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>Why would someone pay €75 million to launch 5 tonnes to GTO on the Ariane 6 when they can spend $62 million and get an extra 3.3 tonnes of capacity on the Falcon 9?

Because their satellite is, perhaps, 3 tonnes, allowing them to fly in the upper berth for €45 million while another customer pays the rest in the lower berth. Capability isn't useful if your payload doesn't use it.

>Based on your numbers, Falcon 9 is $9 million and $7.5 million per tonne. Ariane 6 is €15 million and €7.8 million, respectively. Given €1 is generally worth more than $1, and that the Ariane's prices are still just projections, I think you made your counterargument.

These prices are within 20%, which I'd call competitive given non-price factors. The claim was not that Ariane was cheaper.

>Source? It's been a few years since I was in the launch industry, but even then piggyback slots on Falcon 9s were in heavy demand. Sufficiently so that a number of companies (e.g. Spaceflight [1]) cropped up to broker them.

Secondary payloads — especially multi-smallsat rideshare — are notoriously hard to coordinate. Spaceflight's SHERPA mission was supposed to fly secondary to the (tiny) Formosat-5 payload, but was pulled due to delays.[0] SFI now plans to stick with "dedicated rideshare" on rockets booked by them entirely for their customers. Their first flight will be SSO-A on a dedicated Falcon 9 later this year.

Historically, Falcon has flown few secondary payloads. An OG-2 prototype flew as a secondary on CRS-1, but was lost due to the engine-out on ascent. Iridium-6 shared with NASA's Grace-FO, after both missions dropped off Dnepr due to the Ukraine crisis.[1] Hispasat-30W carried a small hosted (then released) secondary as part of an experimental deployment system.[2] I can't think of any other notable secondary payloads.

[0] https://spacenews.com/spacex-delays-force-spaceflight-to-fin...

[1] https://spacenews.com/iridium-buys-eighth-falcon-9-launch-sh...

[2] https://spaceflightnow.com/2018/03/12/spacexs-most-recent-la...

> their satellite is, perhaps, 3 tonnes, allowing them to fly in the upper berth for €45 million

€45 million is over $52 million. The Falcon 9, in re-usable mode, is cheaper and, in non-reusable mode, requires you find a buddy who will pay at least $10 million for 2 metric tonnes of launch capacity.

> Secondary payloads — especially multi-smallsat rideshare — are notoriously hard to coordinate

It's an easier problem to solve than building a new launch platform. Particularly if reusability increases launch frequency.

Ariane 6 was designed assuming reusability would fail. That wasn't unreasonable ten years ago. I agree there will be niches where someone will be forced to pay up for scheduling. But as launch frequencies increase--from SpaceX as well as Blue Origin, RocketLab, India, et cetera--that niche will narrow.

>€45 million is over $52 million. The Falcon 9, in re-usable mode, is cheaper and, in non-reusable mode, requires you find a buddy who will pay at least $10 million for 2 metric tonnes of launch capacity.

F9 reusable is about the same. For Falcon 9, you'll need that secondary payload provider to also pay for a custom payload adapter and deployment mechanism, since berths aren't standardized as on Ariane.

>It's an easier problem to solve than building a new launch platform. Particularly if reusability increases launch frequency.

Certainly, but it's not one that has been solved. I suspect moving forward we'll see it mostly solved for very small sats on dedicated rideshare missions, while excess payload for larger commercial sats remains unused.

>Ariane 6 was designed assuming reusability would fail. That wasn't unreasonable ten years ago.

Certainly. But it's important to note that designing for first stage reusability wouldn't necessarily be profitable either. SpaceX is already cheaper without it and is quickly taking market share away. As launch cadence drops, financial returns on reusability fall quickly. If you're second fiddle already, you may very well lose money by investing in reusability.

>I agree there will be niches where someone will be forced to pay up for scheduling. But as launch frequencies increase--from SpaceX as well as Blue Origin, RocketLab, India, et cetera--that niche will narrow.

I'd argue Ariane's niche remains reliability, not scheduling (which it has problems with because of the dual berth conops[0]). SpaceX will soon own schedule reliability as its backlog dissipates and boosters are rapidly reused. But there's a reason JWST is going on Ariane 5.

[0] https://spaceflightnow.com/2018/04/27/concerns-with-indian-p...

>Secondary payloads — especially multi-smallsat rideshare — are notoriously hard to coordinate.

Ariane would be terrible for such payloads. These tend to go into lower orbits and Ariane can't restart it's upper stage engine to change the orbit. Something like Electron is a much better -and cheaper- choice.

> Secondary payloads — especially multi-smallsat rideshare — are notoriously hard to coordinate.

Can’t wait for a Lyft Line for space ;)

“Your rocket will depart in 3 months.”

The company is named Spaceflight Industries.

When it comes to the cost of the mission those differences are peanuts. I guess that at some point SpaceX will find out that the the price of the launch wasn't the bottleneck after all.

Except it actually is. When a fully functioning satellite costs e.g. 200m$ and the launch is another 200m$ it makes sense to overbuild your satellite to 600m$ with crazy redundancies etc to make sure it won't fail early on it's mission life. At the same time the big dumb booster concept like Ariane 5 and 6 makes tradeoffs like no upper stage engine restart capabilities which are ok for GTO missions but mean that multi-sat LEO or MEO constellations are impossible( you can't change the orbit and drifting is expensive).

Historically speaking, generally because the money lost by SpaceX not being able to launch on anything close to schedule costs them more than the few percent they could save. (Remember, there's a whole bunch of cost in building the satellite too.)

> because the money lost by SpaceX not being able to launch on anything close to schedule costs them more than the few percent they could save

This is a valid pitch. Memorably, Skybox almost went bankrupt waiting for their Ukranian launch partner to put their birds in orbit.

That said, this isn't a good business plan. Pitching availability for a non-just-in-time manufactured product is a bearish bet on competitors' production schedules. Not a bad bet in the rocket business. But re-usability both decreases costs and increases launch frequency. Ariane 6 is, on multiple levels, the EU calling Elon Musk on a bluff. Not unreasonable a decade ago, when the project was planned. But wrong today.

It's also awkward to advertise a project by the low demand for it.