So because an incumbent exists ESA should give up, let their production and development pipeline rot away and "enjoy" the monopoly until it's too late to change something?
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
It's not commercially viable. That means it has no room to organically drive economies of scale and thus learning curves, which has downstream effects on evertyhing from recruiting to supplier negotiations. Europe has a launch vehicile. It does not have a platform. Virtually everything in Ariane 6 will have to be thrown out to be relevant in a modern, reusable design.
Put another way, SLS didn't prepare Boeing and Lockheed Martin one iota for the modern launch industry. If anything, it drove ambitious people away from them.
Jobs, yes, strategic, no. Being able to put ten birds up in a year means an adversary can blind your space capabilities, if we’re taking the argument to absurd ends.
We Americans would be defensive about ULA, probably, if it weren’t for SpaceX. The problem is the EU has no plan B. If SpaceX cuts them off, Ariana or not, they’re crippled as a spacefaring enterprise.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
SpaceX is absolutely nothing new in the process, other than having been funded by explicit military program to prop up new space launch vendors.
It is not just "a commercial launch provider". I don't expect the US to launch their military payloads with Chinese rockets, private or not, in the same way I don't expect China to use SpaceX for their own military payloads. Same thing for the EU, they prefer to send their military payloads with their own rockets, that is Ariane.
Ariane is private too, it is also a commercial launch provider. It is heavily subsidized by the EU member states and not as competitive as SpaceX, but from a national security perspective, the situation is similar.
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.
But spending on development of new steam engines when the competition already has electric ones is pretty backward.
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).
Edit: ok, got it now. This is about a European rocket serving European strategic needs, why would I be talking about USA?
It's a huge fucking problem if you're not American. If you don't want to be subject to American law. If you don't want your technology inspected or tampered with by Americans. If you don't want the transaction to be in dollars (extra-territoriality of US law on all dollar transactions). If you don't want to deal with the problem of American citizens and companies subject to FISA, who could face severe repercussions in the US if they don't spy or facilitate spying on their non-American clients.
The US isn't really interested in the secrets of some Malaysian or Brazilian TV satellite.
Once again, compliance with US regulations, including export control, dual-use goods and tax regulations, can be weaponized, and has been in the past.
Maybe the TV satellite manufacturer has also supplied a weather satellite to Brazil that contains technologies covered by export control, bingo. Your satellite and your assets in the USA are frozen until the manufacturer provide all the information needed to decide whether or not it was a spy satellite.
The godamn Mars rover is covered by 14 export control technologies. https://www.bis.doc.gov/index.php/documents/pdfs/1008-satell...
It's a minefield and it was designed to be one. I know of several non-defense companies whose first question on the phone is "are you a US person as defined by FATCA and FISA ?".
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?
What race ? Having your own launcher is already a win in a fast changing world