involved being cagey about it. I would assume the use of the intellectual property either means that Thales owns it or that ESA has given explicit permission for it to be used. The latter doesn’t really make sense to me and the former worries me.

2022 also ended with the decision being made at the ministerial meeting to implement the first two flights of Space Rider.

The above is a really brief look at the history of the vehicle. Space Rider and the Vega programme that it’s intertwined with are fascinatingly complex, filled with compromise and intrigue. I fully intend to eventually write a book on it all. 

Credit: ESA

The bad

Almost a year ago to the day, I published a Space Rider update discussing where the project was with acting ESA Space Rider Programme Manager Dante Galli. During that interview, Galli stated that the agency would complete a critical design review at the system level by Mid-2022 which would pave the way for entering into the implementation, test, and validation phase. A maiden flight was, at that time, planned for late 2023.

In reality, the critical design review was only completed in October last year with Galli telling European Spaceflight that the agency would be consolidating the last aspects of the design in the early months of 2023. This likely puts the program six to eight months behind the projected schedule from 2022. However, the maiden flight of Space Rider has already been pushed out by at least a year with the agency now targeting the final quarter of 2024 for its maiden flight. 

This, however, likely doesn’t consider potential delays caused by the return to flight of the Vega C launch vehicle which is currently grounded after a failed flight in December 2022. Depending on who you believe, the vehicle was scheduled to fly as many as twenty missions over the next two years. I think that’s likely much larger a projection than the one Avio or Arianespace are operating under, but it’s hard to tell. Nonetheless, if Arianespace, operators of Vega C, lose two to six months of the vehicle’s 2023 flight capacity, it will push much of its manifest out. There will definitely be some reshuffling for priority missions of which Space Rider may be unlikely to make the cut, especially when it's pitted against missions like the four Sentinel satellites that are expected to be launched aboard the vehicle over the next two years. And this is all assuming that the vehicle does return to flight in two to six months. 

Vega and Vega C are similar vehicles but are not the same vehicle. As a result, there can’t be a one-to-one comparison. However, an examination of the process followed by Arianespace, ESA, and Avio in returning a similar vehicle to flight can be a valuable comparison. With that in mind, it’s interesting to note that the cause of the first failure of a Vega vehicle in July 2019 was identified as originating from the vehicle’s second stage. Although it is not the same stage featured on Vega C, it was also a second stage that failed on the December 2022 flight. After its 2019 failure, Vega returned to flight more than a year later in September 2020. A similar delay would be devastating for Avio, Arianespace, and the maiden flight of Space Rider. It would also be pretty devastating for Europe as a whole, to be fair. The results of the investigation into the failure are still pending.

Again with the numbers not adding up

Last week I discussed how Susie’s wet mass seemed to be outside the Ariane 64’s payload capacity. Well, would you believe that Space Rider seems to also be outside Vega C’s payload capacity? Although, it really depends on who you believe and, of course, the reference orbits in question, reference orbits which are rarely stated. Can we normalize stating reference orbits? Stating a kg amount into low Earth orbit is incredibly vague. We’re talking about orbits from as low as 160 km all the way up to 1,000 km. Rant over, let’s continue.

On the Avio website, it claims that the payload capacity for Vega C to low Earth orbit is 2,300 kg, which would not be sufficient for the 2,950 kg Space Rider reentry module. However, the Arianespace website puts the payload capacity for Vega C to low Earth orbit at 3.3 tons, which would be 2.99 metric tonnes (I’m just assuming Arianespace is using imperial measurements, which never made sense to me, but that’s beside the point). A 2,990 kg payload capacity would be sufficient. There is, however, also the matter of the service module. Despite this being derived from the Vega C AVUM+ upper stage and, as a result, acting as the vehicle’s fourth stage instead of a payload, the addition of the Avum Life Extension Kit (ALEK), which includes a pair of 3.5 m solar wings, surely adds mass to the overall configuration.

According to this paper, the AVUM+ upper stage has a dry mass of 590 kg and a propellant mass of 740 kg for a total mass of around 1,330 kg. According to ESA, the Space Rider service module has a launch mass of 2,000 kg meaning the Space Rider additions add around 600 kg to the total payload mass. This seems to take Space Rider outside the capacity of a baseline Vega C. So, does that mean that ESA will need to implement the P120C+ upgrade before it is feasibly possible to launch Space Rider? If so, a 2024 debut will be out of the question with the new booster only expected to enter service in 2025. An empty payload bay could shave 600 kg off the mass of the vehicle allowing a maiden flight to be launched aboard a base Vega C. However, ESA has already put out a call for flight opportunities aboard the maiden Space Rider flight. It may be that, like Ariane 6, the payloads aboard the maiden flight will account for a small fraction of the total payload capacity meaning the lack of payload could still potentially explain the discrepancy. But I really don’t know. I am really starting to question my sanity with these payload discrepancies. 

Conclusion

I know it might not seem like it, but I really do love the Space Rider programme. There is, however, a lot that annoys me about it. I hate that it’s not getting more serious publicity. On the few occasions that I do see it mentioned, it is talked about more as a novelty than a serious force in the in-orbit space services and logistics market that is currently receiving so much attention. The robotic arm on its own is a capability that no other vehicle currently operating today can claim (at least I think that’s true - comment if it’s not), and it opens up so many potential missions. It is the programme’s lack of transparency that takes it for me, though. 

I’m so tired of having to dig around the multitude of ESA domains and subdomains or wait for weeks at a time to get progress updates from the agency’s press office on publicly funded programmes. And when I do, the answers are filtered and managed to ensure only the spin remains. I’m so jealous of the reports that the NASA OIG publishes. These reports hold a magnifying glass to programmes and then the OIG publishes the results publicly so that anyone can take a look behind the curtain. The NASA OIG’s reports on the Orion and SLS programmes have been awe-inspiring. It might come as a surprise to many, including me, that ESA has, like NASA, an inspector general whose sole function is providing an authoritative but independent assessment of the technical and managerial quality of agency programmes. However, unlike NASA, reports created by the ESA inspector general are never made public and the position reports to the ESA director general instead of being managed by a separate entity. The work of the ESA inspector general is so removed from the general public that I struggled to find the name of the individual who currently holds the position. The agency maintains a page that features the names and positions of “ESA top management” but the inspector general does not seem to have made the cut. I did eventually find out that the position is, and has for the last two years, been held by Giovanni Colangelo. This, however, threw up more questions. According to his LinkedIn profile, Colangelo has worked for the agency for just over a decade. However, my research has turned up references to Colangelo working for ESA prior to that. It appears that he went straight from Delft University to ESA in 2004 and his tenure at the agency has thus been around 18 years. I’m not saying an individual like this couldn’t be impartial, but it probably wouldn’t be who I would pick.

The result of this lack of public transparency is that deadlines and budgets are allowed to slip and balloon without the public ever really hearing about it. This is, of course, exacerbated by the European public’s general disinterest in what ESA is doing. I have an extreme amount of respect for the current ESA DG Josef Aschbacher. I got the chance to interview him before he took up the top spot, and he struck me as a genuinely great force for positive change in the agency. His tenure so far as the ESA DG has done nothing to dissuade me from this opinion. As a result, I would like to put it to director Aschbacher that I believe it would go a long way to building trust with the public that funds the agency if he would begin to make all reports created by the ESA inspector general public in their entirety. 

---

Extra reading credit - Together with my partner Capitol Momentum, I published a report examining three German launch startups entitled Road to the Launchpad: A Comparative Analysis of Germany's Microlaunchers. The report includes a detailed examination of the financial status and developmental progress of each company. It's an interesting read and well worth your time.

European space capsules go commercial - The Exploration Company has secured €40.5M in Series A funding led by EQT Ventures and Red River West. The company is developing a reusable space capsule called Nyx that will be used to fly science missions, resupply space stations, and, in time, hopefully, host crewed missions. This latest round of funding will be used to commercialize the maiden full-scale prototype of Nyx, finalize and launch a second capsule demonstrator, and expand its workforce.

Pictures or it didn’t happen - ESA has published a gallery of Ariane 1, 2, and 3 images arranged chronologically by launch date. It's a beautiful visual history of the birth and development of the vehicle. According to the ESA space history Twitter account, a similar gallery for Ariane 4 and 5 will be coming soon. These galleries will, of course, be significantly larger than this first one.

For the oppressed people of Australia - UK-based Surrey Satellite Technology announced the opening of its Australian office in Adelaide. The exact reasons for the office weren't clear from the press release, but it seems to be an attempt to capitalize on a growing space market in the country. The press spin version of that was to "collaborate with the Australian space industry" and to show Airbus' (SSTL is a part of the Airbus Group) "commitment to further enhancing the sovereign space capability and expertise of the Australian space sector." They make it sound like a humanitarian mission. I can't say I’m a fan of this kind of press release.

The wind beneath IRIDE’s solar wings - ENPULSION announced that it had been selected by OHB Italia as its propulsion partner for the IRIDE constellation. The IRIDE constellation will be composed of Earth observation satellites of different types and sizes combining SAR, optical, panchromatic, hyperspectral, and infrared sensors. Although the announcement only occurred last week, it appears that the contract was actually signed in December 2022. The contract is for the delivery of 12 NANO thrusters that will utilize ENPULSION's Field Emission Electric Propulsion technology. There is also a provision for an additional 12 satellites.

I want to be snarky, but I’m just sad - Swedish telecommunications company Ovzon has pulled its Ovzon 3 satellite from Arianespace launch services. The move came after satellite manufacturer Maxar informed the company that there would be additional delays in the finalization of the satellite. According to Arianespace, the company "could not accommodate a short-term launch opportunity matching the rescheduling of the project." Ovzon 3 will now be launched aboard a Falcon 9.

By your powers combined, we are Thales Group (I’ll be impressed if someone gets this very dated reference) - Thales Alenia Space has been selected by the Korea Aerospace Research Institute to provide electric propulsion for its GEO-KOMPSAT-3 communications satellite. The satellite will make use of Thales' new TETRA electric propulsion product line which has been designed and is assembled in the UK with support from the UK Space Agency. According to the company, Thales Alenia Space in Belgium will provide the Propulsion Power Unit, and Thales in Germany the electric thruster.

If there’s no press release, did it even happen? - South Korea has selected the Avio-built Arianespace-operated Vega C vehicle to launch the country's multipurpose imaging KOMPSAT-6 satellite. The satellite had initially been slated to be launched aboard an Angara rocket, but South Korea formally revoked the contract due to sanctions imposed on Russia. It was weirdly difficult to find a primary source on this one. Arianespace has, rather uncharacteristically, not yet published a press release with the contract announcement.

Do you want to sponsor a Europe in Space newsletter issue? - Despite only launching in May 2022, the newsletter has quickly gone from strength to strength and is now read by CEOs, decision-makers, and influential members of the media. If becoming the next company to sponsor an issue sounds like something you would be interested in, send an email to andrewp@europeanspaceflight.com