Related acronyms: RTFA (Read The F**ing Article) and RTFM (Read The F**ing Manual). The latter was a very common answer when struggling with Linux in the early 2000s...
Ariane 6 is quite heavily subsidized, with ArianeGroup getting €340M per year to operate it [1]. With an expected 10 launches per year, that's about €34M/launch.
But in the grand scheme of things it doesn't matter: Europe needs to be able to put its own military satellites (or anything else critical) up there. Military satellites sold to third party countries also won't launch themselves...
All major aerospace companies and projects are heavily subsidized in every country otherwise they would never survive or even be born. Like how much profit did NASA make over its lifetime?
NASA is a government agency though, so it doesn't have profit generation as its target. And that's fine, neither does the US army or any other government branch except for the tax office.
Right? At a certain point, governments are the only entities that can afford to send things to space. "Highly-subsidized" here just means "government is 99% of company's market base".
That certain point is in the past. Today, all sorts of private entities send things into space. As launch gets cheaper, private activities in space will dominate, if they don't already.
> But in the grand scheme of things it doesn't matter: Europe needs to be able to put its own military satellites (or anything else critical) up there. Military satellites sold to third party countries also won't launch themselves...
I'm very surprised the EU and the USA and SpaceX didn't work out a deal to buy a certain number of F9's to be launched and operated from the EU. The EU would pay a (vey high) price to buy outright the rockets, and would agree not to develop a competing rocket design in the next 20 yrs.
> The EU would pay a (vey high) price to buy outright the rockets, and would agree not to develop a competing rocket design in the next 20 yrs.
So the worst of both worlds? It would still be very expensive, but also dependent on a foreign entity and with hands tied for the next decades unable to develop people, skills, or products in that direction.
European space programs are motivated by jobs, retaining domestic skills and actual usefulness in that order. Funding is allocated to companies based primarily on the country they’re in - funding must be split across all funding countries.
ESA is never going to just buy a rocket, because that would completely defeat the point of ESA.
Why? That would be a bad deal for ESA. Instead of being behind 10 years with a fighting chance to catch-up, they would be 20 years behind and dependent on one, maybe two unreliable partners (Musk and maybe the USA under Trump).
Would that even be possible? SpaceX would need to either provide intense training (engineering, operating, etc) for their rockets, or to provide the staff and facilities themselves; basically the company would need to double its staff (if not more) to support a scheme like that.
I mean it makes sense, why not sell off rockets and whatnot commercially like the mass production strategy that Musk has in mind? But I don't think there's enough launches yet to warrant that. In fact, SpaceX is booked full for the next few years already; unless that's intentional, they simply don't have the production capacity to humour that idea.
> 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).
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.
I'm not quite sure what you mean by saying that the Japanese road network is not a grid. In terms of actual layout, it's quite grid-like. I would even say it's usually much closer to a nicely laid-out grid than the mess any European city is.
What Japan lacks are addresses that can be found easily without using a map. Apart from Kyoto, roads in Japanese cities don't have names (or number), so addresses within cities are not "{number} {name of street}". Cities are cut in areas smaller and smaller all the way down to a block. The last number will be the house on that block. So addresses within cities are "{name of area} {sub-area number} {block number} {house number}", with some variations from city to city.
An address might be "Nantokacho 11-16-8", which means the 8th house around the 16th block of the 11th sub-area of the Nantoka area. Good luck figuring that out without a map!
Location: Japan
Remote: Yes
Willing to relocate: within Japan only
Willing to travel: Yes
Technologies: Elixir, Phoenix, PostgreSQL, Python, Django, Celery, RabbitMQ, Azure, Jenkins, CI/CD, C#, Unity, Javascript, Delphi
Résumé/CV: request via email
Email in profile
I'm a generalist with deep experience shipping working software, and keeping it up and running. I'm currently working in the financial sector, but I am willing to work in any field providing the work is interesting!
Location: Japan
Remote: Yes
Willing to relocate: within Japan only
Willing to travel: Yes
Technologies: Elixir, Phoenix, PostgreSQL, Python, Django, Celery, RabbitMQ, Azure, Jenkins, CI/CD, C#, Unity, Javascript, Delphi
Résumé/CV: request via Mail
Email in profile
I'm a generalist with deep experience shipping working software, and keeping it up and running. I'm currently working in the financial sector, but I am willing to work in any field providing the work is interesting!
"a few misc planes on the chopping block in the future" sounds somewhat disingenuous: we are talking of a fleet of 477 Airbus A320s [1] (family, mostly A319s and A321s), nearly 50% of American Airlines entire fleet.
This includes 80 A321 NEO, and with a further order for 50 A321XLRs I strongly doubt these are on the chopping block. The A321 NEO is very hard to beat on transcon: AA needs the subtype, so it's here to stay. And Airbus knows it: the A321 NEO is expensive...
As for the older A319s, AA is currently looking for their replacements: it should be either A220, 737 MAX7 or maybe Embraer E2 195. If they go for the 737 MAX7 that will make it to 4 types, eventually: Airbus A321 and Boeing 737, 777 and 787. Otherwise 5 types.
No. You wrote something that read as if AA is looking to replace all Airbus equipment. That was replied to with clarification that AA is looking to replace some of the older Airbus equipment but clearly not all of it. Now, your retort reads as a smarty pants chiding at someone else implying you didn’t actually know everything and smarting from it.
My retort was quoting you. Besides, I wrote "mostly" focuses... That doesn't mean "only" focuses. "As if" is only in your mind by a mistaken interpretation. Please reread my original post, this time slowly. Good grief.
The only airlines that are Boeing or Airbus exclusive are low costs (like Ryanair or Spirit Airlines) and tiny airlines operating a handful of planes. Otherwise it's all mixed fleet (Delta, Air France, JAL, ANA, Lufthansa, UA, etc.). If you separate wide-body and narrow-body then your statement is more correct: as going narrow-body Airbus and wide-body Boeing (or the other way around) is not rare.
The threshold I've read on airliners.net is at about 30 frames. Below that costs of a sub-fleet are too high and you should aim for commonality. Above 30 frames you should pick the best plane for your routes, regardless of commonality.
So for example running two fleets of 30 A350-900/1000, and 30 787-9/10 would be perfectly rational. But having 50 A350-900/1000 and introducing a sub-fleet of 10 787-10 is unlikely to be a wise choice, even for routes where the 787-10 would beat the A350-900.
> The only airlines that are Boeing or Airbus exclusive are low costs (like Ryanair or Spirit Airlines) and tiny airlines operating a handful of planes.
This isn’t true for the reasons you are implying. Most of these smaller carriers fly to regional airports with smaller runways and smaller demand which the 737 specifically is ideal for (since that’s what it was designed). It’s also one of the most common planes out there, so when smaller carriers are looking to buy, that’s what’s available. It’s not that they are looking to be a single vendor airline. It’s just that the one vendor made the plane they need.
On the lower end the 737 has competition from Embraer, Bombardier (and now Airbus through the CSeries/A220), ATR, etc. Turboprops in general (and thus ATR) are not popular in the US, but they are quite popular elsewhere.
But the specific example I had in mind is Air Tahiti Nui, and its grand total of four 787-9. It’s simply an airline specialized in bringing tourists to Tahiti from far, far away. Hence high density 787-9.
But even a very small airline like Air Senegal has a pretty diversified fleet, of 9 aircrafts…
Think about the (grossly simplified and somewhat questionable) historical availability of: electronic gates -> binary -> assembly -> C -> Python. Each of these steps as allowed one engineer to do the work of an entire team at the previous step.
And yet here we are: as technology has made engineers massively more productive, the need for engineers has gone up massively. Simply because the gains in productivity have made more projects doable.
So the question is not whether AI will make engineers more productive. The question is whether it will allow more projects to be undertaken. I don't have the answer to that question...
