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Comment by jlmorton | Hacker News Reader

Alain Charmeau spelled this out explicitly to Der Spiegel:

> Charmeau said the Ariane rocket does not launch often enough to justify the investment into reusability. (It would need about 30 launches a year to justify these costs, he said). And then Charmeau said something telling about why reusability doesn't make sense to a government-backed rocket company—jobs.

> "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!'"

http://www.spiegel.de/wissenschaft/technik/alain-charmeau-di...

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What will make even more sense is when he says to his teams: "Farewell, it was really nice working with you all, too bad the foreign competition slashed prices and bankrupted us"

The solution is therefore pretty simple: taxes will subsidize "industries of national interest". It is for the same reason as the US would never buy Swedish fighter jets, Israeli ICBMs or German submarines. This has been true since the beginning of the nation state.

Great idea - note however the lack of existance of Swedish fighter jets, the low quality of Israeli ICBM, and the rarity of German submarines.

A government can subsidize with taxes an industry as much as it wants, and force its products down its citizens throat as much as it can: it will not be able to create quality, which is essential to get a large market demand.

Unless the industry is very hard to replicate for whatever reason like large capital requirements given the available technology (ex: a computer in the 1940s, sending a human to the moon in the 1960s) this create a market opportunity.

Natural market forces such as competition ensure the end result.

EDIT: My bad, I forgot about the Swedish Gripen. It exists, which is no small feat by itself! It is just low quality and rare.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saab_JAS_39_Gripen

"Gripen has achieved moderate success in sales to nations in Central Europe, South Africa and Southeast Asia; bribery has been suspected in some of these procurements, but authorities closed the investigation in 2009"

Thanks to bribery, this wonderful piece of technology could be sold to major world powers like South Africa and Hungary.

Actually Saab has been producing fine Swedish jet fighters for 60 years. Ever heard of the JAS 39 Gripen?

The Gripen is not Swedish?

Competition works when the market is open. But the space market is far from being open. Even building a satellite without including an ITAR or EAR part was politically impossible a few years ago for an EU company.

> the low quality of Israeli ICBM,

They really don't need to threaten anyone who lives far from them.

> and the rarity of German submarines.

Which makes a lot of sense given the mission of the German Navy (which is mostly protecting a relatively small coast from almost non-existent enemies).

> note however the lack of existance of Swedish fighter jets

Er, what?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saab_JAS_39_Gripen

My bad.

Thanks to bribery, this wonderful piece of technology could be sold to major world powers like South Africa and Hungary.

It is a great idea indeed, but note:

- The Gripen fighter jets (designed and built in Sweden) listing no less than 17 (!) current and confirmed future customers here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saab_JAS_39_Gripen#Operational.... The list of nations considering buying those jets is even longer.

- You are either incredibly well informed or not informed at all about the quality of Israeli ICBMs, but since they are ordering submarines capable of launching ICBMs and are capable of launching satellites into orbit, the general state of Israeli ballistic capability is definitely high enough to deliver warheads anywhere on the planet.

- Allegedly, the latest generation of German submarines is good enough to penetrate the defenses of a US navy carrier group (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Type_212_submarine#Operations). They are in service with both the German and Italian navies with four more ordered by the Norwegians.

Quality helps with generating demand but it is not enough, especially when selling to governments. If you don't believe this, please consider if SpaceX had still gotten the NSA launch contracts if SpaceX had been a Chinese or Russian company.

I fully agree that, when selling to friendly governments, quality is not much of a factor

There are a number of reasons why Europe would prefer a more expensive European launcher over a cheap American one. More or less the same reasons the US military has preferred pre-SpaceX American expendable launchers to superior and cheaper European ones for a lot of missions.

Yes, Europe wants their own launchers anyway as the access to US launches is still a hazardous endeavour for critical payloads. And the recent moves of the US international politics are not going in the right direction.

As long as there is no reciprocity in the full access to the markets, we will live a semi-closed gardens. If the markets open, it won't take long for the European companies to develop a reusable launcher capability. The technology and the knowledge exists already, but there is no political or financial incentive to do that right now.

But the premise that there will only be 10 launches per year is (hopefully) false.

If launches get much cheaper, there are many reasons to launch more stuff. To orbit, to the moon, to Mars, ...

Right. You build the rocket for the 10 guaranteed launches, then you move right on to building the next rocket, because you'll need another in case you lose the first. Then you build another after that, and that one can put up some payloads that were not-so-guaranteed. Then you build another after that, and by then, some of the labor that used to go completely into construction is now reconditioning and inspecting the reusable hardware instead. Eventually, your construction crews are building at the replacement rate for whatever sized fleet of reusable rockets you need to put up the payloads you can cram into your launch pipeline.

As it is, that pipeline is fixed at 10 launches per year. If the pipeline were fatter, they could fit more launches into it. If they can do more launches, they can court more customers.

If cost to orbit is cheap enough, you can do things like launch a big, dumb tank of water, xenon, hydrazine, liquid fuel, food supplies, oxygen candles, or anything else useful only in quantity, and requiring no life support. With those up there, you can do rendezvous-and-go missions, and it costs less money to get to wherever you're going. If you can do more launches, you can spread more missions out across multiple launches.

Consider you'd need to invest not only in manufacturing the rockets, but also on shipping them to launch sites, increasing launch site capacities to deal with extra launches, adding extra capacity for fueling the extra rockets, to prepare and mate the payloads (that'll need to be built by someone, somewhere)... Nothing there is really cheap.

In the end, the rocket is not really the most expensive part. It's just the part that, until recently, was expensive and thrown away after a single use.

Hopefully false, and you need to increase that number to at least 20, more likely 30 to pay for the investment. That is very the problem lies - the risk.

Looking at the spaceflight calendar for the rest of the year, there are 6 flights where Ariane 5 could used, if you exclude all the national missions from non-EU countries. Let's round that to 10 as this does not cover all the remaining launches. So we are at a possible market of ~20 launches a year, with the current cheap prices of SpaceX. In order to justify reusability, Arianespace/Airbus would need to plan on having a 90/100% marketshare of the very competitive market, while their US competitors could benefit from quite lucrative military missions.

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