Europe's mini-space shuttle completes successful 100-minute mission

Europe’s mini-robotic space shuttle completed its first test-flight Wednesday afternoon, marking Europe’s entry into developing reusable rockets that one day may help take humans to Mars.

Dubbed the Intermediate eXperimental Vehicle (IXV), the minivan-sized spacecraft has a wingless design that is able to test a fiery return through Earth’s atmosphere – something only a handful of spacecraft designs have been able to do.

The flight blasted off this morning from Europe’s Guiana Space Center on the northern coast of South America, sending it eastward over the Pacific Ocean in a sub-orbital flight at an altitude of 200 kilometres. The entire flight lasted just over 100 minutes before parachutes were deployed and the vehicle gently splashed down about 3,000 kilometres west of the Galapagos Islands. Upon hitting the water, a balloon-based floating system was deployed, which kept the two-ton spaceship from sinking to the bottom of the ocean.

Loaded with over 300 onboard sensors, the goal was to test its guidance systems, manoeuvrability and heat shield, and on initial examinations, it looks like they all performed with flying colours.

"It couldn’t have gone better.” said ESA director-general Jean Jacques Dordain, according to BBC News.

"But the mission itself is not over because now it is necessary to analyze all the data gathered during the flight."

With so much success, the European Space Agency is already looking ahead to follow-up flights where the designs will be tweaked based on the full analysis of all the data from today’s flight.

Just as exciting will be the launch of NASA’s solar monitoring satellite DSCOVR, slated for this week. It will be riding a commercial rocket built by private company SpaceX, which will be testing its own reusable first stage rockets. It will mark the second attempt to safely land the leftover first stage booster on an ocean platform.

SpaceX’s billionaire founder Elon Musk hopes to reuse his rockets, but that requires them to get back to Earth intact. But if the first attempt that ended in a fiery explosion is any indication, it may be a while before we see that pulled off safely.

The ultimate goal with these experimental test flights is to one day to be able to both reduce the cost of spaceflight and develop probes that would be able land on other worlds in the solar system and blast off from their surface for return flights to Earth.

The cost of launching single-use rockets remains exorbitant and they take weeks and months to set up. For example, the cost of each launch of the now-retired NASA space shuttles was estimated to be about $1.5 billion, and turnarounds between missions took months instead of the days it was originally touted to be able to do.

If Musk gets his way, he figures that by reusing his rockets with perhaps only a two-week turnaround, he could reduce space launch costs at least 100-fold.

The long term goals of testing these new spacecraft designs in the United States and Europe is to one day have the right vehicles that can safely, quickly and efficiently take humans to the surface of Mars and back. And reusable transportation systems may very well be a key component if we ever hope to plant astronaut boots on the Red Planet.