ESA ATL Plausibility Checks and Development

Delta Force

Banned
The French have a large and advanced nuclear program for both civilian and military applications. Acquiring enough plutonium to power a space probe should not be too large of a problem for the ESA if France is willing to donate some, especially since they are one of the few nations that practice nuclear fuel recycling.
 
Workable Goblin

Workable Goblin

Delta Force said:
The French have a large and advanced nuclear program for both civilian and military applications. Acquiring enough plutonium to power a space probe should not be too large of a problem for the ESA if France is willing to donate some, especially since they are one of the few nations that practice nuclear fuel recycling.
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Actually, it would be. You need Pu-238 specifically (other isotopes of plutonium have undesirable properties), which requires specialized facilities--not quite to the level of having a dedicated reactor just for Pu-238 production, but close. You can't just get it out of spent nuclear fuel (there's small amounts, but it's very difficult to extract). So, you have to spend quite a bit of money (the DOE today is estimating a couple of hundred of million dollars) to start production, for a series of very expensive probes that the ESA isn't going to be launching very many of...no, this isn't something they're going to do unless a space bat comes down and waves a big budgetary wand over them.
 
Michel Van

Michel Van

Delta Force said:
The French have a large and advanced nuclear program for both civilian and military applications. Acquiring enough plutonium to power a space probe should not be too large of a problem for the ESA if France is willing to donate some, especially since they are one of the few nations that practice nuclear fuel recycling.
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in 1963 The French even proposed Nuclear Engines for EUROPA rocket !
http://www.flightglobal.com/FlightPDFArchive/1963/1963 - 0921.pdf

back to European Space probe
In time of ELDO ESRO were several German proposal for Deep space probe
several Jupiter probe, one Venus Orbiter with lander and a solar Probe

in ESA had also unused Proposal for 1980s
Kopernicus Mars orbiter
Giotto II
a Mercury orbiter
 

Bahamut-255

Shevek23 said:
I am subscribing to this since I don't know much about the story of Europe in space and want to learn and so I won't burden your timeline with lots of my patented tangential comments...not yet anyway, until inspired to...:)
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Thanks for subscribing then. :)


Shevek23 said:
Well I never heard of the airline; a Wikipedia search turns it up along with misspellings (or rather mistranslations) of some anime character, and other characters and place names in video games and the like. Google search turns up more company names...

...And the first thing I thought it might mean, a variation on the spelling of the goddess Eris.

So--is this meant to be a tribute to Discordianism or what?
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Actually. There's a constellation by the name of Aeris - though it is also a mistranslation of a Japanese Video Game Character. I selected it as a benchmark primarily because I like the name. It may change during development so it's best not to take it as a given.


Delta Force said:
The ESA could carry out a large space probe program. There are so many places to send probes that the ESA could get a lot more innovative science published through probes than by manned spaceflight. ESA could focus on the farther planets and asteroid belt, areas not as well explored by the US and USSR. How about a probe mission to investigate Ceres, the first large asteroid found and a planet in the 1800s?
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As Truth Is Life said, without a large Plutonium 238 production programme, don't count on trips to the outer planets. The inner planets and asteroid belt, where solar panels are quite usable, however, are much more viable. Joint Ventures ala Cassini/Huygens though, are also quite possible - though that 10/1997 launch window is an absolute must, if they don't want to wait until sometime around 2597 to try again.
 
Workable Goblin

Workable Goblin

Bahamut-255 said:
As Truth Is Life said, without a large Plutonium 238 production programme, don't count on trips to the outer planets. The inner planets and asteroid belt, where solar panels are quite usable, however, are much more viable. Joint Ventures ala Cassini/Huygens though, are also quite possible - though that 10/1997 launch window is an absolute must, if they don't want to wait until sometime around 2597 to try again.
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Later on though, as with OTL Juno, solar panel technology advances may very well allow missions as far as Jupiter. There have even been serious-ish proposals out to Uranus on solar cells, but those would need advanced (ie., expensive and risky) technology.

Also, if they use SEP, they could do better than 2597. Just saying...;)
 

Bahamut-255

truth is life said:
Later on though, as with OTL Juno, solar panel technology advances may very well allow missions as far as Jupiter. There have even been serious-ish proposals out to Uranus on solar cells, but those would need advanced (ie., expensive and risky) technology.
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Looked it up. With 8-9 w/m2 at Jupiter's distance from the Sun, they need 60 m2 to power all the systems using it's solar cell tech - indicating 10-12% efficiency of the cells, not including degredation of said cells due to Jupiter's magnetic fields and radiation belts.

For Saturn, you'd need 4x the solar cell area or solar cell efficiency for the same amount of power. Possible, but by that point, RTG could well turn out to be more mass-efficient than solar cells.

So while this makes Jupiter missions an option, for anything further out, they will need to work with another space agency.


truth is life said:
Also, if they use SEP, they could do better than 2597. Just saying...;)
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As for Solar Electric Propulsion (SEP). IIRC, with Smart 1, they've already proven that it works OTL, and it should be viable for certain missions. But they have their own problem. While extremely efficient - about 5,000s Isp - they are just as extremely power-hungry, requiring power loads in the region of Megawatts and more to provide substantial thrust.

Although, in space, they can be operated for days and weeks on end to accumilate a large delta-v for a mission. So you could use it up to the asteroid belt to build up some serious velocity, but after that, you won't be able to provide enough power for it and it becomes deadweight IMHO.

Still plenty of ways to make use of it. And it's more vastly more controversial cousin, Nuclear Electric Propulsion (NEP), is something to look into - though adoption of such a system is next to impossible.
 
Workable Goblin

Workable Goblin

Bahamut-255 said:
As for Solar Electric Propulsion (SEP). IIRC, with Smart 1, they've already proven that it works OTL, and it should be viable for certain missions. But they have their own problem. While extremely efficient - about 5,000s Isp - they are just as extremely power-hungry, requiring power loads in the region of Megawatts and more to provide substantial thrust.

Although, in space, they can be operated for days and weeks on end to accumilate a large delta-v for a mission. So you could use it up to the asteroid belt to build up some serious velocity, but after that, you won't be able to provide enough power for it and it becomes deadweight IMHO.
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Think more like months--that's the advantage of EP, it might have low thrusts but you can just keep going and going and going, and that huge ISP means you can end up going really fast. Anyways, SEP has been seriously proposed for as far out as Uranus, again--and even if it can't go all the way, it can be a serious booster rocket.

Also, you forgot Deep Space 1 :( EP was not very risky with SMART-1...
 

e of pi

truth is life said:
Think more like months--that's the advantage of EP, it might have low thrusts but you can just keep going and going and going, and that huge ISP means you can end up going really fast.
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Months? Dawn thrusted for years on end and next year it'll pick right back up to get from Vesta to ceres. Its mission-end delta-v total will be something in the 10km/s range. That's the same as a chemical rocket going from the ground to orbit!
 
Workable Goblin

Workable Goblin

e of pi said:
Months? Dawn thrusted for years on end and next year it'll pick right back up to get from Vesta to ceres. Its mission-end delta-v total will be something in the 10km/s range. That's the same as a chemical rocket going from the ground to orbit!
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Years then. Hey, a year is just 12 months :p
 

Delta Force

Banned
You are right. I thought that the space powerplants used the same isotope produced by nuclear reactors and used in nuclear weapons. Turns out that you would indeed need a special program to gather Pu-238. If France wanted to it could do it, but it would probably have no real reason to do so since it would have little use outside of physics research and space exploration. Not having an economy as large as the US or USSR, even if it did embark on such a program it would probably have enough for only a few space probes.
 

e of pi

Delta Force said:
You are right. I thought that the space powerplants used the same isotope produced by nuclear reactors and used in nuclear weapons. Turns out that you would indeed need a special program to gather Pu-238. If France wanted to it could do it, but it would probably have no real reason to do so since it would have little use outside of physics research and space exploration. Not having an economy as large as the US or USSR, even if it did embark on such a program it would probably have enough for only a few space probes.
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Hell, we only OTL in the UShave enough for a few space probes. Congress cut the money for production by the DoE and keeps cutting restart attempts out of the budget requests. Juno is solar for two reasons:
1) Solar is finally good enough for limited viability in the outer planets and
2) We have so little plutonium of the type needed for RTGs left that we needed to take even that marginal option to save it for other missions.
Next time budget season comes around, write your Congressperson, it's like a $200 million appropriation that keeps getting cut year after year and very soon it's going to have dire results for NASA's unmanned mission planning capability.
 

Bahamut-255

Manned Spacecraft

Well. I think now is the time to sort out the serious points concerning this TL. Seeing that manned spaceflight for ESA is a given here. I'll work on the core technical aspects.

The design I've opted for the the Soyuz. I selected this for the following reasons:


  1. Mass effeciency - not having to make all the habitable volume return to Earth in one piece allows me to cut the mass a bit. Which will be required given the capabilities of the two launch vehicle designs that I'm looking at for sending it into LEO.
  2. Flexibility - IMHO, it should be at least a little easier to adapt such a design for certain missions. i.e. docking port, interior equipment

While I call it a Soyuz design. I believe Shenzhou would be a more accurate term. Seeing that this manned spacecraft will effectively be a massively uprated version of the Soyuz Manned Spacecraft.

For one thing, it will be larger. Massing between 8,000-10,000Kg. At the maximum 10,000Kg limit I'm looking at, it should carry a delta-v budget of about 570-580 m/s, plenty enough for the required missions. The higher mass of the system from earlier posts is because I'm raising the internal volume, in part by increasing the external dimensions. I think 10.5-12m3 is perfectly reasonable for the mass. Crew size is the same at 3 max.


As for the launch vehicle. The Europa series, I struggle to get above 6,000Kg LEO without substantial upgrades - effectively making it an all-new design. So rather than try to make a new one look like an old one. I'm leaning towards designing a new launch vehicle, where the up to 10,000Kg of the Manned Spacecraft to an LEO orbit of 225x225Km at 51.6 degrees inclination is the limit of the base version. The performance augmented by use of boosters when not carrying a crew.

I should be able to achieve this since the time for ESA manned flight that I'm looking at is the late '80s to very early '90s. Before the end of the Cold War. Which, IMO, did more to kill off a number of ESA ambitions than everything else combined. If development of both spacecraft and launch vehicle are started in the early '80s, it should be very doable ITTL.
 
Michel Van

Michel Van

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MUC

I'd love to see a Sänger II space vehicle produced. Maybe with more funding and a more active German role earlier on in the ESA?
 

e of pi

The major thing I'd add is to be sure to take into account the effects of ESA's program on the programs of other countries and the ripples back to Europe. How will a native ESA launch capability and their plans for independent platforms effect NASA's plans for using Shuttle and the design,construction, and flight of Freedom/Fred/ISS? What about Russia, does this have any effect on them? Butterflies to ISS could do it, since the approval to turn Fred into the USOS of ISS was so tenuous OTL--one vote! This has come up in ETS: our original plan was to limit how much we focused on the international programs, but it kept getting more focus on other programs as it was developed and written, especially now that the writing wavefront is moving on into the 80s and we're finding the details our plans didn't take into account.
 

Bahamut-255

e of pi said:
The major thing I'd add is to be sure to take into account the effects of ESA's program on the programs of other countries and the ripples back to Europe. How will a native ESA launch capability and their plans for independent platforms effect NASA's plans for using Shuttle and the design,construction, and flight of Freedom/Fred/ISS? What about Russia, does this have any effect on them? Butterflies to ISS could do it, since the approval to turn Fred into the USOS of ISS was so tenuous OTL--one vote! This has come up in ETS: our original plan was to limit how much we focused on the international programs, but it kept getting more focus on other programs as it was developed and written, especially now that the writing wavefront is moving on into the 80s and we're finding the details our plans didn't take into account.
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And that's the sticking point. So many change-waves that will occur, with a serious batch of new options, though others could close.

I recall that in OTL, the ISS Killing Bill was defeated by 314-315 in the HoR, and always had a troubled life - after all, by the end of the 1980s, they had already spent $8,000,000,000 on Space Station Freedom without even making a single piece of it!

As for ISS-esque Space Station? It still seems likely to me that it will go ahead. A collapsed USSR & a NASA need to be seen to be doing something will make sure of that IMHO. Though expect ESA to be able to contribute more into it - a bigger Columbus, ATV system, crew transfer, lifeboat and MTFF are the major points.

STS-51 will occur as per OTL - sorry S. Christa McAuliffe - though I'm debating how much will be learned from it, since by this point, the ESA manned spacecraft will be well under construction.

The effects on Russia, however, I'm wrestling with. One reason the Russian Space Agency recovered was the need for manned flight when Columbia disintegrated on reentry, and STS retirement, leaving the Soyuz the only way of reaching ISS OTL. Another was the development of their own commercial launch services using their proven Soyuz Launch Vehicle and UR-500. While having NASA support Mir allowed it to remain in orbit until 2000 OTL. What troubles me is how much they will be able to do ITTL. Still can't quite figure out if it's gonna me more, the same, or less.
 

Bahamut-255

Manned Spacecraft - Part II

Another look at the technical aspects of the ESA Manned Spacecraft. With the beginnings of a development schedule.

I've opted for the upper mass of 10,000Kg. mainly for larger modules and a greater propellant reserve. This should allow for an internal habitable volume of between 10.5-12.0m3. The delta-v budget appears to be about 550m/s based on the 1,800Kg of N2O4/A50 propellant that it will carry, at least on 1st Gen. Models.

The basic technical breakdown is as follows:

HM: 1,700 Kg

RM: 3,300 Kg

SM: 5,000 Kg (1,800 Kg N2O4/A50)

Crew Size: 3

Life Support: 30 person-days

Orbital Storage: 210 Days

This seems perfectly reasonable to me, using the Chinese Shenzhou as the benchmark. And doable based on EU tech available at the time.


As for the timeline. Having development work begin in the early 1980s, with first flights towards the end of the 1980s, resulting in operational status by 1989-1991 - before the fall of the USSR - appears possible to me.

Another option concerning the manned spacecraft is to do a Soyuz/Progress with it. That is, have it adapted to function as an unmanned resupply vehicle as well. Given that this should be an easier task than the manned aspect. Having it ready by the early-mid 90s for, first Mir, then ISS is more a than acceptable development timeline for me.

Everyone's thoughts on this? Be honest.
 

Archibald

Banned
Very nice, sounds quite reasonable to me - technically and time- wise. As for the anme, I sugest Eureca or Solaris. :)
 
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