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This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon Europe programme under grant agreement No 101082326
ENLIGHTEN (European iNitiative for Low cost, Innovative & Green High Thrust ENgine) is an EC-funded project focused on one big objective: developing new technologies to reduce costs of access to space, while increasing competitiveness of current and future Space Transportation Systems (STS) in Europe.
Autonomous access to space is a prerequisite for the strategic autonomy of the EU. It is a key enabler and indispensable element in the space ecosystem and the value chain, without which there is no space policy.
In consequence, the launch market has experienced a drive toward reduced launch costs showing an increasing competition at the global level, which will certainly further increase with the announced entry into operations of heavy reusable launchers. To remain competitive in such a rapidly evolving market and still offer affordable access to space to European citizens, new solutions enabling operational capacities by 2030 and preferably earlier for current launch systems are needed.
Given the small European institutional demand and the barriers to access the international market, it has become now mandatory for European launchers to reduce their costs substantially to stay competitive in the open commercial market on which they depend in order to spread fixed costs.
Presently Europe can rely on 2 operational launchers: ARIANE and VEGA (heavy and medium class launchers). Both launchers are using solid propellant boosters while Ariane 5 (and soon Ariane 6) is also using a high thrust liquid LOX/LH2 engine on its main central stage (the “Vulcain 2”); Vega E is expected to use a liquid engine LOX-CH4 based upper stage.
In the future, the trend in Europe will be to concentrate on green performant propulsion systems substituting the more pollutant and toxic solid propulsion systems for cryogenic engines.
In particular, the use of green hydrogen and bio-methane will drastically reduce the climate impacts of space transportation. Future launcher roadmaps currently discussed with ESA envision fully liquid reusable launcher families based on common building blocks to the benefit of all European actors. Those fully reusable launchers will make use of multiple cryogenic engines.
Prioritising the engines is particularly relevant due to the high costs associated with propulsion systems as more than half of a launcher cost comes from the propulsion system. It is therefore important to first concentrate the effort on the cost and performance of high thrust propulsion systems to restore and ensure the competitiveness of the European launchers for the future.
Since its inception in 2016, reducing the costs has been a key objective of the PROMETHEUS program, a precursor of a new engine family answering to the future needs of European launchers lead by ArianeGroup in the frame of ESA Future Launcher Preparatory Programme. Building upon the first results of its Prometheus Methane engine development, ArianeGroup together with its partners proposes in the ENLIGHTEN project to accelerate and broaden the efforts started in the Prometheus project.
Besides cost reduction, the flexibility of the launcher is another key parameter for the competitiveness of space transportation systems.
The ambition of ENLIGHTEN is to reach the described “Challenges” by introducing new concepts and processes into the production and exploitation of liquid engines by:
Processes with potential applications in most significant sub-systems of the engine, allowing to win in time of conception, production and part count of the engine, and thus reducing environmental impact of the production.
For better engine operability, maintenance and overhaul, as well as improved test management and exploitation during development and engine acceptance.
The above is not independent from the single propulsion technology, on the contrary they will be fully integrated to develop a new generation of low-cost liquid propulsion sub-systems. Main key subsystems are:
In complement to the Thrust Chamber Assembly and the Turbopumps, which are produced in the frame of the ESA FLPP program, these subsystems are the most important and costly parts constituting such an engine.
The final step will be then to define the test platform allowing the integration of all these components in one workhorse engine demonstrating the capacity for such a low-cost engine to be quickly operational and available for all European launcher families.
The outcomes of this project will then allow to proceed to an incremental upgrade of the European launcher family to promptly restore the competitiveness of European strategic launchers:
Quick wins of some technologies matured in the frame of ENLIGHTEN could be applied to the current Vulcain 2 rocket engine (Horizon 2025)
Objective would be to enable the replacement of the Vulcain 2 engine
by a PROMETHEUS-H engine, leading to a reduction of a factor 5 to 10 of the costs (Horizon 2027+)
Objective will be to provide to all European Launchers with a family
of low-cost, green and reusable engines, based on Hydrogen or Methane fuel (2030).
© All rights reserved
This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon Europe programme under grant agreement No 101082326