Hacker News Reader

Comment by 908B64B197 | Hacker News Reader

> That is a lot of time—nearly a decade—and money for Europe to develop what is essentially a poorer version of SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket.

That's generous coming from Ars. Ariane 6 is a technological dead-end. No re-usability, no human rating, no path forward for larger payloads.

Europe has at least a 15 years technological gap with the first versions of the Falcon 9. And it's on track to get bigger as Starship enters testing.

At this point, any rocket program other than what SpaceX is doing are government job programs.

View on HN

> At this point, any rocket program other than what SpaceX is doing are government job programs.

That is the thing: all rocket building organisations before SpaceX were actually government job programs. The goal was not to build cost efficient rockets. The goal was to maintain a large pool of trained aeronautic engineers and technicians for strategic defence purpose.

> The goal was to maintain a large pool of trained aeronautic engineers and technicians for strategic defence purpose.

at best. at the _very_ best.

IMO the real goal was keep constituents happy and the votes coming in to stay in power as long as possible.

Additionally have an ICBM capability. (What is Delta?)

> Additionally have an ICBM capability. (What is Delta?)

Sort of. There's a reason why (some) modern rockets are based on the first generation of ICBMs instead of later versions[1].

The military pretty quickly figured out that operationally, SRB based ICBMs are just far superior to the initial liquid fueled ones. While for commercial operation, the reverse is true, although the hybrid model has been successful for quite a while.

---

1. Mostly. Yes, Minotaur is a thing. But those are made from decommissioned ICBMs. Northrup Grumman (nee Orbital ATK) developed an almost completely SRB based rocket for NSSL, but it wasn't competitive.

Not being beholden to a foreign company or government is a strategic advantage.

It’s not always worth it, but being able to say No often lowers the cost of saying Yes.

> Not being beholden to a foreign company or government is a strategic advantage.

Yes, but that was never the primary stated reason for Ariane 6's development. That's a later goalpost moving.

From a 2015 ESA announcement of Ariane 6 development:

> “These contracts will allow the development of a family of European launchers, highly competitive in the world market and ensuring autonomous access to space at fully competitive prices for ESA’s Member States,” said Jan Woerner, Director General of ESA.

Seems like a primary stated reason to me.

https://www.esa.int/Enabling_Support/Space_Transportation/Ar...

This is not a Europe-specific screw-up. The US has the same issue with the SLS where the senators are mud-fighting to gather more pork for their states. Ariane is really public sector just like SLS even though it's run by Boeing.

The bigger issue is why Europe doesn't have a SpaceX but then again the US only has one and for many years people were saying it would crash and burn, which it literally did many times. It could easily have gone another way.

I think part of the issue is the more complex legal landscape and less available real-estate. It would be pretty unthinkable for a company like SpaceX to basically own a community like Boca Chica and shut it down as it pleases.

But overall I'm happy with Europe. Needless to say, economic progress isn't everything and Europe is a much safer place with much more welfare for those who slip between the cracks. I'd take that over golden mountains any day. I really don't care about GDP per Capita but more about quality of life. I even chose a relatively low-wage country to live in. Of course that requires some money but we still have a good life here. It's enough.

> The US has the same issue with the SLS where the senators are mud-fighting to gather more pork for their states. Ariane is really public sector just like SLS even though it's run by Boeing.

I think the tragic part is that the Ariane 5 was an extremely commercially competitive rocket before SpaceX came along. They certainly beat the pants off of ULA. Whereas SLS was never going to be anything but a boondoggle.

> The bigger issue is why Europe doesn't have a SpaceX but then again the US only has one and for many years people were saying it would crash and burn, which it literally did many times. It could easily have gone another way.

We'll see. Between Blue Origin, Rocket Lab, and Relativity, I'm willing to bet that at least 1 becomes commercially successful over the next decade.

SpaceX is also a government jobs program.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com