It's interesting to see them say 2030s now. When the plans for "Ariane Next" first came out, they were aiming for 2028. Sounds like the program has already slipped quite a bit.
Ariane Group is going to be in for a rough time every year beyond ~2026 that they delay. By then most of Starship (SpaceX), New Glenn (Blue Origin), Terran R (Relativity), and Neutron (Rocket Lab) should be operational - all of which will at least reuse the 1st stage.
Of course, they'll be able to fall back on institutional payloads to maintain a minimum level of funding. But that's not a great place for the program to be in terms of funding. Or politics.
This whole situation is really tragic. The design of Ariane 6 was finalized in 2016 - after SpaceX had successfully landed a Falcon 9 for the first time. While I realize that that would have been quite late in the design process for the rocket, it really shows the weakness of Ariane Group when it comes to assessing the competitive landscape and making difficult decisions.
To be fair, it is hard on the king to wear the crown for too long. Europe and Russia had a long run; we'll see how well SpaceX carries the burden.
Those were not plans, just one space agencies ideas.
> they were aiming for 2028
That was just political marketing, had nothing todo with reality and was never even remotely possible.
> To be fair, it is hard on the king to wear the crown for too long.
The were not really the king. For GEO missions yes, but for LEO Soyuz was always cheaper. And yes ArianeGroup was launching them, but its hardly their technical capabilities that made that possible.
It's worth remembering that when F9 had successfully demonstrated reusability, they were still running from reality and arguing that reusability wasn't worth pursuing. Kind of like with ULA, they aren't merely bad at assessing the competitive landscape, they actively blind themselves to it.
I think it's unrealistic to expect a multi-national government funded organisation to offer a commodity service at a competitive price. With all the conflicting national interests and bureaucracy that come with this funding model, how should they compete with much leaner, commercial organisations that are only responsible to their shareholders? But does it really matter? If the main objective of the Ariane Group is to offer Europe independence by providing access to space, I think that’s worth a premium.
> it's unrealistic to expect a multi-national government funded organisation
Maybe then those organizations should admit that rather then lie about it. ArianeGroup always justified Ariane 6 early on by claiming with it they would be competitve with SpaceX.
Of course they thought about competitive with SpaceX in 2014, not 2024 when Falcon 9 flies weekly and Starship is deep in development.
> If the main objective of the Ariane Group is to offer Europe independence by providing access to space, I think that’s worth a premium.
Maybe then they should have had a clear strategy around achieving this goal effectively rather then deluding themselves.
Europe having Ariane 6 and Vega rocket for example make no sense. They could have one engine, for example Merlin 'European Version' and use it as the only engine one all their rockets.
However they have an incredibly complex bespoke first stage engine, and complex bespoke second stage engine. And lots of different solid rockets and so on.
If they had planned for making the most expensive possible thing to achieve independence they certainly managed it.
> I think it's unrealistic to expect a multi-national government funded organisation to offer a commodity service at a competitive price.
Except that they used to. They certainly beat the pants off of ULA (nee Boeing/Lockheed Martin) when it came to competitive GEO/GTO launches.
> But does it really matter? If the main objective of the Ariane Group is to offer Europe independence by providing access to space, I think that’s worth a premium.
It's a lot nicer to have a European rocket program that happens to make lots of money on the commercial market so that the member states basically don't have to fund it.
The current situation, where ArianeSpace doesn't win that many contracts, so it has to be heavily subsidized by member states is much more difficult. When it comes to politics, there are always more hungry mouths than there is available bread.
> If the main objective of the Ariane Group is to offer Europe independence by providing access to space, I think that’s worth a premium.
I mean in that case, wouldn't the superior option be having a more cost competitive private launch provider in Europe? that way you'd get both European independence and lower prices. Surely there's a way to foster that situation, since that's what the US has.
We should demand more and should not accept subpar performance.
This is somewhat like Nokia vs Apple, only worse because of the bureaucratic EU-wide red tape involved.
Yes, Europe should have its own space industry and be independent. But we should not accept rubbish or "paying a premium". We should demand more and aim at the top. Europe deserves it and can achieve it.
SpaceX has rocked the boat and thay should be an opportunity for drastic changes, especially in view of this fiasco.
Don’t forget Firefly’s MLV/Antares300 (F9 style, kerolox reusable first stage), and Stoke’s full RLV (smaller, mere medium class a bit more payload than Vega/Vega-C, but still potentially important). These companies have hardware in testing now as well.
Admittedly I don't know much about the economics of rocketry, but the Ariane 6 doesn't seem much different from the Ariane 5 and I can't imagine it actually brings much to the table in terms of performance or cost savings, especially in light of how involved the development of it was.
This is true, read my top level post for more information.
The Ariane 6 is basically an evolved version of what was the Ariane 5 ME. Many of the things that are now Ariane 6 were developed for Ariane 5 upgrades.
The new upper and lower stage engines are both just upgraded Ariane 5 engines.
However they realized they could never compete with the Ariane 5 core against Falcon 9 (in 2014) they changed some political design processes and made the rockets more flexible.
The most relevant difference between Ariane 5 and Ariane 6 is that Ariane 5 always had to huge solid boosters, while the Ariane 6 has 2 or 4 depending on the mission.
That makes is possible for the Ariane 6 with 2 boosters to be in the competition for LEO missions. Something Ariane 5 wouldn't have been able to do.
But you are right, the 5 billion $ it cost to develop Ariane 6 will required it to fly for decades to make it worth doing compared to Ariane 5 ME.
That's just it, for decades the "new" version of a rocket only had very small incremental changes and didn't raise the bar much at all. That's how commercial aerospace has worked for a very long time.
Much like the Toyota Camry which has been the best selling sedan in the US every single year since 2000.[1] It gets a slight incremental change each year, but no ground-breaking changes or utterly re-thinking what a car is.
Guess what sedan is now out-selling all other sedans? [2]
(Hint: not the one that has been getting incremental updates since well before 2000)
> the Ariane 6 doesn't seem much different from the Ariane 5 and I can't imagine it actually brings much to the table in terms of performance or cost savings, especially in light of how involved the development of it was.
My understanding is that Ariane 6 was explicitly designed to reduce production costs compared to Ariane 5, in large part due to competitive pressure from SpaceX.
> With the new Ariane 6 slated to enter service in 2020, ArianeGroup promises to cut per-kilogram launch cost by 40 to 50 percent compared to Ariane 5.
I don't have much faith in anything beyond Starship and New Glenn. I've been hearing things at Rocket Lab are a mess right now, and relativity and rocket lab basically both are pivoting because SpaceX has made their original launch plans moot.
China will in the next 1-3 years launch a reusable rocket. Bold prediction, but their combination of massive money, engineering howto and shameless industrial theft makes it a no-brainer.
In terms of other launchers, I can see whoever buys ULA launching something reusable in the next decade, as well as ariane space.
And likely neither will Russia, China, India, Japan or anyone other than the US - with maybe the exception of New Zealand.
The writing has been on the wall for where rockets were going for ten years, policy makers absolutely have failed, but let's not pretend it's only Europe who have got it wrong.
Also, the negativity these sort of headlines bring to "tech" in Europe as a whole are also unhelpful. Europe is absolutely at the cutting edge of technology.
China is definitely working hard to have it, maybe copy-paste approach but it is. We in Europe are definitely not cutting edge in general, maybe robotic space exploration but this is changing also rapidly. The problem is Arianespace and France. It's the similar issue to HLS. It's just a way to distribute money without any meaningful vision. Years of denial and ridiculing of SpaceX. The sad part is there is still no vision even when the world moved on.
The US won't have the tech in 10 years either if current levels of political tribalism continue.
Seems that a lot of people want to see Elon destroyed over Twitter/politics. See the incredibly negative reaction to the Starship launch attempt compared to the much more positive reaction to previous test flights that ended with a boom.
And if they destroy our current best hope for the future of space exploration in the process of going after Elon, they don't care, it's 'a win for the environment', or acceptable collateral damage to take down an 'evil multibillionaire'
(Maybe Elon should even consider stepping away from SpaceX? - but then projects as ambitious/risky as Starship would likely be dropped)
> See the incredibly negative reaction to the Starship launch attempt compared to the much more positive reaction to previous test flights that ended with a boom.
You are rewriting history. The same fucking thing happens everytime a rocket explodes. The same reaction happened with the earlier test flights again.
Some dumb idiots in the media and twitter right bullshit. A few dumb politicans try to cash in and do a bunch of saber rattling in congress.
Same game over and over, it doesn't matter and doesn't change anything.
SpaceX or Musk will not be destroyed by this nonsense.
Was the last Starship launch actually covered or reacted to differently? New York Times basically said "it exploded but experts agree that this was an important step forward" and all coverage and reactions I saw were "gosh, this is awesome, better luck next time". The negative comments I saw were the same I have been seeing since Falcon 9 was learning how to land.
Elon is a great salesman, but I think SpaceX is far enough along that it would be fine without him. Maybe better than fine, given how reckless he can be.
Who cares what some people want to see? All that matters is what they can actually help to make happen. And Elon being "destroyed" is only gonna happen through his own actions. He's his own worst enemy, and yes, buying Twitter and all of his subsequent actions with it were a huge mistake, a big unforced error. He's turned a lot of people against him, and for what. Hell, I'm very enthusiastic about space travel and yet he's even turned me against him somewhat, as I absolutely hate the waves of layoffs across tech his actions have precipitated. Him and Zuck basically gave everyone else "permission" too, and us tech workers have suffered severely for it.
While much of Rocket Lab’s team is still based in New Zealand, they are now a US-based company and their Neutron reusable medium-lift rocket will be built in the US and launch from the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport (MARS) in Virginia.
As far as I know they do not have any plans to launch reusable rockets from New Zealand.
I don’t think RocketLab had plans to ever commercially launch rockets out of NZ.
Its latitude is really not optimal for anything other than polar orbits and it’s too far from any potential customers which would increase the cost considerably.
Top 10 most innovate countries: Europe takes 7 positions, including #1.
Machines for manufacturing: Europe.
Machines to produce semiconductors: Europe.
Healthtech (Siemens, Philips): Europe.
Food tech and agriculture (Foodvalley): Europe.
Water management, port management: Europe.
Aviation: Europe.
Your world is built on leading Europe tech. Admittedly, the software isn't. Which is easy to tell because software is in a shit state.
All manner of cutting edge industrial and manufacturing technology. Not the glamorous consumer-facing stuff, but stuff like industrial automation equipment and software from the likes of Siemens, ASML's EUV lithography tech, etc.
> Europe is absolutely at the cutting edge of technology.
Cutting edge of technology is industry creating or industry changing technologies. The US has dominated these since the 80s, but arguably even before that with railways, and after all the atom bomb was invented by immigrants in the US.
The web, social media, smartphones.
And now space industries and generative AI.
And why is this?
Lots of network effects, but also places like the EU have it completely backwards in terms of policy. Policy doesn’t create innovation. It might support it, but real innovation comes from freedom and letting innovative people roam free. The US government is doing it best to stop this but still hasn’t managed it luckily.
I just don’t see how europe is at the cutting edge of anything, any companies they lead their field are downstream of leading US industries.
I don’t know if it’s possible to recreate what the US does. Probably not. But what EU bureaucrats try and do basically fails every time.
deepMind was only recently overtaken by OpenAI. And I'd chalk that up as a maybe.
Europe does have a lot of midtier industrial companies that do world-tier work. This includes Defense, Air transport (Airbus), Automotive, Pharmaceutical (BioNTech RNA vaccine coming from EU work) and I'm sure many other sectors.
> Europe is absolutely at the cutting edge of technology.
Unless that technology is launch vehicles, in which case they'll whinge and whine and eventually contract someone else to do it for them and pretend they have a competent space program.
Everybody except SpaceX is struggling to make their launch vehicles reusable, including the US companies. And even SpaceX hasn't been able to get the full reusability, not for the lack of trying. Which hints at that the reusability might be a niche solution that worked for SpaceX in particular, and maybe for some other companies which have been particularly lucky to be in a sweet spot and have a combination of factors. Policy is one of them, sure - but not the only one.
I'd also like to remind that the reusability isn't limited to the SpaceX style VTVL. There are also potentially promising things like VTHL flyback boosters, but they are untested and nobody is currently positioned to throw money away to test smart solutions hypothesized in 60s, because the margins for the failure are non-existent in the industry.
To say that "SpaceX hasn't been able to get full reusability, not for lack of trying" is a huge stretch when they've only just gotten around to the first orbital flight tests of the vehicle they designed for that purpose.
Similarly, the only other company that has even tried to make a proven launch vehicle reusable is Rocketlab. So suggesting that others are struggling, when they either haven't even tried yet or are still working on getting to orbit, is ridiculous.
On top of that, the argument that reusability doesn't work for others for any reasons other than policy also doesn't really fit. Launch prices for all other rockets are higher, even the ones developed to better compete with F9 are only in the ballpark of its launch price and completely uncompetitive on launch cost and cadence.
I think its perfectly fine that a private space company massively funded by billionaires and massive investment funds show the way before government space companies tread the path. Expecting govt funded organizations to innovate will only happen in times of nation-to-nation competition or in times of War. Usually, risky innovation is frowned upon and there is little understandings of mistakes. Learning from many failures - the SpaceX approach - is not tolerated for tax-payer funded companies.
And doing it in a decade or two is actually fine. Tech will stabilize by then and there will be more skilled people to hire. Why the rush ?
Pardon my French, but complete and utter nonsense.
> Michael Griffin. Griffin later estimated that SpaceX was around 85% funded by the federal government, mostly through his NASA awards, with the remaining 15% funding split between Elon Musk and other private investors. He felt the amount of government funding was "excessive in his view" compared with what he originally envisioned for the commercial space program.
From SpaceX's Wikipedia page. The Falcon 1 which was expandable, nothing special and cost ~$100 million was privately funded, the rest relied on very generous subsidies. (Regardless of Musk's posturing and outright lies)
On the contrary, outlandish and expensive (like aerospace) moonshot bets with uncertain financial benefits often happen due to government help, even in times of "unlimited money" which are far from the norm. For starters, Tesla and SpaceX both only happened due to US government subsidies; Airbus, the by far best civilian airplane manufacturer today, only exists because of European government pressure and funding. Bombardier only managed to design the C-series with Canadian government funds. All recent developments in renewables were off the back of massive subsidies for their adoption.
"Massively funded by billionaires" in this case means that the spoils of this research will be privately owned, yes. But the taxpayer is still paying for about 80% of each rocket that explodes. SpaceX's true innovation is in achieving massive subsidies on collecting this data.
Also, the US administration didn't got it right, because Nasa didn't do it. They had spacex to do it for them, while half of american society is insulting the elon musk.
Let's not pretend any administration got it right.
Just like the french administration had nothing to do with Pasteur creating the vaccine against rabies, the German administration has nothing to do Gutenberg creating the press and italian administration has nothing to do with Salvatore Sanfilippo creating redis.
At best, administrations from the past may be somewhat credited to foster an environment favorable for something like this to happen.
And even that is a stretch, given most administrations don't design anything, but rather react politically to whatever is the current situation.
SpaceX was nearly bankrupt when NASA awarded them $1.6 Billion to deliver cargo to the ISS, saving the company when it only had one successful launch. Then later on for the commercial crew program they selected SpaceX along with the (then perceived to be) safer bet of Boeing. Not to mention all of the other launches SpaceX has done for NASA or other government organizations.
This is an important comment. Governments, politicians, love to take credit for what other people accomplish, when, in reality, at best, they might provide money.
Imagine a scenario where you start a company that solves a really difficult problem --taking years of hard work-- and then a VC who provided funding takes credit for the effort. Even worse, the news organizations give the VC credit for the results. That's what politicians do.
> Let's not pretend any administration got it right
Well allowing and encouraging commercial space missions to unlock private sector was politically challenging and a huge win; not something you’d see in many other jurisdictions
The Obama administration should be credited for ending the government's monopoly on leading the direction of space endeavors. And Trump's administration mostly followed that course and stayed out of private aerospace's way. It's only been the current administration (ironic given Biden's connection to Obama being his VP) that's tried to reverse course and return to the cost-plus MIC paradigm that entrenched players loved so much.
I feel we're setting up for a SpaceX monopoly if they nail Starship reusability.
The only meaningfully reusable rocket right now is the Falcon 9, and while that significantly reduces the already cheap launch costs, it doesn't really change them by an order of magnitude, and with so many other costs, it doesn't make that much more possible that was previously impossible.
Arguably Starlink is possible now and wouldn't have been before, but there are other similar (fewer satellites) constellations not relying on F9 being that much cheaper. Also arguably there are more smallsats going into orbit, but I think RocketLab has done roughly as much for them as the F9 has so far.
As for other providers, ULA hasn't got a lot of re-usability built in, at least not to the extent that Starship (theoretically) or maybe even F9 has. RocketLab is starting reusability work, but is a way off anything good. Blue Origin are continuing to... well... who knows.
I don't think anyone other than SpaceX are going to have usefully reusable rockets for another decade. I'm also not sure SpaceX are going to be more than 8 years ahead anyway because I don't think Starship will be delivering on its promises for at least another few years.
> The only meaningfully reusable rocket right now is the Falcon 9, and while that significantly reduces the already cheap launch costs, it doesn't really change them by an order of magnitude, and with so many other costs, it doesn't make that much more possible that was previously impossible.
SpaceX's charges around $1,200/lb to low earth orbit. Soyuz costs around $8,000/lb. The space shuttle was $30,0000/lb. Because of SpaceX's lower launch costs, they now put more mass into LEO than the rest of the world combined.
>I feel we're setting up for a SpaceX monopoly if they nail Starship reusability
NASA gave contracts to BlueOrigin, ULA and others beside SpaceX. ULA was the only rocket provider to Pentagon for a long time before SpaceX come along. Jeff is as rich as Elon and he did pump money into BlueOrigin every year. if SpaceX did a better job then SpaceX deserved the market shares.
They will definitely have a monopoly for the next 10 years. But beyond that I doubt it - economies of scale don't matter that much (yet) in rockets which gives other companies a chance to grow.
one thing SpaceX did that doesn't get a lot of intention is reignite innovation in aerospace. If SpaceX gets overtaken by a competitor imagine the technology that had to be developed to accomplish dethroning SpaceX. Many of these launch companies sprouting up wont make it for one reason or the other but it won't be because of lack of inspiration.
BO has a more traditional approach to design than SpaceX's iterative process. They spend more time on simulation and analysis than on real world testing. Right now it appears that the SpaceX approach returns better results though they do have to deal with the peanut gallery using tests that end in explosions as an opportunity to attack the company instead of acknowledging that it's part of the process. If Blue Origin has a rocket explode, that's a much bigger blow to them as RUDs are not a significant part of their process. It also means their process is far less observable to outsiders, so a year or two from how, they might have New Glenn rockets in regular operation and for most, that will seemingly come out from nowhere.
By now Bezos is spending more then 1 billion per year.
BlueOrigin is a huge company already, and the basically make no money what so ever. 1 billion might cover labor cost. But given the infrastructure they are building and the actual rockets and so on, it has to be significantly more then 1 billion.
Well they are making slow progress on a hugely complex rocket, New Glenn. The might fly it in the next 2 years.
BE-4 engine delay. It delayed New Glenn and also ULA Vulcan. Vulcan is slated to start launching Amazon Kuiper Sats. And Rocketlabs Peter Beck is saying these constellations are slated to start going up en masse starting ~2026
No we are not. Because players like Amazon literally just spend like 5 billion on launches for SpaceX competitors. And many other constellation will do the same.
The government already is forced to have at least 2 providers and they want more not less.
Other governments, Europe, India and China will not simply give up.
And while talking about entities with absurd money, Bezos has spend a decade now funding Blue origin he will not just give up.
Venture capitalist are still funding many new rocket companies.
And yet somehow people believe he won't be able to hire a team to operate and scale an already-extant shitposting website. The cognitive dissonance is pretty amazing.
That's no longer true, pretty much any big car manufacturer outside of Toyota has caught up. Not only that, they provide much wider variety of vehicles (from the Renault Zoe and Dacia Spring all the way to massive pickups like the Ford F-150 Lightning).
Anybody who is watching this industry knew this. Ariane 6 is really just a slight upgrade over Ariane 5. The Ariane 5 ME is mostly what the parts that are now in Ariane 6 came from, otherwise Ariane 6 would have taken much longer.
This was approved in 2014, and the rocket wont be really operational until 2024. So 10 years for a really simply upgrade. Some of the parts now on the Ariane 6 have been in development for 20+ years.
Even if right now, Europe decided to do a huge new rocket projects, it would be 10 years minimum. But this is not likely going to happen. Many didn't even want to spend the money for Ariane 6. An agreement on a real large reusable rocket is politically not feasible anytime soon, an no country, not even France is gone do it alone.
Of course a real reusable rocket is gone cost more the develop then the Ariane 6, a slight upgrade over Ariane 5. Ariane 6 cost 5 billion and that ignores a lot different costs for infrastructure and development of sub-components over the last decades.
So a decade is actually an incredibly optimistic prediction, 2 decades is more likely and that is far from certain.
And even if they do so, they will never have a large share of the market. They will battle a whole host of other companies, RocketLab, ULA, Relativity for things that SpaceX will be excluded from (Amazon and so on).
Honestly as an European - this is not on the table of high priorities right now. Let Musk figure out between F9 and Starship how it’s best to produce rockets for the next half century, then copy and remake the same thing here.
The EU having independent access to space is a point of pride, not a continental emergency.
> Aside from Arianespace, Europe is currently fostering a number of private rocket companies, including Rocket Factory Augsburg, Isar Aerospace, PLD Space and Skyrora, with some of these rockets to be reusable. However the rockets in development are light-lift, whereas Ariane 6 and its possible successor are much more capable, medium-heavy-lift rockets.
The real problem is that there's no prototype path for Ariane. SpaceX had the grasshopper and others. The original space race was very incremental.
Hopefully the smaller companies will succeed with their more manageably sized rockets. Then they'll have to fight an uphill political battle against the big incumbents, just like SpaceX did.
Ariane could make prototypes too, but they probably won't.
It's more about the humans than the hardware. Schedules slip for many reasons. Landing and reusing a rocket is new to them. There's nothing like reality to force people to be realistic and get experience.
Europe is failing because it's not a single entity. It's a loose cooperation between many countries.
Insane amount of talent is wasted because of "so called" european language and cultural racism.
Companies are still "national" instead of european and talent is not appreciated. Taxes are sky high and so is national, cultural racism. You think a brilliant bulgarian scientist is treated the same by his French colleagues?
Until this changes and europeans will start treat their fellow europeans fairly nothing will improve.
> You think a brilliant bulgarian scientist is treated the same by his French colleagues?
As a Bulgarian who lives and works in France, yes. Ffs multiple very high profile French authors, thinkers, theatre directors are originally Bulgarian (Tzvetan Todorov, Galin Stoev come to mind, there's also a lady whose name I can't recall) so even in very conservative areas they're accepted, let alone in scientific areas.
As a person from another Eastern EU country who worked in German and French corporations, absolutely no. The people at my current US employer treat me very, very differently. I'm never going back.
Even just the casual dismissal of my attempts to ask to speak a common language (English) - them switching to German/French whenever there was at least one other speaker of the language - even though the firms declared the working language is English...
Where I live if a person who doesn't speak our language comes into the room we all switch to English so the person can feel welcome.
Stuff like credit cards issued in my country simply not working and them saying things like "yeah well we don't trust these eastern banks" with the typical "zomg another poor schmuck"-look...
I think that's the best explanation of the current situation in Europe.
Just look at Germany, biggest economy in EU. It's treating it's migrant workers as slaves. Feeding failing pension system from them. Not giving any rights for innovation(you can't start business without German national cofounder) or even any motivation to innovate(high taxes, anti-success culture, strict residence laws).
When you mention any problems with Germany to Germans, they're so protective and unwilling to change that their only response is "go back home if you don't like it here".
> you can't start business without German national cofounder
That's an outright lie, you need a Visa though if you're not a citizen from
a Schengen country.
> strict residence laws
Ever tried to get a Greencard? And if you have the financial backing, up until the start of the Ukraine war there were plenty of states with a golden visa program.
I think you're being too harsh on german and european policymakers. I agree, the climate for startups is abysmal and the room for improvement is huge, but in terms of being inclusive EU is leading over the US.
> When you mention any problems with Germany to Germans, they're so protective and unwilling to change that their only response is "go back home if you don't like it here".
Lived in Germany for five years, 100% agree with this. The Germany Defense Squad is very real.
Germans are way pricklier about criticism of their country compared to Americans, which surprised me somewhat, given Americans' reputation for superpatriotism.
That's not to say you won't ever see the same kind response from some Americans (especially those further right), but what surprised me is that even centrist or center-left Germans of the kind you'll see on Reddit were so defensive, while centrist and center-left Americans are practically lashing themselves with a cat o' nine tails over how dumb the US is on many issues, and heartily agreeing with foreigners on criticism.
Why on earth would Europe be "a single entity" ?! The more you are forcing it to be (like pretty much a Soviet administration), the less it is working...
All the "European success stories" are things that were created by what you call "loose cooperation between many countries", like Airbus, which is indeed the way to go.
I want Europe to succeed and that's why I'm staying here, but I have to agree that the racism situation in France is really bad. It's the main reason I won't work for a company here.
The US was 1 country and was beaten by Europe for 2 decades in space.
The US is winning now because they hit the jackpot with Elon Musk and SpaceX. Without SpaceX Europe would still be winning against the US in terms of rockets.
Now granted, one can argue that Elon Musk and SpaceX wouldn't have been possible in Europe, and that is partly true as well.
But US still got lucky that SpaceX happened right when they wanted private supply of ISS.
This is what happens when someone is ten years ahead of everyone else in development. And, to make it worse, when, during those ten years, everyone ridiculed what they were doing.
In some ways this is exactly what "The Innovator's Dilemma" is about, isn't it?
Would it make sense for SpaceX to become like Boeing and sell/lease reusable rockets to others? Elon was well-known for always using the reusable airliner argument when explaining why reusable rockets were important.
Readit News
Ariane Group is going to be in for a rough time every year beyond ~2026 that they delay. By then most of Starship (SpaceX), New Glenn (Blue Origin), Terran R (Relativity), and Neutron (Rocket Lab) should be operational - all of which will at least reuse the 1st stage.
Of course, they'll be able to fall back on institutional payloads to maintain a minimum level of funding. But that's not a great place for the program to be in terms of funding. Or politics.
This whole situation is really tragic. The design of Ariane 6 was finalized in 2016 - after SpaceX had successfully landed a Falcon 9 for the first time. While I realize that that would have been quite late in the design process for the rocket, it really shows the weakness of Ariane Group when it comes to assessing the competitive landscape and making difficult decisions.
To be fair, it is hard on the king to wear the crown for too long. Europe and Russia had a long run; we'll see how well SpaceX carries the burden.
Those were not plans, just one space agencies ideas.
> they were aiming for 2028
That was just political marketing, had nothing todo with reality and was never even remotely possible.
> To be fair, it is hard on the king to wear the crown for too long.
The were not really the king. For GEO missions yes, but for LEO Soyuz was always cheaper. And yes ArianeGroup was launching them, but its hardly their technical capabilities that made that possible.
Although, if actions speak louder than words, choosing to go ahead with Ariane 6 is pretty strong confirmation.
Maybe then those organizations should admit that rather then lie about it. ArianeGroup always justified Ariane 6 early on by claiming with it they would be competitve with SpaceX.
Of course they thought about competitive with SpaceX in 2014, not 2024 when Falcon 9 flies weekly and Starship is deep in development.
> If the main objective of the Ariane Group is to offer Europe independence by providing access to space, I think that’s worth a premium.
Maybe then they should have had a clear strategy around achieving this goal effectively rather then deluding themselves.
Europe having Ariane 6 and Vega rocket for example make no sense. They could have one engine, for example Merlin 'European Version' and use it as the only engine one all their rockets.
However they have an incredibly complex bespoke first stage engine, and complex bespoke second stage engine. And lots of different solid rockets and so on.
If they had planned for making the most expensive possible thing to achieve independence they certainly managed it.
Except that they used to. They certainly beat the pants off of ULA (nee Boeing/Lockheed Martin) when it came to competitive GEO/GTO launches.
> But does it really matter? If the main objective of the Ariane Group is to offer Europe independence by providing access to space, I think that’s worth a premium.
It's a lot nicer to have a European rocket program that happens to make lots of money on the commercial market so that the member states basically don't have to fund it.
The current situation, where ArianeSpace doesn't win that many contracts, so it has to be heavily subsidized by member states is much more difficult. When it comes to politics, there are always more hungry mouths than there is available bread.
I mean in that case, wouldn't the superior option be having a more cost competitive private launch provider in Europe? that way you'd get both European independence and lower prices. Surely there's a way to foster that situation, since that's what the US has.
This is somewhat like Nokia vs Apple, only worse because of the bureaucratic EU-wide red tape involved.
Yes, Europe should have its own space industry and be independent. But we should not accept rubbish or "paying a premium". We should demand more and aim at the top. Europe deserves it and can achieve it.
SpaceX has rocked the boat and thay should be an opportunity for drastic changes, especially in view of this fiasco.
The Ariane 6 is basically an evolved version of what was the Ariane 5 ME. Many of the things that are now Ariane 6 were developed for Ariane 5 upgrades.
The new upper and lower stage engines are both just upgraded Ariane 5 engines.
However they realized they could never compete with the Ariane 5 core against Falcon 9 (in 2014) they changed some political design processes and made the rockets more flexible.
The most relevant difference between Ariane 5 and Ariane 6 is that Ariane 5 always had to huge solid boosters, while the Ariane 6 has 2 or 4 depending on the mission.
That makes is possible for the Ariane 6 with 2 boosters to be in the competition for LEO missions. Something Ariane 5 wouldn't have been able to do.
But you are right, the 5 billion $ it cost to develop Ariane 6 will required it to fly for decades to make it worth doing compared to Ariane 5 ME.
Much like the Toyota Camry which has been the best selling sedan in the US every single year since 2000.[1] It gets a slight incremental change each year, but no ground-breaking changes or utterly re-thinking what a car is.
Guess what sedan is now out-selling all other sedans? [2]
(Hint: not the one that has been getting incremental updates since well before 2000)
[1] https://alansfactoryoutlet.com/the-best-selling-car-model-ev...
[2] https://www.caranddriver.com/news/g43553191/bestselling-cars...
My understanding is that Ariane 6 was explicitly designed to reduce production costs compared to Ariane 5, in large part due to competitive pressure from SpaceX.
> With the new Ariane 6 slated to enter service in 2020, ArianeGroup promises to cut per-kilogram launch cost by 40 to 50 percent compared to Ariane 5.
https://spacenews.com/arianegroup-cfo-pierre-godart-on-arian... (2017)
I guess, we'll see if they achieve that goal. Although rocket pricing is notoriously opaque.
China will in the next 1-3 years launch a reusable rocket. Bold prediction, but their combination of massive money, engineering howto and shameless industrial theft makes it a no-brainer.
In terms of other launchers, I can see whoever buys ULA launching something reusable in the next decade, as well as ariane space.
The writing has been on the wall for where rockets were going for ten years, policy makers absolutely have failed, but let's not pretend it's only Europe who have got it wrong.
Also, the negativity these sort of headlines bring to "tech" in Europe as a whole are also unhelpful. Europe is absolutely at the cutting edge of technology.
Seems that a lot of people want to see Elon destroyed over Twitter/politics. See the incredibly negative reaction to the Starship launch attempt compared to the much more positive reaction to previous test flights that ended with a boom.
And if they destroy our current best hope for the future of space exploration in the process of going after Elon, they don't care, it's 'a win for the environment', or acceptable collateral damage to take down an 'evil multibillionaire'
(Maybe Elon should even consider stepping away from SpaceX? - but then projects as ambitious/risky as Starship would likely be dropped)
You are rewriting history. The same fucking thing happens everytime a rocket explodes. The same reaction happened with the earlier test flights again.
Some dumb idiots in the media and twitter right bullshit. A few dumb politicans try to cash in and do a bunch of saber rattling in congress.
Same game over and over, it doesn't matter and doesn't change anything.
SpaceX or Musk will not be destroyed by this nonsense.
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every time i touch grass while talking about elon people are always amazed with him, why is that?
While much of Rocket Lab’s team is still based in New Zealand, they are now a US-based company and their Neutron reusable medium-lift rocket will be built in the US and launch from the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport (MARS) in Virginia.
As far as I know they do not have any plans to launch reusable rockets from New Zealand.
Its latitude is really not optimal for anything other than polar orbits and it’s too far from any potential customers which would increase the cost considerably.
This has to be said over and over again. RocketLab is an US company.
And RocketLab large Neutron rocket will launch from the US and will be built in the US.
> Europe is absolutely at the cutting edge of technology.
Not in rocket technology.
Lolwut!?
Which technology? Certainly not space tech. Certainly not AI. To what, then, are you referring?
Top 10 most innovate countries: Europe takes 7 positions, including #1.
Machines for manufacturing: Europe. Machines to produce semiconductors: Europe. Healthtech (Siemens, Philips): Europe. Food tech and agriculture (Foodvalley): Europe. Water management, port management: Europe. Aviation: Europe.
Your world is built on leading Europe tech. Admittedly, the software isn't. Which is easy to tell because software is in a shit state.
Cutting edge of technology is industry creating or industry changing technologies. The US has dominated these since the 80s, but arguably even before that with railways, and after all the atom bomb was invented by immigrants in the US.
The web, social media, smartphones.
And now space industries and generative AI.
And why is this?
Lots of network effects, but also places like the EU have it completely backwards in terms of policy. Policy doesn’t create innovation. It might support it, but real innovation comes from freedom and letting innovative people roam free. The US government is doing it best to stop this but still hasn’t managed it luckily.
I just don’t see how europe is at the cutting edge of anything, any companies they lead their field are downstream of leading US industries.
I don’t know if it’s possible to recreate what the US does. Probably not. But what EU bureaucrats try and do basically fails every time.
Europe does have a lot of midtier industrial companies that do world-tier work. This includes Defense, Air transport (Airbus), Automotive, Pharmaceutical (BioNTech RNA vaccine coming from EU work) and I'm sure many other sectors.
What technology? Do you have any examples, especially enough to make such a broad statement?
https://www.asml.com/en/products/euv-lithography-systems/twi...
Unless that technology is launch vehicles, in which case they'll whinge and whine and eventually contract someone else to do it for them and pretend they have a competent space program.
I'd also like to remind that the reusability isn't limited to the SpaceX style VTVL. There are also potentially promising things like VTHL flyback boosters, but they are untested and nobody is currently positioned to throw money away to test smart solutions hypothesized in 60s, because the margins for the failure are non-existent in the industry.
Similarly, the only other company that has even tried to make a proven launch vehicle reusable is Rocketlab. So suggesting that others are struggling, when they either haven't even tried yet or are still working on getting to orbit, is ridiculous.
On top of that, the argument that reusability doesn't work for others for any reasons other than policy also doesn't really fit. Launch prices for all other rockets are higher, even the ones developed to better compete with F9 are only in the ballpark of its launch price and completely uncompetitive on launch cost and cadence.
Policy makers made it happen in the states through what they funded.
And doing it in a decade or two is actually fine. Tech will stabilize by then and there will be more skilled people to hire. Why the rush ?
> Michael Griffin. Griffin later estimated that SpaceX was around 85% funded by the federal government, mostly through his NASA awards, with the remaining 15% funding split between Elon Musk and other private investors. He felt the amount of government funding was "excessive in his view" compared with what he originally envisioned for the commercial space program.
From SpaceX's Wikipedia page. The Falcon 1 which was expandable, nothing special and cost ~$100 million was privately funded, the rest relied on very generous subsidies. (Regardless of Musk's posturing and outright lies)
On the contrary, outlandish and expensive (like aerospace) moonshot bets with uncertain financial benefits often happen due to government help, even in times of "unlimited money" which are far from the norm. For starters, Tesla and SpaceX both only happened due to US government subsidies; Airbus, the by far best civilian airplane manufacturer today, only exists because of European government pressure and funding. Bombardier only managed to design the C-series with Canadian government funds. All recent developments in renewables were off the back of massive subsidies for their adoption.
Let's not pretend any administration got it right.
Just like the french administration had nothing to do with Pasteur creating the vaccine against rabies, the German administration has nothing to do Gutenberg creating the press and italian administration has nothing to do with Salvatore Sanfilippo creating redis.
At best, administrations from the past may be somewhat credited to foster an environment favorable for something like this to happen.
And even that is a stretch, given most administrations don't design anything, but rather react politically to whatever is the current situation.
Imagine a scenario where you start a company that solves a really difficult problem --taking years of hard work-- and then a VC who provided funding takes credit for the effort. Even worse, the news organizations give the VC credit for the results. That's what politicians do.
Well allowing and encouraging commercial space missions to unlock private sector was politically challenging and a huge win; not something you’d see in many other jurisdictions
That is exactly what they did and lots of politicians tried to prevent it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commercial_Orbital_Transportat...
We need something similar in the EU... and we definitely need less France in the EU.
Rocket Lab couldn’t even get enough funding in New Zealand, which is why they had to relocate to the USA.
The only meaningfully reusable rocket right now is the Falcon 9, and while that significantly reduces the already cheap launch costs, it doesn't really change them by an order of magnitude, and with so many other costs, it doesn't make that much more possible that was previously impossible.
Arguably Starlink is possible now and wouldn't have been before, but there are other similar (fewer satellites) constellations not relying on F9 being that much cheaper. Also arguably there are more smallsats going into orbit, but I think RocketLab has done roughly as much for them as the F9 has so far.
As for other providers, ULA hasn't got a lot of re-usability built in, at least not to the extent that Starship (theoretically) or maybe even F9 has. RocketLab is starting reusability work, but is a way off anything good. Blue Origin are continuing to... well... who knows.
I don't think anyone other than SpaceX are going to have usefully reusable rockets for another decade. I'm also not sure SpaceX are going to be more than 8 years ahead anyway because I don't think Starship will be delivering on its promises for at least another few years.
SpaceX's charges around $1,200/lb to low earth orbit. Soyuz costs around $8,000/lb. The space shuttle was $30,0000/lb. Because of SpaceX's lower launch costs, they now put more mass into LEO than the rest of the world combined.
NASA gave contracts to BlueOrigin, ULA and others beside SpaceX. ULA was the only rocket provider to Pentagon for a long time before SpaceX come along. Jeff is as rich as Elon and he did pump money into BlueOrigin every year. if SpaceX did a better job then SpaceX deserved the market shares.
And notably, Blue Origin has been in business for two years longer than SpaceX, but has far less to show for it.
BlueOrigin is a huge company already, and the basically make no money what so ever. 1 billion might cover labor cost. But given the infrastructure they are building and the actual rockets and so on, it has to be significantly more then 1 billion.
Well they are making slow progress on a hugely complex rocket, New Glenn. The might fly it in the next 2 years.
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The government already is forced to have at least 2 providers and they want more not less.
Other governments, Europe, India and China will not simply give up.
And while talking about entities with absurd money, Bezos has spend a decade now funding Blue origin he will not just give up.
Venture capitalist are still funding many new rocket companies.
https://www.reddit.com/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/k1e0ta/eviden...
This was approved in 2014, and the rocket wont be really operational until 2024. So 10 years for a really simply upgrade. Some of the parts now on the Ariane 6 have been in development for 20+ years.
Even if right now, Europe decided to do a huge new rocket projects, it would be 10 years minimum. But this is not likely going to happen. Many didn't even want to spend the money for Ariane 6. An agreement on a real large reusable rocket is politically not feasible anytime soon, an no country, not even France is gone do it alone.
Of course a real reusable rocket is gone cost more the develop then the Ariane 6, a slight upgrade over Ariane 5. Ariane 6 cost 5 billion and that ignores a lot different costs for infrastructure and development of sub-components over the last decades.
So a decade is actually an incredibly optimistic prediction, 2 decades is more likely and that is far from certain.
And even if they do so, they will never have a large share of the market. They will battle a whole host of other companies, RocketLab, ULA, Relativity for things that SpaceX will be excluded from (Amazon and so on).
The EU having independent access to space is a point of pride, not a continental emergency.
The real problem is that there's no prototype path for Ariane. SpaceX had the grasshopper and others. The original space race was very incremental.
Hopefully the smaller companies will succeed with their more manageably sized rockets. Then they'll have to fight an uphill political battle against the big incumbents, just like SpaceX did.
Ariane could make prototypes too, but they probably won't.
The only really fundamentally new thing is the upper stage engine and that's hard to prototype launch.
Insane amount of talent is wasted because of "so called" european language and cultural racism.
Companies are still "national" instead of european and talent is not appreciated. Taxes are sky high and so is national, cultural racism. You think a brilliant bulgarian scientist is treated the same by his French colleagues?
Until this changes and europeans will start treat their fellow europeans fairly nothing will improve.
As a Bulgarian who lives and works in France, yes. Ffs multiple very high profile French authors, thinkers, theatre directors are originally Bulgarian (Tzvetan Todorov, Galin Stoev come to mind, there's also a lady whose name I can't recall) so even in very conservative areas they're accepted, let alone in scientific areas.
Even just the casual dismissal of my attempts to ask to speak a common language (English) - them switching to German/French whenever there was at least one other speaker of the language - even though the firms declared the working language is English...
Where I live if a person who doesn't speak our language comes into the room we all switch to English so the person can feel welcome.
Stuff like credit cards issued in my country simply not working and them saying things like "yeah well we don't trust these eastern banks" with the typical "zomg another poor schmuck"-look...
Julia Kristeva? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julia_Kristeva
Just look at Germany, biggest economy in EU. It's treating it's migrant workers as slaves. Feeding failing pension system from them. Not giving any rights for innovation(you can't start business without German national cofounder) or even any motivation to innovate(high taxes, anti-success culture, strict residence laws).
When you mention any problems with Germany to Germans, they're so protective and unwilling to change that their only response is "go back home if you don't like it here".
That's an outright lie, you need a Visa though if you're not a citizen from a Schengen country.
> strict residence laws
Ever tried to get a Greencard? And if you have the financial backing, up until the start of the Ukraine war there were plenty of states with a golden visa program.
I think you're being too harsh on german and european policymakers. I agree, the climate for startups is abysmal and the room for improvement is huge, but in terms of being inclusive EU is leading over the US.
Lived in Germany for five years, 100% agree with this. The Germany Defense Squad is very real.
Germans are way pricklier about criticism of their country compared to Americans, which surprised me somewhat, given Americans' reputation for superpatriotism.
That's not to say you won't ever see the same kind response from some Americans (especially those further right), but what surprised me is that even centrist or center-left Germans of the kind you'll see on Reddit were so defensive, while centrist and center-left Americans are practically lashing themselves with a cat o' nine tails over how dumb the US is on many issues, and heartily agreeing with foreigners on criticism.
All the "European success stories" are things that were created by what you call "loose cooperation between many countries", like Airbus, which is indeed the way to go.
The US is winning now because they hit the jackpot with Elon Musk and SpaceX. Without SpaceX Europe would still be winning against the US in terms of rockets.
Now granted, one can argue that Elon Musk and SpaceX wouldn't have been possible in Europe, and that is partly true as well.
But US still got lucky that SpaceX happened right when they wanted private supply of ISS.
In some ways this is exactly what "The Innovator's Dilemma" is about, isn't it?
Would it make sense for SpaceX to become like Boeing and sell/lease reusable rockets to others? Elon was well-known for always using the reusable airliner argument when explaining why reusable rockets were important.