ESA Votes to Suspend Roscosmos Partnerships

Preach it! Outside of FOSS contributions, commercial EU software industry is in a sorry state, unless you count the crypto trading and fintech platforms getting millenials and zoomers to gamble their little money they have on stonks and crypto coins because they can't afford to invest in decent real estate, which I don't think is a healthy industry to promote as far as SW innovation goes.

All great EU innovation comes out universities and research and institutes funded mostly by EU taxpayer money, and the good innovations get immediately bought up by US or Chinese big tech, with the duds and left overs being bought by clueless European dinosaurs like Siemens, Daimler, T-Systems, etc. So basically our tax money is funding US and Chinese tech dominance because EU old money and EU governments are too cheap and clueless to invest in local tech and instead are focused on offshoring everything and investing only in perpetuating the real estate bubble and living off rent seeking while taxing the skin off your back, and most people suffering from rampant inflation and now rampant energy costs because EU leadership didn't bother investing in energy self-sufficiency.

Not exactly a healthy environment to breed good competitors for AWS, Google, Apple, Nvidia, Tesla and Microsoft, despite the social safety nets, when you're being financially squeezed from all directions.

India has a 10 ton launcher. It flies very rarely too.

I don't think the poster your replying to is saying that, nor do I think the market is headed in that direction. Currently, SpaceX has the only crew certified transport aside from Russia's Soyuz capsule for transport to ISS. That is likely to change in the next two years as Blue Origin continue their certification process and NASA's SLS gets closer to launch (whether or not SLS is a good decision is a totally separate conversation). The more options, the better.

> I reckon I'm one of the few on this forum that doesn't hold SpaceX stock.

I reckon there are only a few that do actually hold SpaceX stock, given the fact they are a private company with limited investment opportunities for the common person.

Probably because it's a dumb strawman you've created to knock down. Strawmen do indeed tend to be hard to understand since they aren't actually real. There is no "thirst" to see a private company monopolizing space travel per se. What people are thirsty for is serious, cheap, effective, ambitious space travel in turn leading to serious space development and humanity (and life in general) moving beyond the cradle permanently. The irritation with government agencies is a matter of brutal raw fact: they have failed miserably at this, and they're getting WORSE, not better. Debacles like the SLS or Shuttle. Zero effort to drive down cost, rather the reverse with space being treated as a very shitty bit of pork. I don't even want to say "jobs program" because SpaceX and co will generate WAY more jobs via space development in the long term, but long term thinking isn't very fashionable in much of government anymore. Or at least not in this sphere.

Everyone interested in space would be delighted at more competitive players. And there are indeed a number that might manage it alongside SpaceX, eventually. Smaller players like Rocket Lab are in fact launching for real cargo to orbit, and have reasonable plans to scale up. There is certainly room for another provider or two. But NASA, ESA, Russian, and other government efforts aren't even trying to go there yet and show no potential to do so. They are stupendously wasteful cash blackholes, which is coming directly out of money that could be doing awesome stuff. Awesome good government stuff even, the kind of blue sky research and infrastructure work that governments can do to really blaze the way and help industry. The billions being sunk worthlessly into SLS could be funding a true space station/shipyard/depot [0] designed around the capabilities of Starship, helping to further accelerate smaller hungry players with the capital they need to get into the medium-lift aspect, not to mention a lot of great science.

You're confusing dislike for the gross waste and failures of old fat players and excitement with the incredible efforts and progress of young ambitious new players with some sort of silly "monopoly" thing. Try to research and think about things you don't actually know much about or follow yourself a bit more before forming an opinion perhaps?

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0: Including helping to figure out standards so that fuel depots can be used by multiple players fairly.

Of course ESA has Ariane but it's not cost competitive.

They have marketing that's proven to be especially effective on software engineers.

You misunderstand. The "thirst" is for a private company making space travel cheaper than ever before. Also before SpaceX came along the US launch industry was basically in the position of the current European space industry. A single old decrepit launch company with overpriced rockets.

Are there really that many people that buy individual stocks like this? I have a 401k, but I have no idea what stocks were purchased with my money.

ESA is basically open to partnering with them, there is a statement somewhere about them looking into reusable systems. It's politically tricky because part of ESA'S remit is to contract with member states and increase capacity in Europe: you buy into ESA, ESA throws you bones in the form of tender opportunities. I believe it's also reasonably fair, so they make sure that contracts go to everyone.

That also means that most of the big ticket contracts go to companies like Airbus and Ariannespace. Airbus would lobby pretty hard if ESA started spending big money in the US. Though you can see how that worked out for Boeing. A lot of these contracts are big and multiyear, projects using specific launch partners are designed around fairing capacities and so on. We don't necessarily need roscosmos for a lot of this, plenty of launches are done using Ariane rockets from Kourou.

SpaceX isn't publicly listed so the vast majority of people here don't own any. It's not like TSLA.

Finally on monopolies - ESA already doesn't really build much itself, most of the hardware is built by private companies. NASA is the same, though they have a bit more in house capacity than ESA. Apollo and the Space Shuttle were spread out to a huge number of US contractors (people like Lockheed Martin, Rockwell and Northrop Grumman). Orion/SLS? Not built by NASA, built by boeing, rocketdyne and others.

SpaceX has had remarkable success precisely because they disrupted existing launch platforms that were failing to innovate fast enough. In a monopoly, users don't have choice which is not the case here - there's Blue Origin, ULA, Ariane, etc.

Ariane 6 already has planned flights, then you need to move over 4 flights from Soyuz and then OneWeb has another 6. It will take many years for the Ariane 6 to complete all these things and it will be far more expensive.

Nobody ended any peace. The fight between Putin's Russia and NATO is purely on the ideological and economic level. It was the decision of NATO to escalate it.

Ukraine was neither part of EU nor NATO. The war has nothing to do with NATO other than them supporting the other side. Were the support for Syrian rebels or the bombing of Libya military attacks on Russia? No. NATO countries have invaded plenty of countries. People just have more sympathy with Ukrainians because they are not "brown people".

I recommend watching this video of Vladimir Pozner speaking about it at Yale University. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8X7Ng75e5gQ

As for right now, I guess the main thing is to support the refugees as best we can and pray they will be able to return soon.

From the Russian perspective, I expect they already understand that they are at war with NATO. Since Russia can't "win" a war with NATO in any reasonable sense, it is really just a question of how scorched-earth they feel like going in defeat.