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.
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!
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.
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.
Depending on Russia or the USA is an intolerable risk.
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.
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.
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 ;)