3w ago

Themis stands on the launch pad

www.esa.int

In brief
The first model of ESA’s reusable rocket demonstrator Themis is standing on its own legs at its launch pad in Kiruna, Sweden.
Themis is set to be the first European demonstration of a full-scale vertical take-off and landing rocket element that uses cryogenic propulsion.
This is the first time the rocket stage demonstrator has had its four legs installed, now the demonstrator is fully assembled.

8 comments

Better late than never, so lets hope that from here on they double down and speed up development to catch up.
Also to state the obvious: it is too round on the top, it needs to be pointy
- I wonder if you could change from having a pointed top to an inverted point with cuts out the side bulbing into like a ramjet engine.
  So the air is forced in through the top compressed and jettesoned out the sides downward. Wouldn't do any good on decent, but it would be fun to model and see if it made any benefits on launch
I'm not familiar with what they're doing here, but I'm guessing that for the purposes of just showing it taking off and then landing again or whatever, they don't need to take it to space, so probably don't need cowling to make it more aerodynamic.
EDIT: Oops. meant to respond to the comment about how pointy the end was.
- This short article has a few more details on the timeline, specifically this graphic might be useful.
  The first flight will be a small “hop”, where the engine will fire continuously but at varying ‘throttles’ – this in itself will be a first for Europe with the use of cryogenic propulsion. Flying up to 100 m on its first trip towards space, the hop-test is a significant milestone and allows engineers to focus on the critical landing and ground sequences for such a rocket.
  So you are right T1H's job will be to perform "hop" tests.
  
  Thanks for doing the digging on it.
  One other argument, aside from just lack of need and weight, for running it stripped down might also be that this may be risky --- like, they may expect to lose a few of these along the path to ironing out bugs. If you don't need to strap something to this, you'd probably rather not do so, if you're liable to destroy a few.
  I dunno how many SpaceX lost in their development process, but I'm sure there were some.

8 comments