Europe's new heavy-lift rocket, Ariane 6, made its inaugural flight
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6-10 years from now Ariane Next/SALTO will aims replicate Falcon 9 efficiency and the design will be very similar: reusable, RP-1/LOX, Prometheus engine is similar reusable open cycle engine as Merlin with lots of 3D printed parts.
The first doesn't imply the second.
Ariane 6 is behind:
* ULA's Vulcan
* SpaceX's F9/FH
* SpaceX's Starship (who knows when it'll start launching payloads)
* Blue Origin's New Glenn (supposed to be launched in September)
in terms of raw performance as well as $/kg.
There are also a number of other rockets like RocketLab's Neutron and Relativity's Terran R that seem like they'll outcompete Ariane 6.
The medium/heavy lift market is getting much more crowded than it has been in the past.
Right now, Europe has a functioning rocket program under their own control.
I think it's understandable for an engineering community to talk about the tech, but people seem to be forgetting the geopolitics.
Ariane 6 will serve fine as an "assured access to space" for the local market (which is important), and good on them for finally getting it off the ground. But it's design goal was "Falcon 9 competitor" and it certainly isn't.
Lol.
Starship has successfully launched more than Ariane 6. The only reason they aren't launching payloads right now is because they want to nail down reuse first.
There's less info on New Glenn, but a lot more footage has come out since David Limp took over. And the DoD thinks Blue Origin has a good enough shot at launching this year that they added them to NSSLv3.
> Right now, Europe has a functioning rocket program under their own control.
> I think it's understandable for an engineering community to talk about the tech, but people seem to be forgetting the geopolitics.
Sure.
But that would have also been true if they'd just kept Ariane 5.
A lot of people are dumping on Ariane 6 because ArianeGroup spent a bunch of money and time to make a rocket that's not that much better than the previous one. When they could have made an actually competitive rocket instead.
It seems like most of the world has decided not to fly on Chinese rockets, so those aren't really competition.
But I totally agree with regard to India: PSLV and GSLV are both good, competitive rockets. It'd kind of a shame that they don't launch more often. It makes me wonder if there's some sort of organizational dysfunction going on. It does sound like they're going to be launching OneWeb going forward, though, which is nice.
The Chinese market is so large that this does not matter: https://payloadspace.com/2023-orbital-launches-by-country/
India's space program/industry, though significant, is much smaller than China's. SpaceX makes up 90% of USA's launches at present.
US: 109.
China: 67.
Russia: 19.
Europe: 3.
Other: 25.EDIT: I would like downvotes to explain their reasoning.
The whining about him being untrustworthy stems almost entirely from him having different political views (and not being afraid to voice them), and the stream of mostly unsubstantiated hit pieces and awful reporting regarding Starlink in Ukraine.
With the way you guys talk about it though, he might as well have personally caused the crash of more than two full passenger jets.
Ariana 6 might be the stupidest civil aerospace project in the world after Boeing’s Starliner.
Europe does something
> Aha it's bad why did they even try
Europe doesn't do anything
> Aha Europe always late, never innovate, Europe bad
"Doing something" isn't a goal in itself. Ariane 6 in context of the 2020s is similar to programming a new MySpace app for Symbian OS right now. Hard work, costly, needs a lot of qualified workforce, and the product has very limited audience.
Arianespace had the lead and lost it, because it kept the old way of doing things. Or are you arguing Ariane 5 was technically behind and wasn't competitive in the '00s?
Ariane 6 is not that far behind the other "old space" companies, which the US is struggling to keep around as alternatives to SpaceX. It's not like Boeing and ULA are doing much better.
We should be critical of Arianespace, and find ways to get it to improve, but just throwing everything at SpaceX will do nothing to keep them honest.
Almost all space activity, with the exception of satellite launches, is useless. Let's say we build a Mars and Moon colony, then what? You do it, because you want it as a goal in itself. If you don't grasp that, you don't understand anything about space.
The same fundamental problem also applies to the idea of an economy that is 100% productive and that consumption is evil. If you get rid of consumers, you can also get rid of the producers. You can get rid of the economy. No human existence can be justified under the guise of "productivity" unless that productivity leads up to some consumptive activity.
Companies in that space can have islands of inconceivable incompetence that remain surprisingly stable.
I don't see the contradiction what you seem to be implying.
Just because something must be done, doesn't mean that anything done should be celebrated. One can still do the wrong thing, and people can comment on that.
Also HN is not a single entity. Even if you would see some contradiction between attitudes (which I don't see here) it could be still explained by the fact that many different people post on HN and they have different opinions, thoughts and values.
China is... weird.
Most of the rockets they launch are small hypergolic rockets (Long March 2-4) with clear ICBM heritage. Which are multiple generations "behind" Ariane 6.
They do have some more modern cryogenic rockets, but they can't seem to scale those operationally. Presumably it'll happen eventually. But who knows when that'll be.
They’re decently far along on their reusable booster [1], with a methalox engine being developed by a private company [2].
Of course, everything looks cute until it flies. But that programme is arguably ahead of anything ArianeSpace is working on.
[1] https://spacenews.com/china-to-debut-large-reusable-rockets-...
Vulcan rocket has already launch and cost the same as Ariane 6 without subsidy. They have a credible reuse program called SMART. Vulcan uses advanced stage engines.
BlueOrigin, for all their diddling and money wasting, is gone launch pretty soon with a rocket that is way more advanced in literally every way.
RocketLab has been executing quickly and their next generation Neutron rocket will be on the market literally a decade before any reusable offering from Arianespace. Their engine development is working on a staged rocket engine far more advanced then ESA next generation engine. Development on that engine is progressing much, much faster and is cheaper.
Relativity's Terran R rocket is deep in development. Lots of component testing and fully built engines being tested. Their Terran R will also hit market many, many years ahead of whatever Ariane Next is gone.
And in fact, while all these people working on next generation system, there isn't even the glimmer of political agreement about development of a next generation European system.
Either you are just lying or you have not actually studied the launch market at all.
> All while being independent from the whims of one single individual, ensuring independent launch capabilities for national security reasons.
Yeah really sucks for the US to have 5 very aggressive competitive companies coming online. Much better to have monopoly that requires 5 billion $ to get the most basic rocket upgrade ever to fly.
The cost to build a satellite is high enough that most customers don’t want it to explode. Until New Glenn has a solid track record they’re not really comparable.
ESA has no resources to directly compete with spaceX or china unless Europe changes attitude and realizes that they have the resources and responsibility to do more in this mission for humanity
The narrative is independent of the price.
SpaceX has showed that they may refuse service in various situations, such as drone access to Starlink Internet in a battle during Ukraine war. Thus a government being dependent on them for their space fleet, gambles the possibility of being suddenly unable to guarantee commercial services such as Galileo GNSS, or during military operations.
SpaceX rushed to provide terminals to Ukraine for free when they asked for them, and that was laudable. But SpaceX had no mature defense sales program set up, or it was bypassed. I could argue that this was another instance where Elon's impulsiveness created issues that SpaceX would have to deal with down the line, such as ongoing payments and the lack of a shield for their commercial business.
Properly set up, a defense sale will include such things like a guaranteed minimum buy, service level agreements, and the legal and diplomatic framework to provide a level of shielding to the contracting company from third-party complaints to alleviate the risk of an arbitrary service shutdown.
We cannot build an European equivalent of Starlink with expendable rockets. It would be just too expensive to build hundreds and hundreds of one-time rockets and immediately destroy them.
If the goal is building a European Starlink, Ariane 6 is a step backward. It fundamentally cannot support the required launch cadence and doesn’t build any of the foundational technologies required to get there. (Analogous to Starliner, which was also pitched as a back-up plan.)
No good deed goes unpunished.
I'd wager to say that this is hardly a matter of competition, but simply to guarantee continuation of a basic need in a situation where it might become much more important
No. But they should learn their lesson and try to run instead of plodding along at a glacial pace.
Oh but wait, they're govt funded with no success incentives other than some sort of vague sense of pride for a job well done.
My money is on they're not going to come out ahead in the race.
There is no race between ESA, NASA and Roscomos. The Russians and the French are not going to abandon their rockets and entrust their nuclear deterrent and early warning system to SpaceX.
Isn't Ariane Group jointly owned by Airbus and Safran? Which are both publicly traded companies and France only has a ~10% stake in both?
The United States is certainly happy to (launch military payloads with SpaceX). Having access to far more launch capacity, far more cheaply, is surely a significant strategic advantage.
Edit: Added text in parentheses for clarity.
EU countries, not having a reusable rocket at their disposal, will have to pay through the nose for every launch, discarding the entire expensive rocket in the process.
Of course, that will limit their ability to launch satellites into space: the cost of discarding a rocket is high (let's not even start about fairing dimensions and subsequent limits on payload size). Wrecking a sophisticated machine after each use is uneconomical.
Meanwhile, the US is galloping towards much cheaper launchers. This means that by 2030 or so, they will be able to put orders of magnitude more tonnage onto orbit.
China noticed - and it is trying their darndest to close the gap.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RD-180
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Security_Space_Launch...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30542226 ("Russia halts deliveries of rocket engines to the U.S. (reuters.com)")
(It's not a national security payload, but the Starliner ISS astronauts also went up on this Russian engine).
The success of this model hasn’t gone unnoticed by China, who are funding several private rocket companies (such as Space Pioneer) to develop reusable launch platforms in competition with the state-owned contractor CASC. They are making rapid progress!
It’s not a meaningful alternative. The comparison to a Yugo is apt: it’s more expensive and less capable, with its sole advantage being it’s made in Europe and so will get European launches. But anyone launching on it is structurally disadvantaged against a competitor (or peer) who launches on SpaceX.
Strongly agree—Europe needs an indigenous launch option. Ariane 6 is not it, and I’m sceptical ArianeSpace can ever deliver it.
You only have to look at what happened with Starlink and Ukraine.
Last thing EU wants is to put their vital strategic interests in the hands of Elon Musk and his erratic whims.
Especially given they are planning to fine X 6% of their revenue which may end up bankrupting the company given its perilous financial state.
What race ? Having your own launcher is already a win in a fast changing world
Is this a big risk in the low, high drag orbits that the vast majority of SpX launches target?
So it's worth keeping an eye on things and making comparisons. I at least, don't say any dollar more than SpaceX spent by Ariane is bad. But if they spend multiple billions more... maybe we could build some trains or something for that money.
What race ? And if there is even one who cares ?
If EU pays 10x or 100x more to launch satellites the world isn't going to change all that much.
That may be true for a few military satellites. But ESA is talking about putting up a Europoean mega-constellation. In that context, launch costs do really matter.
Not really.
Strategically important projects rarely live or die based on costs.
Especially when they are a fraction of the total spend on the project.
That may be true of other projects, but LEO communications satellite constellations have a history of going bankrupt. Cost is very relevant in this case.
> Especially when they are a fraction of the total spend on the project.
I guess 40-50% is technically a fraction.
1. Ariane Next will use a Methalox first stage and a Hydrolox 2nd stage[1], not Kerolox (RP-1).
2. Given how long it took to get Ariane 6 to the launch pad, and its similarities to Ariane 5, 6-10 year is very optimistic.
---
1. From what I understand, this is due to political wrangling. Germany wanted to make the engines for the 2nd stage. IMO SpaceX's approach of using the same engine everywhere is superior.
Sure, Ariane 6 is a stop gap and likely has some interesting tech that will be useful later on, but it was stupid not starting a full blown reusable rocket program at the same time, when it became evident how much of a dead end it is.
Redundancy in novel fields is not a waste, it creates opportunities to try subtly different approaches in various places, and in so doing creates new knowledge that can progress all similar projects in the future. At some point, if you dump the same amount of human resources into a single project vs separate projects, you end up with something approaching the same thing, but resources (dollars/people) aren't entirely fungible and having separated projects provides an opportunity for cultural dissimilarity and other human factors to create innovation that would otherwise be stifled in a larger funded project.
Personally, I am really happy to see how much investment from many different angles is happening around space.
The Ariane 6 program was selected Dec 2014[2].
Reusable vehicles are clearly the way to go but that was a little early to say Falcon 9 was going to be the success it is today.
That would trigger politically-impossible lay-offs in France.
Not even NASA could resist developing their SLS rocket, which realistically should have been replaced with funding private heavy lift rockets. And that is despite the fact that they are much less politically constrained than ESA.
Germany does it in its national program. https://www.dlr.de/de/ar/themen-missionen/raumfahrttechnolog...
And yet, that seems like the model ESA is moving to. Not exactly - it's more NASA style letting companies bid on launches instead of directly funding rockets. But close enough.
I don't think ArianeGroup is in trouble in the near term.
But Avio - the makers of Vega - are very unhappy about that direction, since the current crop of Rocket startups more directly competes with them.
…at which point it will be competing with Starship.
Ariane 6 cannibalises Europe’s chance at being more than an also-ran in space:
“An Arianespace manager pushing his company as the only solution to Europe’s launch challenges isn’t that noteworthy. However, the fact [Arianespace’s CEO] urges the need for a ‘reusable heavy launcher’ is notable, considering his previous noncommittal remarks about rocket reusability. The certainty of his statement leaves no ambiguity–Ariane 6 just won’t be able to compete in the global market. It will take a (single and expensive) reusable heavy launcher (manufactured by Arianespace) and (funded by) a unified Europe to compete (with SpaceX).
While [Arianespace’s CEO’s] admission of reusability’s future in Europe is surprising, his constancy in his attempts to keep European space activities hostage to Arianespace is not. To be clear, he wants European taxpayers to fund reusability development and manufacturing only through Arianespace. He believes Europe can’t afford more than one reusable heavy launcher and that if Europe were to pay for a reusable rocket, then Arianespace must manufacture it.”
https://www.illdefined.space/arianespace-the-only-fish-in-th...
No commercial entity would come up with the idea of building a launch vehicle in Europe. Making a rocket reusable means that it would not leave French Guiana far behind. There would be less need for rockets from the European mainland.
Launch controlled by Europe. French Guiana is Europe, geopolitically speaking. SpaceX building rockets in Europe wouldn't give Brussels the strategic autonomy of an Ariane launched from below the equator.
We give all of our data to US companies and that's ok (?), but for some reason we need to be able to launch our own rockets?
No, for the same reason trucks aren’t overkill for horses in logistics. Unit costs, lead time, orbital flexibility: there isn’t a market for Ariane 6 left.
Even ArianeSpace’s CEO admits Ariane 6 is obsolete and that Europe needs “a reusable heavy launcher” [1].
[1] https://www.illdefined.space/arianespace-the-only-fish-in-th...
The biggest market is probably internally for Starlink. But itself, that'll be quite a lot of launches. Especially if SpaceX ends up pursuing an enlarged constellation size.
For the same reason, it's almost certain that ArianeSpace won't get any launches in the 2nd Kuiper tranche - New Glenn should be more efficient and capable than either Ariane 6 or Vulcan. Even if it isn't up to the task operationally, Vulcan will probably receive the balance of launches.
The doors opened on IFT3. If it was life or death starship could put something into orbit right now. Obviously it’s not the best solution for that currently (compared to say an FH) - they want to get the reuse working, but that doesn’t negate the fact that starship has been to orbital height and speed (albeit on a suborbital trajectory)
This actually seems quite reasonable considering the Ariane 6 is a non-reusable, low-volume design.
It’s after subsidies [1]. Actual costs are 4 to 6x Falcon 9, and that’s comparing actual costs today for Falcon 9 to projected costs in the future for Ariane 6.
[1] https://www.space.com/europe-ariane-6-rocket-debut-launch
They’re both state supported. But Falcon 9 is cash-flow positive on commercial launches where the only operational subsidies are launch complex access.
ESA is analogous to NASA. ArianeSpace is Europe’s ULA. Europe doesn’t have a SpaceX; Ariane 6 is a Yugo in the modern launch market.
It seems like for the cost to be lower you would be wanting to fit as much as possible thus impacting how often it is being launched. So not sure if the two have the same requirements.
Starlink alone will fill Starship’s most-ambitious deployment schedules for years. That gives plenty of piggyback capacity to swamp the market with.
I understand things can go wrong and it's good to have a backup plan in the long term... But that's not that many years out. You can go without access for a few years .. It seems like a tiny risk
It's not that we don't trust the Americans per se (although opinions may differ on that topic), but we don't want to have to.
ArianeGroup also manufactures the M51 missile that goes inside our SSBNs and unlike the Brits we do not accept depending on Americans supplying us with the missiles for our nuclear deterrent.
The Charles de Gaulle aircraft carrier almost got immobilized back in the early 2000s due to withholding of spare parts from the USA because they were pissed we called bullshit on their Iraq WMD claims. The USA routinely uses ITAR as a pressuring tactic to stop European weapon sales to foreign countries, which is why we're actively scrubbing every last ITAR component from all of our weapon systems.
Just because we're allies doesn't mean that the other party has or will have our best interests at heart. The Americans have proven to be quite temperamental and under-handed when our strategic objectives aren't aligned with theirs.
Aren't you? In 2003 Russia, Germany and France were strongly against illegal American invasion of Iraq. The US invaded anyway, ruining the country. What have France and Germany done about that?
The fact that the US government decided to unilaterally invade Iraq anyway is not our responsibility to bear. What could France have done more, try and enact economic sanctions or wage war against the USA over this?
Everything it is doing now towards Russia.
France and the USA may be allies, but economic relations have been complicated for over 40 years. The USA has no hesitation in interfering with or sabotaging the French economy (aukus subs, alstom, airbus defense, galileo), claiming that its law is extraterritorial in order to condemn company directors, and all the drity tricks imaginable.
This is what led many European companies and gouv in the 90's and 00's to prefer partnerships with Chinese and Russsian companies.
Even the British, with their special relationship, have completely isolated their nuclear industry from all US companies for fear of being screwed and at the same time signed partnership with CGN in China.
Ariane Group is first and foremost a defense company owned by the French state, Germany and several other European countries.
Ariane group designs and manufactures French ICBMs. This is a significant part of its business.
The French government wants a sovereign means of putting heavy military satellites into orbit (twice the weight of the Hubble telescope).
The French state will never let its intelligence, early warning and nuclear deterrent depend on the United States.
Also keeping the expertise and the people is a critical factor.
0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinking_of_the_Rainbow_Warrior
All are friends with NATO, but that does not exclude spying and all kinds of shenanigans. US spies non-Five Eye countries mercilessly. They get caught sometimes. Like the systematic wiretapping trough Danish cables from 2012-2014.
Both US presidential candidates are not mentally well. Who knows what they might do.
I bet it will be a lot more than that.
SpaceX benefits from massive taxpayer support and uses facilities built by the military and NASA.
It’s not a like for like comparison especially give SpaceX keeping its books private and giving no clear public indication of how reusable its rockets really are or their refurb cost.
Given Musks history of creative accounting quoting their PR numbers, the ones they pitch congress, as facts is naive in the extreme.
SpaceX provides a per-seat, per-launch cost, not a direct government subsidy - That would be ULA. ULA was literally a direct mechanism for transferring tax revenue to large multi-national defense companies to procure "independent access to space" (sound familiar?).
They do use (and pay for and lease) NASA and Air Force facilities - but in America, airports are government institutions as well, that are explicitly leased out to airlines. Reuse of NASA's unused resources, rather than destroying them (or paying for the upkeep) after the shuttle program, was an explicit political decision.
So why isn't SpaceX cheaper? They have kept prices high (but still lower than everyone else) to help fund Starlink. The fact that they can do so is reflective of Falcon's costs.
Reusability is real. Ariane 6 is nothing more then the ULAification of Arianespace.
Another way to look at the price is from supply/demand angle. Even if real cost of falcon 9 launch is much lower than its price, SpaceX can not just lower the price, otherwise they will need to handle even greater demand.
Even with current price their launch cadence grows exponentially year by year. With lower prices they would need to grow even faster.
If you don't gain any additional volume by lowering cost, it doesn't make any sense to lower your cost.
It also doesn't help that Rockets (for fairly obvious reasons) are highly regulated, which further distorts this market.
I don't know how effective this was. Did it backfire by promoting economies of scale in a program that went on to sell to adversaries anyway? Did it murder the domestic engine programs and did that have knock-on consequences? I don't know if the policy was effective, but I do know that stopping "engine proliferation" was a widely given and accepted reason for those programs.
Of course that means not leaving them over to the bear.
I mean, for many years the US bought seats on Soyuz launches, so that was an even more direct mechanism.
So does ArianeSpace [1]. (It’s majority owned by the French state. EDIT: It’s not.)
> no clear public indication of how reusable its rockets really are or their refurb cost
Refurb rates and turnaround times for Falcon 9 first stages are publicly documented [2]. Refurb costs are more opaque, but they’d have to be multiples of what SpaceX charges to approach Ariane 6’s cost projections.
Ariane 6 is obsolete on arrival; ArianeSpace’s CEO admitted as much in asking the ESA to fund a reusable heavy booster like Falcon Heavy [3].
[1] https://www.space.com/europe-ariane-6-rocket-debut-launch
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Falcon_9_first-stage_b...
[3] https://www.illdefined.space/arianespace-the-only-fish-in-th...
Is that really true? I thought it was owned 50:50 by Safran and Airbus which are both publicly traded companies.
~25% of Airbus is owned by France, Germany and Spain. France owes ~11% of Safran. So France seems to own only ~10% of ArianeSpace
[1] https://www.arianespace.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/Corpo...
True, but the EU has tight rules about government subsidies (TFEU art. 107-109) which don't have equivalent in the US.
> Ariane 6 is obsolete on arrival; ArianeSpace’s CEO admitted as much in asking the ESA to fund a reusable heavy booster like Falcon Heavy [3].
This is true though.
Aviation and space have been a super-highly subsidized environment since day one, on both sides of the Atlantic.
ESA member states contributed €2.815 billion for the development of Ariane 6. Industry contributed €400 million.
Additionally, the member states have agreed to subsidize the Ariane 6 to the tune of €340 million annually.
Sure. See the rest of the article. Everyone else has been saying the same for a decade.
Note that the reusable heavy launcher he’s pitching is still aiming to deliver in a decade what SpaceX can do today. It’s not a strategic option, it’s a jobs programme.
If ESA has 100 payloads, it can just book 90 of them on SpaceX and the mandated 10 of ArianeSpace (to keep the political pork happy), and lose only 10% efficiency (considering Ariane flight is twice as expensive as SpaceX).
The problem is that ESA has no scalable payload economy, nobody has a good reason yet to launch that much mass. SpaceX is its own customer with Starlink for scalable launches, but ESA or NASA will not deliver 100 sattelites per year.
> "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. That makes no sense. I cannot tell my teams: 'Goodbye, see you next year!'"
https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/05/ariane-chief-seems-f...
I remember one of the execs of ArianeSpace or ESA just a couple years ago stating on radio with much confidence that SpaceX would never manage to reuse a rocket.
But in the grand scheme of things it doesn't matter: Europe needs to be able to put its own military satellites (or anything else critical) up there. Military satellites sold to third party countries also won't launch themselves...
[1] https://europeanspaceflight.com/arianegroup-to-receive-e340m...
All major aerospace companies and projects are heavily subsidized in every country otherwise they would never survive or even be born. Like how much profit did NASA make over its lifetime?
I'm very surprised the EU and the USA and SpaceX didn't work out a deal to buy a certain number of F9's to be launched and operated from the EU. The EU would pay a (vey high) price to buy outright the rockets, and would agree not to develop a competing rocket design in the next 20 yrs.
Isn't the whole point of Ariane to maintain European capability for independent space launches?
It would be very hard to spin that up from nowhere after twenty years of complete inactivity.
So the worst of both worlds? It would still be very expensive, but also dependent on a foreign entity and with hands tied for the next decades unable to develop people, skills, or products in that direction.
ESA is never going to just buy a rocket, because that would completely defeat the point of ESA.
It doesn't seem that surprising given the terms.
I mean it makes sense, why not sell off rockets and whatnot commercially like the mass production strategy that Musk has in mind? But I don't think there's enough launches yet to warrant that. In fact, SpaceX is booked full for the next few years already; unless that's intentional, they simply don't have the production capacity to humour that idea.
When the Forest Service buys a truck from Ford do you also call that "taxpayer support"? The government buys stuff from SpaceX, it hasn't directly subsidized SpaceX for years. The government buys from the lowest bidder, which is almost always SpaceX. For example, NASA estimated that it would have to pay $1.5B to deorbit the ISS. After tender, SpaceX bid and won with an $843M bid. Who is subsidizing who here?
> uses facilities built by the military and NASA.
And for which it pays quite dearly for, on the order of $1M per launch. It's quite clear from Rocket Lab's books that operating their own launch facility is far cheaper than using the Space Force's or NASA's.
> creative accounting quoting their PR numbers,
To win their contracts, SpaceX has had to open their books to both the Space Force and NASA. It's one thing to lie to the press in a tweet, it's quite another to lie to the military in audited books. The press may be gullible, but army accountants are not incompetent and the consequences for lying to the military are not minor.
SpaceX's books are not open, but the amount they receive from the government is very public. It's quite obvious that SpaceX is highly profitable. They receive well under $2B from the government each year, they sell a couple dozen other rocket launches to others for ~$70M apiece, have not raised money for over 18 months, have a payroll approaching $1B per year and are quite obviously sinking multiple billions each year into Starship and Starlink. The only way the numbers add up is if Starlink is ridiculously cheap to build and Falcon is ridiculously cheap to launch.
To my knowledge, in the case of NASA’s launch contracts, only US companies are allowed to bid on these. It’s quite understandable that Europe would like to keep domestic capabilities the same way NASA aims to maintain the US’ domestic capabilities.
Not true. One example: <https://www.yahoo.com/news/ariane-5-rocket-delivers-satellit...>
Ariane 6 was funded by European taxpayers to the tune of €2.815 billion.
>and uses facilities built by the military and NASA.
Ariane is launched from the Guiana Space Centre which is owned and operated by the ESA. Since you haven't familiarised yourself with the topic, ESA is the European Space Agency and is owned by 22 European governments.
In addition, the member states of the ESA will subsidize the rocket for up to €340 million annually in return for an 11% discount on launches.
Elon in some interview was stating that Falcon architecture limits reusability to particular amount days so it is not _rapidly_ reusable in comparison to having Starship being catched by tower/reused rapidly. However mentioning merely days - that is surely pretty reusable and makes economical sense.
https://youtu.be/aFqjoCbZ4ik?si=pK-tptp0XbmOeoWN&t=432
> "... a couple days to get booster back. At least a few days to refurbish it for flight ..."
In practice, wiki mentions 21 days as fastest turnaround for a single booster: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Falcon_9_first-stage_b... - So that means bringing booster back with ship, refurbishing, putting on the new payload and launching again.
Their next-gen ones should be reusable, and share a lot of design with the Falcon 9 family. Methalox might next, as it's very promising, but the RP1 supply chain is well established.
It's not just that the Shuttle was expensive to refurbish. It was also very expensive to build.
Whereas Falcon 9 is much less expensive to build new than Ariane 6.
Ariane 6 was designed to be cheaper to build (cheaper than Ariane 5, that is).
ArianeGroup literally just got 5 billion $ plus use of lots of tax payer subsidized infrastructure. That is 4 billion $ more then SpaceX ever got for development of Falcon 9.
Falcon 9 got an old shitty broken down launch sites they had rebuild, ArianeGroup got a whole new built launch site for free.
But feel free to live in fantasy land.
> It’s not a like for like comparison especially give SpaceX keeping its books private and giving no clear public indication of how reusable its rockets really are or their refurb cost.
Actual smart people and analyist firms have done a lot of work on this. And literally every single expert on the topic disagrees with you.
Its literally impossible to assume SpaceX is not saving money, because it would be insane for them to do 100+ launches if they couldn't do as cheaply as they claim.
> Given Musks history of creative accounting quoting their PR numbers, the ones they pitch congress, as facts is naive in the extreme.
No idea what you are talking about. All SpaceX contracts with the government a fixed cost. What they actually cost doesn't matter, if SpaceX can't deliver, they pay it themselves.
If the were constantly offering prices cheaper then they can do things for, they wouldn't exist.
Its amazing the brain power it takes to believe that SpaceX is losing money on launches, losing money on development contracts, and is developing Starlink and Starship and is losing money on Starlink operations. But somehow they still exist because 'mmhhh they raised money'.
Problem is we know how much money SpaceX raised, you can look it up. And we know what they get paid for their government contract. Their money raising isn't that crazy, in fact, its hard to believe that they have enough to work on Starlink and Starship at the same time. Other companies have spent far, more on things that are far less impressive.
But somehow they did both at the same time while also developing human launch. Increasing launch rates. And taking on a number of other fixed price development contracts. And somehow they still exist.
Anybody who actually studies these numbers come to the same conclusion. And those simply don't agree with you. Go and actually try to build a model and do the numbers yourself. You will prove yourself wrong. But of course you wont do that, because you were already to lazy to look up what all the space analysts already concluded.
Better just keep repeating those anti-Musk talking points you found on twitter from people who wouldn't know what side of a rocket points up.
If they wanted to raise money without it becoming public, they could do so easily - for example using directors loans.
A better way to guess their expenses is to look at how many employees they have. Lets call it 15,000. Lets put average pay at $150k/year after overheads and taxes. 96 launches in 2023. That puts the salary cost per launch at $23M/launch.
It's a very rough figure because obviously some rocket parts are purchased, there are other overheads, and there are other revenues and costs from starlink etc.
What matters is marginal cost of every other launch of Falcon 9. Most analysts put the number somewhere between 10 million $ and 25 million $. I think very few people would guess more then 20 million $, specially now as launch rate has gone up. My guess is that 15 million $ is more reasonable.
SpaceX pretty consistently ramped up their money raising along with their development programs. And they were pretty transparent about all of that. Not a single company who analyses SpaceX has ever suggest that SpaceX might somehow have raised much more money. Maybe a few 10s of million. But its hard to raise billions without anybody knowing.
And I'm just rather believing people who spend a lot of resources trying to understand SpaceX rather then somebody in an internet form saying 'maybe they have raised billions without anybody knowing'. Because only if its actually billions would it change anything about my argument.
What is numbers actually suggest is that SpaceX Falcon 9 operation are highly profitable. They are selling launch way above cost. Numbers and information we have suggest that SpaceX bids very aggressively on their development contracts for NASA, and they are like no making a profit on those, maybe a loss. In case of Starship, a big loss. But likely they get that back with continued operation beyond the initial orders (or that has been the reality so far). Numbers suggest that SpaceX is making a killing on DoD contracts, they knew they were the only viable competitor so they bid very high on those. I think just one that stuff, SpaceX would be a highly profitable company.
If this was not true, then there simply is no way they could have sustained the massive investment in Starship and Starlink.
So unless somebody shows me prove or anything close to a credible source, showing that SpaceX raised multiple billion additional $, I'm just not gone believe the SpaceX is losing money on everything narrative.
Frankly given how insanely expensive something like Starship is, its crazy how little money they have actually raised. Its basically a drop in the bucket to compare it to SLS.
And by then, SpaceX will be 10 years ahead of them with a next-gen platform.
Not a great sounding story.
Or going bust if Starship will turn out to be a flop.
We (US vs Europe) are not racing nor competing in this in any way, we just need to put out payload up there too. We desperately need our own skillset though, with Trump or similar breed potentially at power across the pond US will become more hostile towards Europe and let russia roll over Ukraine and maybe further, absolutely no doubt there.
That's what presentation by some high-ranking ESA person said when I was considering joining a Master's program in Spacecraft Design in Kiruna, Sweden, where some ESA launch facilities are located. I found that goal extremely uninspiring, especially combined with European salaries, so I opted to keep getting paid well working on software to feed people more burgers.
I can't be the only one who thinks this is still a huge win. What did launch costs look like 10-30 years ago?
Also keep in mind that most of Falcon's use is for SpaceX itself, 2/3rds of launches are for Starlink.
SpaceX has a large fleet of Falcon 9 reusable boosters, but still needs to build one every now and then.
No it doesn't. That directly contradicts the actual rational for Ariane 6 as outlined in 2014.
There were two options, Ariane 6 or Ariane 5 ME. With France principally favoring Ariane 6 and Germany Ariane 5 ME. With Ariane 6 costing many billions, and Ariane 5 ME costing a few 100 million $.
The Ariane 5 ME would have done the 'independent access to space between now and 2030s' just fine.
The explicit reason why they wanted Ariane 6 was to remain competitive against the Falcon 9. They were starting to lose launches on mass to Falcon 9 already by 2014 and were panicking.
Its simply PR spin to now pretend this never happened. But rather admit that they spend 5 billion $ to lose the commercial market anyway and were basically now subsidizing uncommunicative launches for US cooperations instead.
Ariane 6 achieved the exact opposite of what its rational was in 2014. Instead of helping Europe pay for its space industry, it has to be subsidized.
> 6-10 years from now Ariane Next/SALTO will aims replicate Falcon 9 efficiency and the design will be very similar: reusable, RP-1/LOX, Prometheus engine is similar reusable open cycle engine as Merlin with lots of 3D printed parts.
Sure in fantasy land this is true. The reality is, after the gigantic expanse of Ariane 6, that cost way more then expected. With Europe having huge debt and Ukraine was, plus very expensive new space systems, there is very little actual drive towards a new large rocket system.
Such a rocket system would again cost many, many billions and this will be politically impossible, not just because of the money.
Beyond the rational mentioned above, the reason Ariane 6 was picked, was that France was willing to give solid booster contracts to Italy. So France literally 'paid off' Italy to get them on board Ariane 6.
The reality is, Italy simply will not wnat to move away from solids. And Germany is, very, very, very unlikely to be onboard for another gigantic rocket investment, after they already didn't want the Ariane 6 in the first place. Without Germany and Italy there simply isn't gone be a 'next big European rocket'.
Between your optimistic 6 years prediction, I would say 2040 is a much more likely date then 2030. We have already seen delay with the test platforms. And we are already seen a collapse of the 'all ArianeGroup' all the time mantra that Europe had. The idea that ESA would hand ArianeGroup another 5 billion $ in the current environment just isn't gone happen.
And this is simply because of exactly what people already pointed out in 2014. Wait until the technology is ready, and then develop a next generation rocket, rather then rush out a sub-optimal design 'quickly'.
Now they have shot their powder and are stuck on a slightly improved Ariane 5 rocket with no reasonable path for upgrade. Exactly as many critics have pointed out in 2014.
> reusable, RP-1/LOX, Prometheus engine is similar reusable open cycle engine as Merlin with lots of 3D printed parts.
Prometheus has been in development since 2015 already, and they are not even at full duration testing yet. Bragging about a new GG engine today isn't that impressive, not for a space power that has been making engines for decades.
RocketLab, has just recently switched from Gas Generator to Staged. And with much less money their Archimedes seems to be developing much faster then Prometheus while being much more advanced.
Europe is just being out executed in so many way. RocketLab will basically develop a complete new rocket and advanced engine for a cost comparable to what Europe spends on engine development and re-usability test programs.
RocketLab will put this stuff into commercial deployment a decade before ArianeGroup despite having started years later.
Sorry, I'm not that impressed by 'maybe in 2035 we will clone SpaceX architecture from 2020' just with a much less optimized engine.
I'm hoping for some space race. It would be great if the United States would transfer a part of MIC funding to space exploration.
Twice the cost and at a small fraction of the frequency is competition in the way a rubber duck competes with a battle ship.
Ariana 6 isn’t meaningful competition. ArianeSpace’s sole value is in its potential of becoming competition if one day sensibly managed.
So it is crucial for Europe to maintain and develop its knowledge and industrial base, but indeed they should also adapt to compete because that's the only way to survive in the long term.
SpaceX built heavily on NASA's heritage. But very few people came from old space to SpaceX. The cultures and skills simply aren't very transferable.
That’s what the Starliner folks said. The fault in their argument was ignoring scale effects.
Ariane 6 buys Europe zero practical launch independence, other than maintaining the workforce (and accompanying skill set). If SpaceX blocks Europe, it’s game over for any constellation operator and, in all likelihood, the European commercial space sector.
Ariane 6 hopes to do 10 launches per year by 2030. That’s a few weeks’ Falcon 9s today. Each Ariane 6 launch requires subsidies to be competitive, and that’s assuming Arianespace’s forecasts hold. (They haven’t.) Every one of those euros could be used, instead, on R&D.
Ariane 6 uses cryogenic fuel. It has no landing system, mass-manufacturing site or refurbishment elements. That means that none of the foundational technologies for reusable launch are being worked on. (Ariane 5E would have been a strategic hedge. But Paris wouldn’t have it.)
The point is Ariane 6 enables nothing new. If SpaceX blocks Europe for some reason, with or without Ariane 6, Europe isn't going to have a LEO constellation. Keeping Ariane 5 (5ME [1]) and developing a reusable platform would have been a smarter use of resources. (It aso wasn't particularly daring, either, over the last decade.) Instead, the ESA gets stuck with SLS but for Brussels.
Falcon 9's fuel is cooled slightly, if not cryogenic (RP-1 becomes denser when cold), and of course Starship uses cryogenic methane. And they both use liquid oxygen, although that's an oxidizer, not a fuel.
An extreme illustration: would you say that Spain had strategic independent seafaring capability if it had maintained fleet a galleons to this day?
If USA will go hermit mode like at the end of 19th century, then they will have no other choice. And we certainly have signs of US wanting to go into isolation.
Vulcan's capacity for a year or so is already booked, and Ariane 6 is also fully booked for several years out. Others in the class are approaching first flight, but still lacking enough information to book a launch on.
Not here. If you’re bootstrapping a modern navy you don’t start by building galleons. Ariane 6 is the prettiest space galleon there ever was. That doesn’t translate into meaningful R&D for a reusable booster. (For example, cryogenic fuels aren’t great for reuse. So dump the engine. Their production cycles are artisan versus assembly line. Et cetera.)
This isn’t a story of European incompetence. It’s one of excellent engineers being wasted by an extractive monopoly. We had the same problem in America in ULA; we never figured out how to reform them. We got lucky in a reboot.
Which is why Starship doesn't... wait a second!
Depending on Russia or the USA is an intolerable risk.
I'm really puzzled at the lack of investment into any kind of reusable launch vehicle that could even come close to competing with SpaceX. Launching on this expensive relic of the past makes zero sense unless your payload is a military spysat.
If you're interested in money, there are better investment opportunities around. And if your angle is national security, the ~€500 million/year needed for a program such as Ariane 6 is little more than a rounding error.
It's not as high-profile as the race to the first moon landing, but America's new ambitions to returning to the Moon are at least in part fueled by not wanting to be upstaged by the Chinese. Now both are aiming for putting humans on the moon again before 2030, and both have plans for at least one moon base (that each originally announced to happen before 2030)
Of course, building a rocket requires a shit-ton of resources, so if anything is impressive then it's the management of those resources.
Disagree.
The newtonian physics part of flying a rocket is indeed the boring part of rocket science in these days of Ghz computing.
But all the engineering (an altogether different - if related - discipline) required is anything but simple.
And engineering and all of its sub-disciplines (materials science, propellant research, iterative refinement, operational research, logistics, 3d printing, computing, simulation, structural engineering, etc...) is both where the complexity lives and where the greatest progress in rocket science has been made.
The devil is in details, as usual.
The stresses, forces, environment etc that these machines face mean that it is always impressive the don't blow up.
And its silly talk to say that the ESA shouldn't have its own rocket programmes.
Spoken like a true software engineer ;)
It isn't the same thing as the APU in a plane (where I think most people are getting the 'auxiliary power unit'). The APU here is a secondary thruster which ensures proper pressure (and likely ullage) for the main engine to start.
Top comment from above submission:
mrtksn 18 hours ago
IIUC this is one of those projects that the governments fund when the free market solution doesn't exist.
Sure, Falcon 9 or Soyuz exists but those are foreign entities that might become unavailable due to politics, therefore a local solution must be developed even if its not the most cost effective. It also must help train and retain local talent and distribute funds to participating parties.
So, it may be a bit expensive but in the end you get a rocket, a workforce who knows how to design and build rockets and they happen to spend the money they receive locally.
IMHO they should invest in video production and art too, no one ever comes close to Space X in that department.
edit: Wow, so much negativity for a successful launch.It was so clearly superior to all other battleships that the name "dreadnought" become a generic name for a modern battleship.
But here's the thing: navies around the world resisted building their own dreadnoughts. If you've spent your military treasure on pre-dreadnought battleships, how do you explain to citizens that they're all obsolete and you need to start from scratch?
And so it is with reusable rockets. In 2018, Alain Charmeau, an ArianeSpace exec, said that re-usable rockets make no sense because, "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!" And that would be bad because what do you do with the employees? [1]
This is classic sunk-cost fallacy.
[1] https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/05/ariane-chief-seems-f...
Yet Starship managed to fly into orbit and re-enter successfully before Ariane 6 flew even once.
A decision which, according to Isaacson's Elon Musk, Musk insisted on against considerable opposition from his engineers. One more point against the frequent claim that Musk isn't a "real" engineer/doesn't really do anything at SpaceX.
We have people comparing strategic assets and state-owned enterprises to private commercial enterprises. Well done.
By now, making a new rocket today that is non-reusable is like inventing the penny farthing and trying to compete in modern day tour the France.
Europe deserves to be led by bold industrialists, not ran by frightened bureaucrats.
"passengers" → "payloads", I assume.
P. S. HN please tell me about your (European) nation's future rocket builder.
https://europeanspaceflight.com/sidereus-space-dynamics-comp...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aerobee
Sidereus' EOS is a miniature, reusable orbital launcher. Load it in a tuck, drive to a field outside town, launch it with your cubesat, then go pick it up at the local airport as it glides back down from space on its parafoil.
https://www.sidereus.space/eos/
SciFi stuff if it works.
There they are munching up unbudgeted food and oxygen.
Which will not be a problem, since ISS should have a reserve supply for 3 months, but it should impact the the next supply run.
Will Boeing bring them back?
I would think NASA has reached out to SpaceX, and possibly the Russians (? in today political climate?) and asked what their rescue capabilities might be. SpaceX seems likely to be able to prepare rescue rocket fairly quickly?
They are not stranded. They are staying because this Starliner is rated for 45 days at the station and since the service module (the location of the helium leak) is disposed of before reentry. Better to delay and attempt to gather as much information about the leak as possible while they can still run tests than have to try to figure out what might've been wrong after the fact.
Would the UK have been a part of this pre-Brexit?
They do not have a direct involvement in the Ariane project however.
I really hope they don’t give up and manage become more ambitious.
Interesting to think about a way how these perfectly connected people could be exchanged to some new, pragmatic generation.
The inspection costs needed for reusability are undervalued by the SpaceX fantroopers.
[1]: https://www.reuters.com/technology/space/europes-ariane-6-ro...
35:13
end of this the upper stage will flip in space and restart the Vinci engine to
break and set itself on a collision
35:19
course with Earth burning up in our atmosphere and limiting space debris but
before it touches atmosphere two
35:26
capsules are set to detach and had on their own mission to survive the extreme
temperatures of the re-entry and all
35:32
three elements will then splash down in the Pacific Ocean far away from
civilization this will end our mission
[0]
[...]
4:42:58
according to this new situation which means that the Vinci engine decided not
4:43:04
to restart because there was no ipu uh operating so he was not in a good
condition to restart and so there was a
4:43:12
passivation of the upper stage which was triggered in order to make it an object
4:43:18
which does not create um dangers of debris and the passivation works
4:43:25
perfectly according to plan uh and also it was the the launcher system decided
4:43:32
automatically not to to release the two capsules the two passengers because it
4:43:39
would have created additional debr and so uh we have an event which is not
4:43:44
understood yet which is why did the Apu stop but all the rest of the mission was
[1]