This article is written as if the delays are some kind of gotcha, but is it really that bitter a pill to swallow? The goal was never to outcompete SpaceX on price. The EU wants to have access to space technology that's not tied up to foreign governments or oligarchs, and reduce the launch cost in the process.
Obviously such a program will be more expensive than a private endeavor, no member state is going to invest into the program without some kind of return and that comes with delays and higher cost.
Shopping around for launches now that the Ariane 6 has been delayed isn't some kind of epic defeat in the battle for spaceflight, it's just an inconvenience necessary to keep other projects on track.
> This article is written as if the delays are some kind of gotcha, but is it really that bitter a pill to swallow? The goal was never to outcompete SpaceX on price.
Sort of.
It's easy to forget, since SpaceX has such dominance over the space industry currently, but commercial space was mostly split between Europe and Russia before SpaceX. The goal of Ariane 6 was to help ArianeGroup maintain its marketshare - particularly of GEO/GTO launches - in the face of aggressive pricing by SpaceX.
> Shopping around for launches now that the Ariane 6 has been delayed isn't some kind of epic defeat in the battle for spaceflight, it's just an inconvenience necessary to keep other projects on track.
I think there may be some missing context here.
There has been a somewhat strong movement to limit European institutional launches to European rockets, in the same way that the DoD/NASA does with US launchers.
Keeping the legacy Ariane 5 launch platform alive is fine. But Ariane 6 effort and funding should have been directed into a highest-priority ESA project to create SpaceX-style reusable heavy-lift launch vehicles. Europe cannot let an increasingly unstable Elon Musk be the de facto gatekeeper to space.
I know Ariane 6 development goes way back but it doesn't make sense to invest more in the development of single-use heavy-lift launch vehicle.
Edit: The initial concept art for Ariane 7 suggests it is a SpaceX-style reusable rocket.
Ariane 7 is not due for anything. Its just some agencies playing around with ideas. There is no real plan for Ariane 7 and no authorization for anything.
Also, people need to understand that most of the Ariane 6 is just Ariane 5 ME. Lots of parts of the Ariane 6 had been in development long before the Ariane 6.
The new upper stage engine took 20+ years to develop.
It was very hard for ESA to even get funding for Ariane 6, many nations wanted to stick to Ariane 5 ME. It will be a long while until the authorize another 4 billion $ for a new rocket.
>Europe cannot let an increasingly unstable Elon Musk be the de facto gatekeeper to space.
unstable according to who, the media who are mad at him over Twitter? I keep seeing people make claims like this but if he was such a lunatic it seems like Blue Origin, Lockheed/Boeing, or the entirety of Europe should be able to beat SpaceX pretty easy if it's being run by a lunatic or just wait for it to collapse. Occam's razor would be that Musk isn't really as crazy as his public persona
and yet there are competitors with far bigger budgets who can't seem to poach those engineers doing the work. Or for some reason refuse to hire the engineers that are kicking their ass. So Musk is either a better manager(getting more done with equal talent) or better at finding talent that Boeing and Blue Origin reject. If Musk is actively impeding SpaceX, why can't these companies seem to beat him? SpaceX engineers should be jumping at the chance to take their knowledge to Boeing/Lockheed/Blue Origin/Europe and work for people who are better than Musk(according to the media)
BlueOrigin is spending 1-2 billion a year easly on New Glenn. That is probably as much or more then SpaceX spends on Starship. And there is really no question what the better program.
> Or his choices turned out to be better out of poor luck. Survivorship bias.
If you start out with 1000 and 1 is successful claiming survivor bias might be valid, if its a tiny number of companies this explanation doesn't really work. Specially in a field where before SpaceX most starups just outright failed with no survivors at all.
Hard for me to judge spacex, but I know Tesla is second to last in reliability (at place 27, only better than Lincoln). Let me quote from the report:
"Model Y still has body hardware issues with the tailgate and door alignment, paint defects, and multiple other problems. The Model X and Model S have body hardware, climate system, and in-car electronics problems. All three models are well below average."
Maybe, an unstable slave driver who just wasted 44B because he couldn't keep his mouth shut is not the best leader for anything that requires long term care??
If you invoke a report, how about actually providing the report? Because I think this wasn't a report about reliability at all. Paint defects have nothing to do with reliability for example.
If its the report I'm thinking about, the difference between Tesla and their competitors isn't actually all that great. Not to mention this report is already a few years on.
Also, this report only evaluated Model Y from California, China, Berlin and Austin have better reputation for quality.
Model Y is the most sold car in the world both by volume and revenue in Q1 2023. I don't know about you but if I can choose between some 'report' and being car that makes the most money of any car on the planet, I know what I would choice.
Its a bit ridiculous to say 'haha you loser your 27 in some random report' and ignore that Tesla is both growing very fast an is highly profitable. Call me crazy but I thought those things were important.
Musk really is the only person where people have to make up these ridiculous arguments to somehow justify that he is an insane madman, despite his companies being incredibly successful.
> not the best leader for anything that requires long term care??
He is the longest serving CEO in the car and the space industry. He is literally known for having a long term view and both of his major companies have seen incredibly growth for 20+ years. Like 2 decades isn't long term enough for you?
I get that people dislike Musk, he isn't very likeable, but some basic logic needs to be applied when criticizing.
This is such an strange line of argument. Nobody would ever use such an insane line of argument for anybody other then Musk.
Of course in a company of 10k+ the real work is not done by the CEO. Like this is an absurd standard.
But since when does company leadership not matter anymore? SpaceX has been consistently successful for 25 years and somehow the founder, CEO and chief engineer had nothing to do with it?
I am not the media. I am not mad at him for buying twitter but mad at how horrible he was to it's employees and how he manages it now.. I am a person who bought a Tesla, and follows every SpaceX launch. A big fan! Until about 3 years ago when he started getting increasingly unhinged, or perhaps, no longer hiding that he has always been mean, petty, and often stupid outside the realm of newtonian mechanics.
Free speech absolutionist! Then de-platforms NPR and reinstates misogynists, racists, and insurrectionists. ok.
This is just such nonsense. Musk is the literally the longest serving CEO in the car and space industry. And he is well known for being the opposite of hands-off.
You can read interviews with lots of former engineers, journalist who cover SpaceX and pretty much every other source, Musk is incredibly hands on, he leads engineering meeting that can sometimes be 4h long going into the night.
What is your source for this 'hands-off' attitude? Because its the opposite of what every source who actually works or observes SpaceX professionally.
The reality is many people just hate Musk and feel the need to not just dislike him personal but try to discredit everything he has ever done. Giving credit to somebody who you personally dislike as a person is just not something many people are willing to accept.
Wouldn’t that signal competence? He has set up an amazing organization furthering his ultimate goal(colonizing space).
Now he can waste his free time on Twitter, just like everybody else
I agree; he's chosen good people, and he's set an ethos. It's not just luck.
But "wasting his time on Twitter" cost him $44Bn, and landed him with serious problems he can do without. People who control that much money don't discuss their financial plans on Twitter for lulz, because it's irresponsible.
In the Netherlands every single project goes vastly over budget. It's never been a bitter pill. There's always more money to throw at things and people forget.
The entire European space program is but a rounding error in the grand scheme of things.
I agree, pointing that something is running over budget, when it is done by public company. That might be surprising only for people outside of Europe.
When Ariane 6 was first discuss politically it was all about how it would beat SpaceX in the market, how competitive it would be and so on and so on. Endlessly talking about how Arianespace was so superior to SpaceX in terms of launch cadence and reliability and so on.
And now 10 years later its 'well we need to launch sats ourself, of course we can't compete with SpaceX on the open market'.
If their goal had actually been assured independent access to space, doing the Ariane 5 ME was a better plan. Because the reality is, the cost for Ariane 6 is far greater then the money saved by going from Ariane 5 ME to Ariane 6. It will take a decade or more of flying Ariane 6 before this actual saves money. And by then the better have their next rocket in planning.
This BBC article from 7 years back is a great read [0]:
For its part, Airbus Safran does not envisage making Ariane 6 recoverable, not in the short term.
Mr Charmeau believes that different market conditions apply in Europe and the US, which means there will not be a single, winner-takes-all approach.
He cites, for example, the restricted procurement that exists in all major political blocs, which essentially bars foreign rockets from launching home institutional and government satellites. Nowhere is this more true than in the US, but in Europe too there is an "unwritten rule" that European states should use European rockets.
Mr Charmeau added: "And we have other specificities in Europe, such as the technology of propulsion, which is much better than the US one, both in solid and cryogenic propulsion. This allows us to launch [two satellites at once], which is another factor for competitiveness, maybe much better than re-usability - we will see in the future. And one characteristic, for example, is that we have only one (main) engine on the Ariane 64, whereas our competitor is going for re-usability because he is using much more engines. (The Falcon 9 has nine engines on its first stage.)
...
"I could talk for two hours about the advantages or disadvantages of re-usability. Is it appropriate for the European situation? I don't say 'no'; I don't say 'yes'. I just say 'we're discussing it'; we're looking into it in detail.
"But just look to your daily life: you are buying returnable bottles or one-way bottles, and obviously for both there is a market."
Two satellites at once - just imagine! Always worth keeping in mind the ability of intelligent, powerful people in positions of leadership to confidently state absolute laughable nonsense which is treated seriously up until the moment it's proved invalid by cold hard reality.
I don't see stating that it "may be much better than re-usability, we will see in the in the future" as absolute laughable nonsense, I see it formulating an assumption that one approach might potentially better than another, but leaving room to be disproven later. The very basis of the scientific method.
> such as the technology of propulsion, which is much better than the US one, both in solid and cryogenic propulsion
Both of these are totally wrong but ok.
> This allows us to launch [two satellites at once]
Something that is very restrictive, requires the perfect set of costumers. And they are able to do that, not because of their amazing technology, but rather because they just build a really big rocket.
> one (main) engine on the Ariane 64, whereas our competitor is going for re-usability because he is using much more engines
Yeah one incredibly fucking expensive main engine that isn't all that good. And also a bunch of very expensive solids.
In total Ariane 64 engines cost more then those of SpaceX and are not reusable.
I think what they were alluding to is their long fairing option being, well, fairly long. F9's is maybe a bit undersized in part due to starting out a lot weaker than it is today, albeit it is a good size for Starlink.
The really tragic part of this whole affair is that the design for Ariane 6 wasn't finalized until 2016 - after Falcon 9 landed for the first time.
At the time, ArianeGroup (particularly Stéphane Israël) shrugged it off as irrelevant; such a position has since been shown to be foolhardy - to the extent that the designs for Ariane 7 looks like a methane powered semi-clone of Falcon 9.
In practical terms, ArianeGroup lost an entire design cycle due to bad decision making. When the next Ariane is done it'll have to compete in a world with not just Falcon 9, but 2-4 of Starship (SpaceX), Neutron (Rocket Lab), Terran R (Relativity), and New Glenn (Blue Origin).
I'm happy that at least they're now trying to catch up. If they'll only stay one cycle behind, that's not even that bad. My worry is that they're not going to be able to maintain that distance ...
Launching James Webb was part of the European part of helping with financing James Webb. And of course they picked their own rocket to do so.
Ariane 5 was not picked because its the most reliable. Ariane 5, Delta IV and Atlas 5 all had the necessary certification to launch James Webb.
Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy also have this level of certification, but of course they got it after James Webb was already assigned.
Your comment is just a fundamental misunderstanding of how launch vehicle selection works and how NASA certification levels work. Please stop with these uninformed comments.
Same as Artemis, same as the ULA rockets. Usual governmental kerfuffle. Sigh.
SpaceX best decision was not letting the US gov/mil get too involved in their management. They would provide a service and that's it
But that being said, projects of that magnitude usually get delayed. Sigh.
(also for those who don't remember - Ariane 5 had some delays and high-profile unscheduled disassemblies at its start. But hey, also remember all the fireworks SpaceX gave us at the beginning as well)
Exactly, it's just the wrong people at the top and the wrong incentives. Is Arianespace structurally capable of producing economical access to space? Probably not.
State sponsored programs can move fast. Kennedy gave his "man on the moon" speech in May 1961, and we put a man on the moon in 1969.
8 years to develop the Saturn rockets and all the associated lunar module gear, without any ability to do sophisticated computer modeling or simulatoins. That's pretty competitive; SpaceX is about 20 years old now.
At the Apollo program's peak the US was also putting more than 4% of the total US budget toward the program. If the EU put more than 4% of it's total budget toward ESA I'm sure they could do something similar.
But that's not the point. The point of Falcon 9 was to reduce the price of getting to space. That was purportedly the promise of Ariane 6 but now there has simply been goal post moving to "it's to maintain independent access to space".
People love to quote this 4% total budget thing. Like yes we get it, but please stop just repeating that stuff.
Government did much less stuff in 1960s, that was before the Great Society and many other things. 4% total budget in 1960s and 4% in a modern Western state are totally different things.
Slow is smooth, smooth is fast. "Fast moving companies", from a Europeans perspective, often comes down to: ignored all the regulation, at least some of which was there for a reason. And now look at the mess that was left behind, it'll take decades to clean it up.
There's a middle ground between the two. You can take it slow enough to ensure well-regulated production, but you can still aim to _iterate_ over your designs for a fast-feedback cycle.
It's the latter that's really causing SpaceX to run rings around its competitors.
I fully agree with that, SpaceX definitely earned the place it occupies right now.
I only objected to the view that "fast moving" is a goal in and by itself, and warrants dropping regulation left and right, just for the hell of it. In some way, the EU is a place I like to live in, _because_ it moves slow. I enjoy having all the rights and safety nets as a citizen, and I voluntarily give up opportunity as long as I can keep the former. If a company respects that, it can iterate all day (and many companies do, not only European), but if it doesn't, I don't care for their nice and shiny. IMHO, they're just a prototype. Either a) their business model is based on ignoring regulation, b) they'll adapt eventually, or c) another will come and eat their lunch a few years later.
There's also the fact that pretty much every useful technology from WW2 ended up being made by dominant industry in the US, because everyone else was rubble.
Airbus came much later than Boeing and managed to be a worthy global competitor. US being first was no advantage for them in the end.
Europe missed tech not because they were not the first (China also wasn't first), but because they ignored the growth and importance of this sector for decades, and still do.
But I can tell you as a French, not having any natural resource and an economy mostly based on services in today's world is not making me bet on a bright future for us.
China has over advantages, like have a sixth of the population in the world, having massive mineral and coal resources and being the factory of Europe and the US.
Baring a miracle, my continent has nowhere to go but down.
We have no metals, not fossil fuels, massive debts, an expensive lifestyle and few industries that cannot be copied elsewhere.
Post covid and the ukraine war, we are in deep, deep trouble.
Politically the extremes are rattling more and more, and they may very well win at some point because things are looking bleak.
Of those, only the resources are an inherent problem, and I'm not sure if it's really that bad if you take a continental perspective. I think you need to take a step back, and look at production of goods, technology, and services, not at money flow. In the end, getting rid of debt is just one default away, and that's a political decision. The Chinese exploit their resources and work hard - good thing they invest at home and in their military, because otherwise they might never get something back for their troubles.
The EU incorporated a lot of countries in the last 30 years, some of them in a pretty bad shape after their transictions from socialism into a market economy.
Of course it would decrease GDP per capita.
But GDP per capita, and Nominal GDP per capita non adjusted by purchase power parity only tells half the history.
Free healthcare, good quality public education, cheaper and or subsidized housing, better worker protections and other good wellfare policies largely make for the nominal GDP difference betweeen the US and most EU countries.
Not to mention that a lot of economic activity not directly related to goods in the US like the sue-happy judicial economy, speculative financial services and insurance, and the cartelized highly inneficient healthcare industry are a big portion of the GDP.
> ncorporated a lot of countries in the last 30 years, some of them
Every of those countries was in a better shape than China, when it started the transition to a market economy.
> Free healthcare, good quality public education, cheaper and or subsidized housing
You do understand that those (highly desirable) goods need to be paid for, and in the past have been paid for by the economic success of the successful EU countries like the Netherlands, etc. But even those have been loosing their competitive edge more and more vis-a-vis China and the US. Loss of access to cheap Russian energy will make this worse. With economic decline those niceties will wither, too ...
Hearing about office culture in France was a shock. The country held up as a shining beacon of progressive policies also has a miserable culture of "no one leaves before the boss" and "you work till 6:30, even if you have nothing to do" like in Japan or Korea? So bizarre!
Is Ariane 6 long-term infrastructure? Unless I missed something it's still a totally expendable launch system. That doesn't seem like it's viable in the long term.
Europe has to accept the loss of Ariane 6. We have to write it off, it's a pill we have to swallow. Either get Ariane 6 into production right now or continue with Ariane 5, but we have to get Ariane 7 into development as fast as possible. Ariane 6 is a dead-end.
Everyone is pretty pessimistic here, but you have to keep in mind that before spacex ariane was a big player. They didn't realise the revolution happening until it was too late and now have this uncompetitive rocket, but Ariane is not entirely stupid and incompetent. They can create a reliable, good rocket.
> At this point, any rocket program other than what SpaceX is doing are government job programs.
That is the thing: all rocket building organisations before SpaceX were actually government job programs. The goal was not to build cost efficient rockets. The goal was to maintain a large pool of trained aeronautic engineers and technicians for strategic defence purpose.
> Additionally have an ICBM capability. (What is Delta?)
Sort of. There's a reason why (some) modern rockets are based on the first generation of ICBMs instead of later versions[1].
The military pretty quickly figured out that operationally, SRB based ICBMs are just far superior to the initial liquid fueled ones. While for commercial operation, the reverse is true, although the hybrid model has been successful for quite a while.
---
1. Mostly. Yes, Minotaur is a thing. But those are made from decommissioned ICBMs. Northrup Grumman (nee Orbital ATK) developed an almost completely SRB based rocket for NSSL, but it wasn't competitive.
From a 2015 ESA announcement of Ariane 6 development:
> “These contracts will allow the development of a family of European launchers, highly competitive in the world market and ensuring autonomous access to space at fully competitive prices for ESA’s Member States,” said Jan Woerner, Director General of ESA.
This is not a Europe-specific screw-up. The US has the same issue with the SLS where the senators are mud-fighting to gather more pork for their states. Ariane is really public sector just like SLS even though it's run by Boeing.
The bigger issue is why Europe doesn't have a SpaceX but then again the US only has one and for many years people were saying it would crash and burn, which it literally did many times. It could easily have gone another way.
I think part of the issue is the more complex legal landscape and less available real-estate. It would be pretty unthinkable for a company like SpaceX to basically own a community like Boca Chica and shut it down as it pleases.
But overall I'm happy with Europe. Needless to say, economic progress isn't everything and Europe is a much safer place with much more welfare for those who slip between the cracks. I'd take that over golden mountains any day. I really don't care about GDP per Capita but more about quality of life. I even chose a relatively low-wage country to live in. Of course that requires some money but we still have a good life here. It's enough.
> The US has the same issue with the SLS where the senators are mud-fighting to gather more pork for their states. Ariane is really public sector just like SLS even though it's run by Boeing.
I think the tragic part is that the Ariane 5 was an extremely commercially competitive rocket before SpaceX came along. They certainly beat the pants off of ULA. Whereas SLS was never going to be anything but a boondoggle.
> The bigger issue is why Europe doesn't have a SpaceX but then again the US only has one and for many years people were saying it would crash and burn, which it literally did many times. It could easily have gone another way.
We'll see. Between Blue Origin, Rocket Lab, and Relativity, I'm willing to bet that at least 1 becomes commercially successful over the next decade.
Obviously such a program will be more expensive than a private endeavor, no member state is going to invest into the program without some kind of return and that comes with delays and higher cost.
Shopping around for launches now that the Ariane 6 has been delayed isn't some kind of epic defeat in the battle for spaceflight, it's just an inconvenience necessary to keep other projects on track.