As the SpaceX steamroller surges, European rocket industry vows to resist

The old jobs were under your directive. The new jobs are not.

One of the reason might have been vanity but if you look at it with the view point of a CEO from a European firm, reusability was a risky gamble:

1) In order to keep your manufacturing quality, one needs to produce a new rocket every two or three months. Beyond that, the people manufacturing it losses knowledge and unless quality assurance is increased a lot, you will losses quality.

2) EU was doing around 12 launches a year, and that was by being very cheap. You could plan on increasing the market share but that starts being difficult as a lot of what remains cannot use a European launcher for political reasons.

3) For the sake of the argument, let say cheaper price double the market share, that leaves 24 launches a year. Based on a manufacturing of 6 launchers a year, this leaves 4 launches per rocket. And that is with very optimistic numbers (doubling of marketshare, no issue with reusability).

4) If you look at the numbers from SpaceX, 4 launches per rocket is where the reusability starts making sense. But ideally, you want more. 5) The Airbus people have shareholders to account to, not a CEO who does not care risking going banqueroute while pursuing a dream to go on Mars.

So yeah, doable but much more difficult than in a market with better access to investment and to huge cash cows named NASA and DoD

Electric cars? Nope, we've invested too much in ICE R&D and need to pay it back over another 100 years.

Solar? Nope, we promised the private coal plants decades of profits.

Public Healthcare (In the USA)? Nope, waaaaaay too many billions being made on insurance.

etc. etc.

Which is why we need to ignore what the establishment things and just do our own thing whenever possible, or at least support anyone trying to go clean slate.

The financial basis of SpaceX reusability is conditioned on having access to a lot of launches, and increasing the market even further by making launches cheaper. If SpaceX ended up only doing 12 launches a year each year from now on, they would lose money from reusability instead of saving it, because they would have pay ~as much to maintain the Merlin line as they do today, and that is probably most of the cost of making rockets. In order for them to make bank, they need to be able to maintain the line, and grow launches to consume all of it. (Hence, StarLink.)

Alternatively, they can produce all the first stages they ever intend to make, a good enough stockpile of Merlins for the second stages, and then shut down the line and get paid for launches without the expense of making rockets. This is what I suspect they'll do, except that at that point they will not shut down the line but will change it to make Raptors instead. Both for Raptor engined upper stages on Falcon 9:s, and eventually BFR.

In any case, Arianespace probably doesn't believe they can raise the launch count enough for reusability to be useful.

  "I think we are in different worlds,” he said. “In the US, they think and they speak like this. Our mission is different. Our culture is different.”

As a fun analogy, I'd love to think what would have happened if AT&T had kept their operators and not put in electronic switches.

Commerce would still be back in the 1950's, and everyone would work for AT&T. We'd be making nowhere near as many calls, and business would operate much slower than today, meaning innovation & collaboration would be much slower than today.

But that's the choice

SpaceX is following a series of failed initiatives - the Shuttle, SSTOs like the DC-X and Venturestar - and trying lots of seemingly crazy things in the process. Let's not get carried away by survivorship bias.

"ArianeGroup is subsidized by its member governments." Furthermore, "SpaceX does not have a monopoly on [American] launches, as Arianespace does in Europe" and "had to compete with the US-based United Launch Alliance from the beginning to break that company’s monopoly on military and civil space missions" [1].

[1] Ars Technica

Are the European space companies subsidized by ESA and the other European space agencies? Yes. Is it much different from the subsidies in the US? Not really. Is the US space market bigger than the European market? Definitely!

The planned Ariane 6 is cost uncompetitive with the Falcon 9 and variable cost and mass uncompetitive with the Falcon Heavy. There are no plans for a European reusable. The “our mission is different...our culture is different” comment implies a regulatory, not technological, solution.

http://www.france24.com/en/20150620-interview-stephane-israe...

http://aviationweek.com/space/arianespace-esa-we-need-help

Alain Charmeau has as well:

>Even as Charmeau decries what he calls subsidies for SpaceX from the US government, he admits that Ariane cannot exist without guaranteed contracts purchased by European governments. To make the Ariane 6 vehicle viable, Charmeau said Ariane needs five launches in total for 2021 and eight guaranteed launches for 2022.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/05/ariane-chief-seems-f...

Once SpaceX has proven they can do safe crewed flights and Blue Origin goes beyond testing flights, why is there a reason to pay the huge ULA markup any more?

ULA, as well as Airbus, has a problem: they're constantly being meddled with by politicians without any idea what they're doing and decide stuff that's totally unreasonable from an economical point but helpful for their (or their party's) reelections. Airbus employs 130k people, Boeing 140k and Lockheed 100k, and in addition there are a lot of people in the supplier companies. That's a lot of voters, and the companies are often enough big employers on a regional/local level.

Which means: SpaceX and Blue Origin will conquer the entire commercial sector plus an enormous amount of US government work. EU-founded projects will (politically mandated) stick to Airbus, but the political inability of Airbus to innovate will lead everything else go to SpaceX/BO. And the taxpayer will have to "save" them... or have to deal with hundreds of thousands people out of jobs.

But I think your model is a bit of hyperbole. You’re downplaying the statistical model that goes with this. Launching a rocket is Russian roulette. The odds are quite different when you want to launch a rocket once versus a dozen times.

(1 - p)^n = the odds that I still have a rocket after n launches, where p is the odds of it blowing up on any given launch. The asymptote is at 0 and it gets there pretty fast.

The good news is that the cost benefit analysis has a similar problem.

Let’s say you want to reuse a $10M part once. Right now it costs you $20M for two flights. You create a $11M version that costs $1M to refurbish. That’s $12M for two flights or $6M per flight. You got a 40% cost improvement. So now you go for 3 flights. Now you have a $12M part that costs $1M to refurb. That’s $14M for three flights or $4.66M per flight.

From 1 to 2 you saved $4M per flight. From 2-3 you saved an additional $1.33M per flight. From 3 to 4 you’d save $0.66M per flight, by adding another $1M to your up front costs.

The bean counters are probably going to push back here. Opportunity costs you see. They’re going to demand you reduce costs, find revenue neutral ways to improve profits. For instance if you can cut 25% off the refurb costs that’s a better cost improvement than getting to 5 launches. While that makes getting to five more appealing, it also takes time. So you can imagine what the gap between five and six will be filled with. Cheaper rocket, lower refurb costs again.

If they have money to spend at this point they’ll give it to the lobbyists or marketing department. You aren’t the best investment they have anymore. Increased revenue is.

Technologically realistic. Politically unfeasible. ArianeGroup's factories provide high-paying jobs across Europe. Re-tooling them will not be possible for another generation.

Source: I worked with launch start-ups. Their dismissal by EU politicos was resounding, particularly in contrast to the American and other countries' responses.

"Steamroller surges"? Really? Has the author seen a surging steamroller? That's not what steamrollers do. It's hard to stop a steamroller, yes, but its moves aren't sudden. It doesn't suddenly accelerate. You can see the steamroller a mile coming. It starts slowly and goes slowly.

And as you noted, you don't usually resist steamrollers. That's a silly thing to do.

Reminds me of the singing octopus from Orwell's examples of how not to write:[1]

> The sole aim of a metaphor is to call up a visual image. When these images clash — as in The Fascist octopus has sung its swan song, the jackboot is thrown into the melting pot — it can be taken as certain that the writer is not seeing a mental image of the objects he is naming; in other words he is not really thinking.

[1]http://www.orwell.ru/library/essays/politics/english/e_polit...