It’s unfortunate that Ariane 6 already has no realistic chance of being price competitive with Space X. However it’s great that they are doing something still as competition is what will push us forward.
The main point is for Europe to have launch capabilities and maintain their skills. That's also the reason why ESA is so inefficient, they are here mostly because of politics.
If it wasn't for that, they would have used US, Russian or Chinese rockets.
I suspect that the US gave a heavy push to SpaceX (they saved them from bankruptcy in the early days) because they were in the same situation with NASA. SpaceX was their chance, and they took it, they are also keeping an eye on Blue Origin, because who knows what will happen next.
The relationship between ESA and Arianespace is not necessarily that fundamentally different to that of NASA and SpaceX. Arianespace is only partially state owned (it's a join venture of two publicaclly traded companies) and in some ways it was the SpaceX of the 80s and 90s.Ariane 4 was very competitive and at some point had the majority of the commercial satellite launch market.
Of course like the rest of Europe stagnation has set in and it was left behind over the last 10-20 years.
Note that they are with... some? success trying to greatly reduce costs as a response to SpaceX. Have you heard of any other launcher company trying that recently?
Airbus owns 50% of Arianespace so it makes sense.
> Have you heard of any other launcher company trying that recently?
I guess the issue is that it's such a big market and there isn't a lot of competition and everything is partially or mostly subsidized by governments (through NASA or ESA) how all have their own agendas which introduces a massive amount of inefficiencies. It's not like Ariane 6 would have ever been developed for entirely commercial purposes.
Blue Origin is almost completely irrelevant. Jeff Bezos may buy United Launch Alliance, but it likely won't help given Blue Origin's abysmal track record.
Amazon's Project Kuiper (the Starlink competitor) has no affordable launch provider since they're avoiding SpaceX, so it's also dead in the water.
If that’s true there’s likely major managerial or structural issues that are gumming things up.
From [0]:
> As a space reporter, I have spoken with dozens of current and former Blue Origin employees, and virtually none of them have had anything positive to say about Smith's tenure as chief executive. I asked one current employee about the hiring of Limp on Monday afternoon, and their response was, "Anything is better than Bob."
[0]: https://arstechnica.com/space/2023/09/bob-smith-is-finally-g...
It is the platform NASA is using for the upcoming ESCAPADE mission to Mars. And it was used for the CAPSTONE Lunar mission, for example.
As to whether Amazon's Spacelink competitor will be launched depends on whether BO can get their New Glenn rocket - a Falcon 9 competitor - up and running. If they do they should be able to 'launch their own dogfood' just like SpaceX is doing with Starlink on Falcon 9.
Also, nobody outside of SpaceX really knows how much their reusable first stages really saves them. That’s especially true for the Falcon Heavy (which is comparable to the Ariane 6) where the center stage does not / cannot be reused.
The US government "funds" SpaceX in the same way you fund Apple when you buy an iPhone or Shell when you buy gas.
They are a customer, they pay for a product/service.
They are not giving money for free just to keep them afloat.
It's a bit different. Without the US gov as a early customer taking lots of risk, they company wouldn't exist. Apple or Shell wouldn't change even if 100,000 customers decided not to buy their products/service anymore.
> The first two Falcon 1 launches were purchased by the United States Department of Defense under a program that evaluates new US launch vehicles suitable for use by DARPA. The first three launches of the rocket, between 2006 and 2008, all resulted in failures, which almost ended the company. Financing for Tesla Motors had failed, as well, and consequently Tesla, SolarCity, and Musk personally were all nearly bankrupt at the same time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX#2005%E2%80%932009:_Falc...
OK, it's like early Apple customers buying the Apple I.
Without those customers taking the risk Apple wouldn't exist today.
Still just a customer buying something, not "funding" in the way you make it sound.
Arianespace is a shitshow. Our Yankee analogs are Boeing and Lockheed. They could each absorb unlimited funding to design substandard packaging for peanuts.
The US government funds satellite/space stuff generally. Look at how much money has been spent on DoD polar orbit, MEO (GPS, etc) and geostationary orbit satellite development, construction, launch costs and associated earth station construction over the past 20 years. Mostly from traditional DoD contractors like Boeing and United Launch Alliance. Throwing some money at SpaceX is actually quite "new".
If you stop building any highly technical thing for a long period of time, you lose the institutional knowledge base and engineers/technicians who can do it. The UK had a great deal of trouble and delays when they re-started nuclear submarine construction after a 15+ year gap with the Astute class, because everyone who was involved in that industry had gone and done something else or retired. It's pretty logical from a national-security point of view that the Europeans and ESA want to maintain a minimum level of capability to launch stuff on their own, even if it's not as "good" as a re-usable Falcon 9 / Falcon Heavy.
The US government is a big customer if that’s what you mean. It does not overpay to use spacex (goes with lowest bidder between them an ULA).
You’re vaguely trying to imply that spacex is only kept alive by the government like Arianespace and that’s pretty dumb. It has at least one US competitor to beat on gov contracts and global competitors on non-gov contracts that it consistently takes the cake from on cost.
> Also, nobody outside of SpaceX really knows how much their reusable first stages really saves them.
The implication being what? It spends a fortune on barges and refurbishing as an elaborate hoax or fraud because its not a significant cost saver?
For heavy, as a sibling pointed out, the center stage is reusable. The recent launches paid extra to sacrifice it for orbital parameters. “At the customers request” on the webcast.
Look, I’m all for competition in the launch space because I don’t like monopoly players, but pretending spacex is like the others living on a government feeding tube is laughable.
Here’s the litmus test. Which company wins bids for non-government contracts?
If it was always going to the lowest bidder, SpaceX would beat ULA on price on most missions and ULA would likely no longer be viable. They make sure ULA wins enough contracts to remain viable, even if that costs more than giving them to SpaceX
SpaceX only get paid as they can deliver. Europe cover the cost of Arianne 6 development, and will continue to do so.
Falcon 9 will likely have up to 100 launches in 2023. Arianne 6 is planned to have at most a dozen launch when it’s matured, which is still several years away
Maybe I'm reading too much into this, but to me it came across as the gov't giving money to SpaceX just to keep it alive instead of the US gov't actively doing business with a company successfully launching their assets into orbit.
NASA continuing to award Blue Origin contracts is funding BO since they haven't done anything.
I think they just gave contracts, not any grants or funding. And they got contract after successful test flight of falcon 9 afaik. I would hardly consider this heavy.
As for the contract, it was a $1.6B contract, not small. And sure, it wasn't a grant, something was expected in return, but in practice, it was essentially the same, SpaceX wouldn't have been able to survive without it, and grant or contract, had they missed the chance, it would have been the end. Also, the US regularly gives new contracts to SpaceX, and I suspect at an inflated price compared to purely commercial launches. In theory, these are not subsidies, but in practice, I can't imagine NASA and the US government not do anything in their power to keep SpaceX healthy as they don't have anything better by far.
[1]: https://www.vox.com/2014/5/5/5674744/how-nasa-became-utterly...
Your link says that US had no homegrown option, when it used russian rockets.
The only part that matches “because cheaper”, was atlas rockets using soviet engines, but that also had additional reasoning of keeping russian rocket engineers away from iran and north Korea.
So overall, US definitely will subsidise a US company. (If not spacex, then other company which demonstrates competence) Strategically it is a must have capability. If you depend on others, you open your self up for bunch of risks.
Even if there were superior foreign options NASA/etc. would rather work with an American company as long as it’s not hopelessly behind.
They do cost more than commercial launches, but that is because they have extra requirements that commercial customers don't, and that adds a bunch to the total cost to fly those missions.
https://spacenews.com/40006spacex-says-requirements-not-mark...
Had Arianespace been required to actually do the same thing, it would likely have cost the government 4+ billion $.
So this 'not small' contract was actually an incredible hart to fulfill and incredibly risky gamble by SpaceX.
SpaceX is the exception here
The other US competitors are kinda behind as well, see the ULA Vulcan, or non-existent
So yeah it's not about being the cheapest, it's about having the capability
The difference between the two looks a lot smaller when one considers the total price including the payload.
800M satellite + 75M for an Ariane 6 versus 800M satellite + 65M for a Falcon is, well, not quite a rounding error, but probably within the acceptable margin for keeping it in the European family for many projects.
Cost per kg on Ariane is unfortunately going to be more than double Falcon 9.
Starship is in similar stage of development and by the time A6 comes online it will compete with Starship not falcon .
For Starship, it's an in-development rocket with a focus on novel technology as well as cost engineering. Orders of magnitude cheaper is a great goal but it's impossible to know if or when SpaceX can achieve it.
They had more successful launches in 7 years than Ariane in its whole history.
It seems that this rocket is not yet out and operational but already “obsolete”.
I guess this is the price for independence. Or wrong incentives.
https://www.fool.com/investing/2023/08/27/despite-rare-profi...
e.g. the government giving them free money just so they can continue to exist? SpaceX does not survive on subsidies.
> contracts
Doing work in exchange for money? Yes, that's how SpaceX survives. That's the way any rocket company is supposed to survive, yet you're construing this as somehow a bad thing. Seems like a sad case of EDS.
https://europeanspaceflight.com/europe-will-introduce-a-reus...
Back the day, before SpaceX came along a serious launch provider, ESA conducted a study on the financial viability of reuseable rockets. The conclusion was, that they are viabke, technically feasible but only financially interestung with a number of launches per year for which there was no demand.
SpaceX for sure is launching a lot of their own Starlink satellites...
> Breakeven in 2 to 3 flights
But then, 7 days ago he posted on https://www.reddit.com/r/ula/comments/17wos9u/tory_bruno_ceo...
> As I have said before, propulsive fly-back generally requires an average reuse of 10x per booster, which has been achieved.
So maybe it is difference between SMART (catch by helicopter) re-use and propulsive landing
But he does acknowledge in comments that reuse can improve launch cadence.
Today, it seems, a lot of the launch volume comes from Starlink, which is basically SpaceX in-house demand for something we have no clue about its financial viability or profitability. Hence, I am quite sceptic about a lot of the space launch stuff. We have quite reliable numbers for SpaceX competitors (launch costs, development...) while SpaceX is somewhat of a black box. That alone makes comparing claims from SpaceX (which might well be true, but we cannot tell either way) to verifiable numbers from others dubious at best.
Starlink achieved cash-flow breakeven it seems: https://www.reuters.com/technology/elon-musk-says-starlink-h...
But the journalism... that statement is only in the title.
Edit: This is the first time I hear the term "Cash-Flow Break-even"... Is this metric from the same set as "Cash-flow before outside investment" and "Community adjusted EBITDA"?
What's questionable is starlink, starship and Falcon Heavy
Starlink has been their solution to that but it is still an open question how well that makes money and for how long...
And we have not really seen a space market exploding behind it.
Sure, now no-one questions whether landing a rocket is possible at all and whether it is worth it.
What a ridiculous statement...
This just in, blowing up your car is cheaper than refilling the tank, wow!
There's proof right now btw, in SpaceX's Falcon prices vs others.
Plus the common sense that remaking something is more expensive than not.
Done properly, reusable will always be cheaper, inheritly.
So for the Space Shuttle reusability did not pay off, because it had a low flight rate and a very high cost of refurbishment (the Solid Rocket Boosters in particular probably never paid off- due to the landing into the ocean and the salt-water dunking they had to be fully taken apart after every flight, inspected, and put back together, and that meant that you actually had labor costs of twice the work of just assembling a new one- the materials cost savings was simply not worth that). This is one reason that SpaceX ended up abandoning their original plan of recovering engines from the ocean, though they were trying to do it much harder with liquid fuel engines rather than the simple solids that STS used.
One interesting thing about SpaceX (a privately held company, which does not publish useful financials) is that they have also claimed they invested a lot into the factory for churning out engines with many fewer man-hours than their western competitors. That investment might not make sense if you are counting on reusing all your engines many times before they are replaced- unless you are looking at many many launches of Falcon Heavy, which I will be curious to see if they actually do (the market for super heavy rockets like that has never really existed at more than 5ish a year, and I'm personally uncertain if satellite internet can get there).
Before SpaceX came along, the (Russian) Progress company was the cheapest in the world, with their R7 Semyorka (Soyuz 2 is the modern version) rocket family. That was because the Soviet Union had invested in a very heavily automated, highly productive launch factory (they launched a bucket-dropping spy satellite every two weeks, plus manned launches, Progress resupply flights, Molniya commsats, etc. so they had a very high flight rate) that needed very little in the way of manpower to make their engines and rockets- and that investment definitely paid off, the R-7 family has flown into space more than any other rocket in human history. But making it reusable and investing heavily in highly automated production tend to cut against each other as solutions to the cost problem until you get to extremely high flight rates.
Whether you think that at current flight rates the numbers point to re-usability comes down to how much you trust Musk the businessman (personally not very much), and how much you trust Shotwell to manage Musk and bring the company to a good place in spite of Musk's random perturbations (personally I have great faith in Gwynne, but your mileage may vary).
there is no proof that re-using something expensive instead of throwing it away every single time is more economical?
You might want to reconsider that opinion
It takes about three weeks to reuse a Falcon 9 first stage and no major parts are exchanged. Which indicates that, unlike with the Space Shuttle, the refurbishment is pretty straightforward.
New parts and work of qualified humans are two biggest cost items and if both are obviously not that high, the total cost of reuse cannot be that high.
We have completely lost visionary people ever since the fall of the USSR. Our politicians are mere managers (and often enough, they're extremely bad even in that role), our economy leaders largely only care about their own bottom line, and while our universities generally churn out decent graduates, they completely dropped the ball on innovation, research and actually retaining staff - made more difficult by the fact that we don't have absurd amounts of money sloshing around from donations, estates and other sources.
Comparing private companies to public funded ones is such a ill founded idea... I can't even begin to comprehend the optics of most in this thread, if I'm being honest.
"Non-response". Renault had electric vehicles on the market in 2012 (Zoe), same year as the Tesla Model S. The BMW i3 came out in 2013. Different focus, slightly slower research for some groups to get a common platform (e.g. VW), but it's not like there was absolutely nothing and it took 10 years for European car manufacturers to realise EVs can work.
Without any idea of the market demand. At the current cost of developing new Platforms (a few billions), you could understand being risk adverse. Low sales would have killed the whole companies.
At this stage Ariane is just a money-burning program to create jobs that are supported only for political purposes. makes no financial sense at all, it's all obsolete tech.
Why spit on it, imagine the situation was reversed, you'd be happy NASA had some sort of alternative to China to launch stuff no ?
I find that the exact same people who place free market above all social concerns, will happily give up quite a lot for national security, but sneer when others do the same.
NATO is not a US-controlled army defending Europe. It's a collaborative alliance to scare a bit anyone trying to invade us, but it's not gonna do us any good if the US decide to become crazy or if one of their critical allies attack us and they don't want to risk it.
Notably it allowed them to stay out of folly like the Iraq war.
The price/kg is 3-4x higher for Ariane.
And IIRC Ariane 6 can also bring up somewhat heavier payloads because they launch from closer to the equator?