Concern in Europe that the Ariane 6 and Vega-C rockets will not be competitive | Hacker News Reader

Concern in Europe that the Ariane 6 and Vega-C rockets will not be competitive

arstechnica.com

105 pointstosh229 comments

I remember this comment from ArianeGroup chief:

> "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!'" [1]

[1] 2018, "Ariane chief seems frustrated with SpaceX for driving down launch costs" https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/05/ariane-chief-seems-f...

Wow. That's literally Luddite thinking, which is not what you want to hear from someone in charge of a rocket company.

That's not luddite thinking, that's a politician thinking. Ariane, just like SLS, is mostly a job program for large companies with huge workforces and thousands of small subcontactor shops. Manufacturing less rockets without a viable replacement would be an economic and political disaster.

Of course, pretending like SpaceX was not a serious threat was an economic and strategic disaster, albeit on a slightly longer term and with less visibility. The ArianeGroup CEO in question retired less than a year after that infamous interview, so he clearly didn't care about that longer term.

Won't decreasing the price, increase the demand and thus increase the workforce required ? I mean this is basic production engineering "Law of Demand".

> Won't decreasing the price, increase the demand and thus increase the workforce required ?

This assumes there is a need for additional launches and that lowering the cost will increase the demand. While, in this case, I think it's obvious lowering launch costs will increase demand, but, if you could remove an appendix for half the price I don't think there would be a huge uptick in demand for surgeries.

I wonder if your analogy holds true for cosmetic surgeries. We know that cosmetic surgery tourism has increased for nations like South Korea (and even Turkey) thanks to cheaper procedures compared to the US. Of-course, the pandemic has messed up all such economic key-indicators currently.

Look at the head of the EU! They literally chose the most mediocre bureaucrat in Germany to run the whole area. It's emblematic of how the EU functions.

VdL is certainly mediocre, but she's a career politician, not a bureaucrat.

Luddites fought against automatization of human work. There is no equivalent in the rocket industry, certainly not what this boss is doing. Production of a single launcher per year would absolutely be uneconomical.

Where the boss is going astray is in his inability to conceive of a robust private demand for launches. SpaceX has a huge private manifest, including their own project, Starlink.

But this is Europe and European Space Agency and the Franco-German spirit shows. Government is what matters first and foremost, everything else is uncertain and thus better ignored.

(Yeah, I know. Not everywhere in Europe is the same. Estonians would probably have a vibrant private launch industry, if they were as numerous as the French. But they are only a million.)

> inability to conceive of a robust private demand for launches.

If the money used in public launches is redirected to development of more/better payloads, then the number of launches can increase.

One of the reasons building a spacecraft is so expensive is because they need to be designed to be extremely light because launching is expensive and extremely reliable because they won't be cheaply replaced. If launching gets cheap, we can reduce the cost of development a payload and increase the iteration pace, which is much like the SpaceX approach to fail cheaply and quickly.

Correction, luddites were basically homeless people fighting against their former employers, not the machines.

I think we both mean the same.

"Automatization" was a decision on the part of their employers, the machines themselves had no say in it. They just were a target at hand.

once you understand that Arianespace primarily exists as a means to funnel taxpayers money to the companies that produce components for the rockets then it all makes sense

It's what you might expect when the "business" isn't a business but a political project funded by taxpayers.

this is natural ego talking people want to keep their share; it's a bit sad that his reaction is not 'holy.. reusable vertical landing rockets are mindblowing.. why aren't we beating them ?'

Or... you can cut costs by a factor of ten and increase demand accordingly and then build more rockets, but yes, if you don't need more, you don't build more, hello.

Yes it's like he doesn't know any economics. I expect he is rationalizing past decisions to use non-reusable rockets.

His risk/reward structure is different from Musk's.

As a state contractor, if you undertake something risky and it fails, you will be in a world of hurt. Possibly even land in prison. Certainly the press will hound you and pelt you with accusations of nefarious manipulations and hidden corruption.

It is safer to just kick the can down the road, and risk-loving individuals won't even try to work in a risk-averse structure, much less lead it.

But unless you end up lower cost than SpaceX, you probably won't get a single extra launch. So far, they basically only get EU political projects, and those tend to not care about price.

So, basically, the ESA response goes like this:

2011 - no one is doing rocket reuse, so it is obvious that it would be too hard and probably uneconomical; let us go on with expendable launches as usual.

2021 - oh no, SpaceX has mastered first stage reuse, they took the entire market, now it would be too hard and probably uneconomical to try to compete with them. So let us go on with expendable launches as usual!

They can sorta-kinda affort that, for the French government would never give its business to some dirty Amis, even if it meant to pay 10x or 100x as much for the same payload to LEO. Paris wants to retain its strategic independence and I can understand that.

But for ESA it means that they will be a designated and expensive horse-and-buggy company in the age of a Ford T.

Too shortsighted. Both parties are right.

ESA improved their rocket design for the 2nd stage. Almost a Raptor. But of course not a real Raptor, more like a VW compared to a Mercedes. Rocket reuse is also a revolutionary new idea, which didn't work out when NASA and the Russians pushed for it, but it now it works. Who would have thought. But by far not as complicated as a Raptor, which does not need multiple stages.

So now they are pushing for reuse, which is not that hard to introduce medium term.

Yes, exactly, government funded enterprises don't innovate like private funded enterprises. They simply can't overcome the political obstacles in the way.

> ...while member states of the European Union pay for development of the rockets, after reaching operational status, these launch programs are expected to become self-sufficient by attracting commercial satellite launches to help pay the bills.

I think the amazing thing about SpaceX is that they are constantly improving their stack. They don't finish designing a rocket, unless they're working on the next big rocket. The model of "build a rocket, and then sit back and profit for the next few decades" model is never going to take off again. A lot of the old launch providers need to reckon with this reality, and it's going to be really hard to turn these giant aircraft carriers of companies into embracing this new way.

I don't think the latter part is correct. In fact, many European companies, especially from Germany, are quite agile market leaders. The fact that classical rocket companies are not that agile is probably caused by the comparatively small market.

Before Elon came up with StarLink, even the Falcon 9 was a relatively boring concept, from the economical perspective. Yes, you can save say $50M for your launch. But your satellite costs hundreds of millions and it has a very long lead time. SpaceX has slips and occasionally loses a bioster. So you might simply buy the Ariane offering because they will effectively purpose-built the rocket for you. Especially when there are political connections to be maintained.

But with a high-volume market things shift considerably. Now it looks freakishly expensive to launch even for $10M when your satellites roll out of the factory in the dozens. And the concept of building a rocket on demand when you might need to replace a few broken sats next quarter is just outlandish.

I think old rocket companies are basically just seeing the entire business model change from a ultra-specialist logistics company to something more akin to FedEx.

>Before Elon came up with StarLink, even the Falcon 9 was a relatively boring concept, from the economical perspective.

http://personal.ee.surrey.ac.uk/Personal/L.Wood/constellatio...

I'm pretty sure that the idea behind huge fleets of commercial LEO internet communication satellite constellations had existed long before Elon tried his hand at it (first proposed in 1994).

Even starlink was only brought in-house after a cancelled project with OneWeb (formerly WorldVu) https://www.wsj.com/amp/articles/elon-musks-next-mission-int...

Iridium (1987) doesn't count as a huge enough fleet to warrant reusable rockets? It took them a LOT of launches...

It's basically a two minima space.

You can get 10 launches per year and pretty high reliability and high cost. Satellite cost is maybe 10x the launch cost. Government and commercial operations are possible. Europe has to maintain this for strategic reasons, no matter the cost.

And then there's the "newspace" strategy. Low cost launch achieved by reuse brings more demand, satellite cost goes down. When price goes low enough, completely new markets become possible. You enter a virtuous spiral. This is at least the theory. Requires a large amount of political capital to do this, as it will be lossy for a long time and there will be high profile failures (because you do so many launches and iterate). So this is probably only doable by mega billionaires who "get it" (the newspace way of thinking), not by public companies or governments.

Even Elon Musk didn't "get it" originally, they were trying to fish the rockets from the sea and refurbish them. At some point he turned around completely. Grasshopper and vertical landing was done.

> Before [anyone showed it could be done] the Falcon 9 was a relatively boring concept, from the economical perspective.

There, I fixed it. The reusable orbital launch vehicle revolution may well reduce launch costs by an order of magnitude when it's all said and done. That's not even relatively boring. It's not boring at all. It's nothing short of amazing. But it was boring when no one knew how to make it happen.

> But with a high-volume market things shift considerably. [...]

That's on the money. Government-owned/operated launchers are in trouble.

Rocket reuse is not a panacea. There is a very real expendable cost advantage in choosing SpaceX but rocket reuse will not reduce rocket costs significantly. There might be another -50% costs to be had once they iron out all the kinks but what Elon musk promises will not happen because he always overhypes everything.

Sure, he overhypes, but already Falcon 9 is cheaper than all others and precisely because of reuse. I don't see how to deny this. Oh sure, SpaceX is a privately held corporation so we don't really know the real numbers and maybe he's just underpricing to convince the world he's right even though he's wrong, or something. But there's a reason ULA and others are getting into the reuse game, and it's that rocket engines are unbelievably expensive, so if you just reuse those you save a huge amount on costs. The evidence is overwhelming that reusing rocket engines is a huge savings. It must follow that reusing the whole launch vehicle would be a bigger savings.

> In fact, many European companies, especially from Germany, are quite agile market leaders.

Can you name a few?

Herrenknecht, Liebherr, BioNTech.

Google for "Hidden Champion".

> But your satellite costs hundreds of millions and it has a very long lead time.

$50m is still a lot, and not every sat costs that much. How does a corporate bean counter justify spending $50m more than they have to?

> SpaceX has slips

Are there launchers that don't??

> and occasionally loses a bioster.

Losing a booster is a risk for SpaceX, not for the customer.

> So you might simply buy the Ariane offering because they will effectively purpose-built the rocket for you.

Nonsense. Unless there's something to do with fairing sizes, $50m is $50m.

> Especially when there are political connections to be maintained.

Ahhh, got it.

> $50m is still a lot, and not every sat costs that much. How does a corporate bean counter justify spending $50m more than they have to?

That's seems pretty easy? The satellite easily has a 2 year lead time, and it's 100s of millions so you can't afford to build a spare 'just in case'. At that point, spending an extra $50M to reduce the (perceived?) chance of a 2-year project delay starts to look pretty cheap.

Of course, this is dependent on there being a material reduction in the probability of RUD. And as SpaceX has accumulated more data on reliability, it starts to get very hard to argue that there is indeed a material reduction.

The Falcon 9 launch cadence is simply incredible right now. You have to start wondering if the uneconomical competitors will be able to stay on schedule while losing business and money. How does one perceive a "chance of a 2-year project delay" with SpaceX under the current circumstances but not with Ariane? It's quite a stretch. Would it stand up in court if shareholders sued over unnecessary spending of an extra $50m/launch?

> Are there launchers that don't??

Naturally, everyone has delays. But a company that purpose-builds the rocket for you does not, for instance, have to deal with a RUD of the booster it wants to use for you.

Selecting launch providers is not just about the sticker price of the rocket. But with more and more launches it obviously becomes ever more important.

> But a company that purpose-builds the rocket for you does not, for instance, have to deal with a RUD of the booster it wants to use for you.

Let's not forget too that EVERY booster for EVERY rocket other than Falcon 9 suffers a rude, if scheduled, disassembly EVERY time. When Falcon 9 suffers an unscheduled one, it's SpaceX's loss, not the customers. How can you possibly think that the occasional loss of a booster post-boost phase is a problem for the customer?!

The problem is not loss of booster, but loss of or damage to payload. In this regard, Falcon is comparable to other rockets.

Starship and the undeveloped Superheavy, not so much.

That's not what u/choeger was saying. A booster loss post-boost does not and cannot damage the payload.

One simple manufacturing mistake can delay your launch by a huge amount. One technical software problem can do so too.

The fact is, Arianespace just had massive month long delays because of production issues.

While SpaceX has 5 flight proven booster ready in the pipeline if one fails, its next one up and very little delay.

Its not even comparable.

The bigger question is how much higher is the chance of the anomaly in the reused booster. If it's comparable or identical to new one, there's literally no problem for SpaceX, big one for everyone else.

Its hard know, but reused boosters have the highest DoD and NASA certification a 100% perfect flight record and the same insurance premium.

IIRC they have re-flown two boosters 9x each.

Anyways, soon enough we'll know what their real reliability story is.

> But a company that purpose-builds the rocket for you does not, for instance, have to deal with a RUD of the booster it wants to use for you.

What?!

Large aerospace companies are constantly working on modifications, repairs, upkeep that all require significant analysis. For a commercial jet, something like a truck driving into a jet engine nacelle might entail significant engineers' time (CFD, FEA etc.) because the safety margins for aircraft are so small. The results might be a once off-repair, or it might lead to a redesigned part that is put into production. It's usually not that interesting to the public though.

- Worked at one, know others still there. Truck example is real.

Interesting take. Is there a next after Starship?

Starship is significantly scaled down from their original plans. Despite being enormous, it's actually about the minimum viable size. Assuming there is the traffic to support one of course, there are actually a number of scaling advantages to greater size when using stainless steel as the construction material. So while it'd take a long while, SpaceX may well ultimately find it advantageous to do a larger Starship 2.

Another area that humanity hasn't even gotten to the stage of considering yet would be dedicated interplanetary space transport craft. For now SpaceX is planning to just use Starships for getting out of gravity wells and getting between them. But the kind of cadence, $/kg, and sheer capacity Starship will enable also opens up the real option of permanent orbital assembly and maintenance facilities, and in turn the construction of spacecraft optimized purely for use outside of gravity wells (so much more emphasis on ISP vs thrust, no need to worry about aerodynamics, far less restriction on size, optimization for long time travel like potential synthetic gravity via spin, more radiation shielding, etc). No reason SpaceX couldn't lead the charge on that too in principle, though certain attractive forms of propulsion like anything using nuclear would probably necessitate more government involvement until/unless SpaceX can form their own mature government far down the road.

Anyway, $100-200/kg (or less!) and huge volume/high cadence is so radically disruptive that it's kind of hard to predict how space will look a few decades down the line. It's going to be a wild thing to watch, with lots of opportunity.

There are quite a few benefits of how current Starship has been designed and actually nicely demonstrates how cleverly though out the whole thing is!

It goes between two places with at least some sort of atmosphere by default (or one with and on without for the Lunar variant) so while indeed dragging aerosurfaces with your in the vacuum of space might seem wasteful on the first look, you can save huge amounts of delta-v once you arrive at your destination due to atmospheric braking.

A purely built for space vacuum only craft could be built to be much lighter but would also need to loose all that excess interplanetary speed with engine power alone, potentially negating the advantages quite a bit.

There are, of course, various hybrid approaches: - the space only craft still could have some limited aerodynamics to do earocapture to orbit at the destination or at least do aerobraking from a "cheap" eccentric capture orbit - you could have a space only "hotel" ship on a cycler orbit and get passengers and cargo using Starship like "taxi" ships from a planet - a big complex space-only ship could have fancy high tech low thrust & high ISP engines that would not realistically fit on craft that needs to be fairly aerodynamic

Also as for in space construction - indeed, it will enable really massive and efficient space structures, but we are not there yet space infrastructure wise. And Starships so far have shown how easily they can be made in their current form using very basic tech during their assembly, even compared to tech used for existing decades old expandable rockets! :)

So no doubt eventually big efficient high tech in space cruisers will carry the most interplanetary traffic, it seems like Starship is a surprisingly good fit for the time being & for putting in place the building stones of that future. :)

Yes, this. With orbital assembly you can have fewer engines (save on weight) all optimized for vacuum and no fairing or a super-minimal fairing (save on weight).

Heck, you don't need orbital assembly for that. SpaceX could put in orbit a single- or two-engine starship with no landing legs and no heat shielding for transfers. Eventually they could decommission one such truck to make an orbital station.

> Anyway, $100-200/kg (or less!) and huge volume/high cadence is so radically disruptive that it's kind of hard to predict how space will look a few decades down the line. It's going to be a wild thing to watch, with lots of opportunity.

There might be so many satellites in orbit as to permanently disrupt astronomy on Earth, necessitating a fleet of replacements for the James Webb telescope.

> Heck, you don't need orbital assembly for that. SpaceX could put in orbit a single- or two-engine starship with no landing legs and no heat shielding for transfers.

That's SpaceX's lunar lander plan - a Starship that'd never need to come back to Earth except for refueling.

Keeping stuff in space has a maintenance cost - both station keeping which can be relatively cheap, and maintenance for any space trash collisions.

Most importantly, there is no commercial space station to move people and current starship test articles are not fitted for passenger transport nor low earth orbit rendezvous.

It's a long road from even a properly working Starship towards this goal.

Maintenance for space junk collisions should be cheaper than landing and relaunching, and, if launching heavier things gets cheaper, we can afford making them less delicate.

> permanent orbital assembly

Sorry not familiar with these plans - does this mean that we assemble a bigger rocket (by using earth based rockets) at ISS level orbits and then relaunch to another planet?

I assume this is going to be not too much more than "we dock several components together in Earth orbit, then fly the whole thing where we want it to go"

In theory this would work for anything that is permanently in vacuum, such as the NASA Lunar Gateway (though it's currently planned for lunar-orbit operations only), or some future low-Earth orbit station such as Gateway Station[1] or some sort of Venus, Mars, or Ceres orbital habitat.

[1] https://gatewayspaceport.com/the-gateway/

After Starship, Elon has stated he wants an upgraded Starship with double the radius: https://www.teslarati.com/spacex-elon-musk-starship-the-next...

After that, orbital infrastructure: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1373132222555848713

And possibly nuclear propulsion? https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1153378777893888005

Not to mention colonies on other planets: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1373735946244431873

Most of that is pretty long-term though. I suspect Starship will remain a commercially viable platform for quite some time after its inception.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Starship mostly lists uses that don’t have a real market right now:

  - Reusable launch system
  - Intercontinental transport
  - Space tourism
  - Earth–lunar transport
  - Mars colonization
  - Multiplanetary transport

The only thing with an existing market in that list is “launch system”. They’ll have to develop the market for 100 ton launches, though (100 tons is 20% of the mass of the ISS)

Because of that, I would say starship still has to prove it is commercially viable.

Space tourism, in particular, highly depends on how safe one can make the trip. A 1:1000 risk of death likely would make many would-be passengers think twice before booking a trip.

It also would depend on making the trip nice. The first few tourists might go for bragging rights, but after that, one would need attractions in space. Building those there will increase the cost of a trip.

Earth-Lunar transport now technically has a market: CLPS

https://www.nasa.gov/content/commercial-lunar-payload-servic...

Granted, it's a monopsony for now but...

Also, the next market might be "companies who want to mine asteroids for rare metals or rocket fuel", in which case SpaceX may be in the "sells pickaxes to gold miners" business.

Those who pursue asteroid mining would do well to review the history of recently dormant or acquired companies such as Planetary Resources, Deep Space Industries, and Shackleton Energy Company.

Not even close, Starship even in biggest variant is not a tug or a space station.

Yes, it may well be that there's no market for 100 tons to orbit launch vehicles. It also may be that the only "market" for interplanetary travel is taxpayer funding. It's also possible that 100 tons to orbit for super low cost might be so transformative that in a couple of decades time we might actually see asteroid mining (which even now seems farfetched) to pay for it all.

Elon has stated that Starship will likely be cheaper per-launch than Falcon 9 despite having more than 5x the payload capacity: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1258580078218412033 (Guessing this is primarily due to reusability of the second stage, which Falcon 9 lacks.) So even if everything else fails to pan out Starship could still end up being extremely profitable just by dominating the existing launch market.

That said, I agree that some of Elon's longer-term goals in space are somewhat more questionable from an economic perspective. Safety is still a big question mark when it comes to tourism and intercontinental transport, and a lot of the other proposed uses (such as Elon's goal of settling Mars) have questionable economic value. Will be interesting to see if any new markets get created by Starhip's record low launch costs.

Elon Musk has mentioned an 18m wide version of starship (current is 9m)

Is the cost to doubling the width of starship proportional to pizza?

Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments? You've been doing it a lot and it's not what this site is supposed to be for.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I was wanting to compare the industrial scale cost of doubling the width of a pizza to doubling the width of the cross section of a starship. Your entitled to you're opinion

No, much higher, because of extra engines and more plumbing.

Starship is already pretty marginal of an upper stage and it's fired early. More marginal than old Space Shuttle, but cheaper to refurbish.

OTOH, the weight of the rocket grows mostly linearly (it's essentially a skin around propellants), the number of engines grows with the square of the diameter and the fuel volume grows at a cubic rate, so the engines can burn for longer (at some point, aerospike engines will become practical).

The main difference between EU and SpaceX is probably investors.

And that SpaceX sells its packages overpriced to the military. It's normally called state-funding but not in this instance.

The real world is more complicated than just 'overpriced to the military'.

To heavily paraphrase the story: The US military has a number of unusual requirements that are not cheap to meet (security, extra review, etc etc). SpaceX originally balked at a number of those requirements, but after a fair bit of back and forth, they eventually threw up their hands and said "Sure! Whatever you want, but you have to pay all the extra costs". And so the US military launches are significantly more expensive than the commercial launches, but the large part of that is because the costs are genuinely higher.

And political fragmentation.

I know SpaceX gets plenty of government funding these days but, unless I'm significantly mistaken, that isn't how they boot-strapped. To me this is a case study of an agile entrepreneur creating value and savings for customers through innovation versus giant incumbents encumbered by bureaucracy and being unable to adapt until they are threatened with being pushed into insolvency or extinction.

Falcon 1 got funding from DARPA. Falcon 9 got funding from NASA as part of the effort to develop resupply for ISS. For both efforts there was significant private money put in as well. Musk has said they would have succeeded w/o government money but it would have taken longer, which is debatable.

Musk also put in his Paypal earnings into it.

Let's put it this way - if it wasn't for private entrepreneurship and Musk's vision, SpaceX wouldn't be here no matter what DARPA or NASA would have done.

Elon's leadership drive and capital had the catalyzing effect. Without Elon, all the capital in the world would've gone into laggy bureaucratic procurement and project management pie in the sky bridges to nowhere. ARPA might've done what today's DARPA/NASA does not do.

Elon literally put in most of his wealth to build spacex and was on the verge of bankruptcy if he couldn't prove his launcher worked and get funding.

Nothing I said contradicts that.

Well, SpaceX Falcon 1 started with private money. However their first 'test' costumers was a DoD student project.

However then they did got significant (200-300M) in funding because of the effort around commercial resupply of ISS and more later but that financed the whole Falcon 9 and Dragon program.

That funding they used to offer a rocket that then accumulated a huge backlog of launches because of the low pricing they offered. Note, this was before re-usability was even a factor.

Its also true of course that other companies, including ULA (and its parents LM and Boeing), Orbitl ATK and others also had to option to commercially bid for those government contracts.

Orbital ATK did however their rocket met with no success in the commercial market.

Rocket Plane Kistler tried, but their efforts were very much Old Space and they couldn't raise the insane amount of money they wanted to raise and NASA kicked them out of the program.

Overall, SpaceX was certainty helped by the need for Commercial resupply of ISS and without that they might have gone bankrupt. However, what they did with the funds, was truly amazing and beyond what anybody could have hopped for.

And this was one of the best decisions NASA ever did.

FT had an article about this a few months ago- Arianspace is seeing their business evaporate overnight, and they have no reusability story, and Europe doesn't do enough launches to really drive much business.

EDIT: Link: https://www.ft.com/content/24cca993-b249-45a5-8c42-b39c0ec30...

Interesting what happens when you let ambitious people actually collect the fruits of their labor and then do what they want with their money, like start Tesla and SpaceX. Maybe they should try it out and see if they get innovation for once.

Too bad _most_ wealth isn't the fruit of labor but extracted rents and 'what they want' is to preserve those rents in inflated non-productive financial instruments.

If we thought like you, we would all be living in mud huts because fair is fair and nobody is allowed to have more than anyone else. Having a reward system for people who move production and efficiency forward to provide goods and services for everyone else is how humanity advances. Life is not completely fair but its the best system we have.

I didn't say nobody is allowed to have more.

I 100% agree that people who _move production and efficiency forward_ should be allowed to allocate more capital!

Where I imagine we disagree is about what counts as productive

I agree with your comment but it feels out of place considering that the complaint is about unproductive financial instruments.

Low interest rates create zombie companies that are only staying alive thanks to cheap credit. If the Fed were to raise rates all those unproductive companies would go bankrupt at the same time and we would have the biggest crash in the last 80 years. The only reason you would keep this scheme going is because you care about the owners of those financial instruments and those owners aren't poor people.

Nobody has ever realistically said all should make the same. Even the USSR had different pay for different skills. Money hording is unacceptable.

Money hoarding doesn't directly affect other people in a fiat system; remember money is fake, we can just make more of it. Hoarding it is a deflationary pressure and is combated by inflating again. (this is called functional finance and of course isn't 100% true, you do have to reclaim the hoard through taxes or something eventually)

Rich people do things like own Amazon rather than own a huge pile of money; this makes them rich because a whole lot of other people are willing to give them money. This also doesn't directly affect you, but at least it indirectly affects you differently.

Money hoarding has nothing to do with your life quality as life quality is a logistical issue not a money issue. If I give everyone 1 million dollars for example, there are still only 30k nurses in the country for 320 million people. Nothing changes except for the price of nursing services. The same goes for homes, education, etc. And rich people dont take 50 nurses, buy all the single family homes, or eat 1000x their portion of food. Quit making excuses and being a negative person and learn to understand that life quality is about expanding economic production and efficiency through entrepreneurs, not being a negative jealous person trying to bring everyone down so its all fair and square but production comes to a halt and everyone is worse off. Socialist thinkers like yourself are really short sighted and the Karens of the economic world.

It's a tough sell, saying that Elon Musk and other entrepreneurs are more effective with their money than a democratically-elected board of experts might be.

Production doesn't come to a halt without entrepreneurs in any world except Ayn Rand's.

Ah yes, I know of many great companies that were founded by democratically-elected boards for experts.

Imaginatron, Fantasticallipsis, Non-existamatica, and of course many others.

Can you honestly name a single company that was founded in this way you claim would be better?

Yikes I couldn't disagree with this harder. Design by committee is a dumpster fire 99% of the time. Even "Mythical Man Month" discusses the importance of a top down design for software systems.

There's no such thing as money hoarding. If you keep cash in the mattress it loses value to inflation (i.e., to the state). If you keep money in the financial system then that money is _used_ to fund others' ventures. If you invest your money (e.g., in a business, in stocks, whatever) then the money gets transferred to others who will do similar things, and you now have possession of a (hopefully) productive asset!

There is no such thing as money hoarding. "Money hoarding" is ideological and utter nonsense.

But the healthcare is freeeee!

I wish healthcare was actually free in Europe.

>Germany, with no history of its own rockets during the European Union era

I guffaw'd at this one

Funny and sad at the same time. Germany, at one time, was so far ahead in rocket science it's arguable if anyone else was even doing serious work in comparison. When that sector experienced near-total brain drain after WW2 that intellectual diaspora launched the space programs in the United States, Russia, France (and possibly Israel and Japan though the history there isn't as clear). It's interesting to think that the origin location for this brain trust still hasn't recovered or rebuilt this knowledge base.

> When that sector experienced near-total brain drain after WW2 that intellectual diaspora launched the space programs in the United States, Russia, France (and possibly Israel and Japan though the history there isn't as clear).

Don't forget UK. Peroxide technology of Black Arrow descends nicely from Peenemunde's works.

> When that sector experienced near-total brain drain after WW2 that intellectual diaspora

interesting take on "brain drain" considering most scientists which where of military relevance where either getting to work in the US (with some heavy handiness because of being a war criminal) or being imprisoned to do research in the USSR.

Well, large parts or the Ariane program are built in Germany - the upper stages IIRC. SRBs in Italy, etc.

Why? "during the EU era" == well after WWII. The victors left Germany with none of their wartime rocket brain trust.

Germany has a very dubious non-EU rocket-related history. Specifically V1 and V2 rockets that were launched at London in WWII.

Well, there was OTRAG: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/OTRAG

But they had to launch from elsewhere, mostly for political reasons.

Of all the people to be beholden to for space launches the billionaire who wants to go to mars seems like the least worst option. Better than any nation state certainly.

Being beholden to SpaceX also means being beholden to the United States, since SpaceX is based there and can't easily move elsewhere due to ITAR.

I agree with your logic 100%... but are SpaceX's rockets ITAR? I legit dont know. If they were eventually going to hold a nuke on the tip or used as Space Force transpo, I wouldn't bother asking. I just haven't heard DoD interest yet, but I've also not paid too close of an eye on the matter... as I live in viewing distance of rocket launches... god damn they're annoying at this point. Then again, NASA usage... is that instant ITAR stamp too?

But some backdoor US influence to say,"Hey, that country? Yea, fuck those guys. They dont get to use shit." I see that as a possibility.

I think it's pretty safe to assume that any device that could be converted into an ICBM with minimal effort would be covered under ITAR.

ITAR is surprisingly broad. It covers a lot of stuff that no one cares is restricted, but that just gets ignored.

> but are SpaceX's rockets ITAR? I legit dont know.

The technology absolutely is classified. Elon can't reincorporate in Mexico or any other country and take the knowledge and know-how and plans and workers with him. He could go and start from scratch, but there's a good chance that the U.S. would treat that as espionage or worse.

https://futurism.com/spacex-building-military-rocket-to-ship...

SpaceX signed a contract with the Pentagon

Alright, nevermind then. I see the ITAR rubberstamp is nicely well warn over there. ITAR all the things.

Elon musk said a few years ago during a conference that he wasn't even allowed to hire non-US-citizens because of this.

Guess other countries need to embolden their entrepreneurs and risk takers to compete or something.

This is a chance for Europe. It should be something like the US in the 60's. The USSR launches sputnik - what do you do?

I'm not saying it's a government program. Maybe it's some genus idea that encourages the private sector. Maybe it is a government program. Honestly, who cares.

What it shouldn't be and probably can't be is trundle along the status quo. Doing that is worse for everyone. Even deciding that space flight isn't worth the effort; that's there's no future in it and Europe would be better off doing something else - even that would be better for everyone then what they're doing now.

What they're doing now is more and more just a political program that makes people happy as main goal, sends a few rockets into space as a secondary goal and sets fire to a large number of Euros as a consequence.

Well here is what the US richest are doing with their time and money.

Jeff Bezos, $183 billion: Blue Origin with a smaller side of Amazon. He's going to spend his fortune on space and giving it away.

Elon Musk, $173 billion: bound up in pursuing SpaceX, Mars, Tesla / electric vehicles, batteries, sustainable energy.

Gates & Buffett, $235 billion: giving it all away, saving millions of lives around the world. These two will give away $300+ billion ultimately, most of it going to people outside of the US.

Zuckerberg, $111 billion: Facebook at present, and supposedly going to give it all away (he's young, so we'll see what he does yet).

What are Europe's richest doing?

Bernard Arnault, $124 billion: probably just going to keep the dynastic wealth going based on what he hasn't been doing (he's 72 and clearly not acting to give it all away). Stagnant, dead money, entrenched generational wealth intent on never going away.

Francoise Bettencourt Meyers, $72 billion: she's what the next generation of dynastic squatters from the Arnault clan will look like. Just keep passing it down, doing absolutely nothing interesting or of importance, exactly like her mother before her.

Amancio Ortega, $67 billion: another dynastic passer-downer. It appears he's intent on just giving it to the next generation rather than doing something interesting with it or giving it away.

Francois Pinault, $42 billion: mini Arnault, rinse & repeat.

Fashion and cosmetics. That's one core of Europe's obvious problems. The other elite rich in Europe present the same problem, such as the Wertheimers in France. None of these people have the minds or inclination to build rocket companies or anything similar. It's entirely counter to European culture to take your fortune and risk it doing something 'crazy' like a SpaceX or Tesla.

And those fortunes are far larger within their respective economies than the huge fortunes in the US are vs its economy (scaled to the US, Arnault would have a trillion dollars). So they'll be even more of a rotting drag on the future there. Spain will probably be choking on Ortegas for hundreds of years.

This is the last several hundred year story of European wealth, repeating endlessly. Western Europe, among all major wealth regions on the planet, is the absolute worst when it comes to endlessly passing down dynastic wealth.

The US has its own prominent examples of recent epic dynastic wealth, as with the second generation of the Waltons or the Mars family. The US also has very large offsets that don't do that whereas Europe has none.

Billionaires through heritage vs. Billionaires through tech seems a better comparison.

I'm pretty sure that a billionaire like Tr. Isn't giving anything away either. And that's with very low taxes.

Everyone gives away wat more in Europe through taxes, not "donations/charity". It's not "optional".

Isn't this the most ideal scenario? This can only benefit humanity, spin up new advanced reusable rocket system for EU.

Strategic industries are never left to markets. Each big geopolitical power has their own.

Consider chip manufacturing. Why just not let TSMC and Samsung do their thing? Why the US government intervenes and tries to skew the markets.

Probably for the same reason that the Taiwanese government recruited Morris Chang to start TSMC and strategically skew markets towards Taiwan.

Yes.

Taiwan had very purposeful government strategy. First import substitution, then export expansion.

Taiwanese industrial policy was to concentrate support for export expansion into two industries, petrochemical industry and electronics industry. First there was these plastic "made in Taiwan" exports. Then came electronics.

Because the US government understands this no matter how much people think individuals are better and all that rubbish. The model of operation in the united States has consistently been to crop up innovative businesses around strategic industries. SpaceX would not be this successful without the billions NASA poured into it repeatedly.

E pluribus unum!

If there were, say, ten top-end fab companies, I don’t think anyone would be worried. Today, there are 1.5. That’s obviously a problem.

There's always the SABRE engine that could do with more money and manpower: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SABRE_(rocket_engine)

Great way to never be competitive in rocket launch. Huge investment required for little benefit.

The Skylon people (who emerged out of the largely unsuccessful British government rocket program) basically invested this concept that was supposed to be amazing and basically hand waved all the insanely complex engineering questions away.

Their original analysis for Skylon has already been beat handily by SpaceX.

Watch Elon Musk talk in Britain where they ask him about Air breathing engines. His point is simple, if you are gone introduce a massive amount of new complexity, you should get a a massive payoff. And with these engines, this is simply not the case.

Investing the same effort into simple better first stage engines, will likely result into a far better outcome. That is exactly what SpaceX did.

Maybe for some future Hypersonic airplanes or something this could maybe have some use, but for rocket launch, I don't think so.

The massive payoff from the wikipedia page:

> and with the vehicle reaching orbit with more payload mass per take-off mass than just about any non-nuclear launch vehicle ever proposed.

For comparison the Falcon Heavy can lift 68,000kg to low earth orbit [0]. Since we're talking HOTOL, an Antonov can lift about 350,000 kg [1] - it's not hard to envisage a working HOTOL craft lifting something easily in excess of the Falcon Heavy, and with less fuel, and probably less dependent on other factors (temperature, weather, noise, no complex launch sites and so on). Being able to launch close to suburban areas, which rockets cannot do is likely to be a game changer as well. I'd sooner fly from London to Sydney in a SABRE powered craft, than a giant exploding tube that Elon Musk is suggesting.

Elon Musk is a good salesman, and obviously has a vested interest in promoting rockets over any alternative.

I think it's a bit unfair to say:

> basically hand waved all the insanely complex engineering questions away.

when they're solving each challenge as it comes along, such as the working precooler. [2]

I'd like to see this succeed. But you're likely correct.

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falcon_Heavy 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antonov_An-225_Mriya 2. https://www.reactionengines.co.uk/news/news

> > and with the vehicle reaching orbit with more payload mass per take-off mass than just about any non-nuclear launch vehicle ever proposed.

Sure but that is not a relevant measure.

> Elon Musk is a good salesman, and obviously has a vested interest in promoting rockets over any alternative.

He is also an engineer who had money to create any company he wanted to hand he didn't invest in an air-breathing engine.

And as I said, transporting human from a to b might be one thing, but for actual launch it will not be competitive.

> (temperature, weather, noise, no complex launch sites and so on)

When you have nothing that is even remotely close to working, making all kinds of claims about how amazing it will be is really easy.

Building a complex shaped air-frame that is supposed to hold liquid hydrogen is already incredibly complex. Then saying it will also be able to launch in bad weather, at any temperature without launch infrastructure on a standard airport. It will of course also amazingly stable.

Color me skeptical that a team that has never managed to do much of anything could pull of a whole long, long list of highly speculative, incredibly innovative new concepts that have never flown before.

And not only get it to work once, but actually survive reentry heating, land on a standard airfield and quickly launch again.

> when they're solving each challenge as it comes along, such as the working precooler. [2]

They are moving threw a whole host of complex issues extremely slowly and from the whole Skylon plane they have maybe solved 2% of the issues.

High risk to never really work though — it makes SpaceX and Raptor look conservative.

1.8 Million to study is not "freaking out".

It's not helping either, EU just loves to do these things. Last year 600k to find evidence of uncompetitive behaviour of US tech giants[1]. Another 300k to know that Kronos Group has released something called glTF. Don't get me started on FiWare or GaiaX. People don't even believe you if you claim 100 mil is spend on nonsense. At least if they spend 10 mil on a sound wall for a road though a meadow, people might have some idea why that might be dumb. Put AI, cloud and blockchain on the proposal and you can get away with murder. Universities don't give a shit, sign off on all of it, better you get the easy money then the other guy. Innovation consultant talking out of their ass all day, or do you think Gartner has tested, for real, all the different cloud BI tools they put on their laggard chart.

Makes me feel helpless, nothing that can be done about it.

[1]https://www.reuters.com/article/us-eu-tech-antitrust/eu-look...

There's some great shit too. Webinos was an absolutely fantastic, consumer-secure IoT platform[1]. It still feels like it fixes so much of what's wrong with internet-of-things technology: it's all on someone elses networks. Webinos used basically VPN technology to connect your systems to your self. I really wish they'd seen better adoption!

I hadn't heard of GaiaX. The mission statement sounds incredible though. It sounds like trying to create a democraticized online market-place. Rather than rely on big tech to intermediate all our search & transactions. It sounds amazing. So virtuous, so smart, so obvious. But I know nothing about implementation. And less about adoption.

There's a fairly popular post in this thread about EU looking grim[1], & the top reply is the US looking grim. The answer I wanted to put there was that it's the lack of efforts like this, it's the lack of big initiatives & trying things. That things feel stuck, that only the very wealthy get a chance to try & bootstrap things. Failure & bad efforts aren't great, but it's worse to have a society that's not trying, that doesn't have some surplus capacity dedicated to giving folks a chance to try civilizationally-benefiting radical & practical things.

There's a lot of bullshit & bad. Yes. And it does feel like we're falling away from seeing success. But this should be a rallying cry. It should prompt adjustment, a redoubling, trying to find out how we're not taking things seriously & finding ways to distribute the money more widely, to less classic figures, trying wider innovations, and see what we learn.

Also though some times big innovation is semi-necessary. I definitely have trepedation, a mix of hope & fear, but efforts like the EU chipmaking[2][3] plans are 100% what ought to be happening. Huge investment, but if it fails, my recommendation would 100% be to try again. Stop failing. Probably by failing faster, failing smaller, & working up to bigger.

As Kevin Kelly says, "over the long run the future is decided by optimists"[4]. Making your part of the world a place where optimists get chances, where things are tried, even when the criticism is correct & things are bad, is what keeps a place vital.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26544555

[2] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-56334210

[3] https://www.nextplatform.com/2020/04/22/drilling-down-into-t...

[4] https://twitter.com/kevin2kelly/status/459723553642778624

You had me believing there for a second. Webinos is death, link just doesn't work anymore, wikipedia lists a whopping 5.400 downloads on a budget of 14 mil[1]. Every fucking time, someone gets money to write software with as selling point to "enhance EU values" or a coalition to commodify the complement against EVIL American competition. You don't want to start business where your margin is competed away by marked forces, go and ask a poor cacao bean farmer.

I am all for big moonshots, but these project feel more like LARPing what the Americans did profitably 10 years ago.

[1]https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/257103

society has a real fucking problem adopting things that are good for them. we all hate iotshit, but how many of us go the extra mile to do ethical, consumer empowering iot? no one. folks like tp-link suddenly close down their devices & all the home-assistant & handful of webthings users cry & are sad. screw you, you bought unethical hardware & circuit/software bent it to your will, but now it's chuffed. it was never an ethical enough start, even though you tried to empower yourself, you got wicked wicked burned. rarely do ethical, proper chances come along to try & support.

webinos was so noble, so good, such a well thought of way to do iot. that had all the right priorities.

it's fair & easy to call this a catastrophe, a disaster. but it keeps feeling to me- and this is dark- that the real disaster is us, mired in a deep deep inability to evaluate the free market of ideas, & pick actual good ones.

it makes me absolutely desperate to believe the "1000 true believers" thesis, or as I once heard it, the "follow the alpha geeks" thesis. i want to believe change is not that hard, if you can get users empowering themselves & each other. webinos never got 1000 true devs. but, to me, we are all to blame. and we will suffer endless tales of how bad iot is for decades to come as a result. how can society better adopt?

Stop pretending your shit doesn't stink. Hunger is eating away at our lands and some nerds are working on networks without some perceived moral shortcomings.

way way way more nerds are getting bread off shitty bad failing products that society can't maintain or fix. there is incredible damage being done by the status quo that a very minimal investment proposed very excellent fixes for.

you are being extremely scarcity conscious in only the narrowest most self-selective view possible. doing good things ought be worthwhile & it could be. rather than shit on the attempters I think we should consider what beyond the tech made webinos not succeed? and how and what pieces are addressable and how?

Most of my IoT devices are made by European companies (Eve and Hue) so you'd think an EU standard could work. But nobody needs their lightbulb to run a "web OS interface". This standard seems to break the rule of least power compared to something like Thread or HomeKit.

That's just one example. The evidence of this has long been clear to anybody watching the space.

While they usually try to pretend everything is awesome in public, they are clearly in a shit position.

Arianespace has already publicly stated they need more political help (after just getting 3.5+ billion $). There have been a whole storm of demands that all European institutional costumers should be forced onto the Ariane.

The Germany military was politically attacked for launching on Falcon 9 (that was when they still didn't take SpaceX seriously).

Politicians, ESA bureaucrats and people from the European industry have all essentially said the same stuff with a different spin depending on their position.

German and European journalist who are not just institutional PR printers have had a field day calling them out on their idiotic statements they made about SpaceX between 2014 and 2019.

Agreed! 600k per organization seems like pennies compared to the Billions invested in SpaceX so far.

My reading of the article is that these monies are allocated for a report on what to do about SpaceX's lead.

That's why I'm skeptical when government tries to spend money on innovation. It works for a while then becomes institutionalized and risk-averse, sticking with what they know.

Europe should start attracting VC money instead of all the grants that just waste EU money. As much as it's trendy to look down on VCs, they are outperforming EU government innovation budgets.

Dude.

What's up with people laughing at innovators and going "oh no, nobody could've seen this coming" when they succeed? This seems especially terrible in Europe, with maybe the (perhaps coincidental) exception of VW.

I think this is what happens when you get politicians trying to beat capitalism at its own game.

I really wish Europe would understand that you can’t beat capitalism on innovation and delivery.

EDIT: I think a lot of the replies missed the point I was trying to make. I'm all for the free education, amazing healthcare, better regulation, etc that we have in Europe. But no state will ever beat private companies on innovation and delivery. If you want to sponsor a space industry, create public contacts that companies have to compete against and win.

Government is part of the innovation equation, the private space sector would not exist without US vs USSR Space Race.

Where Europe and others continually drop the ball is due to short sightedness and a reactionary mindset. They want to back alternative options to today’s market environment rather than planning for, incentivising and investing in future market making solutions.

It would not exist in its current form, but a space industry would almost certainly still exist without the Cold War. Space is too useful to just ignore, regardless of whether or not it was another venue for a geopolitical boxing match.

Yeah, that's something I have been wondering - how would things look like if the main driving force behind spaceflight was entrepreneurs of the Goddards generation, not military mainly trying to get good ICMBs and spy sat launchers ?

A lot of the current status quo of single use state of the art super-expensive hyper-optimized launchers can be IMHO traced back to ICBMs and spy sat launcher where accomplishing the given military mission was the most important goal, whatever the cost (both monetary and in general sustainability).

I wonder if it all was instead financed by private and commercial money from the start, we might have perhaps ended up with cruder (partially ?) reusable rockets much sooner, not to mention with a more robust in-space infrastructure (propellant depots, etc.) that simply does not make sense if you just want to lob nukes one way or launch a couple expensive spy sats per year & don't care about anything else.

I looked into agriculture in North African countries. You can do crazy things with greenhouses and aquaponics but compared to simple fertile soil it is very expensive. So the problem shifted into creating fertile soil and once I read up on afforestation it feels absolutely trivial but the scale of the problem is so big that only governments can attempt it.

USA gives those countries foreign aid in dollars which are then spent on weapons and food imports when afforestation programs are actually what is really needed there. It's not rocket science. You install sand barriers to prevent erosion and you plant trees to increase the water capacity of the soil and 50 years later you have a nice forest which you can convert to farmland.

You can look at optical astronomy for how the "market" would look like if it was only science driven: all innovation happening on government funded projects, with very few companies worldwide having some manufacturing capability.

In any case, calling Goodard a entrepreneur seems pretty strange: he was a professor interested in rocketry firstly as a means of recording the state of the atmosphere at very high altitudes. To the extent the market gave him any attention it was as a source of cheap entertainment by making people laugh at him.

I should have worded it better - not Goddard himself but the early pioneers of rocketry in general in the US, Britain, Germany and Russia, if they could have developed the technology without military influence.

Still you might be right that it might have never got the funding it needed like that and stayed a pure niche for ever.

SpaceX and Tesla are both great examples of big government involvement. US government created market for SpaceX and Tesla to get into.

Neither of them would exist without government contracts, government subsidies or regulation.

Tesla, SolarCity and SpaceX – received $5 billion in government support in 10 year years 2005 - 2015. On top of that government contracts and regulation.

Which is a lot less than what their competitors received. So did big government hurt or help?

I'm not sure why you're getting downvoted, but both Tesla and SpaceX only exist because of government policy.

Strangely enough, I would argue that SpaceX probably could have existed without government policy (but maybe not so soon).

Tesla, OTOH, is completely a product of the government. Elon Musk himself said (before he turned into some strange version of libertarian), that it was government funds that allowed Tesla to survive right after the financial crisis.

And for over a decade, Tesla's biggest money maker is ICE companies paying Tesla for renewable credits required by the government.

> I'm not sure why you're getting downvoted, but both Tesla and SpaceX only exist because of government policy.

This is not true.

> Elon Musk himself said

This is wrong. You are remembering this wrong, Musk has corrected this often.

The reality is in 2008 SpaceX got saved by Daimler.

Later they did get a DoE investment for Model S manufacturing but that did not save the company. They could have raised the money without the government but it would have been more difficult.

> Tesla's biggest money maker

This is again, wrong. In terms of total revenue its a small part.

It is true that Tesla would make less profit without those credits but they would still be a hypergrowth company and would still be successful.

Also, those credit system exist for all manufactures and there is an equal playing field.

I'm not sure "surviving because of the government" and being a "product of the government" are at all the same thing.

Obviously, the private market is about going above and beyond, in exchange for money.

The government's goal is to provide a baseline of service for everyone.

We don't want people to starve but that doesn't mean they get to eat out in an expensive restaurant.

> I think this is what happens when you get politicians trying to beat capitalism at its own game.

I'm rolling on the floor laughing right now.

In the past five years, there is a country which erected multiple new trade barriers, put in place tariffs, enacted protectionist policies, publicly declared it was going to reassess its transaction with the world to put itself first and threatened repeatedly to leave the WTO. This country is the USA. A country notorious for using extraterritorial sanction to advantage its companies, a country abusing public subsidies to distort markets, a country refusing standards to protect its interest.

Let this be my last post on HN. Everytime I think this site has reached rock bottom it succeed in hitting a new low.

Edit: Anyway, let me try to add something of value to the discussion and add some perspective to the extremely poor article from ArsTechnica. The European space program is a direct descendant of the French space program which was first and foremost a military program. It was developed to put in orbit information satellite and break France depandency on US unreliable US information. This capability remains relevant now more than ever. The civil program is mostly a cost offset. If the EU has no share of the civil markets, it makes the military program more expansive. From this point of view, it makes sense to invest both as a way to develop know how and because it might not cost more than maintaining the existing knowledge anyway.

Well, yes and no.

Let me start by saying generally I'm 100% with you. I'm a huge fan of capitalism and I think that to get the best of both worlds you need people who demand accountability and action from their government. My view is usually capitalism isn't to blame, lack of the will of the people is.

With that being said, SpaceX is where it is today by partnering with the government for contracts, which helped it build out and develop. I view this as a good thing - government can and should bootstrap companies and industries like this. It's good! SpaceX wouldn't be where it is today if the path forward was just, uh, figure it out... being able to win contracts to deliver value for NASA and the government was/is instrumental to its success and from here it can go on to do additional work for other countries or in the private sector. This means employment for Americans and lots of money spent to push the frontiers of science and space development.

Unfortunately, it seems so much of this has become politicized to the point that it's nonsensical. Depending on who you ask, Elon is a capitalist pig, or a communist getting free hand-outs from the government. It's so stupid.

I think in this case it was a win-win all around.

NASA also has an operational mandate that limits what they can and cannot do.

Much of the science NASA produces is tremendous stuff, but they can’t just be given a budget - even with the friendliest administration - with permission to go nuts.

For better or worse, private industry fills these gaps.

Any well-capitalized space company could “go nuts”, and as long as the higher-ups (execs, board, shareholders, etc.) are happy then there is a wide open space (forgive the pun) to innovate in.

On the contrary, a business needs to turn a profit in order to survive, and this largely limits the activities it can do to those that are economically profitable.

There are alternative approaches - for instance you can be Amazon/Uber/Tesla/GameStop, who aren't profitable but are simply so cool investors just keep them running forever. However, it's possible that their investors are the actual customers and their product is their coolness expressed as shares.

(Amazon is kind of messing this up by starting AWS, which is actually profitable, but the retail side isn't.)

Amazon Retail has been profitable since 2018 https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2020/0...

Tesla turned its first profit last year: https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/TSLA/tesla/net-inc...

Tesla's P/E is over 1000. It's almost incidental that it's actually profitable now.

Sure, but if its stock price plunged due to massive sellout, its profits wouldn’t really change. I’m directly refuting the claim that Tesla is unprofitable. It’s in fact a sustainable dividends-paying enterprise. Perhaps a comically over-priced enterprise, but sustainable and dividends-paying nonetheless.

I mean, it's not dividend-paying, nor is it doing stock buybacks. Aren't they doing equity raises? That's literally reducing the value of your stock.

They are doing a good job paying back their bonds and their hype field is certainly repaying investors for now.

You’re right; I meant to say that they can be expected by current investors to be dividends-paying at any time in the future because their economics are fundamentally GAAP profitable at this point (https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/27/business/tesla-earnings.h...). This is no longer an unsustainable business we’re talking about here, hype notwithstanding.

Now, Uber on the other hand...

Tesla is a company that is doing okay. I can comfortably say that it will exist in 40 years but I don't think that it will actually ever justify its current valuation. What is probably going to happen in 10 years is that investors wake up and sell their overpriced shares until the P/E is at 50 or something.

Is GameStop cool? I though the point was that it is not and investing is just an ironic pose...

Right, and like I said, if the higher ups are happy to make big investments in long-shot projects, then that is what will be done, regardless of whether or not the result is profitable.

This is not unlike biomedical engineering: invest in big expensive projects expecting several to fail and a few or one to recoup the costs for the rest and then some.

Was it that Americans pay the most for and get the least healthcare?

Health care has been incredibly regulated in the US for a long time, from local to the federal level harmful regulation are enforced. In fact it is horribly regulated by any rational logic.

But instead of looking at that and seeing the issues with it, the whole world just uses it to bash on capitalism, as if the US Health care system was some exemplar free market system. US politicians have no interest in reforming the system other then add more and more layers on top or keep the status quo.

Funny enough medical care that doesn't fall under the insurance system is very effective in the US. Eye surgery or beauty operations can somehow be run with amazing capitalist efficiency but routine operations that are about the same in terms of complexity cost 10-20x more.

Arguably one of the best system, Singapore, is more free market then US one.

This is not to say that any system has the perfect combination, but a simple government run health care proves that government run everything is better, and use the US system as evidence is bad argument.

You talk of health care, how is the pandemic going in Europe?

Ironically, that’s largely due to the EU being a bit too free market. The EU is almost the only country/bloc to allow unrestricted export of covid vaccine; indeed, it even exports to other vaccine producers. India was also a large exporter but seems to be tightening up. This is, broadly, a good thing; if it had taken the same approach as the US and UK then supply in many countries would be virtually zero.

So far attempts to deviate from this haven’t really gone anywhere (though there’s currently talk about halting export to other major producers, primarily the UK. I’ll be somewhat surprised if this happens; the UK is so small relative to Europe that an extra ten million doses or so may not be worth the acrimony).

It’s important to understand how SpaceX got to where it is, because it’s often reduced to a “commercial versus government” narrative that is not really accurate.[1] I say this not to take away from SpaceX’s very real entrepreneurial spirit, but simply to fill in the rest of the picture and make the point that “get government out of the way” is not the answer here.

SpaceX received government funding in its early days from DARPA, who hoped to spur the development of small launch vehicles. This money was essential in getting the company to the launch pad. SpaceX ultimately abandoned its small Falcon 1, but a DARPA official said much later that the government had more than gotten its money’s worth from helping jump-start SpaceX.[2]

In 2006, NASA started an innovative program to fund private contractors to develop systems to deliver cargo to ISS. This is sometimes looked at as a dramatic departure from past “government run” NASA programs, but the truth is that all those old programs like the Apollo CSM/LM and Saturn V were also contracted out to private companies. What NASA did differently with Commercial Cargo (and later Commercial Crew) was that it contracted on a fixed-price basis rather than the usual cost-plus system which more or less incentivized the contractors to make things cost more money and take more time (except in special cases like Apollo where there was serious political pressure on the companies to deliver on-time and on-budget). SpaceX ultimately won one of these development contracts, which allowed it to start developing the larger Falcon 9 and the Dragon capsule.

In 2008, after SpaceX first launched Falcon 1 successfully, the company actually still nearly ran out of money. It is not easy to find customers to fly their expensive satellites on a barely-proven new rocket. Fortunately, they won the contract to operate supply deliveries to the ISS (the follow-on to the 2006 development contract). This money saved the company. Even Elon Musk (who isn’t the biggest fan of sharing credit and who will happily call out the government when he’s mad) will tell you that SpaceX would not be here without NASA.

Since then, SpaceX has won the Commercial Crew contract in addition to Commercial Cargo. In addition, SpaceX has launched numerous satellites for NASA and the military.

It’s important to note, contrary to the company’s detractors, that this government money was not some kind of corrupt “giveaway” to SpaceX. NASA and DARPA paid SpaceX to develop and operate useful services for the government. We all benefit as taxpayers from the savings that SpaceX has delivered over the legacy contractors.

The lesson for Europe here is definitely not to stop letting the government plan anything. Commercial cargo and crew capabilities exist in the United States today because the government planned for it. And they also exist because the government was flexible with its plans and partnered with whoever had the most promising ideas instead of insisting on doing everything through the same legacy contractors with the same ineffectual contracting methods. That’s been a really hard lesson to learn, and Congress mostly still hasn’t learned it (larger NASA programs like SLS and Orion are still done the old cost-plus way with the same gravy-train lobbyist-heavy contractors; Commercial Cargo and Crew barely slipped through because they were small and not taken seriously by the space-industrial complex). It will be hard for Europe too, who has a symbiotic relationship with legacy job-machine contractors like ArianeGroup. I really hope they can learn it, because humanity will benefit when cheap reusable launch is common around the world.

[1] Eric Berger, the author of this article, does a good job of painting this full picture (in fact he just wrote a great book about the early days of SpaceX called “Liftoff”), but journalists who aren’t as familiar with the industry tend to miss the picture.

[2] Again see “Liftoff” by Berger.

It isn't just SpaceX.

Rocketlab's Electron has gone reusable also, they already have a private launch site, and, are now exploring a much larger rocket.

Lets relax. RocketLab is a nice company, and I like them but they are playing in a different failed.

They have not 'gone reusable' they have slowly started to work on re-usability.

And a rocket that remotely competes in the area that this article address will not be done for years yet.

In practice, its only SpaceX. But its gone get worse from here for Europe. Starship by itself, and RocketLab and BO will both have reusable rockets before Europe. And RelativitySpace likely too.

Europe feels somewhat depressing these days. I don't recall when was the last time I heard genuinely positive news coming from there. Everything is broken and falling apart.

Funny as from Europe it looks like that in the US from what we hear and read. It's like the US is falling apart.

Maybe generally most places are having a bad time with the pandemic and recession that is coming.

If you are a qualified engineer in Europe, there are a lot of people who have a vested interest in making sure you think that the US is failing apart.

The US is falling apart right now and EU will soon follow.

However, once Biden passes the $3 trillion infrastructure program the positions will reverse and the USA will leave the EU in the dust.

Extreme opinion: All the printed dollars should have been put into infrastructure.

The US isn't going to have a recession this year - things look positive, and the faster we do vaccinations the more positive they'll be. This is mostly because we learned from our 2008 mistakes and are much better at stimulus now (hint: never listen to Larry Summers.)

The EU and Japan are going to be the ones with issues.

Edit timer is pretty short.

Source is OECD projections: https://twitter.com/jasonfurman/status/1369273724743127046

ah yes, it has nothing to do with the petrodollar and the fact that the US can eat inflation thanks to being the world reserve currency.

It’s because the EU and Japan are doing badly at vaccines. I said nothing about their economic policies.

It does have nothing to do with that though, just as you say. I’ll change my mind if Japan ever experiences hyperinflation from too much stimulus though!

In that case you mist be reading primarily US news outlets.

Yeah, it's like Biden winning made people completely forget that Trump was there until little over two months ago and the circumstances that put him there aren't materially changed...

Looking at technology, yes. They sort of gave up competing with US and China, and focus on regulation (eg, GDPR)

But then “9 of the top 10 happiest nations are in Europe” [1]. That’s good news right?

The question is how will this dynamic play out over next few decades. Is it necessary to lead in technology to remain peaceful and happy?

[1] https://qz.com/1986996/europe-is-home-to-9-of-the-10-happies...

According to Bloomberg's innovation index, 7 of the top 10 most innovative countries are also in Europe.

https://www.statista.com/chart/19312/most-innovative-economi...

That article legit mentions Austria as one of the top 10 innovative countries in the WORLD. How can anyone take the ranking seriously?

Because innovation is more than a couple of crappy software coming out of silicon valley...

Perhaps that is a sign you should be looking into methodology and be enlightened?

I can understand where this poster is coming from. I don't know of anything innovative coming out of Austria/Austrian companies.

I'd be fascinated to see how the US states of California, Washington, Texas, and Massachusetts would score on that index.

This is a joke. EU's relative GDP is decreasing, while China's is increasing and US is staying the same.

Happiness research is a total crap-shot. Depending on methodology you get totally different answers.

Bhutan is pretty happy too, whatever that means.

It's feels like Europe has exhausted it's fuel and is now slowing down to a crawl while India and China are just getting started burning their gas. It's history in the making really.

Where was Pfizer-Biontec developed?

The answer is yes. European happiness needs a certain level of prosperity. You only get that with competitive products on the world market. But some parts are still competitive.

Well, there was a presidential candidate promoting "European style socialism" for a while.

You're not alone with that thinking:

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

The problem is basically the welfare state, which requires a huge tax system/burden to support, and encourages 'welfare tourism'.

Dropping all welfare for non-citizens, setting a minimum lifetime income tax paid to receive citizenship (eg. €100,000) refusing further immigration from troublesome nations and actually deporting those already there, as well as raising the retirement age to 70 - and with the savings eliminating payroll tax and cutting VAT to 16% (the legal minimum) across the bloc - are the necessary solutions.

The other issue is land taxation - in many countries eg. Britain, Spain, huge land areas are still owned by basically the aristocracy, who receive EU farm subsidies and pay little in the way of land taxation.

> The problem is basically the welfare state, which requires a huge tax system/burden to support, and encourages 'welfare tourism'.

> Dropping all welfare for non-citizens, setting a minimum lifetime income tax paid to receive citizenship (eg. €100,000) refusing further immigration from troublesome nations and actually deporting those already there, as well as raising the retirement age to 70 - and with the savings eliminating payroll tax and cutting VAT to 16% (the legal minimum) across the bloc - are the necessary solutions

Do you have any source supporting your claim that welfare for non-citizens is a significant part of government expenses? Or any case, more significant than the contributions ( direct in taxation and less direct in products and services ) of said non-citizens?

Going on my observations, the concept seems ludicrous.

Non-Western migrants will represent a negative net fiscal contribution to the Danish welfare state until 2050 according to this analysis:

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00148-017-0636-1

"The natives generate a net surplus of EUR −695. Only for immigrants of Western origin the figures are positive, at EUR 2546 and EUR 47 for first-generation and second-generation immigrants, respectively, compared to EUR −2238 and EUR −1070 for first and second non-Western immigrants"

"The reasons for the expected deficits lie in the weak labour market performance of non-Western immigrants as a group and the fact that people with a low level of education, which includes many non-Western immigrants, tend to retire early"

Denmark has acknowledged this and has expanded assimilation efforts: https://qz.com/1320234/denmarks-new-laws-targeting-ghetto-ch...

The welfare state represents about 22% of the Danish economy: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/-/D...

And welfare spending is about 59% of Danish Government spending: https://www.dst.dk/en/Statistik/emner/nationalregnskab-og-of...

I use the example of Denmark because their data is transparent, but their situation is not much different to other continental European countries.

Western European countries such as Denmark are benefitting hugely from migration from countries like Poland, Ukraine, Bulgaria - because those migrants are educated and raised at the expense of their home country, but actually work and pay taxes as adults in the destination country. Its basically a form of 'human resource exploitation' - contributing to the depopulation of many Eastern European countries. These workers are basically keeping Western welfare states afloat, but the delta between quality of life in the West and East is shrinking.

This is laughable. The real problem is that the euro is dysfunctional and simply cannot work as it is right now.

You seem to be well versed in both EU and USA issues. What's your background?

Fox news

I suspect their not a "real" person, ie astroturfing.

Given nothing fishy is going on, I suspect most people would take my previous comment as an opportunity to stroke their ego.

All their recent posts are broadly political. Maybe a hijacked account?

Let this be a WARNING to anyone else who investigates this user's comments.

This is egregious. Saying Europe is doing badly implies a hijacked account?

"All their recent posts are broadly political" Show me a single political post and I'll delete this account.

>Thanks to its reusable, low-cost Falcon 9 rocket,

Is the Falcon 9 really low-cost or maybe is it that NASA and the American government is indirectly subsidizing the company by overpaying for their launch contracts?

Rocket technology hasn't really changed in decades. Reusability is not a panacea. It increases complexity, decreases safety and much of the cost savings are mitigated by the fact that you have to carry extra fuel for the return back (thereby cutting into the amount of payload you can carry). The space shuttle was reusable and yet, it is generally seen as a disappointment (and I don't believe for a second SpaceX engineers are better than NASA engineers).

> The space shuttle was reusable and yet, it is generally seen as a disappointment (and I don't believe for a second SpaceX engineers are better than NASA engineers).

It helps that SpaceX actually lets their engineers design the rocket, while the Space Shuttle was designed by Congress for defense missions that never happened.

SpaceX engineers probably aren't better than NASA engineers (though the fact that they have a clear mission and actually get stuff done helps with recruiting the best talent). The SpaceX organisation is significantly better than NASA.

> space shuttle was reusable

No, it wasn't. It was sort of reusable, but only with a lot of expensive refurbishment.

> I don't believe for a second SpaceX engineers are better than NASA engineers

Modern materials and computer aided design tools are incomparable to those the Shuttle designers had. Also, SpaceX is less conflicted than NASA was when it designed the Shuttle.

> Reusability is not a panacea. It increases complexity, decreases safety and much of the cost savings are mitigated by the fact that you have to carry extra fuel for the return back (thereby cutting into the amount of payload you can carry).

All evidence points against this. Sure, but you left out the fact that the entire booster comes back to earth. This is absurd.

Increase in complexity is relatively small, decrease in safety is small, part of cost savings related to extra fuel is rather insignificant. So, with any reasonable growing launch market reusability wins.

>Rocket technology hasn't really changed in decades.

Raptor is the first full-flow engine to have flown (not on commercial missions yet, though). There are a bunch of other changes, besides that.

Here we should add a much bigger than what was standard number of telemetry channels SpaceX had (they e.g. were listening to sounds in the tank, among other things, which helped to uncover the problem), modern signalling equipment (Ethernet onboard the rocket as the main mean of communications?), build-a-little-test-a-little philosophy of software engineering (on display with Starship, but actually there from the beginning), little nuggets like lithium alloys and stir welding for stages, best in class (thrust/weight) Merlin (for open cycle combustion engines), Dragon, bringing payloads from ISS (something only Shuttle did in large volumes and masses - but Shuttle was a completely different spaceship class) etc.

> The space shuttle was reusable and yet, it is generally seen as a disappointment

We're well past the point where we risk discovering that SpaceX Falcon rockets are a "disappointment." Just so you know.

> (and I don't believe for a second SpaceX engineers are better than NASA engineers)

And ESA/Arianespace engineers are on par as well. Yet here we are. Has it occurred to you that this isn't really about the quality of engineers? Would you like to know what it is actually about?

The USG is paying SpaceX less than their (older, better connected) domestic competitors. Usually substantially less.

Arianespace gets large direct subsidies, in addition to being paid more per launch by European governments (and commercial customers) than SpaceX.

The subsidies talking point is dumb and needs to die, but I guess it's easier to try to deflect blame than, you know, compete.

> Is the Falcon 9 really low-cost or maybe is it that NASA and the American government is indirectly subsidizing the company by overpaying for their launch contracts?

How can it be overpaying when they crushed the previous monopoly on launch held by ULA? It is known that both Delta and Atlas are a lot more expensive than F9.

And that's been borne out when competing for government contracts, they pretty much always have the low bid and/or have forced their competitors to significantly lower their prices. ISS resupply 1 and 2, Commercial Crew, NROL launches, GPS launches, etc. Look back at the award process if you like.

They did come in 2nd to Vulcan for the recent NSSL contract, which surprised a lot of people. Vulcan, of course, is a newly developed, as yet to be flown rocket and it looks like factors other than price made the difference.

The US govt isn't the only customer though, if I'm not mistaken they're paying the market price just as everyone else? Sure they subsidise launch prices by creating a market, but they do that for all companies, right? SpaceX doesn't win all contracts.

Well .. there was a couple recent news reports that U.S. Space Force paid out $316 million for a single mission[1]. The excuse was that this high fee was required in order to make capital investments to the infrastructure ...

So if the government pays for you to build out your infrastructure you then own and use to secure other contracts ... isn't that a subsidy? Do you not think that will make SpaceX more competitive in the market? ULA got similar treatment, so I'm not saying it's all SpaceX but they are living off of government dole (in a way that is more than just providing a competitive service to the government)

[1]https://spacenews.com/spacex-explains-why-the-u-s-space-forc...

> So if the government pays for you to build out your infrastructure you then own and use to secure other contracts ... isn't that a subsidy?

The other contracts are key here. It's very unlikely that the vertical integration facility will be used for anything else than US government missions, as vertical integration is basically only useful for spy satellites. Without more details it's hard to judge whether the same is true for the West Coast upgrades and extended fairing, but it wouldn't surprise me if we see those only being used for government contracts.

The government paid for the development of that same infrastructure for ULA in the past so its not specific to SpaceX. National security is a unique customer with very specific needs, if they want it they'll have to pay for it.

If a customer wants capabilites you don't have, and don't otherwise have a use for, they get to pay for it. The customer being a government doesn't make it a subsidy.

> (and I don't believe for a second SpaceX engineers are better than NASA engineers)

The software I write can do a lot more than similar software written in the 1970's. That doesn't make me a better software engineer, it means I have access to tools they didn't.

Nice try ULA.

You are coming across as someone who is mad that your predictions for Space X's failure or demise didn't come true.

You are directly repeating the propaganda Arianespace and Russia has been pushing about SpaceX since the beginning. I would honestly advice you to rethink this before repeating stuff that is pushed by lots of Russian government channels.

First of all, you are applying a total double standard. If you want to honestly analyses you need to look at all rockets and the amount of commercial support.

If you are actually interest in the history, you will see that SpaceX got some money for ISS servicing. This money was conditional on flying lots of time, and they had to win the contract against a whole host of competitors. However this amount of money, was tiny compared to the development cost of say an Ariane 5 or Ariane 6.

> Rocket technology hasn't really changed in decades.

This depends on what you mean by 'changed'. Depending on how you look at it a lot has changed, another way of looking at it nothing has.

You could make the argument we are still using lithium batteries today, so nothing has changed since the 90s, but that would be a terrible argument.

And so it is for rockets, there clearly have been advancements that have changed the industry fundamentally since the 90s.

This is true. But again, please actually look at history. SpaceX started taking the majority of contracts BEFORE re-usability was a factor, before SpaceX had human space launches, or even DoD launches.

SpaceX Falcon 9 was taking the majority of launch contracts simply based on rocket design and production. During this time they did not get any money from government for development and yet the improved the rocket every single year by a substantial amount.

They developed re-usability themselves and thus were able to fly even more rockets. And pretty much every expert not paid by the Russian government has now admitted that re-usabiltiy is actually worth if for SpaceX.

The fuel cost doesn't matter that much if your rocket is big enough to carry the required payload that the market demands. Often it would be hard to sell that extra payload to costumers anyway. It is simply false to say 'most of the savings are mitigated by fuel', this is simply not true. The construction of the booster cost 30 million, and its insane to argue that it is not worth it for them to recover that.

Safety is not increased, as both very conservative NASA and DoD certification programs have shown. Reusable boosters have a 100% perfect flight record so far. Reusable boosters are certified for both human and the most expensive scientific missions.

> The space shuttle was reusable and yet, it is generally seen as a disappointment

The Shuttle was partially reusable. Remember that gigantic orange tank? Yeah, that was thrown away. Solid can not really be reused as the cost is in the fuel manufacture. The Shuttle reused the 'box' of the solid boosters but basically replaced almost all of it.

> (and I don't believe for a second SpaceX engineers are better than NASA engineers).

This is just another terrible argument, where I don't even know where to start its so bad.

SpaceX Falcon 9 booster reuse and Shuttle reuse are totally different concept. Shuttle is a second stage, orbital human capable vehicle. The Falcon 9 booster flies only a couple 100km into the ocean and then lands.

Also, the Falcon 9 re-usability was designed in the year 2010-2019. They used modern tools, and used 10s of iterations, and multiple times evolved and adjusted the design.

NASA engineers (actually contractors for the most part) had to basically figure out something that is much harder (second stage reuse) with 1960 technology and basically get it correct on the first try.

You are simply creating false equivalency.

Even so, nobody in the world today would deny that SpaceX had the best rocket building team in the world. They have top people vertically integrated from valves to structures, to engines. I don't think even NASA engineers working on SLS would deny that SpaceX has the best overall rocket team in the world.

>You are directly repeating the propaganda Arianespace and Russia has been pushing about SpaceX since the beginning. I would honestly advice you to rethink this before repeating stuff that is pushed by lots of Russian government channels.

What a crazy accusation to make. I can't have an opinion about the business model of a company lest some doofus accuses me of what? Being a russian bot? Spreading DANGEROUS ideas? Jesus Christ. Get a handle on yourself.

I have no doubt Russians are not objective observers here. SpaceX is a competitor so the criticism they level has to be seen through that lens ... but ... their criticism will have a kernel of truth. On the other side, because of Musk's cult of personality (and don't misunderstood, I like Musk), his companies don't necessarily get the same level of scrutiny either. Are you sure you're looking at it objectively?

I'm not a 'space guy'. I watched video by Thunderf00t where he made some credible points against some of the claims SpaceX makes [1] especially around cost savings of reusability.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4TxkE_oYrjU

I'm not saying you are russian bot, I'm saying governments and companies that don't like SpaceX have spread a lot of misinformation and people pick them up as facts.

I didn't say these ideas were dangerous, just wrong.

SpaceX became commercially dominate when they were had less government money then Orbital, ULA or Arianespace. That is simple fact.

For these companies like Arianespace to have the odacity to complain that SpaceX get financed by government contract while they literally got a check for Ariane 6 that is larger then all development money received by SpaceX for Falcon 9, Falcon Heavy, Dragon 1, Cargo Dragon (2), Crew Dragon.

Not to mention that the money for Ariane 6 is just for that rocket, the individual engines have been government financed with separate budgets for far longer. The Vinci for example has been funded with government money since 2003.

Is just insane cognitive dissonance for them to claim foul.

> their criticism will have a kernel of truth

It my have a kernel of truth but if the 'truth' is something totally banal like 'Reusability is not a panacea.' then that doesn't actually make their arguments valid.

You can just go threw the time progression on the competitors about SpaceX since 2010, first they claimed their prices were not achievable and they would go bankrupt, then they had to much backlog and they couldn't achieve high launch rates, then it was that they couldn't land rockets, then it was that they couldn't actually reuse them, then it was they can't reuse them economically, then it was that while maybe each reuse was economical overall it was not economical because there are not enough launches overall.

The fact is SpaceX launched 50% of the global payload to Orbit, and over around 30% of all spacecraft. Likely this year SpaceX will launch closer to 70% of global payload to Orbit. Their strategy has clearly paid of and allowed them to do thing that were considered impossible not long ago.

Thunderf00t is basically a well known troll that has zero credibility among space fans. He loves to make wide ranging conclusion on very little evidence, lots of extrapolation and even more characterization of the discussion, arguing against straw-men.

If you are gone talk about the 'Cult of Musk', Thunderf00t is the opposite basically the pope of the 'Cult of Anti-Musk', he made a career of making videos about how every Musk is wrong about everything.

>The fact is SpaceX launched 50% of the global payload to Orbit, and over around 30% of all spacecraft.

Again, I'm not arguing that SpaceX isn't capable of ferrying people or cargo into orbit, or that they don't have a viable business, or that they are not leaders in this market segment. That's all fine. I have no issues with Musk or SpaceX. I like seeing American companies succeeding. But perhaps Musk should dial down the hyperbole.

>It my have a kernel of truth but if the 'truth' is something totally banal like 'Reusability is not a panacea.' then that doesn't actually make their arguments valid

But reusability isn't a panacea for cost savings. There are real challenges with reusable rockets. This is where Thunderf00t does a real good job explaining the issues because they aren't space-specific, but rather the problem derives from first principles of Newtonian mechanics (https://youtu.be/4TxkE_oYrjU?t=891) namely, you have to carry the fuel for return, which severely cuts into the amount of payload you can take up. Also, maintenance is expensive. But the issues are there. Tory Bruno, the CEO of ULA lays out the challenges of reusable rockets: https://www.reddit.com/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/ftstmv/tony_o... . Yes, he's a competitor, but his argument strikes me as honest and credible.

So SpaceX hasn't proven the concept yet. They haven't made enough flights (and only the first stage boosters are actually reusable). The Space Shuttle is a good guide of how subtle the issues may be and it may take years to fully realize the flaws in the design or economics. Believe me, I wish them well.

>If you are gone talk about the 'Cult of Musk', Thunderf00t is the opposite basically the pope of the 'Cult of Anti-Musk', he made a career of making videos about how every Musk is wrong about everything.

To be fair to Thunderf00t, Musk says a lot of objectively idiotic things. So the low hanging fruit of, say, hyperloop, that Thunderf00t took much glee in trashing was kind of warranted. It's a stupid concept. SpaceX, specifically Musk and SpaceX president Gwynne Shotwell, also made some outrageously silly arguments around city-to-city rocket-powered transport [2] - a concept that is so idiotic I'm flabbergasted Shotwell (and Musk) would actually try to advance it seriously and also claim it would be available within 10 years. Come on man. And that's the problem with SpaceX and Musk in a nutshell, there make a lot of unfeasible aspirational claims that are taken at face-value by their devotees.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falcon_9#Pricing [2]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dar8P3r7GYA (skip to 15m to see the claim about city-to-city rocket transport)

> I like seeing American companies succeeding. But perhaps Musk should dial down the hyperbole.

We need to make difference between hyperbole about SpaceX and its mission and much more specific claims by SpaceX leadership about Falcon 9 and its re-usability.

> But reusability isn't a panacea for cost savings.

Yes, it isn't, literally nobody ever said it was a panacea, it requires carful engineering in terms of the system you use and do a lot of careful operational engineering. And iterate on both of those things.

> This is where Thunderf00t does a real good job explaining the issues because they aren't space-specific

I refuse to watch any more Thunderf00t videos, all that I have watch have been full of such gross characterizations and misinformation that I believe he is neither credible nor acting in good faith.

I rather react to what Tory is saying, I will not give him clicks.

> you have to carry the fuel for return, which severely cuts into the amount of payload you can take up. Also, maintenance is expensive. But the issues are there. Tory Bruno, the CEO of ULA lays out the challenges of reusable rockets: https://www.reddit.com/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/ftstmv/tony_o... . Yes, he's a competitor, but his argument strikes me as honest and credible.

I addressed all of these things and I have addressed most of them in my first post.

I like Tory and he is a good guy, but as you said he is competitor and he sees it as he sees it. Lets also remember that his predecessor was fired partly because he publicly said they couldn't compete with SpaceX, so we know what happens if Tory said something different.

But let me offer a couple of points. He literally only list the negatives as he sees it. He ignores all potential positives as well.

The ability to improve the design over time from inspection, reduce over-engineering, lower tolerances, replace high risk parts and so on. These things have allow SpaceX to increase the performance by a quite a lot. A reusable Falcon 9 now, launches way more then a Falcon 9 in 12 did without re-usability. And at least part of that is because SpaceX learned so much about the design of their engines.

He mentions some parts that might be replaced, but he doesn't mention that some of those parts could very likely also fly 100 or more times. So you need to consider the upside as well. If do pass that threshold he mentions, the downside he mentions, must equally be applied to the upside as well (and he clearly isn't doing that).

The potential of having a large set of ready rockets. ULA was literally paid a billion $ in subsidies (but Tory would not call them that) so they were launch ready for the military. SpaceX now offers that same service for literally no extra cost.

Tory argues this was perfectly fair money that ULA received (but it didn't help them compete in the private market apparently) but then he assigns no value to the large availability of launch ready rockets.

His assumptions are also based on what he things cost are, and it has been demonstrated many times now, that just because industry insiders believe cost are a certain way, turns out SpaceX can do them for much less. So why would I know believe him on how high these costs are.

He also ignores that re-usability can increase your launch rate and thus divide your fix cost over a much larger amount of flights. ULA right now is spending many 100s of millions on pad upgrades. These upgrades are virtually the same even if you launch 2x as much.

He also makes no point about margin. If you have a 5% margin, and it cost you 5% to achieve re-usability then its not worth it. But if you have a 50-100% margin, then a 5% extra cost means incredibly high winnings.

He also doesn't account for shared infrastructure and development. Landing software and technology required for landing on earth will partly apply to landing for all other NASA missions. ULA might see maintain a team of landing engineers as a cost, rather then an opportunity. SpaceX will use this development forward for many projects and its not a cost, rather then a strategic capability for the spaceflight company, not just a thin launch provider.

He also ignores the increase efficiency of your launch team, if you can launch once a week, you are simply forced to have processes that enable that. Having an efficient team, with efficient processes that can quickly educate new people is a huge benefit.

Consider ULA still launching the Delta 4 Heavy in comparison, the knowledge can be used very few times. It will be better with Vulcan but not comparable to Falcon 9. Again, this is less team utilization, less efficient processes and less knowledge sharing and development.

Also, it is short sighted. He sights many technological problems that simply need to be overcome, as re-usability is clearly right in the long run. Saying we only invest in something once its 100% proven and there is basically 0 risk will simply lead you to being a government only specialty contract that for a time can depend on the government funding because you have no competition. They would not even have done a new rocket if not for SpaceX.

SpaceX is proven the case right now with what they are doing, even if you believe Tory very high estimate of 10 flights, SpaceX has basically shown that this is possible with the current design. Sure their avg is not 10 yet, and of course you could then say 'see its not 100% proven' but simply closing your eyes and waiting until it is literally undeniable is not required for most of the world (basically non SpaceX competitors).

Basically all credible future SpaceX competitors (that don't have fancy government monopolies) have announced working on a re-usable vehicles because they knew there is simply no other economical way to compete and they don't feel the need to deny that SpaceX has cracked it and its either respond or die. The RocketLab CEO literally at his hat.

Consider also this ULA literally had a launch monopoly, in addition to getting absurdly high launch prices for a decade plus, and in addition getting an absurd amount of subsidies (sorry I mean launch readiness guarantees for 900M a year). Despite that, they also got another almost billion to develop their new launch vehicle. Despite that they have not even attempted to implement any even remotely innovative ideas in the last 2 decades. Taking a company like that seriously in terms of their analysis in future technology and how profitable it could be is not credible.

Now, if you actually listen to SpaceX team, and admittedly they are bias in the other direction. They claim operationally even only flying it once would still be worth doing. This is not just Elon Musk but other of the leadership as well. I think that excludes the development cost however. They are closing in on proving that 10 is viable with pretty fast turn around already, and the turn-around avg has been decreasing constantly.

The have also said there is no indication that 10 is end of life and very likely more is very achievable.

At the end of the day, re-usability simply allows you to do things that would otherwise be possible and that alone has a gigantic worth, potentially more then anything. And of course Tory as CEO of ULA only looks at launch because they are a government created (literally) and government funded launch provide, they have no power to invest any of their profits in themselves. Tory is the CEO, but don't think just because he is the CEO, he has anywhere close to the freedom Musk has.

There is simply no way SpaceX could launch every 2 weeks if they had to build all those rockets and rocket engine from scratch and there is no way you could go beyond that.

tl:dr; Even using the most conservative approach advocated by a competitor, SpaceX is close to even jumping that threshold. By any realistic approaches from independent annalists, they have jumped it already.

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