edit: Before that, they also had an unusual concept from 2010, which envisioned first-stage liquid engines with wings that would detach from the booster and fly themselves back. Nothing came from that.
From what I can tell, ArianeGroup was completely oblivious to SpaceX successes, and reacted (way) too late. Ariane 6 is the panic mode reaction to try to remain somewhat relevant and somewhat competitive. Europe needs a launcher anyway, so in fact I'm not convinced this Ariane 6 was really necessary: keeping Ariane 5 as-is (or maybe streamlining its production a bit to cut the fat) would probably have been enough.
ArianeGroup is going the reusable route eventually anyway. They don't have a choice: it's currently called Ariane Next [0] and is expected to enter into service in the 2030s. I'm not convinced the current concept will remain unchanged, since it doesn't exist yet and will probably evolve depending on Starship and other SpaceX projects success (not just technical, but also commercial).
In parallel to Ariane 6 (and as a precursor to Ariane Next?) there are a bunch of European companies developing small launchers to test new technologies: Avio, HyImpulse Technologies, Isar Aerospace, MaiaSpace [1] (owned by ArianeGroup), PLD Space, Rocket Factory Augsburg and Latitude. Probably others I didn't hear about.
At the time Ariane 6 was getting started (publicly), SpaceX was still attempting to land Falcon 9 successfully for the first time. So it was not at all a sure bet that Ariane 6 would end up coming of age in a world where individual rocket boosters have 10+ flights under their belt.
Still, SpaceX was making progress at that time, so ArianeSpace pointedly ignoring the possibility of reuse was, in my opinion, shortsighted.
Edit: SpaceX first booster landing was December 2015.
Per wikipedia:
Selection of the [Ariane 6] design concept was made by ESA in December 2014, favouring it over an alternative all-solid-fuel rocket option. Further design was completed in 2015 and it entered the detailed design phase in 2016. In 2017, the ESA set 16 July 2020 as the deadline for the first flight.
Ariane has always been conceived as a large carrier designed to do a small number of heavy launch to orbit several satellites in geostationary orbit.
Space X was initially designed to do a lot of small launches into low-Earth orbit.
These are two very different approaches.
In 2009 and 2010, when the main design choices for Ariane 6 were made, reusable engines were seen as too costly to develop, produce and maintain for a heavy launcher.
At that time, the scenario envisaged was to return only the first-stage engines via a glider in the same way as the Space Shuttle.
Project planning started in the early 2010s, a few years before SpaceX had come close to demonstrating reusability -- at the time, it was regarded as a fairly risky and dubious experiment.
1 - Engineers and leadership didn't think landing would work that well
2 - The culture at ESA and Arianespace is to NOT have any failures. So they don't have the liberty to launch rockets that spectacularly explode. Even when experimenting, they are extremely risk averse.
3 - The same company builds ICBMs, so demonstrating reliability in civil launchers also asserts reliability for military equipment.
4 -The focus was reducing costs of Ariane5 and make a launcher with similar capability and cost to Russian Soyuz. I don't think SpaceX was the focus for the competition. They also wanted to get rid of the dual launches of Ariane5 and provide a launcher that could just do the large payload of those dual launches independently
> They are planning some form of reusability in the future, just because they have to, if they want to drastically reduce costs [0].
That looks promising at least.
> A thing that is not happening is letting private companies innovate in this space in Europe, as Ariane is still mostly government funded in the EU.
I'm not sure how true that is. I was part of an ESA project around ~2009, and some of my friends are in the space industry. It seems to be mostly private sector companies working together with ESA. You're right that it's not the same as SpaceX, but I don't think it's the case that ESA isn't "letting" private companies innovate.
Ariane 6 is a worthy competitor to the Falcon 9 -- if it hadn't become partially reusable. If it had reached the market 15 years ago, it could have been relevant.
Ariane Next could be a worthy competitor to the Falcon 9R, if they manage to get it to market by, say, 2020. Looks like they're planning to be about 15 years late to market there as well.
They've also got a fully-reusable Starship competitor in the works -- can't be bothered to dig up the link for it, sorry -- which if the schedule holds, should hit the market about 20 years after Starship enters commercial service.
> A thing that is not happening is letting private companies innovate in this space in Europe, as Ariane is still mostly government funded in the EU.
To name a few (albeit not all private): Avio (Italy), HyImpulse Technologies (Germany), Isar Aerospace (Germany), MaiaSpace (France), PLD Space (Spain), Rocket Factory Augsburg (Germany) and Latitude (France).
>as the organization did not believe it was a good direction.
Kinda infuriating -- almost arrogant -- we're behind the US in space technology yet the ESA is insisting it knows the right way forward when a very promising path was actively being set and yet they outright dismissed it.
Ariane Espace isn't the ESA. The ESA put money into the Ariane program, it's not the same. Ariane Espace is a French commercial company with many links to ESA, but its primary mission is to ensure France's civil and military access to space. This has been extended to other European countries, but France holds more than 60% of the shares, the launch site, the transport and assembly infrastructure, and is responsible for the defence of the site, etc.
The French government wanted a reliable way of sending heavy observation satellites into geostationary orbit. This explains many of Ariane's design choices. Civil and commercial activity are just extra or bonus way of cutting costs.
For example, one of Ariane lesser-known activities is to produce ballistic missiles for the French strike force.
Good answer, the european space program is just a spinoff of the french ICBM program nothing else; it also explains the reluctance of other countries to finance it, like anything approaching the french military industry, because you know french are imperialistic, I known, I'm french \s.
Imperialism, I call that General de Gaulle's France! Anyone who says otherwise is a traitor to the homeland, American or Russian bootlickers! \s
More seriously, France often has a non-aligned or sovereign vision of its programmes, which makes many European countries uncomfortable, as they don't really want to assert any form of independence from the USA.
