Space

Few readers would probably be aware that it was Australia that launched the third-ever satellite into space. That was back in 1957 and though our little Wresat was little better than a glorified ELB it was certainly on a par with the rival Soviet and US satellites of that period. We then joined the European ELDO group but regrettably, this eventually died through European disunity and the massive leads being taken at that time by the Superpowers.

Since the demise of ELDO and the Blue Streak rocket programme, Australia has had precious little real involvement in space. All that is changing though. In the past few years the world has become hungry for satellite launch capacity. Satellites from a dozen nations now convey our phone calls,our fax and telex data transmissions, assist our weather monitoring, earth resources surveillance and a multitude of other commercial tasks. Nations that a decade ago would not have thought of turning to space as a business venture are now grasping the many opportunities available to them through having their own indigenous space industry. India, China, Japan, Brazil, Europe and even Indonesia are all forging ahead while nowadays even the USSR is promoting a programme to offer its rockets as commercial international launch vehicles.

Much of this growth ironically was born in the tragic loss of the Shuttle Challenger. With the US Space Shuttle Programme grounded till 1988 and then only primarily available for military loads, the world had to look elsewhere for its rapidly increasing launch requirements. Ironically Europe’s Ariane has also suffered failures that have it grounded till sometime in the second quarter of next year. This has led China and a number of private US companies to enter the space trade with a flourish. The US is now preparing to develop the Aerospace Plane, a next-century successor to the Shuttle while the British forge ahead with Hotol (see following story), the West Germans possibly with Sanger and ESA with Ariane derivatives and eventually the mini-Shuttle Hermes. The USSR is well advanced on its own Shuttle system and China, India and Japan are planning a new family of significantly more powerful launchers than they currently possess. It’s all happening and it’s good to see Australia responding to the challenge that hopefully will carve us a niche in this technically challenging and potentially profitable future.

From now on in each issue of Australian Aviation, we will attempt to keep you updated on how these international space developments are affecting Australia and how we are meeting the challenge.

Australian Space Board Formally Launched

The recent announcement by the Federal government that it was funding the establishment of a National Space Board has met with widespread approval. To operate as a secretariat to the Minister for Industry,. Technology and Commerce, Senator Button, the new Board will be headed by Mr Robert Somervaille who is presently chairman to the OTC.

The objective of the Space Board will be to develop a coordinated and forward-thinking Australian space industry. Specific projects will be embarked upon and part financed by the Space Board, which will be operating on a first-year 1986/87 budget of $5. 25m and is hoped to be funded $100m over the coming five years. Initial projects will include a feasibility study on an orbiting telescope in partnership with NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) in addition to work on a range of detectors for a space telescope and a ground station designed to interrogate the next generation of sophisticated Earth resources satellites.

The formation of the Board follows recommendations made by the 1985 Madigan Report on Australia’s future in space and the more recent Australian Academy of Sciences’ working party report, A Space Policy for Australia. It was estimated that Australia’s fragmented space industry this year would have a turnover of around $45m whereas by taking firm action now to promote the aims of the Space Board this industry should be capable of generating several hundred million dollars worth of work by early next decade in addition to saving Australia vast sums of money in not having to go offshore for much of our day to day space requirements of the nineties.

A Space City for Queensland?

The Queensland government is funding an in-depth feasibility study into the viability of constructing a major launch facility on Cape York peninsula.

Firms involved in preparing the study include Hawker de Havilland, Aussat, British Aerospace Australia, the University of Queensland and the CSIRO. If the project is viable it is hoped that the new base will be able to join actively with NASA in launching components for the future US Space Station (mid 1990s) and the envisaged Moon Base a decade later. Initial funding does not presently exceed that required for the feasibility study though if approved the project will in its construction phase alone provide a valuable monetary windfall for North Queensland. The facility itself would then provide a revenue base of great importance to the region that no other industry could generate.

The north of Cape York also provides an excellent equatorial launch site amidst a stable political environment, something that is difficult to get almost anywhere else in the world. The two US facilities at Vandenberg and Cape Canaveral could certainly benefit by being closer to the equator and in latitudinal terms are roughly where Perth and Brisbane are respectively. Arianespace use their Kourou facility in French Guiana which is about the most equatorial base there presently is. While Kourou is slightly closer to the equator than the proposed Cape York base it still is exclus ive to Arianespace and is also in a relatively unstable political region compared with Australia.

If the base is feasible it would certainly go a long way to assisting the plans of the newly formed National Space Board and in building a substantial foreign exchange revenue base in the decades ahead in addition to giving Australia the opportunity to perhaps design, develop and commercially launch rockets 1n partnership with another country.

Hotol Study Matures

British Aerospace and Rolls Royce are now halfway through their two year initial validation study of the proposed BAe Hotol (Horizontal takeoff & landing) concept.

BAe claim that a system like Hotel is tantamount to Europe, and the large BAe satellite and space division, remaining in the space business. The problem nowadays is obvious in that the entire world launch capacity was swamped within a few months with the grounding of the Shuttle and Ariane programmes. Without launchers, there are no satellite orders and without that the large and prosperous BAe space division might as well cease to exist. To remedy this situation the company is launching aggressively ahead with Hotol as a potential satellite launch vehicle that will be at least five times as efficient as the NASA Shuttle. BAe are not alone as the US itself is forging down a similar path with its Aerospace Plane, though this will to all intents and purposes be larger and more complex than the relatively simple Hotol concept.

Keeping Hotol simple is the secret to its long term success, claim BAe. The craft burns a mixture of liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen in its new highly classified Rolls Royce engines which give it the unique capability to operate both in the atmosphere and in space. For takeoff the craft has a rotation speed of 280kts for a groundroll of around 8,000ft. In an accelerating climb the 230-tonne machine will go supersonic within 90 seconds passing through 40,000ft and out of the normal ATC airline lanes. Mach 5 is reached at an altitude of 25kms after 8 minutes. Thereafter air breathing ceases and a straight rocket climb is adopted, levelling off as the orbital insertion point is approached.

Orbital velocity is achieved at 90km altitude, the main engine is shut down and Hotol coasts to an operating altitude of some 300kms. A typical mission duration is given as 50hrs with each craft requiring five to six days turnaround. Position and altitude changes are achieved by the orbital manoeuvring system (OMS). At the end of this time the OMS slows the vehicle and brings the perigee down to about 70km altitude in preparation for re-entry.

Hotol then re-enters at a high incidence AOA which reduces as speed deteriorates. A hypersonic glide then commences at about 25km altitude. Because of its large plan area and low mass the vehicle has a low ballistic coefficient. Re-entry temperatures are therefore lower and allow a metallic outer skin for thermal protection, avoiding the problems associated with complex protective tiles or ablative coatings. Again this is a part of the inherent simplicity that BAe are building into the entire system.

Final approach and landing techniques are similar to that of the Shuttle though gentler as inital approach is flown at 8 degrees, flattening to 4 degrees for a decelerating final approach at 3 degrees with touchdown at 150kts. Around 7,000ft groundroll would be required. BAe envisage a fleet of such craft, all unmanned and operating on a near daily basis to a commercial time schedule from what would resemble a standard military airfield with a typical three thousand metre runway. Maintenance and support facilities and payload loading stations would be maintained at the base which for best effect would be located near the Equator. This again has favourable implications for the establishment of such a facility in Northern Australia as has already been suggested by the Queensland government.

Hotel would be able to place an 8-tonne payload into orbit using a payload bay of similar dimensions to that of Shuttle. BAe estimates that by the year 2000 they would be able to handle up to 70% of the world’s launch requirements and would provide a far cheaper and simpler alternative to today’s solid fuel rockets and existing Shuttle system.

Initially it was proposed in the media that Hotol would be able to perform a UK/Australia flight in around two hours carrying a module suitable for two to three dozen paying passengers. While this has obvious attractions to the very rich (the fare being perhaps a dozen times that of the present subsonic first class rate!), the fate of Shuttle Challenger may however do for civilian manned spaceflight what the Hindenberg did for airships of the era! Either way, BAe are playing down this aspect and are preferring quite rightly to treat Hotol as a dedicated low cost high-volume unmanned satellite launcher. While designed to be operated totally unmanned there still could be the option of a crew module for specialised recovery-type missions though BAe feel at this stage that even if passenger service were to be actively pursued it still would not be viable till at least 2010 at the earliest.

Meanwhile BAe anticipated that the entire Hotol programme would cost in the region of SUS4bn in 1986 values. This would take the programme through the R&D phase and include exploratory flights with a prototype. First flight is hoped to be achievable by 1998 with the entire programme in place by the end of the century. Each craft would have an anticipated life of 120 flights though if civil aviation is any guide this might well prove conservative. BAe envisage a fleet of up to nine such craft operating from one or more fixed bases with no more specialised support or infrastructure required as found at a medium sized air force base.

In the coming year the results of the 24 month BAe/RR design study will be known. It will then be clear if the project has the technical feasibility to proceed to the cost and time frame. Either way Britain, even with its annual government space budget approaching $A220m, will have to find a major European partner to compete against the combined US R&D assets which are to launch the competing Aerospace Plane. Competition will also come from a family of proposed very large Saturn-like US boosters plus cheaper launchers from both China, Japan and possibly even the USSR.

Either way BAe contend that Hotol, apart from its radical and highly classified engine, embodies existing off-the-shelf techno- logy with a minimum of ground support infrastructure that will keep the system both simple and highly cost-efficient as the major satellite launcher of the 21st century.