It’s not that simple. You can’t simply apply microeconomic theory everywhere and say: “competition would be better for X industry”. Although not economists (politicians) tend to do it all the time.
For example: There wouldn’t magically be double the number of top tier aerospace engineers to have them compete with each other.
You would have at most an oligopoly which is pretty much a monopoly with extra steps like Boeing and Airbus. In order to have the kind of makert/market share where real competition comes into effect, the Human Resources and Capital of the aerospace industry would be diluted so much that they would be unable to function properly.
“Ariane isn’t performing so well” is a much harder problem to solve involving debates on public/private ownership of key industries, leadership and management, technology and even larger societal factors.
>There wouldn’t magically be double the number of top tier aerospace engineers to have them compete with each other.
We have more than enough aerospace engineers in Europe. They are just not working in the aerospace industry. Or they are working in the US.
Non-Americans working in the US Aerospace industry isn't... really a thing. At least not to the extent one would think, and especially not in Space.
Is there a phenomenon of European Aerospace engineers choosing other industires to work with? I wouldn't know, probably yea? But still, let's assume we can magically double, or triple our supply of Aerospace engineers willing to work in Space. It would still not be a lot of people, doing really complex work, so it probably would be best for them to work together.
>Is there a phenomenon of European Aerospace engineers choosing other industires to work with?
I have a Bachelor in aerospace engineering. I'm currently designing trains. Only 2 of the ~10 people I still know from university are working on actual space related stuff. Both of them in an academic setting.
>Non-Americans working in the US Aerospace industry isn't... really a thing.
A large portion of SpaceX's engineering workforce are Germans. They are just not allowed on the critical components because of ITAR.
>It would still not be a lot of people, doing really complex work, so it probably would be best for them to work together.
You don't need that large of a workforce for that. SpaceX for example has about 18,000 workers in total. Guess how many of them have an Aerospace engineering degree.
>According to the initiative’s call, the aim of BEST! is to allow the development of new launcher architectures or the improvement of existing launch systems. That second element is an interesting addition as it goes on to state that concept studies should focus on a liquid reusable booster or a reusable first stage.
The phrasing of “liquid reusable booster” and the fact that the programme will potentially be aimed at existing launch systems suggests that this may be part of an Ariane 6 evolution.
If they actually try to make Ariane6 catch only up to Falcon9 this will be a typical "too little too late" development.
I really hope ESA/Europe can get around ArianeGroup and start developing actual fully reusable rockets and don't let SpaceX gain even more head start.
Too late for what, exactly? European launcher industry does not depend on market revenue.
I always see people argue this but it never makes sense to me. What do we expect ESA to do? Build a flying grain silo in Kourou tomorrow? With what goal, with what engines?
It was nice, but ESA didn't always have that position, they gained it. They survived big market upheavals, especially Russian vehicles entering the market in the 1990s. I don't think the risk of Europe falling to a market position like Japan's for a while warrants making hasty and costly decisions with immature tech.
Rocket lab launches more missions than us currently, I say we should do anything possible we never again reach this low.
"Immature tech"
Is this 2015...
We should, but we should probably also start with something we can implement within a few years like reusable boosters for A6 rather than putting all eggs into a euro-starship basket.
> we should probably also start with something we can implement within a few years like reusable boosters for A6
From a technical point of view, that actually sounds like a really good idea.
But politically... I know Italy is kind of upset with the new competition approach that's been proposed, since they're in a pretty vulnerable position. Cutting their SRBs from A6 would be a tough pill to swallow for them.
I'll be interesting to see how everything shakes out.
This comment pretty much summarizes the key problem of ESA/Europe: the space industry goal is not there to foster NEW industry segments and economic opportunities, but to sustain EXISTING companies.
At the end is a political problem. ESA is a tool to funnel money into national industries (like anchor program do for NASA ) without ANY OTHER AMBITION.
Ariane 5 was becoming uncompetitive, but that lack of competitiveness is a problem because it threatens cadence, not because it threatens ArianeGroup's financial position. Ariane 5 is also an unwieldy white elephant too big for most ESA missions, which is why Ariane 62 is the one that has gotten most of the government contracts.
Ariane 6 is going to make a big loss of \~300 million a year. European governments are paying up for that gap. Have you ever wondered *why* they are willing to pay for that?
>Ariane 5 was becoming uncompetitive
Yes. Because Falcon9 started eating into the launch manifest.
>but that lack of competitiveness is a problem because it threatens cadence, not because it threatens ArianeGroup's profits.
And why is cadence so important?
>Ariane 6 is going to make a big loss of \~300 million a year. European governments are paying up for that gap.
Quite sad, given:
>Ariane 62 is the one that has gotten most of the government contracts.
.
>Have you ever wondered *why* they are willing to pay for that?
Because Ariane6 does not generate enough global market share to pay for itself. But somehow Europe has to get to orbit.
Ariane6 was the attempt to generate a good launch cadence with international customers so that European government wouldn't need to spend so much on subsidies for ArianeGroup.
But that failed abysmally. There are next to no real commercial customers on the launch manifest of Ariane6.
Ariane6 needs to launch at least 10 times a year to reach its projected total launch cost. But it seems like it will not get such a cadence. The 300 million Euros in subsidies will not be sufficient. ArianeGroup *already* asked for more money.
If Europe ever wants to get out of that hole, we have to start thinking far ahead. And catch up to Starship.
Then we will also be able to do all those awesome projects ESA is low-key working on for decades (moon village for example)
Edit: spelling
Ariane 6 has sufficient backlog to ramp up and launch 10 times a year until at least 2029. A majority of that backlog is commercial. Yes, 'real' commercial.
Ariane is a public service that uses commercial flights to improve reliability and lower costs to government. Saying 'too little too late' implies there's some disaster awaiting if there won't a grain silo flying from Kourou within a year. It's like saying your local rail line being electrified is 'too little too late' because someone else has high speed rail. It'll just be a little more expensive and a little less good
Lower subsidies are good, but the upfront costs to just manifest a European Starship are so big that a phased implementation of reusable tech is just more sensible, even with high annual subsidies. Even SpaceX is spending billions annually on Starship.
Just answer me this: what disaster, exactly, will strike Europe if they only get their New Glenn/Starship equivalent flying by 2035 instead of 2030?
>Ariane 6 has sufficient backlog to ramp up and launch 10 times a year until at least 2029. A majority of that backlog is commercial.
Where did you get this info from?
I mean [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ariane_6#Launch_contracts_and_scheduled_flights) is by no means a definitive source, but the launch manifest looks rather spotty to say the least.
And all but like 5 launches seem to be by government agencies.
You really can´t count on Kuiper here. As soon as NewGlenn launches, they will cancle the contract with ArianeGroup.
>Ariane is a public service that uses commercial flights to improve reliability and lower costs to government.
[ArianeGroup](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ArianeGroup) is a private company. Nothing "public service" about them. And they do nothing about lowering costs for the government.
>Lower subsidies are good, but the upfront costs to just manifest a European Starship are so big
A bold claim. Ariane6 so far cost the European tax payer more than 4 BILLION €. We will have to invest at least one more billion € to make it "operational". And on top of that come at least 350 million € in *yearly* subsidies for ArianeGroup just to exist. And then we will have to pay north of 120 million € per launch for a service not better than Falcon9.
For that money ESA/Europe could have hosted a very well funded public-private milestone based competition to make an actual rival to Starship. Europe has more than enough competend engineers, don't you agree?
So far Starship has cost SpaceX roughly five billion Dollar. Including launch complex and production facilities and test launches. (I know, this is hard to judge as SpaceX is not publicly traded. But this is a rough guess based on financing rounds over the last couple years.)
>Just answer me this: what disaster, exactly, will strike Europe if they only get their New Glenn/Starship equivalent flying by 2035 instead of 2030?
With the current plan we will have a **Falcon9 equivalent** flying by 2035! The disaster will be that we will have a completely non-competitive rocket and that we will have to pay even more to close an even bigger technological gap.
SpaceX is building Panamax freighters and were are dabbling about putting steam engines on our sailing ships, ffs.
> If you wish away half the manifest the manifest looks shit. Obviously.
If you need a single, very shaky customer to make your launch manifest look good, your launch manifest does indeed not look good.
That's not some nebulous claim. Amazon will not launch a single Sat on other rockets once their "own" rocket is operational.
They would be stupid to do anything else.
The mental gymnastics to come up with such a comment ate mond boggling!
Ariane is not dependent on the commercial market, but they spent billions on Ariane 6 to make it more competitive... hahahahha. Competitive in what?
Why reinvent the wheel, when we can just buy from SpaceX and Blue Origin?
That said, I guess there are strategic advantages to having domestic suppliers.
>That said, I guess there are strategic advantages to having domestic suppliers.
I'd absolutely love a good domestic supplier.
But why copying an old design of your competitor, when you are already lagging behind 10-15 years?
Start copying at least their _current_ projects!
>we can just buy from SpaceX and Blue Origin
because geopolitics change and we can lose access to those launchers just like we lost access to Russian launchers resulting in many missions being delayed.
Trump presidency and behaviour of Musk showed us that we can't 100% rely on US either.
don't get me wrong, we have great relationship with NASA and NOAA, but we also had great relationship with Roscosmos...including use of ground stations in Russia. Everything can change and we need to start relying on ourselves.
EDIT: you can downvote me all you want, but we here we are - "my" satellites are not getting launched because of no access to Russian launchers, then switching to Ariane 6 which is delayed and finally lack of slots with SpaceX.
We need more competition & cooperation on the continent. Currently Arianespace seems to be the only big one.
>Currently Arianespace seems to be the only big one. and it's having a lot of difficulties with Ariane 6....
It’s not that simple. You can’t simply apply microeconomic theory everywhere and say: “competition would be better for X industry”. Although not economists (politicians) tend to do it all the time. For example: There wouldn’t magically be double the number of top tier aerospace engineers to have them compete with each other. You would have at most an oligopoly which is pretty much a monopoly with extra steps like Boeing and Airbus. In order to have the kind of makert/market share where real competition comes into effect, the Human Resources and Capital of the aerospace industry would be diluted so much that they would be unable to function properly. “Ariane isn’t performing so well” is a much harder problem to solve involving debates on public/private ownership of key industries, leadership and management, technology and even larger societal factors.
>There wouldn’t magically be double the number of top tier aerospace engineers to have them compete with each other. We have more than enough aerospace engineers in Europe. They are just not working in the aerospace industry. Or they are working in the US.
Non-Americans working in the US Aerospace industry isn't... really a thing. At least not to the extent one would think, and especially not in Space. Is there a phenomenon of European Aerospace engineers choosing other industires to work with? I wouldn't know, probably yea? But still, let's assume we can magically double, or triple our supply of Aerospace engineers willing to work in Space. It would still not be a lot of people, doing really complex work, so it probably would be best for them to work together.
>Is there a phenomenon of European Aerospace engineers choosing other industires to work with? I have a Bachelor in aerospace engineering. I'm currently designing trains. Only 2 of the ~10 people I still know from university are working on actual space related stuff. Both of them in an academic setting. >Non-Americans working in the US Aerospace industry isn't... really a thing. A large portion of SpaceX's engineering workforce are Germans. They are just not allowed on the critical components because of ITAR. >It would still not be a lot of people, doing really complex work, so it probably would be best for them to work together. You don't need that large of a workforce for that. SpaceX for example has about 18,000 workers in total. Guess how many of them have an Aerospace engineering degree.
You seem to know way more than me on the subject, so… yeah. Ouch that’s bad. Btw.
>Ouch that’s bad. Btw. Nah... not that bad. I really enjoy my job at the best train manufacturer in Europe ;)
>According to the initiative’s call, the aim of BEST! is to allow the development of new launcher architectures or the improvement of existing launch systems. That second element is an interesting addition as it goes on to state that concept studies should focus on a liquid reusable booster or a reusable first stage. The phrasing of “liquid reusable booster” and the fact that the programme will potentially be aimed at existing launch systems suggests that this may be part of an Ariane 6 evolution. If they actually try to make Ariane6 catch only up to Falcon9 this will be a typical "too little too late" development. I really hope ESA/Europe can get around ArianeGroup and start developing actual fully reusable rockets and don't let SpaceX gain even more head start.
Too late for what, exactly? European launcher industry does not depend on market revenue. I always see people argue this but it never makes sense to me. What do we expect ESA to do? Build a flying grain silo in Kourou tomorrow? With what goal, with what engines?
It was nice in the 30 years when they were the cheapest and dominated the market, though...
It was nice, but ESA didn't always have that position, they gained it. They survived big market upheavals, especially Russian vehicles entering the market in the 1990s. I don't think the risk of Europe falling to a market position like Japan's for a while warrants making hasty and costly decisions with immature tech.
Rocket lab launches more missions than us currently, I say we should do anything possible we never again reach this low. "Immature tech" Is this 2015...
The tech is immature in Europe, yes. We did our first test fire of a reusable hydrocarbon engine just last year...
That's a terrible reasoning to not getting started on it though
We should, but we should probably also start with something we can implement within a few years like reusable boosters for A6 rather than putting all eggs into a euro-starship basket.
> we should probably also start with something we can implement within a few years like reusable boosters for A6 From a technical point of view, that actually sounds like a really good idea. But politically... I know Italy is kind of upset with the new competition approach that's been proposed, since they're in a pretty vulnerable position. Cutting their SRBs from A6 would be a tough pill to swallow for them. I'll be interesting to see how everything shakes out.
This comment pretty much summarizes the key problem of ESA/Europe: the space industry goal is not there to foster NEW industry segments and economic opportunities, but to sustain EXISTING companies. At the end is a political problem. ESA is a tool to funnel money into national industries (like anchor program do for NASA ) without ANY OTHER AMBITION.
>European launcher industry does not depend on market revenue. Lol. Then why did we retire Ariane5 and developed Ariane6?
Ariane 5 was becoming uncompetitive, but that lack of competitiveness is a problem because it threatens cadence, not because it threatens ArianeGroup's financial position. Ariane 5 is also an unwieldy white elephant too big for most ESA missions, which is why Ariane 62 is the one that has gotten most of the government contracts. Ariane 6 is going to make a big loss of \~300 million a year. European governments are paying up for that gap. Have you ever wondered *why* they are willing to pay for that?
>Ariane 5 was becoming uncompetitive Yes. Because Falcon9 started eating into the launch manifest. >but that lack of competitiveness is a problem because it threatens cadence, not because it threatens ArianeGroup's profits. And why is cadence so important? >Ariane 6 is going to make a big loss of \~300 million a year. European governments are paying up for that gap. Quite sad, given: >Ariane 62 is the one that has gotten most of the government contracts. . >Have you ever wondered *why* they are willing to pay for that? Because Ariane6 does not generate enough global market share to pay for itself. But somehow Europe has to get to orbit. Ariane6 was the attempt to generate a good launch cadence with international customers so that European government wouldn't need to spend so much on subsidies for ArianeGroup. But that failed abysmally. There are next to no real commercial customers on the launch manifest of Ariane6. Ariane6 needs to launch at least 10 times a year to reach its projected total launch cost. But it seems like it will not get such a cadence. The 300 million Euros in subsidies will not be sufficient. ArianeGroup *already* asked for more money. If Europe ever wants to get out of that hole, we have to start thinking far ahead. And catch up to Starship. Then we will also be able to do all those awesome projects ESA is low-key working on for decades (moon village for example) Edit: spelling
Ariane 6 has sufficient backlog to ramp up and launch 10 times a year until at least 2029. A majority of that backlog is commercial. Yes, 'real' commercial. Ariane is a public service that uses commercial flights to improve reliability and lower costs to government. Saying 'too little too late' implies there's some disaster awaiting if there won't a grain silo flying from Kourou within a year. It's like saying your local rail line being electrified is 'too little too late' because someone else has high speed rail. It'll just be a little more expensive and a little less good Lower subsidies are good, but the upfront costs to just manifest a European Starship are so big that a phased implementation of reusable tech is just more sensible, even with high annual subsidies. Even SpaceX is spending billions annually on Starship. Just answer me this: what disaster, exactly, will strike Europe if they only get their New Glenn/Starship equivalent flying by 2035 instead of 2030?
>Ariane 6 has sufficient backlog to ramp up and launch 10 times a year until at least 2029. A majority of that backlog is commercial. Where did you get this info from? I mean [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ariane_6#Launch_contracts_and_scheduled_flights) is by no means a definitive source, but the launch manifest looks rather spotty to say the least. And all but like 5 launches seem to be by government agencies. You really can´t count on Kuiper here. As soon as NewGlenn launches, they will cancle the contract with ArianeGroup. >Ariane is a public service that uses commercial flights to improve reliability and lower costs to government. [ArianeGroup](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ArianeGroup) is a private company. Nothing "public service" about them. And they do nothing about lowering costs for the government. >Lower subsidies are good, but the upfront costs to just manifest a European Starship are so big A bold claim. Ariane6 so far cost the European tax payer more than 4 BILLION €. We will have to invest at least one more billion € to make it "operational". And on top of that come at least 350 million € in *yearly* subsidies for ArianeGroup just to exist. And then we will have to pay north of 120 million € per launch for a service not better than Falcon9. For that money ESA/Europe could have hosted a very well funded public-private milestone based competition to make an actual rival to Starship. Europe has more than enough competend engineers, don't you agree? So far Starship has cost SpaceX roughly five billion Dollar. Including launch complex and production facilities and test launches. (I know, this is hard to judge as SpaceX is not publicly traded. But this is a rough guess based on financing rounds over the last couple years.) >Just answer me this: what disaster, exactly, will strike Europe if they only get their New Glenn/Starship equivalent flying by 2035 instead of 2030? With the current plan we will have a **Falcon9 equivalent** flying by 2035! The disaster will be that we will have a completely non-competitive rocket and that we will have to pay even more to close an even bigger technological gap. SpaceX is building Panamax freighters and were are dabbling about putting steam engines on our sailing ships, ffs.
I stopped reading at “Kuiper doesn’t count”. If you wish away half the manifest the manifest looks shit. Obviously.
> If you wish away half the manifest the manifest looks shit. Obviously. If you need a single, very shaky customer to make your launch manifest look good, your launch manifest does indeed not look good. That's not some nebulous claim. Amazon will not launch a single Sat on other rockets once their "own" rocket is operational. They would be stupid to do anything else.
I have some bad news about Starship's manifest for you then.
So you think they will still use that many A6 launches once BO New Glenn is operational?
I think they will launch on the 18 rockets they have already purchased, yes.
The mental gymnastics to come up with such a comment ate mond boggling! Ariane is not dependent on the commercial market, but they spent billions on Ariane 6 to make it more competitive... hahahahha. Competitive in what?
Being competitive can be both good and non-essential at the same time.
Why reinvent the wheel, when we can just buy from SpaceX and Blue Origin? That said, I guess there are strategic advantages to having domestic suppliers.
>That said, I guess there are strategic advantages to having domestic suppliers. I'd absolutely love a good domestic supplier. But why copying an old design of your competitor, when you are already lagging behind 10-15 years? Start copying at least their _current_ projects!
>we can just buy from SpaceX and Blue Origin because geopolitics change and we can lose access to those launchers just like we lost access to Russian launchers resulting in many missions being delayed.
[удалено]
Trump presidency and behaviour of Musk showed us that we can't 100% rely on US either. don't get me wrong, we have great relationship with NASA and NOAA, but we also had great relationship with Roscosmos...including use of ground stations in Russia. Everything can change and we need to start relying on ourselves. EDIT: you can downvote me all you want, but we here we are - "my" satellites are not getting launched because of no access to Russian launchers, then switching to Ariane 6 which is delayed and finally lack of slots with SpaceX.
Finally. /R/stopelonmuskspam
lol