After successfully entering Earth's atmosphere, a European spacecraft is lost | Hacker News Reader

After successfully entering Earth's atmosphere, a European spacecraft is lost

arstechnica.com

73 pointsrbanffy41 comments

In my opinion, the key information:

"SpaceX required [..] nearly $3 billion [..] The Exploration Company would require a similar amount [..] It is not possible to raise that money from private capital markets right now by promising a great return a decade from now."

In other words: All the investors are looking for a quick buck. Nobody is willing to invest into the longer-term future anymore.

> Nobody is willing to invest into the longer-term future anymore

SpaceX raised private capital. It continues to raise private capital. (It still tapped into public coffers for Crew Dragon, though, because the demand side of that market remains entirely public.)

It could do this because NASA had committed to the Artemis programme. That’s the demand. ESA has no similar promise of returns for a private backer; giving money to these guys strikes closer to a grant or donation than investment.

Right now you can’t say much about NASA long time commitment either

> you can’t say much about NASA long time commitment either

Of course one can. Those plans could change. But they were set and funded and that inertia appears to be saving them [1].

ESA has nothing similar planned. (Beyond collaboration [2].)

[1] https://yellowhammernews.com/u-s-senate-directive-would-revi...

[2] https://www.nasa.gov/news-release/nasa-european-space-agency...

>All the investors are looking for a quick buck. Nobody is willing to invest into the longer-term future anymore.

that's a myth

you are confusing liquidity with other aspects of investing. name the biggest companies on the stock exchanges, they've been around for many years, and are expected to be around many more years. That's long term investing.

liquidity means that any particular investor can change their own personal priorities and get out of the long term play in the short term. You want to buy a house with your money, that's ok, the projects you've been invested in can soldier on without you.

if a new company with no track record of making money wants to tie up your investment while showing no results for a decade or more, you yourself would probably be unwilling to invest, because there are many alternative investments that give you liquidity and show results regularly.

I agree, it's about liquidity. But isn't building a company from the ground up always a pretty illiquid process? Until the company starts generating profits, your shares in a new start-up will always be hard to sell.

But then, how can anyone finance a start-up that takes a bit longer to build than the usual web mitm or web advertising play?

Large investors have a balanced portfolio mixing short-term bets with longer term ones.

Companies offering long-term prospects definitely fill a need.

aren't they just trying to get others to invest? and wouldn't such European Investments spur military funding or at least spark some heightened "interest"?

or are they trying to prove that the EU isn't willing "to adequately do space stuff"?

the US grabbed a top robotics company from the EU because the EU apparently refuses to evolve the game based on the rule set they created and CEOs are complaining about too much regulation instead of working with the constraints.

the US reduced constraints to an absolute minimum and, without question, got much farther than European companies but there is zero chance they can handle all the future load without becoming dependent on Chinese supply chains, or is there? and so they need to drive EU spending and European competition in order to drive the creation of European supply chains, in order to keep the markets diverse and incentivise the EU to strengthen their game on the African continent.

I'm out of the loop and mostly guessing ... a lot of middle class Germans are about to be 3rd, 4th, 5th generations heirs, ascending into the 1% and they will have the liquidity to build and expand 3D printing companies in all industries, including metal and construction and German universities are up to speed and I assume other European countries aren't too far behind.

then there is the whole 'Wiederaufbau' of Ukraine in the planning, a country with tech talent and space and now more than present in people's minds, which should additionally drive investments and partnerships aiming at next gen city, civil, construction and space tech.

would love to hear some opionions.

Surprisingly good result on a surprisingly low budget. I totally didn't expect a European company to make it. If it phoned home after reentry it means the hard part is done.

The Exploration Company know what they're doing and execute fast. Contrary to popular belief on here this is possible from Europe...

Of course, they rely on SpaceX because Europe doesn't have enough launch capacity to support their launch rate (1/year at best)

Europe decided that the priority purpose of their launch industry was to provide jobs, not competitive launches.

The primary purpose of the traditional European launch industry is to provide an independent launch capability for government payloads. Cost is irrelevant because the French government in particular wants to be able to launch payloads into orbit without depending on anyone else to do so.

It's failing at that too, in the same sense that maintaining a sailing ship fleet would have failed to provide independent seafaring capability in the latter half of the 19th century.

SpaceX has greatly raised the bar on what can be considered an "independent launch capability." Europe under the current system is greatly limited on what they can imagine doing in space. The equivalent of Starlink is not feasible, for example.

Underlying all this was a failure of vision, an assumption that use of space would be static and change only slowly, if at all, and that launch cost could not be significantly reduced.

Wouldn't it be nice if buying a space launch vehicle were like purchasing a car, instead of (a military) aircraft?

For that same matter, maybe that's part of what went wrong with the aircraft manufacturing business in America. The market really should not have been allowed to consolidate that much; to the point where incentives aligned to financial and regulatory capture / stasis (and pilots only certified on one type of flight vehicle), rather than someone skilled to operate a general aviation vehicle. Though with cars we do have a fairly standardized control scheme, at least for the most important parts. Steering wheel, go and stop foot levers.

heres a gaggle og MIGS, but name your flavor

https://www.barnstormers.com/cat_search.php?headline=MIG&bod...

> For that same matter, maybe that's part of what went wrong with the aircraft manufacturing business in America. The market really should not have been allowed to consolidate that much ...

Consolidation was an inevitable result of the end of the Cold War and massive cuts to defense spending. The defense industry was _encouraged_ to consolidate because the alternative would have been bankruptcy. Obviously, time has shown that this consolidation was bad for the industry and the government, but a lot has happened in the last 35 years that would not have been foreseen then.

> to the point where incentives aligned to financial and regulatory capture / stasis (and pilots only certified on one type of flight vehicle), rather than someone skilled to operate a general aviation vehicle

The type rating structure really has quite little to do with aerospace industry consolidation (if anything, the industry is too fractured to allow for more generic type ratings). Aircraft, their systems, and their flight dynamics are different enough that trying to create a more general type rating would really be impossible. What you do see are families of aircraft which either completely share a type rating or require very limited additional training to maintain a rating for multiple family types (e.g. all 737s, 757/767, 777/787, A32x/A33x/A35x).

Single piston GA aircraft are really the exception, not because they all share the same behavior (there is a truly wild range of flight dynamics and avionics), but because the GA community (particularly in the US) is so large and established that requiring more training/experience is politically impossible. So long as GA accidents don't kill too many bystanders, this will remain the case.

Yep. Two things the space industry and airline industry have in common is that (i) you need to spend an enormous amounts of money to have a remotely viable product, because the physics is hard even without regulation (ii) you don't get that money back unless the product you've spent all that money developing has better unit economics than your competitors for a sufficiently large number of target customers (or your national government steps in to protect you) because there aren't many buyers and the market isn't buying aircraft or payload space because they like the vibe or the aesthetics. That naturally tends towards monopoly (or oligopolies with carefully defined differences in capabilities, some of which turn out to be unprofitable segments...)

> Cost is irrelevant

I agree with your overall point, but I think the person you replied to has a point as well. The cost of developing F9 is ridiculously low (considering the industry), so it should have been possible to do by any country / group of countries if the cost was the only problem...

> "According to NASA's own independently verified numbers, SpaceX's development costs of both the Falcon 1 and Falcon 9 rockets were estimated at approximately $390 million in total."

This seems like revisionist cope. Ariane 4 and 5 were extremely successful in the commercial launch market in the 90s and 00s before SpaceX trounced them. Now that they're floundering, it's not because they failed to keep up but because they never meant to be successful in the first place? That's just not true.

And? So does everyone else, because Transporter rideshares are cheap and incubating your own rocket programme isn't.

SpaceX relies on Europe and Taiwan for its semiconductors. Does the fact SpaceX can't be adequately served by domestic capacity and their in-house semiconductor programme is just getting started mean they don't execute?! Or is it just a little thing called trade that Americans used to believe in?

> SpaceX relies on Europe and Taiwan for its semiconductors

Used and relies on aren’t interchangeable. (To the extent there is reliance, it’s more on Taiwan than Europe.)

tbh launch is at least as commoditised as space semiconductor packaging, especially when it's rideshares to LEO; the Exploration Company wouldn't struggle to get into space if the Falcon 9 wasn't a thing, it'd just have to pay someone else more[1], and no particular reason to doubt its ability to deliver on its longer term plan to develop its own launch capability either. Doubt that SpaceX would want to operate a Falcon 9 without any chips on board or locally-packaged COTS parts either!

[1]if Europeans wanting IODs of their reentry capsules for some reason couldn't use SpaceX, ArianeSpace absolutely has the technical ability to take the equivalent to Transporter mission payloads to the same orbits at the same launch cadence (this was the 14th Transporter rideshare mission since 2021), but obviously price-sensitive rideshare customers aren't going to use it whilst US and Indian launches are options, and much cheaper ones. Extra cost might be a dealbreaker for some less well funded space startups, but not for the company we're talking about here...

> launch is at least as commoditised as space semiconductor packaging

Cadence and national origin de-commoditise launch.

> the Exploration Company wouldn't struggle to get into space if the Falcon 9 wasn't a thing, it'd just have to pay someone else more

And wait longer. Higher cost, uncertainty and lead times challenge project viability.

> ArianeSpace absolutely has the technical ability to take the equivalent to Transporter mission payloads to the same orbits at the same launch cadence

Arianespace has a negligible fraction of SpaceX’s launch cadence. Europe doesn’t have the ability to build e.g. a LEO constellation with its own rockets, or replace destroyed orbital materiel in a conflict as quickly as China or America can.

SpaceX's launch cadence is great for expanding their in-house constellation but basically irrelevant to companies purchasing rideshare slots for in orbit demonstrations like the Exploration Company. Take it from someone that's expecting to fly hardware on two of the next three Transporter missions (in late February and late June next year...). ArianeSpace could absolutely spin up an extra couple of missions on those timescales if their prices were the only option, and satellite integration timescales are a bigger issue for development than the timing of the next launch window. We wouldn't like Ariane 6 prices being added to our mission costs and at the margins some companies wouldn't afford it, but the Exploration Company has raised $230m and has already launched on an Ariane 6. The "Europeans have to use US capacity because they can't innovate har har" argument simply isn't at all relevant to IODs on Transporter missions (which ironically are full of US companies buying slots on European companies' deployment platforms as well as having plenty of critical non-US kit even in SpaceX's unusually vertically-integrated supply chain. Not because the US can't innovate har har but because the commercial space industry is globally distributed and price driven. Well, maybe not price driven if you're the military or Jeff Bezos building your LEO constellation on ArianeSpace launches whilst working on New Glenn...).

Don't think high cadence launches are even particularly high on the list of the US's military advantages in the event of global conflict extending into space: destruction of non-trivial amounts of orbital material would render its launch advantage moot until the Kessler syndrome problem was solved...

> irrelevant to companies purchasing rideshare slots for in orbit demonstrations like the Exploration Company

Irrelevant for rideshare. But ArianeSpace “spin[ning] up an extra couple of missions” is also not ridesharing. Last I checked, you can book a ride on SpaceX faster than anything Ariane.

In the hypothetical where rideshares on SpaceX suddenly cease to exist or to be available to European companies, ArianeSpace would be delighted to have the opportunity to replace them on similar schedules, and would be able to spin up extra rideshare missions to meet that sudden demand for their services reasonably easily (certainly far more easily than SpaceX or anyone else in the industry could nearshore their entire supply chain fwiw; it's pretty obvious your use/rely distinction cuts the other way). SpaceX owns the LEO rideshare market because they can turn a profit at prices others can't match, not because 3 Transporter missions per year is a difficult launch cadence.

""For the first time ever in our country's history, we are making leading-edge 4nm chips on American soil, American workers — on par in yield and quality with Taiwan," Raimondo told Reuters."

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/semiconductors/ts...

https://www.tsmc.com/static/abouttsmcaz/index.htm

Exactly. A Taiwanese company has just started manufacturing leading edge semiconductors in the US. SpaceX, on the other hand uses Taiwanese semiconductors mostly packaged by STMicroelectronics in Europe, although it's announced plans to in-house some of the packaging. Because until recently, it was kind of assumed that buying things from other countries because they did them cheaply and efficiency was sensible business rather than a glaring supply chain weakness or "your continent doesn't innovate, our country is better than yours"...

See also European companies and their choice of launch options...

The execution is possible. The funding is a whole lot harder.

They’re solving the funding problem too apparently.

It’s great to see a company blow past the usual reasons mentioned by European naysayers.

“Mission possible” does not sound like a good name for this kind of situation.

I actually like it and it seems like it turned out reasonably well.

Very confused why any company would pursue human spaceflight. Are there enough ultrarich interested in this type of joyride to make the endeavor profitable?

Hungarians in space , small country but mighty people. We should just change the government

European spacecraft......launched in the US by SpaceX.

Hilarious.

Why is that hilarious?

1. The Exploration Company builds shuttles, not launchers

2. The US had to rely on Russian shuttles for decades after the Challenger drama

Space is hard and sarcasm not useful.

Don’t forget the JWST was launched by an Arianne rocket…

Not because there was no American launch option, but because Europe wanted to be able to use the telescope, so launch cost was their contribution. Ariane 5 is more than capable of course.

i used to be just as shortsighted but that's not how money and building civilisations works.

the US picked an entirely different set of constraints and thus dominated the past decades with ease.

the EU on the other hand, handles and will handle millions of refugees to come, pay for their education and it will be imperative to expand the job markets. and industries.

this should, theoretically, within 10 years, "change the game" again.

"European", "US", "Asian" is just a sponsorship tag with the teams, hardware and knowledge supply chains being globalised anyway, if I am not wrong.

> European", "US", "Asian" is just a sponsorship tag with the teams

That sounds simplistic. They each have vastly different governance principles and philosophical views about the economy.

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