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Comment by AtlasBarfed | Hacker News Reader

... in the USA.

Japan, China, Russia, and the EU will all insist on their own rocket launch capability, won't they?

At a minimum SpaceX shows the path to Starship-level reductions in launch payload costs, then the other state actors will follow the formula.

If this just represents flawed approaches being trimmed from the marketplace, well ok.

... Blue Origin needs to get to "real" orbit, right? Last I heard they were resorting to troll-lawsuits against SpaceX because they weren't getting government launch contracts. Yeah, because... you ... can't yet?

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The ESA/ArianeGroup was blindsided by the economic feasibility of rocket reuse. They have only recently come to terms with this and begun developing their own semi-reusable equivalent to Falcon 9. Ariane 6 (no reuse) hasn't even flown yet but is already obsolete. A European Falcon 9 equivalent is many years away.

I expect the EU to continue building their own rockets anyway, so they don't have to rely on the US and/or Russia. They do want their own launch capability as you mention. But will they produce anything that can compete with SpaceX for the sort of contracts that could go to an American company? Not anytime soon; they're already years behind and if Starship flies soon the gap will be huge.

But once starship gets into service, come on, that might be the most targeted piece of intellectual property in the history of corporate espionage.

Why develop your own? If you are china/russia/india, you simply steal it. If you are the EU/Japan, you "cross-license".

What does foreign patent law mean when national security is on the line?

Starship is going to be an INSANE strategic and tactical weapon for the US government, if only for the rapid deployment ability.

Starship is a private company. It will be so easy to steal. You simply bribe employees, or plant them.

Absolutely it will be a target of intense espionage, but I think building the machine itself is only part of the trouble. A big part of making the machine like that work reliably is having the right sort of work culture, otherwise errors and anomalies will get swept under the rug with disastrous results. I think this will be even more necessary with reusable rockets than with one-off disposable rockets, since with reusable rockets you have to constantly re-validate used hardware, not just brand new parts. The right sort of safety culture isn't as easy to steal as some CAD files. Even if you stole all the plans, it would be many years of hard work to get an organization into the right sort of shape to build and operate the machine.

As for SpaceX being a private company and therefore unusually easy to infiltrate... no. All US defense contractors are private companies, SpaceX being a private company isn't anything special. A B-21 bomber isn't made in a government-run factory, it is made in a Northrop Grumman factory. Spy satellites, missile seeker heads, stealth jet RAM coatings, IFF and crypto systems... all of these things are made by companies contracted by the government. The FBI/etc counter-espionage specialists are well accustomed to this sort of work, SpaceX is nothing special in this regard.

Japan builds their own rockets but they are low volume and not in the market, mostly domestic stuff. Russia is for now out of the international a launch market. China is mostly out of the 'Western' launch market as well, but there is a lot going on there.

EU is spending lots of money for bad results. But because of Amazon they have some contracts. Basically any heavy lift rocket not by SpaceX will get contracts. But SpaceX for now will have to fly a lot of the European payloads, because it will take a long time before Ariane 6 is full operational.

And then it will take another 10 years and another 5-10 billion $ for Europe to launch a competitor to Falcon 9. By that point of course, Starship will already be standard.

India builds rockets at low cadence and are not a serous contender.

> then the other state actors

That takes 15-20 years.

> Blue Origin

Blue Origin spends 2-3 billion a year without revenue. But they are pushing forward. They want be in orbit until 2025 and to be fully operational it will take a lot longer.

"Japan, China, Russia, and the EU will all insist on their own rocket launch capability, won't they?" For their spy sats: well OF COURSE! And we're on the verge of a lot of demand, not considering cheap cubesats can use a 50MP camera + good opticcs and near real-time, global comms.

Man times have changed.

Europe will have to develop a fully reusable launcher to be competitive. Let's call it Ariane 7 and expect it to fly around 2035. They first have to get Ariane 6 off the ground and that's, from what I've heard, a horribly slow process.

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