Hacker News Reader

Comment by perihelions | Hacker News Reader

- "The top factors ESA will consider in this first phase of the challenge are each proposer's business plan, technical credibility, and financial credibility."

The grand European strategy is... to task government bureaucrats to review startups' business plans?? This is going to so predictably lead to more of the same—the creation of companies optimized for writing proposals, and for pleasing bureaucrats.

- "ESA also isn't setting requirements on launcher performance, reusability, or..."

That they're still ambivalent whether they should pursue reusability or not shows how hopelessly unprepared they are.

View on HN

> to review startups' business plans

How exactly do you imagine a government contract working if it's not reviewed before being granted?

> That they're still ambivalent whether they should pursue reusability or not

So they shouldn't verify if a proposal is credible because that's too much bureaucracy but they should dictate to the companies how they want to approach the problem rather than letting each company make their own plans and see who comes up with the best proposal?

> How exactly do you imagine a government contract working if it's not reviewed before being granted?

This. ESA's grant approval process is, to its credit, usually considerably more focused on technical excellence than handwavy projections and box ticking common in other government grant applications and tenders, and whilst PSS forms may be a PITA, you'd think a company destined to solve the hard physics and unit economics problems of building a viable commercial launch service could figure out how to fill them in when given a EUR160m incentive to do so.

The European Launcher Challenge is based off the NASA COTS programme that originally funded the Falcon 9 (just with less money, because Europe, which is a bigger problem than straw bureaucrats) Don't know why people seem to think SpaceX got that money through NASA's magical genius American foresight anticipating Starlink, as opposed them being impressed with how SpaceX complied with their requests for very detailed milestone based plans (which two companies that failed to make progress also managed...)

- "they should dictate to the companies how they want to approach the problem"

No; I mean they should define the problem they need solved. If they're too unfocused to define that problem as "mass-produced reusable rockets", that's a strong signal they've already lost.

There's a dozen newspace startups pursuing reusability, and it's Europe's loss that none of them are in Europe.

No, the problem should be "find a way to launch x tons for <€Y, and be able to do that z times a year".

If mass produced reusable rockets are the best solution then companies will propose that.

Do you actually think that there are any viable alternatives to reusable rockets as a solution to this problem?

There could be? People are smart, maybe someone would come up with a viable approach. Point is, if reusable rockets are the only viable approach, then everyone will use that approach to meet the requirement.

The government should be a regulator and set ground rules. It should provide a market and clear requirements. Then leave private business alone to meet those requirements. If they need funding, leave the business to the VC industry.

They’re offering to fund 160 million euros to bootstrap private enterprises providing launch services to the ESA. Of course they want to review the business plan to make sure it’s viable before dropping a bundle of government money on some random company.

Which is completely the wrong way of doing it. They are the market. So define it and leave it to private industry to fund and develop the capabilities to meet their requirements.

If they say, we are willing to spend X amount of money on Y number of launches. You can rent our launch sites for tests. Here is a list of requirements. They would see incredible results.

But no europe must micromanage and do things in their own bureaucratic way that has always failed.

To compare, meanwhile Astra just $80 million to relaunch (so to speak).

The EU is mostly stringent on the environment, and single-use rockets are pretty bad for the environment: all the metal and sophisticated parts must be produced, only to be thrown into the ocean.

I would expect reusability to be a requirement based on that factor alone. You ca produce carbon-neutral fuel, but there is a lot of environmental load involved in production of the very rockets.

reusability is mainly done for cost instead of environment, but you need to launch a lot to re-cup the costs, and esa is not a commercial org like spacex.

I do think the ESA rockets use a more eco friendly fuel then others, that is probably more important then some metal on the seabed.

Solid rocket fuel is one of the less eco-friendly things that exists. A fully-stacked Ariane 6 is, by mass, 11% chlorine.

That doesn’t really work if you try to create competitors to already established companies in a limited market

lol you don't know the half of it. Working with ESA for anything but the most trivial project is beyond frustrating; it's basically 99% about producing swathes of documentation, which in itself is more akin to philosophy and semantic dissertations over obscure standards than actual technical work.

ESA is so risk averse that it's even weird for a space company

A good counterexample is the Arctic Weather Satellite project. It was defined as a new space process at ESA, so documentation required was reduced at the minimum, and risk acceptance was increased. Absolutely successful, on time, on budget, contractors happy, end users happy. But it is a small project and still difficult to replicate at large and to spread the mindset to other sections at ESA. Source: me. I work at that project as ground segment engineer.

agreed, but what would you argue are the reasons for this mindset? i imagine the main cause is structural, ie. having to deal with all the member states?

not just the members states but also all the other behemoths stakeholders like Airbus, Thales, OHB and so on, which need to make sure that new missions are as easy to adapt to their preexisting flight heritage as possible

A bureaucrat is not allowed to spend money on anything risky and must never allow for money to be used on something other than the intended use.

So the entire process must be micromanaged to death with documentation, which results in the money mostly being spent on the documentation.

“we will continue doing the thing we have always done despite decades of evidence it won’t produce the thing we claim it will produce”

At some point, they need to adopt a different strategy. It feels like every European strategy is optimized for the comfort of bureaucrats rather than actual results.

A bureaucracy can not simplify itself. It is a complex system that can only go one way, ever more complex, until it deadlocks and eventually someone burns it to the ground and starts anew.

> This is going to so predictably lead to more of the same—the creation of companies optimized for writing proposals, and for pleasing bureaucrats.

The european way. I wonder if the bureaucrats even know this is the inevitable result or if it is the actual plan.

Probably just the result of them not knowing any other way of working and forcing it onto everyone they interact with.

I would love to disagree, but after being involved with Gaia X… they cannot even pin down what Gaia X is, even when prompted to. It’s something about a standard for creating standards for a European cloud, but by now we’re several years and even more meta layers in, millions have been spent, and… nothing has come out of it.

It feels like the EU could be so much, if only other people were steering it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com