If seeing a gigantic baguette flying in space is on your bucket list, do we have news for you.
Well, kind of. France will soon have a new player in the space race – a rocket called Baguette One.
Humankind reaching the heavens was once unthinkable, with the rockets that have made it possible named after ancient gods like Apollo or mythical creatures like Pegasus.
Then there’s the boulangerie name that the Bordeaux-based start-up HyPrSpace has come up with for its 10-metre-high pocket rocket.
Baguette One is intended to be a trial run for the company’s larger rocket, the Orbital Baguette One (or OB-1, pronounced ‘Obiwan’, a nod to the Star Wars Jedi Obi-Wan Kenobi).
HyPrSpace CEO, Sylvain Bataillard, said she wanted to be ‘serious but not sinister’ when it came to picking a name.
But the name wasn’t quite serious enough for the presenters at TFI, France’s main broadcaster, when they covered the Baguette One yesterday.
When journalist Adrien Portron began giving a rundown on the rocket to the panel, even he struggled to keep a straight face when they were shown an AI-generated image of a baguette on a launchpad.
Both baguette rockets are micro-launchers – delivery vans for small, 300kg satellites that drift just above the Earth’s atmosphere.
‘To understand, we can compare heavy-lift launchers to micro-launchers,’ Bataillard told CNews.
‘A micro-launcher is like a “taxi” with a high fare currently between $40,000 and $50,000 per kilo to take it into space. A large launcher is like a bus with fares less than $10,000 per kilo.
‘But with our rocket, we could offer a “taxi” for around €20,000/kg.’
These cosmic cabs will rely on a cheap, eco-friendly engine (at least, in the multi-million world of spacecraft propulsion systems), Bataillard said.
Rather than using rocket fuel, ‘space bakers’ designed hybrid boosters that use a mixture of solid and liquid propellants, such as recycled plastic.
Neither of the baguettes will use a turbopump, a costly piece of equipment which pushes high-pressure fluid into the engine’s combustion chamber.
Baguette One will be launched from one of three military bases next year -Biscarrosse, Saint-Médard-en-Jalles or Île du Levant – making it the first rocket launch in metropolitan France.
HyPrSpace’s Baguette One isn’t a half-baked idea, though.
Backed by President Emmanuel Macron, the firm received €35million (about £30million) in subsidies last year.
This is part of the French government’s France 2030, a fund that invests in innovative technologies.
French defence officials have expressed an interest in HyPrSpace’s propulsion technology as a novel way to chuck satellites into space.
More than 26,000 satellites will be launched by 2032, amounting to eight satellites a day, consultancy firm Novaspace estimates.
Elon Musk’s rocket company, SpaceX, owns around two-thirds of the sofa-sized orbiters whizzing above your head right now, according to the satellite tracker CelesTrak.
Yet studies have shown that all this hardware above our heads means more harmful metals lingering in the atmosphere, while some space officials worry that the final frontier is becoming a celestial rubbing tip.
Bataillard, however, remains optimistic.
‘Space today is like the internet in the 1990s,’ she added. ‘We know that a lot of things are going to happen.’
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