It would have enabled Europe to measure up to the Americans and the Russians. The Hermès shuttle would have competed with its Challenger and Columbia colleagues. It would have overtaken its Soviet counterpart Buran, abandoned after the fall of the Wall. The ace. It has not gone beyond the stage of models and technical tests. In an essay published these days by the specialist publisher JPO, the engineer Metz François Leproux returns to the causes of his failure. And points to its legacies, far from being trivial.
The young man knows what he is talking about: he is part of it. A graduate of ISAE-Ensma, he works at Nimesis, which develops shape memory alloys in Frontigny for the space industry. He is also in charge of the Grand Est group of the Association Aéronautique et Astronautique de France (3AF), which bears witness to the vitality of the region’s space industries.
“The story of the conquest of space has interested me for a long time,” he explains. I quickly immersed myself in the French and European program, that’s where I discovered the history of the Hermès shuttle. “If the French sources are few, due to failure, François Leproux is lucky: among his teachers at the engineering school of Poitiers, there are many scientists involved in the development of the shuttle, in the 1980s.
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“We have all the bricks”
His essay reconstructs its entire history and at the same time reveals the difficulty of the European Union in carrying out a common project. Hermès sank for questions of cost, internal governance between Aérospatiale (future Airbus) and Dassault, agreement between the French and the Germans. She left some legacies in terms of materials. Today, there is a thrill, a new ambition, now that the last generation, of industrialists and politicians, the one that suffered the failure of Hermès, has passed the hand.
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The Ariane Group unites skills. Boosted by the successes of the private sector and competition from other nations, the issue of human spaceflight comes back to everyone’s mind. “If we take all the building blocks of space flight, we have them. But until today we never realized that we could assemble them… ”, hopes the Messin. “We, Europeans, are always recognized as experts on a lot of subjects, but we are in a logic of equipment manufacturers, for the benefit of the Americans or the Russians …”
Hermès, a legacy ambition , François Leproux, JPO editions.
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