Super heavy-lift, frequent flights to space for Europe: Protein study results
13/11/2024
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European companies were invited to propose designs for a rocket able to provide enough power and volume to launch huge payloads while keeping costs low and ensuring the environmental impact is kept to a minimum.
Following an open call, two companies were chosen to further develop their ideas: ArianeGroup and Rocket Factory Augsburg.
As potential use cases, ESA provided two space-based scenarios: a solar electricity generator and a data centre. These two advanced concepts, that have also been studied under ESA contracts by European space industry, are far-future ideas that would require lifting large volumes of hardware to Earth orbit.
ESA’s Protein study challenged companies to evaluate the feasibility of a rocket and the necessary ground infrastructure to support such ambitious launches and show how it could be achieved technologically, while pinpointing areas where resources or technology might need more development.
Yes, we can
The study concluded that developing such a rocket within the next decade would be possible in principle and under the right conditions but would be challenging and require the immediate start of further technology developments and tests as well as considering all aspects such as staged-combustion, infrastructure, funding and legal frameworks.
A key feature of any rocket meeting the requirements is that it is at least semi-reusable and uses liquid fuels, including bio-methane and hydrogen, created from low-carbon electricity. This is the only way to meet the high launch cadence required while ensuring a low cost per kilogram of hardware sent into orbit and minimising the environmental impact.
Ground infrastructure was also considered: you might not consider something as benign as the width of a rocket, but design one more than four metres in diameter and just moving it on any road in Europe becomes problematic – any bridge you encounter is not large enough to pass through. Fuelling is also an important factor to consider; it’s one thing to build a rocket but you need to fuel it too, and the Protein challenge requires a lot of it.
Singled out
A key technology gap is a high-thrust staged-combustion engine, which Europe currently lacks to deliver the power needed. ESA is already targeting this area with it’s ‘Thrust!’ project to develop a more powerful, lightweight rocket engine, as well as ArianeGroup and Rocket Factory Augsburg’s high-thrust engine projects Prometheus and Helix.
Thanks to the Ariane 6 and Vega-C rockets, European countries have autonomous access together with just three other countries in the world. The question is, do we want access to a lot more and for a lot less? The Protein studies show we can do it, the next step is political will.
The executive summary of the Protein studies from ArianeGroup and from Rocket Factory Augsburg are available for download.
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