Launch vehicle options for CLLARE | Booster | Forum

Just some thoughts on launch vehicles for CLLARE.

The latest estimate for total mass of the CLLARE mission stack is 6531 kg – but this does not take into account the mass of the astronaut, some consumables, and the structure to hold those consumables.  Once we take into account those masses and the mass of the extra fuel to push it around, I think we will be getting close to the 10,000 kg mark the for the whole stack.

The American company SpaceX is currently developing a two stage LOX/RP-1 booster called Falcon 9.  This is a man rated booster (SpaceX have a contract from NASA to take over resupply of the ISS after the shuttle is retired) which can carry about 11,000 kg to LEO, at a cost of $35 million per launch (which is a lot in absolute terms, of course, but in terms of dollars per kg to orbit it's a very good deal, and they expect to be able to get it down even further).

Since it seems very feasible that we will be able to get our total mass quite close to this amount, I think it makes perfect sense to plan to use the Falcon 9 for the launch of complete CLLARE mission stacks.  The effort involved in developing our own booster for this will be immense – the Falcon 9 will be off the shelf, well tested and known to be safe.

Of course, this does not completely remove the need for our own booster technology.  Our first CLLARE flights will be suborbital and brief orbital flights of just the CM, at around 1500 kg.  This is a very small payload comparatively speaking, and I don't think there are any man-rated commercial options for something of this size.  So it would be sensible to build our own hybrid boosters for this.  This will be a much easier task for us to accomplish (maybe we could use a larger version of Copenhagen Suborbital's HEAT rocket, or a cluster of HEATs?).

Once we have built the small hybrid booster to do just CM launches we will have a much better idea of how hard building an alternative to the Falcon 9 would be and decide then if we wish to pursue that option to make future CLLARE stack launches cheaper.  For now we should plan on using the Falcon 9 because it will be fairly cheap, reliable and it makes our overall mission plan look more achievable.