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Comment by themgt | Hacker News Reader

To start, Dutch company T-Minus will launch a rocket from the German-Offshore Spaceport Alliance (GOSA) mobile platform.

This company apparently doesn't even produce orbital rockets: https://www.t-minus.nl/post/barracuda-rocket-at-esa-pac-symp...

Their largest in-development rocket is tiny, like a 1/4th the size of New Shepherd? Nowhere is it mentioned what orbital rocket would be launching from this spaceport. Just back of napkin I can't imagine you'll see any orbital payload delivered from this pad by 2030?

The obvious thing for Europe to do would be have ESA fund a replica of NASA's COTS/CCDev/HLS programs, which have overall delivered stunning return on investment and arguably the only reason China isn't absolutely dominating space launches now. This type of token "spaceport to nowhere" pet project is going to deliver absolutely zilch. Ariane 6 is a dead end and there appears to be no plan forward.

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The only reason China isn’t dominating is because of SpaceX. NASA helping fund flights is great and helpful to SpaceX but don’t mistakenly credit NASA for SpaceX’s success.

It was more than helpful; SpaceX would have failed without the COTS contract.

There's a tendency by some to describe money paid out by the government for services rendered as "government funding", framed like some sort of unearned charitable gift given by the government to the company which entitles the government to all of the credit in the end. This is an immature point of view that is often the product of motivated reasoning (particularly, motivated by personal dislike of the people/companies involved. There's also some people who thought that capitalism would be trapped on earth with space being the exclusive domain of governments, and are bitter to realize that won't be the case.) Maybe your comment is reacting in part to this tendency, I find myself frustrated with it as well.

Nevertheless, the truth is that SpaceX didn't have the money to develop Falcon 9 until they got that contract. I think themgt is correct to say the creation of contracts like that in Europe could provide European rocket companies the same kind of opportunity to develop technology and prove themselves.

> I think themgt is correct to say the creation of contracts like that in Europe could provide European rocket companies the same kind of opportunity

Europe has literally just spend 5 billion $ on a SINGLE rocket. Its not hard to understand why they don't have money for anything else.

SpaceX was saved by COTS because they were able to borrow money against that contract. And it really only included a couple 100 million to develop the initial Falcon 9. The waste majority of the money was for Dragon.

And they could do it that cheaply and fast because they had the legacy of the Falcon 1 and its infrastructure to build off. And that was mostly developed privately.

At the end of the day SpaceX underbid on COTS and actually didn't make money, it only helped them develop things that would make money other ways.

ESA already had the ATV to do what CommercialCargo does. But because of cost they stopped that program and instead helped with the Orion service module.

They are committed to Orion service module and have no interest in going back to cargo resupply. Given how close the ISS is to the end. By the time they would have finished a new cargo ship, the station is gone be close to gone.

And they simply don't really have the budget for CCDev. It simply doesn't fit in their budget. And even worse, given how absurdly high the cost for the Ariane 6 are, you would expect 6-10 billion for a crew capsule. And you know the European would go for some dumb space plane idea that's gone cost even more.

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