Is Europe Building its Own Starship? Not Exactly - by kuingul
is the heatshield. ArianeGroup’s design won’t have a detachable trunk, which technically makes it more reusable than its competitors. But it also means that Susie will reenter nose/belly first, as it can’t have a heatshield on the bottom.
Designing the heatshield can be a big challenge. As you know, it was one of the weakest parts of the Space Shuttle, which greatly affected its reusability. And at the moment SpaceX are struggling with the Starship’s heatshield, as it continues to lose tiles duringThe propulsive landing of a spacecraft also isn’t new. For example, SpaceX also originally planned for the Crew Dragon to have propulsive landing capabilities. But in the end, they went with landing on parachutes.
It doesn’t look like SUSIE can be considered as “the next step” in spaceflight. In fact, it seems to be only catching up with the current designs that are already in use. It is likely that by the time SUSIE will be ready, Starship will already be actively flying. Which is much more capable, fully reusable and supposed to be much cheaper. However, it doesn’t mean that this will make SUSIE obsolete straight away.
Even though it won’t be exactly cutting edge, it’s really important for Europe to have its own spacecraft. It will reduce their dependency on the US or Russia and at the same time provide more competition for the market. As LEO will become a more and more popular destination with the ISS staying up there until 2030, new space stations being planned,
, etc. it will be important to have as much competition as possible to make sure that the industry will evolve as quick and as efficient as possible.
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