Italy's New Vega Launcher Seen Helping Ariane Upgrade

Europe's go-ahead for the Italian Vega light space launcher could be an advantage in developing improved solid fuel boosters for Ariane 5.

"Vega is a very interesting program," Snecma Group chairman & CEO Jean-Paul Bechat told Show News. "It could kill two birds with one stone-by working on that we can also prepare the subassemblies and test the cost improvements required for the improved Ariane 5."

Snecma is working with program leader FiatAvio on developing an advanced solid fuel rocket motor for the first stage of the three-stage Vega. The first stage of the Vega is an adapted Ariane 5 MPS solid fuel booster, so technology and performance improvements can be fed right back into the Ariane program.

Vega's second stage uses the Zefiro rocket engine developed by FiatAvio. Zefiro has already completed its static firing tests on the test stand at Salto di Quirra, Sardinia. Vega is designed to inject payloads of up to 1.5 tons, such as Earth observation and scientific satellites for civil applications, into circular polar orbit (about 700 km).

The launcher is already seen as the first in a series of smaller rockets to complement the much heavier Ariane range.

Snecma, Bechat notes, sees interesting potential for a two-stage launcher with Vega's first stage and a cryogenic second stage using Snecma's new Vinci engine that is being developed for the upper stage of the improved Ariane 5.

"This is the sort of launcher we could develop for Europe," he says.

The cryogenic Vinci engine was approved by the European Space Agency last June, dashing plans at Snecma and Pratt & Whitney to jointly develop the SPW2000 engine for the upper stage of Ariane, Delta and Atlas vehicles.

"The European Space Agency would not accept it," Bechat says. "All the news we were getting from the U.S., from the State Department and DoD, was good."

He is disappointed that the program did not go ahead, as a transatlantic teaming offered a chance to spread the development costs over a greater number of launches and save duplication of engines for two very small markets. Now Pratt is developing the RL60, and Snecma the Vinci, to perform the same job.

"It is a small niche, with production of no more than 20 a year," says Bechat. "That is the kind of production number the automotive industry has in a minute!

"Amortization of costs is a key problem," he says, and will continue to be so until there is more cooperation in space.