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Comment by themgt | 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.

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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.

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