The Austral Launch Vehicle: 2014 Progress in Reducing Space Transportation Cost through Reusability, Modularity and Simplicity

Abstract

The re-use of launch vehicles (RLVs) is accepted as the most promising method for significantly reducing space access cost, increasing responsiveness and increasing reliability. Unfortunately, flight experience has proven otherwise. This leads to the current situation where all operational launch vehicles are expendable, and the majority of LVs under commercial development are also expendable systems.

The Austral Launch Vehicle (ALV) project is an international effort to develop a cost-optimized partially Re-usable Launch Vehicle (RLV). Now in its fourth year, the ALV project originated as an investigation into the additional requirements that will ensure that re-usability can provide real launch cost reduction. These requirements were identified as modularity, flexibility and simplicity. Modularity is required to increase the vehicle flight rate (through larger payload range and more module flights per launch) and to reduce development cost (through reduction of the number and size of newly developed elements). Flexibility is required to ensure a wide market can be captured, while simplicity leads to critical reductions in development and operational costs as well as increased reliability.

The ALV family of RLVs are being developed based on these principles. In the ALV architecture, only the first stage modular boosters are re-used since they represent the bulk of the launch vehicle mass and cost, while being the simplest to recover. The ALV first stage boosters use a deployable wing and aero engine to return to the launch site after re-entry. Re-use of upper stages does not appear economically feasible, except for small satellite launches where the structural mass fraction of expendable stages becomes excessive. For this reason the ALV project is partnered with the SPARTAN scramjet powered, reusable second stage project of the University of Queensland. The SPARTAN uses the ALV boosters as first stage.

The ALV project gathers students and professionals’ knowledge from several companies, associations and universities in the UK, Australia, France and South Africa. The project is organized in four phases: Phase 0 studies are almost complete, and Phases 1 and 2 consist of the development of test vehicles of increasing complexity as precursors to the full-scale development in Phase 3. The Phase 1 vehicle currently being designed, the ALV-1, is a small scale, low cost, analogue test vehicle to prove key concepts of ALV architecture. It will also be extensively used to develop and test the avionics for the larger vehicles, and is designed to be simple and extremely low cost. Work on the ALV-1 is progressing well, with prototyping set to commence in 2014 and a flight test planned for the end of 2015.