 Hey, what's up everybody? Welcome to Tomorrow. I'm Michael Clark and today I wanted to talk about how with the advent of SpaceX and now United Launch Alliance working on rocket reusability, at least partially, the European Space Agency's Aureon 6 rocket might be partially reusable in the future as well. This is your space pod for June 16th, 2015. The European Space Agency is planning on replacing the Aureon 5 rocket with the Aureon 6 rocket and the concept to make the rocket at least partially reusable has been in progress since 2010 and it's been worked on by the European company Airbus Defense and Space, a division of the Airbus Group. It's actually a new company that was formed in January of 2014 when Airbus Military, Cassidian and Astrium merged into a single company and the reusability concept was started under the former space company Astrium. This idea is similar to United Launch Alliance's concept to recover and reuse just the first stage engines of their proposed Vulcan rocket. But unlike United Launch Alliance's plan to recover the engine mid-air via helicopter, the Airbus idea would fly back to a runway under its own power using drone technology. The project is called Adeline, which is actually an acronym that meets advanced expendable launcher with innovative engine economy. The idea is that after the first stage of the future Aureon 6 rocket is expended and detached from the upper stage in payload, the engine and avionics package would separate from the fuel tanks. The engine module then pull up using small winglets and steer itself into a controlled glide towards a runway. There would also be an aerodynamic shield to minimize the stress and heat on the engine during re-entry. As it gets closer to the runway it would deploy landing gear and a set of pusher style propellers that would allow the module to make a powered horizontal landing. The module could then be refurbished and refloan 10 to 20 times in theory and would have a payload weight penalty of only around 10%. Airbus has already invested 15 million euros into the project so far and has built and test flown a few subscale prototypes already. More testing is necessary of course and even if this concept is officially adopted by the European Space Agency it would not fly on the first version of the Aureon 6 in 2020, which is the priority for Airbus and Aureon space to launch the Aureon 6 first before and if the Adeline is ever implemented. The program managers believe that this reusable concept could potentially reduce the cost of an Aureon 6 launch by about 30%. It'll be interesting to see who has the best reusable system between SpaceX, United Launch Alliance, Airbus, Blue Origin and any other secret programs that haven't been made public yet, if all of them become a reality. I think this is a really cool idea and based on the data they've provided so far it seems like a really cheap and efficient way to recover the first stage engine and I really hope that they are successful in this and I'm really curious to see if that third prototype there in this picture is just a mock up or if they're actually going to be doing some subscale rocket tests that actually fly on a rocket stage and do this whole recoverable system in just a subscale manner. That would be awesome. Anyway I want to know what you guys think about this idea so please leave a comment on our Facebook, Twitter or right here on the YouTube channel and let me know if you think this concept will be a success or not. And if you're interested in helping us to bring you space news like this then please donate to our Patreon campaign at patreon.com slash spacepod. Thank you to everyone who's contributed so far and hopefully we'll be able to continue to do great things and hopefully you know a little bit more today than you did yesterday thanks to tomorrow. I'll see you guys in the future.