By Tim Hepher
VERNON, France (Reuters) – In a discreet forest clearing on a plateau above the town of Vernon in Normandy, France, workers adjust a steel cylinder held under giant red claws – part of a reusable rocket that Europe hopes will slow the meteoric rise of Elon Musk’s SpaceX.
Maiaspace, a two-year-old subsidiary of Europe’s largest rocket maker ArianeGroup, is entering a crucial period of testing for plans to launch Europe’s first partially reusable launcher in 2026, targeting mainly small commercial satellites.
The effort to make Europe more competitive comes a decade after major European governments decided to develop the Ariane 6 heavy launcher without making it reusable, with some critics calling it outdated even before its commercial debut next year.
“On this side of the Atlantic, we have neglected the technologies of reusability,” Maiaspace CEO Yohann Leroy told reporters during a visit to the company’s test facilities on an abandoned corner of a sensitive French rocket engine facility.
“To be competitive we have to lower the costs and recover the first stage,” he said.
Plans to set up Maiaspace were first announced in December 2021 by then French Finance Minister Bruno Lemaire, who bemoaned the “bad strategic choice” of 2014 and voiced ambitions to build “our own SpaceX and our own Falcon 9”.
Blueprints call for a medium-sized launcher whose first stage can optionally be recovered on a barge off the European spaceport in French Guiana and re-used five times.
The two-stage rocket can additionally be equipped with a small extra “Kick Stage” to increase performance.
It will carry between 0.5 and 4 tons depending on orbit and payload, and whether the first stage is recovered, Leroy said. That places it near Ariane 6’s smaller cousin, the non-reusable, 2.3-tonne Italian Vega C which returned to space last week.
So far the goal of emulating dominant player SpaceX appears elusive. But European officials are betting that projects like Maiaspace will spawn a reusable successor to Ariane 6.
TIGHT SECURITY
The plans are being hatched in remote woodlands once used to hide the birth of France’s ballistics and space programme with the help of German scientists recruited after World War II.
Maiaspace shares premises with parent ArianeGroup, builder of Europe’s Ariane civil launchers and French strategic missiles, and tight security harks back to its Cold War origins.
Working behind barbed wire and peeling signs warning of risks of explosion, Maiaspace’s 230 engineers must try to figure out how to close a seemingly unbridgeable gap with SpaceX which first re-launched a refurbished Falcon 9 booster in 2017.
They face technological challenges stemming in part from Europe’s delay in fully embracing reusable technology.
When traditional rockets separate they do so in the vacuum of space. But to be reusable, the first stage must be separated earlier, which risks disturbance from remaining atmosphere.
This is “one of the major technical challenges on which European industry needs to make progress,” Leroy said.
The “interstage” prototype now being prepared by workers is designed to test a solution to that problem this week, with the red claw-like structure simulating the effects of separation.
Maiaspace must also move fast amid relentless competition. Germany’s Rocket Factory Augsburg is also developing a rocket designed ultimately to be partially reusable, RFA ONE, though it suffered a setback when a test engine exploded this year.
Like most of its peers, Maiaspace will also need investment.
It pegs development costs at several hundred million euros. So far it has won 125 million euros from ArianeGroup, owned by Airbus and Safran, and will start discussing a potential new round with its parent next year, Leroy said.
(Reporting by Tim Hepher; Editing by Susan Fenton)
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