Why Tesla is having a harder time than SpaceX
qz.com
qz.com
The heavy-lift launch market is, indeed, an easy one to compete in; Bezos is slow out of the gate, and the rest of the competition comes from some truly wacko engineering organizations. The car industry already optimized its products and processes for cost and efficiency, while the (American) competition seems not to have even tried. (The European and Russian programs have their own handicaps, and India is doing just fine in the adjacent medium-lift market.)
The only reason the launch market seems to be easy to compete in is because the US launch market has historically been a prime example of corruption.
Arianespace has prototypes of fully reusable engines ready now as well, and is moving into early testing.
While the US launch market was disrupted, SpaceX hasn't reduced prices yet, hasn't made it easier to launch for small companies (which would be necessary for a startup boom in space), and other competitors are only a few years behind.
Everything I've read about Arianespace's plans indicate that they aren't terribly interested in reusability. Ariane 6, which is slated for first launch until at least 2020, will be initially expendable. The mentions of Adeline or using Promotheus on Ariane6 seem to be only speculative at this point. Given that they will only maybe start working on reuse after the expendable Ariane6 is launching, they seem to be more than a few years behind. More like a decade.
Based on what information have they been spending 'years' on that engine?
... way more slowly than SpaceX. That's not how a company could survive in the free market.
You keep repeating this, but it's completely untrue. Today an Ariane 5 will cost you $10,000/kg to $14,000/kg to LEO, but you can get a Falcon 9 to LEO for $2,800/kg. That's already a very substantial price reduction, and that's before the economics of reusability has kicked in.
The engine was started in 2017 and is in very, very early stages of development. Saying that it is 'ready' is basically just lying. They made some drawing and they have an idea of what they want to do, that's about it.
Their knowlage on reusability is extremly limited, like SpaceX when they started. It took SpaceX many iterations until they managed an engine that was easly reusable. Engine development takes multible years, Promotheus is a project that has just started and given the history of European engine development, I don't expect that it will even be test fired for a long while, if they are lucky the 2020.
Furthermore the Promotheus engine is a traditional gas generator cycle. This means that it is more comparable to the SpaceX Merlin eninge both in terms of performance and reusability. BE-4 and Raptor are much more performant cycles that get much better efficancy out of the fuel. BE-4 uses a Ox-rich staged cycle, while Raptor uses the even more advanced Full-Flow Stage Cycle. One should also mention that both of those enignes are far further in devlopment compared to Promotheus.
So the very best case for the Promotheus engine is that it will be ready in 3 years and the it will require at least 3-5 years more of iterative testing to get out the full performance ASSUMING they can actually regularly fly these engine in real condition. If they do that they have build an engine that is comparable to current SpaceX Merlin engine.
Even beyond that, because the Promotheus engine uses methane, it can not easly be usesed on the Ariane 6 rocket. A rocket needs to be designed around the engine and the fuel. This means that practical use of the Promotheus would require a completly new rocket devlopment program, or at least a major redesign of the Ariane that amount to the same thing (but better marketing). This would also include redesigning the whole lower part of the rocket so that it could fly back with the main engine.
Given how Europe Space operates, none of this will happen quickly. Changes like that require a years long politcal process and to even get such a project started and that would only happen if the Promotheus is actually a successful program.
Arianespace will not fly a reuable rocket until mid/late 2020s. Even once they do, their rocket still depend on soild boosters that can not be econmically recycled. Because they are planning to throw most of the rocket outside of the eninge and a few core system. The Ariane 6 have a far lower % of reusabilty.
I wish it was different as I am one of the people paying for this rocket. The reality is that Arianespace was totally hostile towards SpaceX and all these ideas. They were literally making fun at them and constantly throwing European style vailed insults at SpaceX and 'the American way' even while the Russian and everybody else started to change their tune. That's why they are now 5 years behind and and they are losing ground quickly.
The predicted price of the Ariane 6 is already not competitve with the Falcon 9 right now. That is their own announced price. Even worse, the devlopment cost of 2-3 billion $ does not have to be amortised by the flight cost. If they had to devlop their own technology like SpaceX mostly does, then they would be even further behind.
Unless a lot of things change, Arianespace will be a dedicated launcher for European govenrments. France will try to use its political power with the EU to force all EU countries to use Arianespace rather then flying commercial rockets so they can give Arianespace enough launches to make them 'close' to competitive. This would make Europe globally uncompetitive both in launch and in space in general.
1.: Prototype implies they're not currently in use
2.: If they were they'd still be thrown away because the rockets can't land
I want to be patriotic but here I can't. SpaceX is far ahead.
New design launching in three weeks would reduce cost even further price will go down maybe by 10 million but cost should go down by around 50 million
Um, no? The competitors have had to drop their prices very substantially in recent years, due to competition from SpaceX. Yet they're still somewhere between 50%-300% more expensive. That's far from "about the same price".
The cost of a launch on Falcon 9 is 62 million USD.
That's not 20 million less, that's 2 million more — ofc, finding a second satellite to launch with is with Ariane more time consuming, so you'll not be as agile.
And if SpaceX cuts the cost of a non-reusable launch (previously 62mm) by 50mm, to 12mm, that'd be a breakthrough. If you meant to say that they cut the cost of reusable launches (previously 30mm) by 500mm (aka paying people for launching), then lol.
Ariane was competitive back when Falcon 9 performance was lower, and splitting capacity 50/50 in an Ariane 5 rideshare gave you similar payload to orbit; these days, it's a very different story.
I agree that the reused prices are starting to significantly affect the market, but otherwise it's pretty much the same, for pretty much the same cost.
This often causes significant delayes and increases the planning effort of all the companies innvolved.
Another problem is that this model does not work for many costumers because there simply is no other cosutmer who wants to go to the same place at the same time.
Arianespace had many problems with this and in their new rocket they are moving away from that idea because of that.
> Falcon 9 launches are only around 60MM if the first stage can be recovered
I'm pretty sure that is false. I think all cosumters pay 60MM no matter what SpaceX does with the booster.
Their early reusable rockets gave costumers a 10% discount from that 60MM but it seems that this is no longer the case.
While the US launch market is not a perfect model of market principles, efficient operation, and fair competition, it's also the only one where it was possible for an outsider to found a new company to do things in a different way.
They haven't yet forwarded reusability savings to customers significantly it seems. I agree that it would be smart for them to increase prices purely on a demand basis, but could imagine that they want to save image with the public and their customers.
That is mostly false. Almost all government have historically given precidents to individual companies. The US for a long time actually had more competition then Europe and it is already more competitive now.
Europe has Arianespace and it has a monopoly and gets massive amount of public funding. That is actually more corrupt compared to the US.
The reality is that SpaceX could never have existed in Europe. If Musk was from France, he would be some guy with a few good ideas somewhere deep inside of ESA or Arianespace.
Maybe the US launch market was still corrupt, even if worse exists.
But only in the US you could have SpaceX. In Europe, Russia, China, India there simply couldn't be such company at the moment.
It takes real engineering and business genius to sell millions of a $20000 car that doesn't suck and turns a profit.
Honda's finest engineers are likely working on the civic and the accord, not the NSX.
It could be that Musk's style is better suited to SpaceX's sort of challenge than to the mass production challenge. The latter is less sexy leap forward and more a matter of a billion boring little "six sigma" style optimizations.
At Tesla on the other hand we have a business that seems a lot simpler at first blush, with Elon reportedly terminating or driving away anyone who disagreed with him.
Now Elon has finally admitted that fully automating their first large scale assembly line was a bad idea.
xD
The headline is open to all sort of interpretation. Most of them, misleading.
But then, the question: "Why is doing things cheaply at scale at high quality harder than creating a few items by hand?" wouldn't draw so many clicks...
1) they're not.
2) a different question: why an electric car company may be more difficult to succeed than a rocket company, is because the former competes with a trillion dollar internal combustion engine industry with more than a billion drivers of vehicles, deep-pocketed incumbents, and the latter has relatively little competition.