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Comment by zpeti | Hacker News Reader

Why don’t they just give the money to spacex? This is such typical French/eu behaviour. Let’s build something that already exists, for 10x the price, 10 years late, so that we can create jobs and have our own... Except the market viability is close to 0.

how about using that money for something that’s actually innovative? Or perhaps charge less tax so people can decide on their own what’s worthwhile.

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While I absolutely agree that SpaceX is way ahead of anyone else, and I am very enthusiastic about SpaceX in general, SpaceX is a US corporation, and it is a really bad idea for any other economy or military to allow the USA to have a monopoly on space tech.

Space has enough strategic advantages that the economic reasoning of comparative advantage, while still true in itself, simply isn’t the most important concern.

"The joint American-European project is expected to cost billions and take just over a decade to implement."

This doesn't exist. It's never been done before. If SpaceX does it before Airbus and brings back literal tons of mars rock then great, but it's not certain when that will be possible.

Market viability isn't an appropriate metric for scientific research.

On the contrary, it would be foolish of the EU to be so dependent on a foreign company, dependent on a foreign law on a subject as strategic as space. It is a crucial choice that, as a EU citizen, I applaud.

It's not beyond the realms of possibility that around the same time as the sample returns to Earth, the US could have geologists' boots on the ground on Mars doing actual geology in situ, courtesy of SpaceX/Starship. Kind of puts this effort in perspective.

They should be going all out for reusability, but instead they chose the oldspace pork approach. I don't know whether to laugh or cry.

> It's not beyond the realms of possibility that around the same time as the sample returns to Earth, the US could have geologists' boots on the ground on Mars doing actual geology in situ, courtesy of SpaceX/Starship.

I mean... maybe? What's your suggestion here? NASA and ESA should put all interplanetary work on hold, in case Musk delivers on time and on budget for once?

> I mean... maybe? What's your suggestion here? NASA and ESA should put all interplanetary work on hold, in case Musk delivers on time and on budget for once?

No. I'd prefer ESA to be building reusable rockets of their own, which offer the prospect of orders of magnitudes greater potential for exploration.

I just find it amusing to imagine the Earth-based geologists poring over their few crumbs whilst actual geologists stomp about on Mars with hammers chipping away to their hearts' content, likely also deploying fleets of rovers etc. and thereby gathering terabytes of data, and it could be the case that these two things are happening very close together in time. Surely you'd agree that's a poignant juxtaposition.

> No. I'd prefer ESA to be building reusable rockets of their own

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adeline_(rocket_stage)

The numbers didn't work particularly well on this one, but it's not like they're ignoring it.

And, frankly, commercial space is doing fine on launchers right now. It's doing very little on future interplanetary concepts, so if anything it would make MORE sense for ESA to focus on them now than previously.

> I just find it amusing to imagine the Earth-based geologists poring over their few crumbs whilst actual geologists stomp about on Mars with hammers chipping away to their hearts' content

I mean, it's _possible_, maybe. But it's not likely. And you can't suspend all work due to dubious claims by someone else. In the 1950s, British fusion researchers claimed that cheap fusion energy would be a thing within a decade. If we had believed them absolutely, the world would still be powered by low efficiency coal and oil power plants; why bother spending all that money developing high efficiency steam and gas turbines, wind and solar power, and fission power, when cheap fusion was about to sweep it away?

And of course, even in the Musk dream scenario where this actually happens, solar electric drive cargo tugs would still be very useful, and this is a decent first step towards those. No-one envisages a long-term purely chemical exploration of space.

US and EU have already a "trade war/tariffs", so it is really stupid to give money to US to build their space industry so in future some weird dispute can cause $EU to lose access to space or over pay. There are also good engineers in EU that would need jobs, maybe they can create better stuff if they compete with SpaceX or create something different that can dominate a niche.

i bet US would have loved Airbus do not exists so Boeing made more money.

For strategic industry you don't want to minimize your dependency on external factors, some natural disaster happens and you no longer have food to feed your citizens or no longer have medicine or your software will refuse to run etc.

> Let’s build something that already exists

What already exists that can do what this is built to do?

Nothing like this currently exists. The closest would probably be Phobos-Grunt, but that, er, didn’t work.

You can look at the UK as an example of what happens when a country abandons its own space program and decides to buy launches in the US instead.

competition is good, it's better than piling all the money in one place.

Is it really competition when nobody is trying?

Surely there's evidence they're both trying?

Europe is trying to build a glorified cargo box. SpaceX is trying to build a starship.

I’d be more enthusiastic if we had 2 attempts at a spaceship.

I am tired of spacex fanboys that cant tell the difference between a scientific mission for research and a commercial operation

> "And this satellite that Airbus will build - I like to call it 'the first interplanetary cargo ship', because that's what it will be doing. It's designed to carry cargo between Mars and Earth,"

It has nothing to do with fanboy or not. I’m sure there are tons of challenges involved in making this happen, but I just don’t think a cargo satellite is fundamentally very exciting.

Having a human in orbit of mars would make the whole process of retrieving rock samples orders of magnitude easier.

> SpaceX is trying to build a starship

No.

No? I agree that so far it has been mostly exploding cylinders, but that doesn’t really change what they’re attempting no?

I don't want my tax money to go fund SpaceX. SpaceX is American and all their capabilities are practically owned by American entities. Europeans like me cannot even work for SpaceX, so unless we have our own parallel programs we would just have no capability at all in this space.

If ESA were building reusable rockets and not instead persisting with a pork-driven employment programme that happens to have a side effect of producing rockets, I'd agree with you. Until then ESA deserve to be hammered with criticism - and especially by those whose tax money etc. is being spent on an approach that is hurtling towards obsolescence.

What are you talking about ? So far Ariane program seems to be a commercial success. ESA on a scientific point of view too. It is true that Ariane 6 will not be reusable, although cheaper than Ariane 5, just like ALL reliable commercial launchers today (even tomorrow for ULA) outside of space X. It is clear that this is the future. However, these are only the first steps. I am not sure that today space X will be able to be profitable with it. Talking about tax money, note that SLS will not be reusable too...

ESA's leaders have mocked and disparaged SpaceX's approach in recent years; why would they bother unless they considered SpaceX a serious threat? They must be worried. I'll also point out that SpaceX naysayers have a dismally poor record of predicting the future.

This isn't an EU/US thing and I totally agree with you on ULA, SLS and I might add Roscosmos etc. I wish ALL launch providers would move towards reusability because in the end that increases the opportunities for getting humanity exploring space properly again, which is what I'd really like to see. Clearly Europe has fantastic engineers: why aren't they leading this transition? Why is it only SpaceX, Blue Origin and Rocket Lab that are actively pursuing reusability today (notwithstanding paper studies etc. from other groups)?

I don't agree nor disagree with you, but I hate the idea that criticism means the critic is afraid.

In this case I'd say the benefit of the doubt should not be with ESA:

'Asked about how the Ariane 5 compares to lower-cost alternatives on the market today, such as SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket, Stefano Bianchi, Head of ESA Launchers Development Department, responded with a question of his own. “Are you buying a Mercedes because it is cheap?”

Ranzo, sitting nearby, chimed in and referenced the India-based maker of the world’s least expensive car. As he put it, “We don’t sell a Tata.”'

And:

'the US military says it pays more for launches because of its mission assurance requirements, which require extra steps to be taken for preparing and attaching the payload alongside myriad other system checks to ensure a safe ride to space for costly national security payloads. What does Charmeau think of this explanation?

“I would be surprised if SpaceX explained to commercial customers that they deliver bullshit to them,” he replied. “I would be extremely surprised by that.”'

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

Ariane 6 will still be significantly more costly that expendable Falcon 9s. It’s a terrible design that learned nothing from SpaceX breakthroughs before reuse was even possible.

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