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Admittedly I don't know much about the economics of rocketry, but the Ariane 6 doesn't seem much different from the Ariane 5 and I can't imagine it actually brings much to the table in terms of performance or cost savings, especially in light of how involved the development of it was.

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This is true, read my top level post for more information.

The Ariane 6 is basically an evolved version of what was the Ariane 5 ME. Many of the things that are now Ariane 6 were developed for Ariane 5 upgrades.

The new upper and lower stage engines are both just upgraded Ariane 5 engines.

However they realized they could never compete with the Ariane 5 core against Falcon 9 (in 2014) they changed some political design processes and made the rockets more flexible.

The most relevant difference between Ariane 5 and Ariane 6 is that Ariane 5 always had to huge solid boosters, while the Ariane 6 has 2 or 4 depending on the mission.

That makes is possible for the Ariane 6 with 2 boosters to be in the competition for LEO missions. Something Ariane 5 wouldn't have been able to do.

But you are right, the 5 billion $ it cost to develop Ariane 6 will required it to fly for decades to make it worth doing compared to Ariane 5 ME.

That's just it, for decades the "new" version of a rocket only had very small incremental changes and didn't raise the bar much at all. That's how commercial aerospace has worked for a very long time.

Much like the Toyota Camry which has been the best selling sedan in the US every single year since 2000.[1] It gets a slight incremental change each year, but no ground-breaking changes or utterly re-thinking what a car is.

Guess what sedan is now out-selling all other sedans? [2]

(Hint: not the one that has been getting incremental updates since well before 2000)

[1] https://alansfactoryoutlet.com/the-best-selling-car-model-ev...

[2] https://www.caranddriver.com/news/g43553191/bestselling-cars...

> Guess what sedan is now out-selling all other sedans? [2]

Have they changed the article? It's the Toyota Camry. The better selling vehicles are trucks and SUV/CUVs.

The article even says "We think hell will freeze over before the Toyota Camry relinquishes its spot as the bestselling non-SUV in the country. It maintained its place with a 7 percent increase over last year."

That’s a pretty disingenuous comparison. It’s like taking a single Android manufacturer’s sales, putting it up against the iPhone and saying “look how hard the iPhones outsell it!”.

Once we stack all the non-Tesla sedans together, it paints a much different picture probably.

And that’s not mentioning that companies get big subsidies for electrification, and Tesla purchases themselves get credits on top of that (although I am unfamiliar if they stack).

I think Teslas are pretty great and Tesla as a company likely pushed electrification ahead by a decade or so, but people seriously need to stop drinking the kool-aid.

ICEs probably have larger subsidies if we look at the entire life cycle, externalized healthcare costs, fissile fuel infrastructure, etc.

> (Hint: not the one that has been getting incremental updates since well before 2000)

According to your article that's exactly what it is.

Did you mean to link something else?

> the Ariane 6 doesn't seem much different from the Ariane 5 and I can't imagine it actually brings much to the table in terms of performance or cost savings, especially in light of how involved the development of it was.

My understanding is that Ariane 6 was explicitly designed to reduce production costs compared to Ariane 5, in large part due to competitive pressure from SpaceX.

> With the new Ariane 6 slated to enter service in 2020, ArianeGroup promises to cut per-kilogram launch cost by 40 to 50 percent compared to Ariane 5.

https://spacenews.com/arianegroup-cfo-pierre-godart-on-arian... (2017)

I guess, we'll see if they achieve that goal. Although rocket pricing is notoriously opaque.

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