MaiaSpace Maia launcher

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arstechnica.com

Concerned about SpaceX, France to accelerate reusable rocket plans

“It’s a real break from French strategy, and clearly inspired by the USA.”…
arstechnica.com arstechnica.com

Concerned about SpaceX, France to accelerate reusable rocket plans

"It's a real break from French strategy, and clearly inspired by the USA."

The new plan calls for the large, France-based rocket firm ArianeGroup to develop a new small-lift rocket called Maïa by the year 2026. This is four years ahead of a timeline previously set by the European Space Agency for the development of a significantly larger, reusable rocket.

Although the technical details are sparse, Maïa will not be Europe's "Falcon 9." It will have a lift capacity of up to 1 metric ton to low Earth orbit and be powered by a reusable Prometheus rocket engine, which is fueled by methane and liquid oxygen. This engine, which remains in the preliminary stages of development, has a thrust comparable to a single Merlin 1D rocket engine, which powers SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket. But since there are nine engines on the SpaceX rocket, it can lift more than 15 times as much as the proposed Maïa in fully reusable mode.
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The way I read this from what others have said this appears to be about crushing other small scale launchers in Europe rather than actually competing with Space X.
 
It will also dubiously stand in front of any future litigations... From public grandiloquent statements and funding to unlimited access into public R&D, this truly looks like a sheep in wolf clothing that wouldn't even beg to be tolerated on the market.
 
France’s CNES: There’s a mini-launcher competition in Europe. We intend to win it

The French government will subsidize development of ArianeGroup’s Maia reusable mini-launcher, and other French mini-launchers as well, to meet a competitive threat from other European small launchers, the president of the French space agency, CNES, said.

The decision was made after France concluded that mini-launchers are not just proving grounds for technologies intended for larger vehicles, but commercially valuable assets in the emerging satellite market.
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In its recoverable mode the launcher loses two thirds of its payload capacity compared to when it’s just used in an expendable mode.

https://twitter.com/x/status/1571031216949788674
View: https://twitter.com/andrewparsonson/status/1571031216949788674


Small update from MaiaSpace: Maia will be capable of carrying 1,500 kg payloads to orbit in an expendable configuration. This is reduced by two-thirds to just 500 kg when it's being recovered. This shows the huge payload tax that's required for recovering these small vehicles.
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Some good news for Maia:

ArianeGroup has committed to increasing its investment in the company’s launch startup subsidiary, MaiaSpace, from approximately €40 million to €125 million.

MaiaSpace was founded in late 2021 with the aim of developing a partially reusable microlauncher. The standard two-stage configuration of the Maia vehicle will be capable of deploying 1,500 kilograms into low Earth orbit when the first stage is expended and 500 kilograms when it is being recovered. However, with the addition of the Colibri kick stage, the vehicle’s performance will increase to 2,500 kilograms to low Earth orbit when the first stage is expended.

Since its founding, ArianeGroup has invested approximately €40 million into the fledgling launch company. This has allowed MaiaSpace to grow to over 115 employees, construct a prototype of the Maia second stage, which has undergone cryo testing, and test-fired the engine that will power the Colibri kick stage all in just two years of operation.

As MaiaSpace pushes forward to its ambitious goal of a maiden launch attempt in 2025, ArianeGroup has committed an additional €85 million to the cause. This makes the company one of the most well-funded launch startups in Europe, surpassing Orbex’s €115 million and only falling short of the impressive €310 million raised by Isar Aerospace. However, the €125 million invested in MaiaSpace doesn’t tell the whole story.

To boost the pace at which it develops Maia, MaiaSpace is utilizing the work done by ArianeGroup for its ESA-contracted Themis and Prometheus programmes. Maia will utilize three Prometheus engines for its first stage and a single vacuum-optimized Prometheus engine for its second stage. As for Themis, considering recent reporting confirming that Maia will stand at 50 metres tall, it’s likely that the very little of the 30-metre tall Themis booster will be left behind.

To date, over €300 million in combined funding has been spent on Themis and Prometheus. This, when added to the €125 million supplied by ArianeGroup, is a more accurate but not perfect overview of the funding that has gone and that will still go towards the development of Maia.
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europeanspaceflight.com

ArianeGroup to Increase MaiaSpace Investment to €125M - European Spaceflight

ArianeGroup’s investment in MaiaSpace will increase from approximately €40M to €125M as the company pursues a 2025 maiden launch.
europeanspaceflight.com europeanspaceflight.com
 
Amazing how the money and IP flow freely to a private ownership without any safeguard or rational guarantee of any proven success.

If the methalox doesn't lift that rockets, would the pile of public money do? (yes, yes, a green startup per se).
 
So about Themis, the demonstrator that Maia's First stage is derived from...

Last year Arianegroup tested Themis landing legs developped by the Swiss company Almatech with ESA funding from the FLPP program...
www.esa.int

Themis landing legs deployment test

www.esa.int
almatech.ch

Landing Legs for reusable launchers - Almatech

Almatech is a privately-held swiss SME delivering critical hardware and engineering services for the space market with reliability, flexibility and efficiency as core company values
almatech.ch almatech.ch


And now the German company MT Aerospace is testing Themis landing leg they developped with funding from the EU "SALTO" program (as part of "Horizon 2020")...
europeanspaceflight.com

MT Aerospace Begins Testing Themis Landing Leg

MT Aerospace has completed initial testing of a demonstrator of the landing legs for the Themis reusable booster demonstrator.
europeanspaceflight.com europeanspaceflight.com
www.linkedin.com

MT Aerospace AG on LinkedIn: #cfrp #sustainability #horizoneurope #rocketscience #greenspace⦠| 12 comments

Milestone alert ð! Last week we tested the #CFRP demonstrator of a landing leg for a reusable rocket ð. The landing leg together with a telescopic system and⦠| 12 comments on LinkedIn
www.linkedin.com www.linkedin.com

Talk about inefficiency!
Now from what I understand, the former is for the First, single-engine Themis hopper (T1H), and second is for the second, three-engines Themis hopper (T3), which are two different vehicles, but with the same size, which will launch from two different launch pads (Esrange and Kourou) for two overlapping programs...

And beyond that, it looks like Maiaspace is also developping their own leg design, despite their first stage being very close to the Three-engines Themis, the legs in some of the recent renders look noticeably different from MTA's

1722392800919.png

A good case of european industrial organization mess...

Meanwhile in China, a country that 10 years ago, had less advanced launcher technologies, and not a single private space company:
1722393108272.png
All of these are the size of a small launcher's first stage, like Themis/Maia
 
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"Aw, China is just copycats.."

(And you go right on thinking that, hey-sir.)
 
All it means is that they are pretty good at it.
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Except for bolting demonstrators to Earth solid ground, when they test them :p

I'm not that shocked the Chinese churn copies of F9R and Starship. I mean, look at Caravelle & DC-9, 727 & Trident, Lockheed L-2000 & Concorde & Tupolev 144. Bottom line: there are not many ways to re-invent the wheel.
 
Archibald said:
Except for bolting demonstrators to Earth solid ground, when they test them :p

I'm not that shocked the Chinese churn copies of F9R and Starship. I mean, look at Caravelle & DC-9, 727 & Trident, Lockheed L-2000 & Concorde & Tupolev 144. Bottom line: there are not many ways to re-invent the wheel.
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True, but my impression as a lay person and someone who is most definitely not a historian of Chinese industrial history is that China largely stopped coming out with original inventions and instead started copying other's ideas about a millennium ago.
 
Michel Van said:
Good news
Maiaspace got the right to transform the disused Soyuz launch pad at GSC.

MaiaSpace selected to operate from former Soyuz launch pad in French Guiana - Maiaspace

maia-space.ariane.group maia-space.ariane.group
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What their press release doesn't say is that they'll likely have to share this pad and infrastructure, since as part of the 2023 ESA Ministerial agreement the Soyuz launch area would be shared between one CNES-selected launcher and one ESA-selected launcher.

Sharing the launch pad will likely hinder their "perspectives of growth in terms of launch rate.", there is also an increasing french governmental/army interest in maiaspace as reusable launcher for national payloads. I wouldn't be surprised if CNES/France influences ESA's selection so that they also pick Maiaspace, or at least a french launcher.

It reminds me of the Wenchang commercial launchpads and its countless shared launchers... Not ideal for RLVs, F9's success was built on the parallel and exclusive use of 3 different (and already built) launch pads.

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From the point of view of infrastructures, they will seemingly remove the Mobile Gantry (MBO), likely because it's too small for Maia, it's tailored for Soyuz's size and specific mix of horizontal and vertical integration, and also because it's still legally Russian-owned. They seem to keep the MIK assembly hangar and the oxygen tanks of Soyuz's fuelling system. Another article says that they ordered a (rail-adapted) Transporter-Erector for Maia.

A quick scale comparison between Soyuz-ST and Maia:

MaiaSoyouz.jpg
 
martinbayer said:
They are. All it means is that they are pretty good at it. Show me *one* single *original* Chinese aerospace concept.
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Whatever Qian Xuesen worked on? :)

The Maia LV is larger than I thought…O/T wasn’t there to be an R-7 evolution where all the cores were to be cylindrical (making it resemble Shenzhou’s launcher) and use N-1 engines?
 
A lot of new papers..and not just on aerospace…are coming out of China—just browsing phys.org will make that clear.

Their current LVs do look a lot like Musk’s, but they are either R-7 size or a bit bigger than Falcon for whatever reason.

They improved on Soyuz.
There are only so many LV designs…had they gone plug nozzle folks would say they ripped off Phil Bono.
 
publiusr said:
Whatever Qian Xuesen worked on? :)

The Maia LV is larger than I thought…O/T wasn’t there to be an R-7 evolution where all the cores were to be cylindrical (making it resemble Shenzhou’s launcher) and use N-1 engines?
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You're probably thinking of the late 90s/early 2000s "Yamal" project by TsSKB-Progress, conceived as an alternative to Angara, which used NK-33 on its core and modular, NK-33 powered cylindrical boosters that were to be shared with another "Polyot" smaller launcher. It's one of the projects that eventually evolved into Soyuz 2.1v

1727609433200.jpeg
1727609512833.jpeg

As for Maia, yeah it's quite big, it uses the same 3.5m diameter and stainless steel tanks as Themis does, so the whole thing; in size; is only a bit smaller than a Falcon 9 1.0; however since methane is less dense than kerozene and (conventional) steel tanks are heavier than aluminium, the performances are quite lower (Maia has been advertised as 4 tons to LEO)

Here's some pictures of the Maia and Themis tanks and stages at Arianegroup's plant in Vernon
1727610504461.jpeg
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