Ariane chief seems frustrated with SpaceX for driving down launch costs | Hacker News Reader

Ariane chief seems frustrated with SpaceX for driving down launch costs

arstechnica.com

55 pointsvaliant-comma27 comments

The author does a good job of pointing out the hypocrisy in complaining about government subsidies yet refusing to make his company more competitive because that would jeopardise the government subsidies his company gets.

The last is noteworthy:

"It is about future business," Charmeau said. "Why do all the billionaires invest in space? Why does Jeff Bezos come to Germany and declare that the country should not go to space? He makes money with your personal data. Today he knows your Amazon orders, tomorrow he drives your car."

Goes to show you where much of the EU's animosity towards US tech firms comes from: local firms and powerful business people with access to politicians lobbying for protectionism.

It’s a cat and dog relation, US firms also tend to see EU in an adversorial way, so it seems logical it’s reciprocated by EU players.

The fact that Google and Amazon have an US heavy consumer focus (new product will be developped and validated for the US first) doesn’t help that perception either.

It sounds like Charmeau is willing to blame anything and everything to avoid the reality that SpaceX is bringing a new economy to the space launch industry. Instead of marketing Ariane as a boutique, reliable launch vehicle for valuable payloads like JWT, it seem like Charmeau wants to blame everyone but himself for Ariane's financial uncertainty.

If I were on the board, I'd ask for his resignation and start looking for a more visionary leader to guide Ariane.

Going into an era of launch vehicle re-usability with SpaceX seemingly so technologically far ahead (still the only party to retro-propulsively land an orbital launch vehicle), part of me feels that this dominance is entirely deserved for having the vision and taking the risk to develop cost effective reusability, and Ariane has enjoyed a cushy position for too long. Another part of me feels that Europe needs a serious competitor to American space-launch to retain independent capability.

I'm a SpaceX fanboy but let's not get too enthusiastic. Arianne has had no vehicle loss since their first flights and is considered reliable enough to launch the James Webb. Nobody in their right mind would put that on a Falcon 9 even if they paid them.

I think one reason that the Arianne and James Webb are such a good fit are because they are designed on the same model. What would a telescope designed around a SpaceX model look like? Self assembly in orbit? Networked independent telescopes? Ariannes are pets, not cattle. What would it look like if we rethought that?

You could argue JWST will be doing self assembly on orbit with the deployment of the primary mirror. There is some very fine wave front adjustment that needs to happen there. They are putting a 6.5 meter mirror on orbit! That alone puts it in a tie for the 14th largest telescope primary mirror when you include Earth-based ones. Very impressive in my book.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_Telescope_Element

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_optical_reflec...

Absolutely! I'm not said it isn't impressive, and it will have great research value. I'm just wondering what might be achievable with different assumptions. Instead of 1 6.5 meter telescope, how about 20 1 meter telescopes?

For the price NASA is paying for JWT I would only launch it on a gold spacecraft powered by unicorns.

It seems to me, that to some extent the cost of launch feeds into the cost of satellites. Spacecraft have to have reliability in the extreme because it's so expensive to put them in orbit, and they're very expensive to service if practical at all.

Is that due to the larger history of success of the Arianne family of rockets?

Rockets tend to get more reliable as they get older because designers find all the various failure modes and fix them. It's normal to have a couple of rapid unplanned disassemblies in your first ten or twenty flights. Ariane 5 did. Falcon 9 did. Basically everyone but ULA does. The only difference between the Ariane 5 and Falcon 9 is that the Ariane 5 has a lot more flights under its belt.

I was interested in your comment about Ariane 5 having a lot more flights under its belt, as it has seemed like SpaceX has ramped up their launches considerably, and the article talks about 5-10 launches per year for the new Ariane 6. So I went and looked up the details...

For anyone interested, Ariane 5 has had 98 launches (93 successful) and Falcon 9 has had 54 launches (52 successful).

However, Falcon 9 has 18 launches in 2017, and is on track for 28 this year (8 completed so far), whereas Ariane 5 had just 6 in 2017 and is on track for 10 this year.

It’s definitely true that Ariane 5 has more experience under its belt so far, but that seems to be changing quickly, and with Ariane 6 resetting some of that experience, I think SpaceX are at a significant advantage here.

Another way to look at it is that the Ariane 5 has 5 failures across less than 200 rocket engine uses (ignoring solids), while SpaceX has 2 failures across 540 rocket engine uses.

spacex also had a total vehicle and payload loss while standing on the pad with engines off, so your metric should be more like 1/540... but then you want to count test firings at mcgregor and every wet dress rehearsals/static fires.

Certainly part of it. I think the JWST is supposed to be a collaboration between NASA, CSA, and ESA. The European contribution is the launch vehicle.

Charmeau is taking the approach of complaining about 'unfair competition' from other businesses rather than addressing the potential for his own company to start differentiating itself and actually competing with SpaceX. Good luck with that terrible viewpoint.

The claim that higher priced government contracts are a subsidy seems valid... But to pretend that spaceflight in any nation isn't government subsidised seems tenuous.

The claim is entirely invalid. Government contracts require far higher levels of service and support than commercial satellite launches. SpaceX may be charging $100M for a $60M launch because of these costly extra requirements, but more importantly, competitors we e charging the government $200M for the exact same launch services.

Is it possible governments require much higher levels of service as a way to justify higher prices?

It's very hard to value the cost of certifications, making them the ideal way to subsidise a deal.

Again, SpaceX government contract pricing is less than half of every other bidders price, so there clearly isn’t any subsidy.

SpaceX did get all 3 launch pads for cheap, thanks to them being stranded assets.

Yeah, it’s certainly an odd statement in a business where the entire industry is primarily government funded.

SpaceX has by far the smallest level of government funding by percentage, and SpaceX “government funding” has almost all been launch services at prices that saved the government many hundreds of millions of dollars. Arianspace gets straight handouts.

>"Let us say we had ten guaranteed launches per year in Europe and we had a rocket which we can use ten times—we would build exactly one rocket per year," he said. "That makes no sense. I cannot tell my teams: 'Goodbye, see you next year!'"

But reusability makes perfect sense if your long-term goal is to set up a gigantic Mars colony.

I want to be patriotic, but damn it, this guy is full of shit. Close that company down until they at least have the intention of competing with SpaceX.

Arstechnica seems to have taken a 180° turn on Telsa lately. I suspect their expanded their PR budged even more. Ariane has nothing to fear from Telsa. Even their launch costs are still higher than conventional launch systems, if you care enough to dive into technical documents, the "driving down launch costs" argument quickly unravels to unsubstantiated PR garbage. Tesla and Spacex sell nothing more than false hopes. They "will" drive down launch costs, they "will" make Tesla profitable and sustainable, they "will" make sure their car breaks consistently through OTA updates... I don't believe them anymore, it looks like a ponzi scheme.

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