Ariane 6 cost and delays bring European launch industry to a breaking point | Hacker News Reader

Ariane 6 cost and delays bring European launch industry to a breaking point

arstechnica.com

49 pointsxoa66 comments

I owe my career to the incompetence and greed of Arianespace. For my master's thesis I reverse engineered launcher ascent simulations for ESA because Arianespace was unwilling or unable to answer basic questions such as "how much payload can rocket X transport to orbit Y which is not GTO" without charging an obscene amount of money and needing months of lead time. A few years later at one of the Lunar X-Prize startups, my team and I sat together with Arianespace's mission analysts and we had to explain to them why you cannot have a 24-hour launch window when you want to fly to the Moon. The bloody thing moves!

After SpaceX published the video from the first successful grasshopper flight it was clear to me and basically everyone else I talked to in the industry that an expendable Ariane 6 was DOA. But the pork must flow...

The corruption, nepotism, and incompetence runs deep in the European space industry. ESA is an organization where people get passed over for promotion because they are "too technical" or don't belong to the right old boy network.

Geo return (the geographic return rule) excacerbates all these problems by creating quasi-monopolies. As an example, the market leader for astrodynamics software in Europe is at the top because their national delegation heavily invests in programs that benefit them and not much else. Thus, they "need" to win a lot of contracts to balance the scales and make a luxurious living by repackaging the same old Fortran77 garbage over and over again.

</rant>

Maybe a dumb question, but why do you need to launch directly to the moon instead of launching to earth orbit then doing a transfer? How much better is the direct method delta v?

I don't know if one trajectory is more efficient than the other, but space propulsion systems are quite tricky and if I remember correctly the X prize was trying to incentivize doing things on a budget to "democratize" access to the moon. It was basically the cubesat of moon rovers. If you think of technical decisions through that lens, it therefore makes sense to ask your launch provider to do as much of the work as possible since they already have a second stage capable of getting you there, instead of designing a bigger payload with a more capable propulsion.

Yeah, Moon flight trajectories could be somewhat head-scratching.

Imagine the Moon orbit is in the plane of the Earth equator (it's not) and you're launching your rocket also to the equatorial plane. Moon rotates around the Earth in one month, LEO period is about an hour and a half, so every approximately 1.5 hours you're passing via point in orbit which has the necessary phase (angular) distance relative to the Moon. If you, for example, going via a Hohmann orbit - half-ellipse from LEO to Moon orbit - you just start translunar injection burn at the point of LEO (approximately) opposing to the Moon. Life is good, you don't need to think much and plan ahead - just gas 'n go.

Now, real world. Moon orbit is 5.1 degrees from ecliptic plane (the plane of the Earth orbit around the Sun), and Earth axis is 23.44 degrees from ecliptic, and there are no convenient spaceports on equator - Alcantara still doesn't launch, and Sea Launch is out of business. So the plane of your LEO orbit is likely different from the plane of the Moon orbit. What does it mean? Two different planes intersect in just one straight line - which in this case passes through the Earth center (or somewhat close to it). If you'd start your engines near the intersection point - when your position on LEO will be near that intersecting line of LEO plane and Moon orbit plane - then you'll raise your apogee and it will hopefully bring you to the vicinity of the Moon orbit. Now, the question: will Moon be there, near that point of its orbit? If you carefully waited on LEO - or launched to LEO in the proper time, taking all this into account - then it might. If not - well, your spacecraft will fly to the Moon orbit and back, as did some Zonds launched in USSR. So here we clearly see the need for the correct launch window.

(And if you won't start your engines close to that intersection point - then you might get as far as the radius of the Moon orbit, but will be away from the orbit itself - the Moon orbit is just a circle, and you'll fly towards some point of the sphere with the radius of the Moon orbit. Could be completely different areas of space, so you need to take the plane of the Moon orbit into account)

Theoretically we might try to change the orbital plane. It's either very expensive in terms of delta-V - you usually don't have nearly the amount of fuel needed - or takes some less fuel and a lot of time - as you need to travel far away, to make the plane change cheaper in the region where the orbital velocity is much smaller.

Realistically it's better to launch towards correct plane and in correct time, and plan ahead. Funny, the Earth-Moon system seems rather simple, and yet we still need to be smart enough to navigate here.

Ah, that explains it. I didn't think about inclination difference. Thanks!

Been a long time coming, but hopefully if it happens an implosion of the Arianespace semi-monopoly will open the way for the EU to see its own domestic commercial providers grow into genuinely globally competitive options. The EU should be focused on generating demand like Commercial Cargo/Commercial Crew did and then allowing fixed price providers to meet it however they can, vs trying to micromanage means and distribution. I think a fundamental mistake of a lot of the old guard, which is really something repeated over and over throughout modern history, is somehow failing to recognize a potentially positive sum game when they see it. There was so much focus on "protecting jobs", as-in existing jobs doing the same existing thing, as if it was a zero-sum game where any money spent more efficiently getting to space would then just mean that the freed up money evaporated. But massively cheaper, higher cadence access to space opens up entirely new and improved economic opportunities and in turn a lot of new potential jobs. The money saved on getting a kilogram to orbit can turn right around into more kilograms that generate a more lasting return then the money previously burned up in the atmosphere. That's "economic growth" in the most fundamental positive way, delivering humans more value for the same amount of energy/materials.

Ariane has turned into a lumbering zombie that is sucking up financial and political oxygen that much more promising players desperately need. But the EU (and the world) is plenty big enough to support their own SpaceX/Rocket Labs/Relativity/etc and next generation space stations/industry. I'm an American and think our own space efforts are one area of absolutely justifiable pride, but it'd be healthy long term if other democracies and groups of democracies offered some redundancy.

> The EU should be focused on generating demand like Commercial Cargo/Commercial Crew did

The EU has long given up on Cargo supply to ISS and that budget is bound in the Orion Service module.

And Crew wont happen in Europe anytime soon.

They simply don't have those things, and partly this is because of their own bad planning and investment.

> then allowing fixed price providers to meet it however they can

The problem is there are no such provider and there wont be anytime soon. Even if they were, they would be small providers who can't launch 90% of the value that Europe might want to launch to orbit in the next decade.

So sure this is a nice sentiment but its not realistic anytime soon.

> Ariane has turned into a lumbering zombie

It always was. Its just that the American and Russians took themselves out of the game by pure stupidity. So Europe was really the only option left.

I don't think we'd even want to launch crew. ISS is slated to be decommissioned soon so what's the point in spending billions on it? There might not even be another one, the Russians certainly won't be involved. And I don't think ESA will go it alone

For cargo Ariane is in the shitpit yes but they're in good company with ULA etc. SpaceX caught the whole industry unprepared.

Actually there was a big movement for crew launches in the 90s. This died becuase it was gone cost way to much.

In the last 2 years there has been a very big marketing campaign by various austronauts and people from ESA to push the idea of a commercial crew from Europe. You can find various article like 'Getting serious about crewed flight' and stuff like that. So there is defiantly a big movement within ESA and European space that want it. However the political will behind any of that has not been even remotely shown.

> ISS is slated to be decommissioned soon so what's the point in spending billions on it?

ISS wasn't slated for decommission when the Europeans decided to stop doing cargo.

And ISS will not be the last space station in human history.

Also I didn't suggest they should invest in crew.

> For cargo Ariane is in the shitpit yes but they're in good company with ULA etc. SpaceX caught the whole industry unprepared.

ESA used to have the ATV but it got to expensive for them. ULA never cared that much. As soon as cargo went commercial other defense contractors snatched it up and used their own rocket, see Cygnus and Antares . ULA is a pure launch company they wouldn't have anything to do with ISS cargo unless somebody booked the flight.

> I'm an American and think our own space efforts are one area of absolutely justifiable pride

As a public agency, I do see the work of NASA as being "ours", but I don't feel the same about SpaceX. It's a private company and could probably be lured away with the right combination of more money, fewer regulations, and better meme potential.

SpaceX is "ours" in the exact same way as Apple, Google, Facebook, Microsoft etc.

It's a company run by Americans in America. Even more so than the other companies I listed because all of the manufacturing is also done here. Pretty much everything the company does is done in this country by citizens due to ITAR.

You are totally wrong. SpaceX is deeply entangled with NASA and DoD. And their primary IP is protected under US regulation, nobody can 'take it away'. And SpaceX launch site and team are essentially purely American. Its crazy to suggested that they could be 'lured away', its a total misunderstanding of the space industry.

Yea, it's like they don't know what ITAR is. If you tried to walk away with the technology men with guns would take it back, you would come back too, dead if you decided to put up resistance.

I feel both sides are exaggerating here - "lured with right combination" and "men with guns". Both of these aren't really working like this in our world.

Ehh ITAR is very serious, national security level stuff. Sure it's not like agents will have you assassinated, but you will definitely be taken by men with guns (the police/FBI) if you try and export that tech.

I wonder how do you know it.

There was some discussion in some rocketry forum of possible collisions between tech export and the First Amendment. I think this is still a somewhat open question.

You may end up in case of "You can avoid the rap, but you cannot avoid the ride". And the avoidance would cost a lot.

Of course you might get a national security letter silencing you from even talking to the judges, getting put in a nice trap if you try to garner support to defend yourself on what you did you could run into further issues.

The party across the table is the US Dept of State, and all its friends. A reasonable person probably doesn't want to be on the other side of that.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Traffic_in_Arm...

SpaceX would only be willing to make that jump if it were fine never getting a contract from the US government again, which means the US economy and/or state imploded.

The dead part is the only exaggeration. That would be a last resort.

If you tried to pack up SpaceX (so to speak) and its technology and move it overseas, the FBI would arrest you and promptly stop you. If you put a fight, they would respond accordingly. That's assuming you were in a position to order that attempted move (you'd have to be Musk, Shotwell probably couldn't get very far given Musk's ownership position).

SpaceX is a very significant national security matter for the US Government and military industrial complex. Of course they would kill you if you legitimately threatened that critical cornerstone; first they'd try to reason with you, maybe subtly threaten you not to try it, then they'd attempt to arrest you (and then in private try to make their point more loudly); if there were no other options, they would kill you to stop the transfer.

This isn't Medtronic or Anheuser-Busch we're talking about. The machine that invades countries, topples governments, takes on other superpowers (Nazi Germany, Empire of Japan, Soviet Union, Russia, China), fights massive wars as it deems necessary (WW2, Korea, Vietnam), and kills people professionally - it needs SpaceX at this point in time (and the future edge that SpaceX launch capabilities may provide).

It's not just SpaceX's value to the United States, it's value against.

Rockets make things go up.

Accurate rockets can also make payloads land where they want...

... like on cities.

All of that depends on having a president and congress that would refuse to approve the transfer. Right now, it’s not going anywhere but who knows what the next administration or two might bring to the table.

It also helps when you own a major social media platform when you are trying to get something done.

I'm sorry but is just nonsense? Go where? To Russia or China, that would never be allowed. To Europe?

And even if it was allowed, the infrastructure and people are here, this would be a decade long transition.

This is just so utterly and completely unlikely that the chance for it happening is so close to 0% that its practically irrelevant.

I think only because its Musk would people come up with scenarios like this.

The only region that could reasonably host SpaceX would be the middle east. You'd get the Saudis or the Qataris using their money cannon to get what they want, and setting up launch operations in the desert, staffed by untaxed and overpaid expats from all over the globe.

And completely aside from that, I really really doubt you'll find people willing to stomach the Musk management/work style outside the US. Just look at the Tesla strikes in Europe.

Americans for of uniquely have the skills and organizational ability, combined with a brutalized work ethic that allows for things like SpaceX to succeed in such a short time.

That can happen in a lot of areas, but not cutting edge aerospace. There you're in ITAR land.

I'm just a passive outside observer currently in the US aerospace field but the defining characteristics of the ESA seem to be:

1. Plowing ahead with an obvious bad idea no matter what because of bureaucratic inertia, and

2. Formulating plans based on requirements that have been defined poorly if at all with the primary goal being to keep the industry alive at all costs

This is also a problem with the Japanese space industry which I, some time ago (although it seems that little has changed), was sent over to work with. Describing the nightmare of bureaucratic inertia over there without understating it by orders of magnitude requires a level of skill with the English language I am incapable of reaching and barely comprehend exists. One firm had an entire building the size of my employer's corporate headquarters devoted solely to housing workers who gathered and analyzed metrics on the people who gather and analyze metrics.

Without exaggeration no engineer could make a decision or perform any task that requires spending money without approval or consultation going up multiple levels and no design, even a simple block diagram, could be created or changed without panels of panels of people chiming in.

I've made a dozen decisions today alone, with no oversight or consultation.

FWIW we barely avoided that here in the USA. I half believe that Congress didn't think anyone would meet the COTS milestones or they'd have never approved it. SpaceX delivered a product so much cheaper with excellent reliability and on-schedule that even the worst of the worst pork-barrel lobbyist-friendly sycophants in Congress couldn't justify cutting them out. But they still tried to keep them out of military contracts. It took some political grease (eg spreading facilities across multiple states to make jobs) and a lawsuit to be allowed to even bid on those contracts.

Even so... we are still wasting money on SLS which is comically behind schedule and over budget. If it ever flies expect NASA to pay 10x what an equivalent SpaceX Starship launch costs.

Defense and space procurement is the least efficient research, jobs, and welfare program ever devised.

> If it ever flies

SLS has already been around the Moon.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artemis_1

While I agree that SLS is a potential boondoggle, in one big respect I like that it exists: I like keeping as many of those people employed as possible, even if it's a de facto subsidy program. I like keeping those skillsets domestically available and primed, spread across several entities (SpaceX, NASA, Blue Origin, ULA and so on). I want us to be able to do it, or other similar big things (a space station, whatever), should the situation warrant building something big. I want those people to be ready to build for early colonies on the Moon or Mars in the next few decades and SpaceX can't provide all the employment.

SLS will cost way too much (already does). It is fairly absurd. I'm still glad that it exists. Build it. Write the check. I don't want SpaceX to be our only path to the Moon and or Mars. I don't agree with the cost or the bureaucracy. I don't agree with lots of things the US Government spends a lot of money on though.

If NASA needs $5 billion extra per year to subsidize SLS, as a taxpayer I'm fine with it. Their budget has gone from $26b to $33b over the past five years. Let's get that to $38 billion in a few more years.

If big rockets are a strategical industry then throwing money at them to keep the industry alive is a good choice. The only issue with it is that SpaceX made evident that traditional rockets are becoming the steam locomotives of aerospace. It's time to build something else. When the EU sees a rocket that lands and launches again it must say me too and start building one.

We have seen the EU, Japan and (as sibling comment says) almost the US space industries have these problems. Can you think of any national space industries which do not? Maybe NZ due to the presence of Rocketlab and nobody else?

I remember a long time ago I watched an interview with a high-level ESA French official that derided SpaceX’s efforts on reusability. It was back when SpaceX was still trying to figure out how to “land” boosters on the open sea. I remember the smug and superior attitude of the guy, he was just shy of calling SpaceX a fraud. Fast forward to today and here we are. I would love to see what he has to say now.

Im pretty sure this guy claimed SpaceX cheated because the govt funded them when they were trying to rev up for the COTS program.

I wonder what he thinks about the Ariane 6 funding structure.

Lots of different ESA and Arianespace made lots of arrogant and wrong statements over the years, trust me as somebody that has followed it.

Their claims about illegal subsidies were always utterly hilarious. It was literally just them appealing to European nationalism without any evidence. They were basically saying to convince clueless ESA member-state politicians of nonsense. There is a reason they haven't even tried to bring this to the WTO, they knew they were full of shit.

A bit like the infamous interview of Steve Ballmer (along with Mike Zafirovski) on the iPhone launch ("it doesn't have a keyboard!")...

I mean, Ballmer was kind of right about that, for business use. As soon as someone wants to reply to an email now they pull out their laptop. What he didn’t realise is that pulling out your laptop is easy enough that you can lose the keyboard on the phone. But it did mean that the smart phone did indeed fail in the way that he expected, in that the business market that windows was serving at the time did not end up using their iPhone for business tasks. In fact people clung to their blackberries for years for that reason, even after the iPhone became an undeniable hit. The iPhone never became a significant business machine for text. Of course he also did not realise that an entire new consumer market would appear for smart phones too, but if you look back it’s not clear that apple did either. They still pushed a somewhat business angle, not a “literally everyone” angle

He was panicking in that interview though for sure, but I think people give him more crap for it than they should

He was very smug and he was proved totally wrong. No phone has a keyboard now, including for business and taking into account that people type even more than when they had Blackberry's "email machines"... he was also wrong about the iPhone's pricing and the rest is, well, history: Blackberry, Nokia, and Microsoft were destroyed.

It's the same logic with SpaceX: a newcomer is doing something new so obviously they don't know anything and will fail... until they destroy all the incumbents. It's always the same process.

Well they type on their laptops mainly

I don't know what world you're living in where people are avoiding typing on their phones. I feel like I see this observation sometimes from people who don't like smartphone keyboards, as if because you're bad at typing on them, so must everyone else be. But look around next time you're at a bar, on a subway, waiting in line somewhere. People type a lot on their phones. And they're really fast at it.

Fast yeah. Faster than me on my PC? No way :)

Surely a swiping keyboard is faster than the "array of tiny keys" approach. It's a much lighter touch.

And that's this narrow view that perhaps made incumbents missed the big picture.

I think the real insight Apple had is that, with phones becoming smartphone, internet, videos, apps, etc people would want a bigger screen rather than a keyboard and a smaller screen even if a physical keyboard might be a bit better to type (and I'm not even sure of that).

A radical idea proved a winner. A bit like with SpaceX...

I fully expect Arianespace to be like Nokia was, very slow, a lot of bureaucracy, and no-one dreaming of anything really new. The irony is that since they launch from the coast of French Guyana reusable boosters that can land on sea platforms sound like the perfect solution for them...

Have you used those tiny keyboards? They were quite amazing

The T9s were... I'm happy that they disappeared. The qwertys were not bad. I'm swiping on my phone to the amazement of my friends that were never able to learn to do it. That beats tapping keys. However a physical qwerty was better than tapping on a qwerty displayed on a touchscreen. Unfortunately it takes 1/3 or 1/2 of the phone and it's there even when it's not needed.

I do far more business email and chat on my iPhone than I ever did on my Blackberry. I think you are being overly charitable to the point of redefining history.

Landing still requires a lot of fuel, which needs fuel to be carried up. It was a waste and still is.

If they come up with reusable fished from the ocean, that'd be useful.

> Landing still requires a lot of fuel, which needs fuel to be carried up.

That's true, and that reduces the payload of the returning stage. To have it working, you either have to reduce the payload or to increase the size of the stage. In both cases the payload weight to liftoff weight decreases.

> It was a waste and still is.

That's false, as in exchange the operator gets the stage back to be reused on the next flight. That's usually a huge saving in costs. Fuel is relatively cheap, and to make a rocket somewhat bigger or a payload somewhat smaller does relatively small change to the price of a kilogram to LEO comparing to the opportunity not to pay for the stage hardware on the next flight.

Overall SpaceX made a huge improvement in costs and moved the world launch industry quite a bit forward.

You have absolutely no idea what you are talking about. It doesn’t require a “lot” of fuel. It depends on the mission profile.

And guess what you can do? Run 9 LEO missions with the same booster and throw it away on the 10th with a GEO mission. That’s freaking incredible.

A booster just completed its 18th flight last week. 18 flights within 3 years. They’ve raised the limit for Starlink launches to 20 reuses.

Cost of refurbishing a booster fished from the ocean would dwarf the fuel cost and lost capacity. Not to mention the extra weight and cost you'd incur building a booster that can impact the ocean at speed.

They have to land a nearly empty booster. They don't need as much fuel as they needed to launch. Anyway, here are the economics according to Musk

https://www.inverse.com/innovation/spacex-elon-musk-falcon-9...

The breakeven is closer to 2 launches than to 3, so 3.

I agree with the other commenters about this being incorrect, but there is in hindsight an even bigger deal -- getting to examine the rocket (not fished out of salt water) after the flight and learn from that is huge and often overlooked.

AND run to failure.

If a booster can survive 20 launches, it probably has most of the gotchas for launch #1 ironed out.

Nobody cares if some performance is lost when you are good enough for 99% of payloads and you save tons of money by retrieving the expensive part of the rocket

It also takes extra fuel to land an airplane. Does it make sense to just throw the whole plane away after one use to save the extra landing fuel?

This comparison would make sense if planes were leaving orbit.

I would love to hear an explanation as to why that makes a difference?

Planes work by heating up air and then going fast enough to fly? While rockets have to eject stuff and move the centre of mass outside of themselves.

Also they need to leave the gravity well while planes don't do that?

It's completely different.

At worst you can still operate the vehicle the same way you would a conventional rocket, so it's strictly better in that sense. For every mission in which the cost of bringing the rocket back is lower than the cost of manufacturing a new one, you come out ahead.

Fished from the ocean... ok...

Do you think you can fall from space and hit the ocean and be reusable? To land in the water and not spatter yourself you'll need to be going less than 20 miles per hour, which is a hell of a lot less then the 1000+MPH a rocket booster is going, and second stage would turn to plasma if it didn't slow down first.

That sort of thing re-reinforces my believe that Musk it's some genius it's that managers like that French guy are blocking progress and creating negative value. Where Musk is usually too nutty and ADD to get the way for long.

(a crazy idea I wanted to get feedback on) Wouldn't it be much easier if everyone licensed tech from space-x? A space tech franchise haha? (To build a colony on mars we need a massive number of flights, why not spread the costs across several nations? Why spend $2b to $6b per flight on a space-x competitor; we want redundancy but it seems massively cheaper to license rather than reinvent. )

Its not a crazy idea, its a smart idea. There are two things that aim against it, export regulation. These could be overcome but it would require a lot of politics and cooperation.

Second, Europe has NIH syndrome and until reticently were 100% convinced that they were simply superior and would never have even considered it even if the US was open to it.

But not reinventing the wheel on the engines and things like that would make a lot of sense. Its just not practical in the current environment.

Up until severe sanctions started in 2022, Arianespace launched soyuz rockets out of guyana they bought from russia.

Were it not for ITAR, and probably spacex's business model, I'm sure they'd love to buy a bunch of falcon 9s, and barges to go with them. That site would likely be the most payload you could get out of one of those rockets, prograde.

It's not NIH. It's independence from geopolitics.

Don't forget Trump's America First movement shook our confidence in our decades-long alliance. And I don't just mean militarily (NATO)

This was long before Trump.

And the thing is, depending on how you do the agreement. Europe could produce the engines themselves, they only would need plans and help with manufacture.

This isn't unprecedented in the space industry. Its how India and China worked with Russian engines. And it also happens between commercial companies.

In case of a complete breakdown of relation Europe could continue to manufacture the engine.

This would allow for in-depended access and still produce jobs in Europe. This could serve for both a large, medium and small rocket. Additionally it could allow for learning to do landing. Also, Europe has a decent second stage engine that they could have combined with that first stage.

Europe has to get away from solid fuel boosters and hydrogen main engines, its totally the wrong architecture and moving away from it would have been smart. Sadly they domed themselves with the Ariane 6 and Vega designs.

If not the US, you could have done the same with something like the RD-191 or something like that.

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