CALLISTO demonstrator and Operations in CSG - French Guiana: status of scenario

Kurzfassung

The CALLISTO vehicle is a flight demonstrator for future reusable launcher stages and their technologies. The program involves three countries and their space organizations: CNES for France, DLR for Germany and JAXA for Japan. The first tests will be conducted in 2024 from the CSG, Europe's Spaceport for commercial launches. The challenge is to develop, all along the project, the skills of the partners. This knowhow includes Products and Vehicle design, Ground Segment set up, and post-flight operations for Vehicle recovery then reuse. Concentrating on operations in CSG and facing numerous and unique constraints [R1], CALLISTO Project has revisited several top requirements and Operational Requirements as well during design maturation process. Main evolutions include, for instance: -The increase of turnaround time between flights, -Landing on ground (close to Lift-Off Pad) instead of a barge in open seas. Anyway, the initial core choices of Architecture design and Concept of operations [R1] were confirmed. Taking into account feedbacks from Vehicle and Ground Segment designers, several innovative choices were introduced especially robots [R2] in charge of: - Reconnection of Safety-critical functions after aborted Lift-Off and landing, - Disconnections of these same functions ahead of Lift-Off, - Initial inspections after landing. Having in mind that the campaign and the set of flights at CSG is supposed to be completed in one row and that Vehicle lay-out optimization is performance (in flight) driven first, the risk in drifting of operations duration must be mitigated. A fair balance between the operational efficiency during ground phases and the inflight performance shall be mastered early in the course of development and ahead of major design decisions for Vehicle design. Several key drivers provide degrees of freedom, as - The devoted effort ahead of the French Guiana Campaign for (i) validating operations to be conducted in CSG and (ii) training of staff as well, - The life time of products and their mean time-in between failure and then planning of maintenance and its duration, - The level of effort allocated to re-check flightworthiness between flights impacting the revalidations testing time line, - The Vehicle limitations vs. natural environment resulting in availability constraints and then possibly undesired waiting phases. The Concept of Operations maturation and challenges regarding flight preparation and Maintenance & Repair Operations (M&RO) definition are detailed in this paper.