I bet you didn’t know that France has a space agency. It’s called CNES.
Now that I have your attention, let’s talk about one of CNES’s more famous concepts, Hermes.
Hermes was conceptualized in the 1980s as a way to service ESA’s Columbus space station, which was never built. Hermes, however, had at least some momentum to it, as the program was one of the key parts of the Ariane 5’s development, as it was intended to launch atop the stack.
Although it suffered a serious bump after the Challenger disaster, ESA continued development of Hermes. The spacecraft was separated into two main sections, a pressurized orbital module mounted to the rear of a reentry glider module. The orbital module would have contained the craft’s engines and provided additional space for cargo. The glider’s frontal cockpit area, the area that the astronauts would have spent most of launch in, was capable of ejecting in an emergency (Hence the gray area near the cockpit). After a mission, the craft would have landed at one of 4 ideal landing sites (Bermuda, Port De France, Guiana space center, and Istres-Le tubé air base). The craft was capable of 30-90 days of life support, and could carry 6614 pounds into space.
The program was cancelled in 1992 because it was massively over budget, even if it was technologically sound. it really makes you wonder how spaceflight could be different if ESA had gone through with the concept. Could we have had a larger, more unique European ISS section, or a more spaceplane-reliant spaceflight climate? We’ll never know.
Related articles:
https://www.spaceflighthistories.com/post/hermes-spaceplane
https://www.esa.int/About_Us/ESA_history/History_Hermes_spaceplane_1987
http://www.astronautix.com/h/hermes.html
https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1979muni.iafcQ….V/abstract
Take action:
https://www.esa.int/About_Us/Careers_at_ESA
https://www.esa.int/ESA_Multimedia/Images/2013/04/Donate_to_charity
