Spaceflight Progress in Europe and Japan

Here a few additions to anzah's cool "Human Spaceflight Progress Around the World" threads.



Spaceflight Progress in Europe


Europe currently has three launch vehicles.

The Ariane 5 is the primary heavy launcher in service since 1997. It has seen a number of updates increasing thrust and payload. It will be succeeded by Ariane 6 focusing on lowering fabrication costs and launch prices.

A Soyuz-2 is used for medium payloads, manufactured in Russia under a joint venture and shipped to French Guiana for assembly and launch.

A relatively recent addition is a small payload launcher Vega. An improved version of its first stage will be used as Areane 6 side booster.


Human spaceflight and spaceplanes seem to be of interest, but struggle with ambitious goals and financing.

In the 1980s-90s there was the Hermes spaceplane project, a compact glider designed to carry 6-3 astronauts and launched by Ariane 5. It was canceled due to unachievable performance and cost goals.

A more ambitious project followed around 2000. The Hopper was supposed to be a horizontal take-off system involving a 4 km magnetic/steam sled launch system. The project didn't progress beyond a subscale flight/glide demonstrator (Phoenix).

More recently there has been more successful experimental work on reentry vehicles, a capsule (ARD) and a small glider (IXV).



Spaceflight Progress in Japan


Japan launched its first satellite 1970 using a small solid fuel rocket. 1994 the liquid-fueled heavy rocket H2 was introduced. It had some reliability issues. The H2A/H2B derivatives seem to do better though.

For (really) small payloads they've developed the SS-520. Only 31 feet tall, technically a sounding rocket, it is seen as the smallest rocket to ever put an object in orbit around Earth.

They are also doing some cool stuff like testing solar sails (2004/2006/2010) and plan a solar sail mission to Jupiter around 2020.

a reply to: moebius

Maybe the UAE will become bigger players in the near future.

I posted this video on anzah's 2nd thread.

Although it is Neil DeGrasse Tyson explaining why a Mars colony is unlikely to happen.

It is at the WG summit in Dubai.

This got me thinking.

"That's an oil rich region".

Is he actually trying to get the wealthy to have a go too. Or, Maybe invest their wealth?

As i said. It was just a thought.