It's official: Europe turns to the Falcon 9 to launch its navigation satellites
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
> Let us say we had ten guaranteed launches per year in Europe and we had a rocket which we can use ten times—we would build exactly one rocket per year," he said. "That makes no sense. I cannot tell my teams: 'Goodbye, see you next year!' [0]
European "strategic autonomy" in a quote.
[0] https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/05/ariane-chief-seems-f...
I think there are many reasons for the current situation.
First, Space X has a grand vision and is driven by it. They have excellent management and ingenious engineers.
Second, (IMHO) Obama's economic policies included picking winners. Space X got a juicy contract for many, many missions. The US is buying US first, so Space X has a nice base-line launch volume that enables them to go towards "mass"-manufacturing. As a result, cheaper prices drive demand even higher, increase volume, and lower prices. The US government has a more innovative approach to industry policies than the EU.
This brings me to the third point: what the EU is doing wrong. While the US tends to _buy the product_ of the new industry they want to create, the EU _funds the research_. This leads to the current situation in which Europe, which had a lead in methane engine research[1], has no methane engine, while the US has a company that earns money by launching a reusable methane engine.
Point four applies to the US and EU: While Ariane Space is private, the money comes from the EU and the partner countries (mainly Germany and France). Engineers did not design Ariane 6; it was created by politicians who squabbled about where which part would be developed and manufactured. There were two competing plans, one driven by Germany and one by France, based on which country would benefit more. I'm unsure about ULA, but at least SLS had the same problem.
So, in Europe, government funding comes with strings attached, and it goes towards research. People laugh about the CEO of Ariane (rightfully so for other reasons) when he complains that Europe is not buying enough launches from them to justify reusability. But he is right on this one. A rocket company needs a baseline of demand to justify going into "mass"-production and reusability. _After_ that, the lower prices will create new demand. In my opinion, this is how it worked for Space X and what Europe failed to see.
In my opinion, both Tesla and Space X are good examples of how to establish new industries (from the view of the government):
* find a private entity with a grand vision * buy their product * use economics of scale to drive down prices
The EU has started incorporating some of these ideas in its latest round of research funding.
[1] I don't have hard evidence for this other than that one of the researchers told me. Even if Europe didn't have the lead, we had cutting-edge research.
This isn't surprising, considering that Ariane Space is fullfilling the role that NASA internal rocket development has in the US.
What Europe lacks is an investment culture, both from governments and private investors. Sums it up pretty much.
The US also has a lot of "fund the research" style programs: anything with a costs-plus contract. SLS is the current example in rocketry, but most past NASA programs were costs+. The commercial fixed-price contracts are a newer and more successful development, at least for things where new science isn't needed and only engineering development is required.
Ultimately it is really about being desinterested/unambitious/distracted.
I've heard this called "boomer engineering" and I couldn't agree more
SpaceX has people and procedures with way more flexibility to do stuff (and a lot of unpaid overtime). Which can be good in some cases and bad in others
Yes, they still have a long way to go, but the C919 is flying and hasn't crashed yet.
Building a passenger jet isn't even that difficult. The difficult part is making it economical - low weight, fuel consumption, high reliability, parts availability, service/repair centers, training facilities, trained crews ...
Are the insurance premiums the same? I don’t know, but I’d be surprised if that’s the case today after all the design and construction problems on the Boeings.
Edit: for this not familiar with Baseball analogies: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brushback_pitch
With engines ranging from civilian turbo props and turbo fans, to military fighters and helicopters, to rocket engines.
>If large amounts of funding is the only thing required to succeed, Blue Origin would now have a nuclear-powered spacecraft orbiting Pluto.
Checking other interviews[0], it seems that Airbus (Charmeau's other baby) is doing a ton of research on the side and is pushing a more commercial angle.
All in all, it sounds like he's more invested in Airbus becoming a SpaceX competitor than Ariane becoming a stronger commercial entity...but I'm also way out of my depth and don't know that much about the guy.
> the Ariane 6 will not fly until 2020 at the earliest
Here we are in 2024, and the first flight of Ariane 6 is tentatively penciled in for June. Not holding my breath, but at least a lot of French rocket scientists have been gainfully employed building this useless white elephant.
https://twitter.com/tesla4k/status/1676077165983723520
"SpaceX primarily seems to be selling a dream. $50M launch is a dream. Reusability is a dream. How do you respond to a dream? You let people wake up on their own. They (SpaceX) are not supermen. What they can do, we can do. - Ariane space exec, 2013"
Here were talking Elon who was already wealthy and managed to fail upward after making money getting fired from one of the first companies he was involved in.
I would blame: - Mishandling the financial crises after 2008 (austerity measures) - Aging population (low birthrate + not enough immigrants) - Internet businesses really have an advantage in markets that are mono-lingual and most growth came from the internet in the past 25 years. - The EU exists, but the market is still very fragmented.
the first time the US got dragged screaming and kicking into the war... And the second time, they might have sat most of the conflict in Europe if they hadn't gotten war declared on them by Hitler
SpaceX is the only outlier in the pattern. Without SpaceX, the US would be in almost the same position as Europe right now. So I'm skeptical about explanations suggesting some deep systemic differences are at work here.
Yes, without decades of public and private capital and other NASA resources supporting commercial space startups that bred, amongst other highly innovative companies, a world beating launch service and global low-latency satellite constellation the USA would be in the same boat as Europe. That is a big systemic difference! The USA has a much more consistent emphasis on private enterprise backing up state capacity that periodically inject rapid innovation and makes things cheaper even if similar forces to Europe gradually entrench monopolies that slow things down and makes them more expensive.
Rocket Lab could have chosen Australia to move to. It could have moved to Canada, or to an ESA member nation and thus gain access to Kourou. But it chose the US despite the ample existing competition there.
It was a really nice place to launch soyuz rockets out of.
ESA subsidised by Jeff's hatred of Elon. And millions of taxpayers, of course.
Isn't it ESA subsidizing Jeff's hatred of Elon? I thought Amazon is paying less than market rate so as to keep Arianespace workers busy.
Other launchers are not currently available.
It is not as if the US had no capability gaps. For a long long while they had to buy seats from Russia to get their astronauts to the ISS.
> we're talking about measurements being made with pen plotters because they'd get angry that "something changed" if we sent them a digital plot taken on the same equipment
That level of conservativism doesn’t sound entirely healthy to be honest.
There is a slightly different situation here, which is that the Space Shuttle was kinda... not that safe. I didn't like that either but for human rated spacecraft the requirements are all more strict, for good reasons. Unfortunately, those reasons are mostly things like Apollo 1, Challenger, and Columbia. But overall I think I agree.
>That level of conservativism doesn’t sound entirely healthy to be honest.
We weren't convinced it was either. Did you know they don't make parts for pen plotters anymore? Somehow the customer was surprised by this. We did manage to convince the right people there to allow the switch eventually but it was a struggle.
The only European country with its own launch capability is Russia.
The UK is notable as being the only country to have had that capability and lost it - which says a lot of the lack of vision and ambition of the British ruling class.
Basically the belief that "economic ties would supercede ideology or meglomania". I suspect if Europe had taken a stronger line on Russia and the strategic threat it represented, then they'd have a stronger launch market since "we'll just buy a Russian launch" wouldn't be treated as a serious option (i.e. even the US was treating this as an option for manned spaceflight, and ULA using old Russian engines on their rockets without a home-grown option till Falcon 9 is ridiculous).
I entirely agree with what you way though. The west is extremely naive in its world view, and has been so for many decades. Silly ideas like "the end of history" are still influencing attitudes even though they are so clearly wrong that no one would explicitly espouse them.
The west has forgotten that not everyone is going to go along with the idea of social liberal free market democracy, and that it is not as appealing to many people from other cultures.
However, this lack of access to space should come to an end soon. The ESA has shipped stages of the first flight hardware for the Ariane 6 rocket to its French Guiana spaceport. While the ESA has not set a specific launch date, it is working toward a window that extends from June 15 through July 31.
And wow, lots of hate for Europe in this thread. Salty much
Arguments involving Musk's products, even tangentially, tend to do that..
Extreme hatred and saltier than a salt mine here.
In practice, there's a floor to the noise which is a reasonable lower bound on your uncertainty.
There's also factors that can't really be overcome from more sats, like multipath effects.
In most cases, though, faster/more reliable fix will probably be a bigger advantage than precision. When you have a partial sky view, more satellites means a better chance of enough satellites falling in that window for a fix.
Most GNSS are largely similar, though, and there are certainly enough papers describing how to perform fixing across satellites of independent constellations so I'm sure it's been implemented in at least higher-end devices. Still, I suspect inexpensive consumer receivers are probably calculating a fix per constellation and then combining those. Fixing across constellations requires combining ephemera, time base, etc. data that varies between them, but all of these are known with high precision, you just have to pull them together.
Since most GNSS are mostly the same, new GNSS constellations are usually launched either to improve coverage in a region, or these days with several global constellations, more often for sovereignty reasons. If you have weapons systems that rely on GNSS, it's better to have your own constellation. GPS for example no longer has a wartime selective availability capability (that would deny use by anyone other than US forces) but it did in the past and, if WW3 broke out, it would probably be implemented again. For much this reason different GNSS constellations tend to operate in different bands (not always, though) so that a country can selectively jam adversarial GNSS systems without affecting their own. GNSS has its origins in the military and is still largely a military capability today, with Galileo being the odd one out that focuses more on commercial applications (Galileo's selective availability capability is used to charge a subscription for higher-precision uses).
And some GNSS do have "accessory" capabilities, probably the most prominent being Galileo's two-way search and rescue messaging capability that will compliment COSPAS-SARSAT. But that's always been the way with satellites. For example, the GPS constellation carries detonation sensing equipment for nuclear counter-proliferation. It just saves money to combine payloads.
One of the reasons to not put GNSS constellations in separate bands is that it simplifies the construction of multi-constellation receivers. Of course, it also makes it more difficult to selectively jam. Some combination of these interests mean that GPS, GLONASS, and Galileo are very close siblings in the radio spectrum. It gets surprisingly political.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galileo_(satellite_navigation)...
I actually have a receiver that does exactly this! It is a Trimble Resolution T, available for very cheap (I believe they're from old cell towers), and it's intended exclusively as a time reference. You first run a 24 hour data collection, and it precisely determines your location before storing it. From then on, the receiver only calculates the time. Very cool stuff, I'm planning on building a GPS-disciplined rubidium clock and stratum 1 NTP server with it.
>Still, I suspect inexpensive consumer receivers are probably calculating a fix per constellation and then combining those.
This sounds like a reasonable solution now that you mention it, for an inexpensive device. Part of my confusion is based in the fact that the constellations actually use different reference datums [0]. Wouldn't the different constellations give meaningfully different fixes even if the solution was "perfect"?
I mentioned in another comment that I pretty much forgot that this could be a political thing. That's a very good point and I don't know why I didn't think of it. Especially with selective availability, which as far as I understand, the US government could just turn on again at a moments notice.
[0] https://gssc.esa.int/navipedia/index.php/Reference_Frames_in...
Obviously if you just mix up the bytes willy nilly then nothing good will come out of it.
How familiar are you with the terminology of mathematical optimisation? If you are then the intuition is that each satelite provides a different error term in one big function you are trying to optimise. The “knowns” you plug in to the terms are your observations (pseudorange, phase, etc) and the orbital parameters of the satelite broadcast by the satelites. The unknowns you are trying to solve are the x,y,z,t coordinates of the receiver you have. You are trying to find the unknowns which minimise the sum of the error terms. The error terms of the various constellations might have slightly different ”shapes”, but you can still run your optimisation them the same. As you add more satelite the number of unknowns remain the same (4), but you are adding more and more equations to your overdetermined system. When things are not pathological that leads to a better, more precise fit.
> aren't they all doin the same thing
Even if they were, sometimes it is valuable to have your own toy. If Russia is having a war in some region of the world and the US decides to turn off the GPS signals there is not much Russia can do about that. It is a US satelite and the US adjusts it as they see it fit.
If Russia has their own satelites and the US would like to deny them this the US have to attack Russian assets directly. That is a very different ball game.
Regarding the political aspect - you're right, and it's easy to forget about. I could say something cynical about that but I'll leave it.
[0] https://gssc.esa.int/navipedia/index.php/Reference_Frames_in...
However, this would require different hardware on both the sats and the ground stations.
You'd prolly need much better coordination algo's too.
Under ideal conditions GPS is already accurate to 30cm, which is frankly astonishing on a planet of 200 million square miles.
You're half-way there, keep it up !
It might be possible to do a different technique and use a swarm of internet satellites: something like how the TRANSIT (aka NAVSAT) system could, in theory, provide navigation from satellite internet machines. In practice you'd need to know each member of the swarm's orbits very precisely to have sufficient accuracy with their Doppler shift, which means that you prefer station-keeping burns to be infrequent[2], and because they are in low orbit- lots of drag, so they need to regularly burn- that's harder to do (this is why the existing systems use medium orbits). Also, a TRANSIT style operation can't really give you turn-by-turn directions on your cellphone, it was about updating a very powerful submarine inertial guidance system with big honking mechanical gyroscopes every few days, the INS on your phone isn't nearly good enough to handle turn-by-turn directions with TRANSIT update rates.
1: Japan has their own Just Japan system, QZSS, which I have vague memories is different, but I don't remember enough to explain it.
2: The way these systems work, you can never really have more accuracy than you know the satellites location in space. In general, you want ground based systems to track and update orbital parameters after every satellite burn to get the necessary accuracy.
Japan's QZSS is complementary to America's GPS and also covers Australia and everywhere in-between due to its orbit.
For generally practical purposes, it can be considered part of GPS. Any GPS receiver in range can receive its signals.
On the satellite side, I had vague memories they were weird when I wrote that. From some quick googling I think they are doing a trick with clock synchronization from ground stations to avoid needing an atomic clock in space, since over Japan and Australia they will always have LOS to a ground-station (which they can use in place of the atomic clock as the master time source for each satellite)[1]. At least, that's what the 2008 Ph.D thesis "Remote Synchronization Method for the Quasi-Zenith Satellite System: study of a novel satellite timekeeping system which does not require on-board atomic clocks"[2] suggests that they were doing. That was published before the QZSS system actually flew, so I still am not sure if they actually went that way or stuck with the conventional atomic-clocks-in-space approach. So maybe they are unique in not needing so much hardware in space, perhaps?
1: GPS, designed to deal with at least the opening stages of nuclear war, had as a design goal the ability to operate without ground stations at least for a while, and there are large swathes of the world that don't have suitable ground stations, so they had to go with the atomic-clocks-in-space route to provide global coverage. By focusing on just a small area and ignoring the 'must operate for several days during a nuclear war' case, QZSS maybe could get away with something cheaper.
2: https://unsworks.unsw.edu.au/server/api/core/bitstreams/9386...
If you meant a single LEO swarm operated by a single entity, yes that's possible too, and there are proposals to do it, because LEO birds can provide much stronger signals, you'd have a decent shot of it working indoors and stuff.
But, the ground-segment necessary to keep track of the clocks on a large number of satellites would be formidable. They'd also be out of view of ground stations for a larger portion of their orbits (since they're so much lower), which means some new work in tracking the clock drift, which is one of the main limitations on accuracy.
https://pib.gov.in/PressReleasePage.aspx?PRID=1883677
How is it inferior? It’s the same orbital insertion and they have a near 100% success rate.
If you spent years and hundreds of millions on the payload, you are willing to pay more to launch on a platform with a very proven track record, like Falcon 9.
I'm pretty sure this is just Galileo. Yeah it's just timing but Galileo has high accuracy and does SAR reception too. And it's government so the price goes up :)
Also, the EU as an entity does not have a military or espionage agency. If someone does that in Europe it's coming from a country, not the whole EU.
2. GPS has huge military implications. These satellites will be leveraged by the military. There are literally military secretes involved in these satellites.
3. The 100M is for the launch, not the satellites. Space X's standard fee is 67M/launch. It seems fair to attribute a lot of the premium to extra security costs around handling military technology.
You read that right, I didn’t make a typo.