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Comment by tekla | Hacker News Reader

It's so weird how increasingly irrelevant Europe is becoming on the world stage. How is a single American private compan lapping around all of the EU seemingly effortlessly?

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Precisely because it is a private company. It’s lapping US Government space flight too, and mainly because it can use its rockets for any customer, not just the defined mission.

Yes, because that was literally the point of the COTS and Commercial Crew

Ariane Space is private, too. United Launch Alliance is also private.

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.

> 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.

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.

" What Europe lacks is an investment culture, both from governments and private investors. Sums it up pretty much. " True though the German goverment invests more into rocket startup to get Private Space working.

Europe has way too much investment culture from governments. All of my friends are creating startups with no decent go-to-market plan, but with 2 PhDs (as required to get BPI funds), a few keywords like “eco-blockchain in the AI cloud”, and BPI funds. It’s a waste, and they spend years on public funds. It also hikes the developer salaries, so there are no developers left for companies who are making real-world products.

I am not sure which program you are referring to, but I know of "EXIST," which is essentially funding for a team of four graduates, one of which has to be business-focused. The explicit goal is to use that time to write a business plan and find investors. That, at least, is a good program, in my opinion.

> 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_.

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.

Europe is now the only large scale producer of well-built commercial aircraft.

https://danluu.com/cocktail-ideas/

China has entered the chat

Yes, they still have a long way to go, but the C919 is flying and hasn't crashed yet.

Eh if Boeing dies Lockheed Martin can get back into the commercial aviation business fairly quickly. They made the best passenger plane of its time[1] after all...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_L-1011_TriStar

That's a plane designed in the 1960s and last produced in 1984. There's a massive gap in development which Lockheed would need to run through. Why would Lockheed even do this? (assuming there isn't a massive subsidy from US government).

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 ...

LMT is the third largest manufacturer of aircraft in the world, after Boeing and Airbus. They've built commercial aircraft before and are the best positioned to re-enter that market if there is a (government-encouraged) opening from massive failures at Boeing. I don't think they'll walk into it unprovoked, but my point is that Boeing isn't the only game in town long-term in the US.

Man the propaganda flies so fast, I don't know how we're going to survive the internet. Maybe instead of just shoveling the propaganda forward you could back up your wild claim with data? What are the odds of dying by flying in the current line of Boeing planes vs the odds in Airbus? Hint: It's lottery ticket odds both ways, it's the same order of magnitude both ways.

One airline has a fleet of 737 MAX planes, the other a fleet of Airbus 320s.

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.

Consider my comment less of statement of objective fact than a rhetorical brush-back pitch in response to the ignorant claim of European irrelevance.

Edit: for this not familiar with Baseball analogies: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brushback_pitch

The hard part are the engines anyway, which are still from the US (GE, Pratt & Whitney, CFM (that one is partly French)), and from the UK (Rolls-Royce).

Not really. Safran are doing just fine in that space.

With engines ranging from civilian turbo props and turbo fans, to military fighters and helicopters, to rocket engines.

This seems like a peculiar take. Outsourcing one part of your space program while your own capability is still being built, is surely just pragmatic and is hardly a leading indicator (let alone 'the' indicator) for European irrelevance.

If your read the article I linked above and countless adjacent ones you'll see a subtext of blaming "unfair State support" (ie. Pentagon/USG) for SpaceX success. Before spaceX, the target was Boeing.

Ultimately it is really about being desinterested/unambitious/distracted.

…says the European state-sponsored rocket company.

Yeah, but Boeing/ULA is also way behind of SpaceX

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

I don't get the part with unpaid overtime. As salaries are definitely not the biggest cost for them, why not just hiring twice as many?

Because the number of good metallurgists, physicists, engineers is limited and SpaceX (and I assume probably Arianne as well) have limits on the citizenship of who they can hire

Applying twice the people to a project doesn’t make it go twice as fast. And salaries are their biggest cost.

It doesn't help that most of Europe is facing significant population decline: https://zeihan.com/demographics-part-4-the-european-breakdow...

Anyone care to comment on why this concise response to the parent's question, supported with a link to the relevant data, was down voted? I'm confused.

It's a usual take on any European topic (made by an American?). The website above is about space, now we talk about demographics? How? this thread is a better one, at least some posters write down arguments about the topic (though I know them) but many heated Americans really disturb the discussion about European politics (EU is in decline, all regulation is bad etc.) it's very annoying.

Let's add to the list of disturbances: "annoyed Europeans who consider that any criticism as coming from heated Americans as if there are no selfaware Europeans"

Again, just a derailing post. It's very annoying.

I mean, they're on par with another American private space company, Blue Origin.

Let me paraphrase an excellent comment on Reddit from the other day, in response to one of the usual lies about how the only reason SpaceX is ahead of the rest of the world is that it got zillions from the US government:

>If large amounts of funding is the only thing required to succeed, Blue Origin would now have a nuclear-powered spacecraft orbiting Pluto.

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