Head of French nat'l space agency warns of American/Spacex dominance
parabolicarc.com
parabolicarc.com
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The three perfectly successful launches of the new American Falcon 9 rocet, developed and launched by the company SpaceX, which was founded in 2002 in a garage in California, pose many questions.
It is, in fact, the first time in history that a privately-owned company has successfully launched--and on its first attempt--a rocket, and what's more, with an approach that's nearly opposite of traditional aerospace industry practices.
These successes lend even more weight to SpaceX's announced ambitions to dominate the aerospace sector. Meanwhile, Europe generally and France particularly have begun the development of the rocket Ariane 6, which is intended to debut at the beginning of the next decade and which will therefore compete with SpaceX's rockets.
Particularly attractive prices
Europe will, by the way, need to announce a definitive price point for Ariane 6 in the months to come. SpaceX has just demonstrated that it can handle commercial launches at particularly attractive prices.
If one compares SpaceX's rockets to its competitors, it differs in three major points. First, its perfect fit with US government payloads: satellites from NASA and the Department of Defense constitute an important part of its manifest and an even greater part of its revenues, because the American government is willing to pay more per launch than commercial customers. Second, its reduced size and ease of construction, which lead to particularly low costs per launch and which make it extremely competitive for commercial sattelite launch: the last two launches of Falcon 9 have been the first commercial satellite launches for the US in several years, due to the lack of competitiveness and availability of traditional rockets. Last, its technical state and industrial organization which, since the start, have been designed around the goal of minimizing development and launch costs: instead of using untested technology, the Falcon 9 uses well-tested technology, easy to develop and cheap to manufacture, and the rocket's manufacture uses very few subcontractors, which limits production costs.
The race to space
Where traditional aerospace industry methods have gone wrong--over the last ten years, the United States has stopped development of several traditional rockets, losing millions of dollars--the Falcon 9 could well propel the US back to the head of the space race.
Not to mention that SpaceX is planning further developments of its rockets which, starting this year, could fly an even more powerful version which might eventially even be reusable, reducing even further the price of a launch--not even the Space Shuttle could do this, though it was designed to!
Such a development would have particularly damaging consequences for Europe; not only for our part manufacturing capabilities but also for the destabilization of our ability to get to space on our own--we depend on the commercial success of our rockets, since we have comparatively fewer European government satellites to launch. These are the considerations that have defined Ariane 6's specifications, so close to Falcon 9's: ease of use for the launch of government satellites and commercial satellites, simplified design, streamlined manufacturing process to greatly diminish launch costs.
We must react
We must admit that today the United States dares us to compete with them by developing a system that meets these recommendations. While for years we've feared competition from the cheaper labor costs of emerging countries, the real competition is from the United States and their capacity to innovate.
This situation is much like that at the beginning of the 1970s in the world of computer, an industry that was turned upside down by a glut of new upstarts which all shared a common origin: in a garage in California. Nearly forty years later, the aerospace industry--which, like the computer industry in 1970, is considered a flagship industry--is experiencing the same revolution.
Europe has dearly bought its supremacy in rocket launches. Ariane 5 is currently the best rocket in the world, considering that its reliability has been established in launch after launch since 2003, and it will remain such because Europe has decided to sustain it and continually adapt it to a changing market.
Yet we must respond to the challenge posed by SpaceX and advance without delay in the development of Ariane 6. We do not propose to develop another Ariane rocket; we need to reinvent the development of Ariane and take the same path as taken by the computer industry in the 1970s and more recently taken by SpaceX. That's the lesson given to us by the garages of California.
[1] http://www.reddit.com/r/spacex/comments/1wgy7a/cnes_figures_...