Hacker News Reader

Now, SpaceX may be building a lot of profit into that $70m, but from the customer's POV it hardly matters

Ariane 6 cost $5 billion to develop, more than NASA paid SpaceX for all of HLS development and lunar landing, and has had as many successful launches (2) in its entire 14 month launch history as Falcon 9 has had in the last 2 days. And Falcon 9 is the old, boring, table stakes rocket.

If your goal is actually getting stuff to space then only being able to get ~1/100th the stuff to space does matter quite a lot.

That $5bn is a sunk cost, and Arianespace should be, within reason, able to deliver as many of them as ESA wants. My point is that it's not clear that ESA actually has a huge problem here; an Ariane 6 launch would appear to cost them similar to or less than a Falcon 9 launch does NASA (never mind a Falcon 9 Heavy, for which NASA pays about 200 million a shot; the bigger Ariane 6 variant sits somewhere between the two in role). This is a change from Ariane 5, which really was far more expensive (almost twice the cost).

It's just totally nonsensical to talk about price when Falcon 9 has no competition on price. SpaceX is rationally going to charge the highest price customers will pay. If a launch costs them $20m but no one else can do comparable kg-to-orbit priced lower than $80m (at much lower volume of launches), they will charge $70-80m.

should be, within reason, able to deliver as many of them as ESA wants

Where "within reason" means 1-2% of launches Falcon 9 can do. Again, if Ariane 6 internal costs were $20m and they could do 150 launches/year, you would see actual competition and prices going down, and Jevons paradox with a lot of new launch demand.

As a _launch customer_, it doesn't _really_ matter to ESA what the underlying cost is, only what they are _charged_. For the time being, Ariane 6 isn't drastically more expensive than the list price for the competition, and is, as above, _cheaper than the cost that other space agencies are actually paying for Falcon 9_.

If ESA was actually a commercial launch company, this would be different, but they're not. (Arianespace _is_, kind of, and _it_ should be far more concerned about this).

For practical purposes the number of Ariane 6 launches is gated by demand. Over the long term you'd probably expect it to be 5 to 10 per year, same as Ariane 5 used to be.

> For the time being, Ariane 6 isn't drastically more expensive than the list price for the competition

That's because SpaceX is soaking up its spare capacity with Starlink. I expect once that market is saturated SpaceX's launch prices will begin plummeting, as it seeks to maximise volume through market share.

More critically: SpaceX discounts for volume contracts. And it's the only launch company offering the kind of cadence populating a LEO constellation requires.

Your cheaper cost is leaving out the subsidies paid to ArianeSpace by EU governments.

> "My point is that it's not clear that ESA actually has a huge problem here"

It's not about the ESA as a client and those bespoke science payloads; it's about (mass-produced) European satellite constellations, and similar high-volume, low-cost payloads.

Apples, oranges... Falcon proved new use cases for rockets and with the EU looking for alternative of Starlink, the EU now must cover the same use case as well without Trump in the supply chain.

> Now, SpaceX may be building a lot of profit into that $70m, but from the customer's POV it hardly matters. They're not in drastically different cost realms

SpaceX internal costs are < $20m a launch. There's a huge profit margin.

SpaceX prices have risen because they have effectively no competition in the medium-> heavy launch market, not because they are more expensive to launch than they used to be.

It's a huge gulf.

> Now, for commercial it's a different story, though really Arianespace and its predecessors have never been _hugely_ competitive there; even before SpaceX their market was mostly stuff that couldn't go on Russian rockets.

This is also not true. Arianespace dominated the commercial market prior to SpaceX. They were doing half a dozen GTO missions a year. Yes it's not dozens and dozens but prior to the dropping of launch costs, expensive GEO satellites launched into GTO was the market.

I'm sorry but this "maybe reusability isn't worth it" is the exact line that ULA and Arianespace have bandied around for a decade and they have lost their entire lunch to a company that can undercut them and still make a healthy profit margin.

> Arianespace and its predecessors have never been _hugely_ competitive

Arianespace is run as a jobs programme and profit centre. It explicitly doesn't even try to compete [1].

So long as Arianespace soaks up European launch budgets, SpaceX's trans-Atlantic primacy is assured.

[1] https://illdefinedspace.substack.com/p/catching-super-heavy-...

Its not urgent until the US government starts blocking ESA from launching anything unless the EU agrees to some trade deal.

Being independent isn't necessarily about lower cost. Its about having an alternative that you control.

... Wait, how would the US government block ESA from launching stuff? ESA has its own rockets, which launch from its own facility and which are not drastically more expensive than Falcon 9 (this is a _fairly_ recent change; Ariane 5 was far more expensive than 6).

> ESA has its own rockets, which launch from its own facility and which are not drastically more expensive than Falcon 9

ESA's launch cadence does not permit populating a LEO constellation. On this, currently, America has a monopoly. (Soon, I expect, to be shared with China.)

Developing a reusable launch vehicle is not needed for a fast launch cadence. The expendable Soyuz family has had 2006 launches since 1957 [1]. That's one in just over 12 days, and in reality, the cadence has been a lot faster at times (for long, continuous stretches).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_orbital_launcher...

> a reusable launch vehicle is not needed for a fast launch cadence

You're correct. But ESA isn't developing a mass-manufactured ELV, either. Themis is basically rebuilding Falcon 1, Prometheus a methalox Merlin.

Nothing ESA is doing generates launch independence from America (or China) in respect of LEO constellations or a war in space.

(That said, I think reusable super-heavy launch, e.g. Starship, will render both mass-manufactured ELVs and these Falcon 1/9 siblings obsolete.)

2nd amendment.

How does that help the European Space Agency?

A joke on how Americans use it to solve their problems, even ones studying from the 2nd amendment itself.

ESA has in the recent past used SpaceX rockets to deliver payloads. [0]

ESA now has the ability but my comment was specifically pointing out that ESA absolutely should have the independent ability to launch equipment.

https://www.satellitetoday.com/launch/2024/10/07/spacex-laun...