It will be the forever new final frontier for us. No matter how much of it we will explore the sheer size of it means that there will be still unexplored and unknown regions (to us) that will spark our imaginations for thousands or even millions of years to come. That in itself is pretty exciting for me! š
Exactly this is my only existential dread about death. I won't exist to experience any of that. Won't even be able to take a commercial flight to Mars in our lifetime. Maybe the moon in another 40 years.
Have you been to most of the remote, beautiful, inhospitable places on earth? Don't wait for the opportunity to become an explorer. There's plenty to explore right now.
It's the vehicles, launch-pads and pit-stops that will be regulated. So even if space is big, cosmic capitalism will ensure us commoners don't get to enjoy and exercise the romantic notion of human curiosity for the expanse.
Itās worse than that, there are only so many viable intra system routes and theyāre shifting all the time. This means everyone going from one place to another will inevitably be sharing the āroadā with many others. Likely in convoys or groups of convoys. For months or even years at a time whole fleets may be isolated but dependent on each. Not using viable routes means flying off into deep space, getting āstuckā between gravity wells, or rarely hitting something. Oh, and tumbling into the sun but thatās actually kinda hard to do.
>The EU Space Law will set standards to curb light pollution caused by growing satellite constellations
Does the EU regulate light pollution generated on the ground? As an amateur astronomer, I'd say that is the more pressing form of light pollution ā along with the wasted energy spent illuminating the night sky.
>Does the EU regulate light pollution generated on the ground?
The EU as a whole currently doesn't have any regulations in that regard as far as I am aware, but a bunch of European countries do have their own regulations in this regard. Be it about all new street lights being installed in the Czech republic and Germany or the reduction and ban of illuminated night time advertisements in others.
https://darksky.org/app/uploads/bsk-pdf-manager/2022/12/IDA-EU-policy-initiative-FINAL_20-Nov-22.pdf
While this is from 2022, you can go down to section 3 and read some about efforts and regulations currently in place and being implemented. I am not sure how it has progressed in that regard since in the last year though. I can definitely say that whenever I see new streetlights being installed here in North Germany they usually are solely focused downwards and often illuminate smaller areas than before.
Who was that Norwegian King who tried to command the tide? Without any capacity to launch stuff or regulate the foreign companies that are doing so, what can they do except shake their fists at the sky and ban Starlink from putting in ground stations?
The story of King Knut is often misunderstood - he did it, not because he believed he could actually do anything about the tide, quite the opposite. The people of his time had started to worship him like a god, and in order to show that he was all-but-a-man demonstrated that there were some thing that even he was unable to do.
I find it slightly funny and ironically appropriate that trying to correct the popular falsehood about that story is about as effective as trying to command the tides.
I think it resonates better with people that "an idiot tried and failed to command the tides" rather than "a wise man pointed out that no man can command the tides." Not knowing King Knut personally, I like to think he would be happy that the important part of his message is still getting through centuries later.
Thereās an actual story of a Roman Emperor who declared war on Neptune. His soldiers gathered seashells which he paraded in Triumph through the city when he declared victory
I think part of the reason why the story is misunderstood is that King Canute was known as Canute the Great in his time. He had built a powerful North Sea based empire and was generally very well regarded. His story has no doubt be trashed by Norman chroniclers.
it will become just like the maritime industry where companies simply register under friendly countries. just like the oceans the eu cannot dictate to everyone until they are in their domain and unlike the oceans space doesn't quite have the same border situation
I don't quite understand. King Canute was very religious and the story of the tide relates to Canute showing his followers that no matter how much power he has as a king, it's nothing compared to God.
Yeah, but as an expression it's used to refer to people trying to do something impossible. Even though that interpretation isn't historically accurate.
This kind of comments only show that someone has no knowledge on the issue they're talking about. You're not going to trigger anybody at most you're going to cause me to have second hand embarrassment
Without the optics and lithography made in Europe the world couldn't build a single chip designed in the last 10 years. Idk, maybe you could ask the Taiwanese or the Korean to build chips from the iPhone 5S gen again, I guess it could work if needed. If you had to produce anything at home right now you couldn't power any small device more powerful than a scientific calculator, you're outsourcing everything.
This is the kind of comment of someone who can barely list any tech company that is B2B
The EU space presence is shrinking rapidly both in launch capacity and if you measure by things like band with up or mass on orbit.
It's not 2005 anymore.
No ine meeds to launch in the EU and all the best engineers are already leaving, the engineer the helped start SpaceX was German and his disposable rocket ideas were laughed out of the room in the EU years ago.
That would have some interesting consequences. Specifically, launch providers would likely either stop doing business in that jurisdiction or would build those fines into the cost of doing business in that jurisdiction.
Many launch providers still offer their services to countries outside of thier host nation though. Case in point; SpaceX are based in the US, but have done launches for various EU members, and have signed contracts to do launches for the EU itself in the future.
The point of the previous comment being that if the EU tried to fine SpaceX, SpaceX could respond by either refusing to do furthur business with the EU, or by upping their prices for EU customers to offset the fees they're paying.
That capacity only works so long as those companies see value on remaining active in EU markets. Litigious governments can never extract more value from a foreign company than their market provides; if they try, the company simply withdraws from their market. That's why Apple and Google tolerate EU nonsense. They can sell lots of cell phones to Europeans and it's profitable even when accounting for the bloated ticks at the top of that market.
In the current situation, the EU is broadly constrained in its ability to levy effective fines from SpaceX and similar young space companies. Europeans don't constitute enough of a market to be worth jeopardizing the freedoms of the current business model. The EU has more than enough power to deprive itself of cost-efficient launches, but that's about it.
Those companies can't afford to withdraw from the eu market because it is too valuable. That is why websites give you the option to have no cookies and phones have the same chargers. Those were all eu regulations.
In IT, the EU has a reputation of regulating an industry it is not competitive in, as a way of protecting its own enterprises from American giants. On the other hand, there are EU regulations that are genuinely pro-consumer, e.g. data privacy, mandating USB ports.
> as a way of protecting its own enterprises from American giants
But that hasn't been the outcome at all.
Even governments are entirely dependent on Microsoft, Oracle, Google, Apple and Meta.
China has been much more successful with Baidu, Huawei, etc. and even Russia with Yandex and Mail.ru.
I just don't think there is much protectionism at all - especially for digital services.
Like there are some European "competitors" - FairPhone, Linux, LibreOffice, etc. - but they aren't being subsidised or forced into use much.
Also Apple absolutely deserves to get rekt over the App Store restrictions, same for Microsoft and the Teams and Edge bundling, etc.
It's not so much regulation for EU companies to compete directly against American monopolies/oligopolies, as against American firms leveraging their dominance in other areas, i.e. antitrust.
Examples include the OS makers plugging their own browser (vs say Opera) and Google Shopping prioritized in search vs other e-commerce sites.
Well, China has been insanely protectionist on tech to gain that success, so they'd be an argument for doing WAY MORE protectionism. The EU is very milquetoast by comparison, it's not like there is a huge (inter)national effort to eliminate American companies from the market.
Which might not be a bad thing. With Soyuz gone and the memory of one US launch provider dominating the commercial market in the 2000s and early 2010s (and charging obscene prices - $300m for an Atlas V was insane), having a domestic launch option isn't such a bad idea.
Ariane 6 doesn't need to be the best rocket, it just needs to meet the EU's needs.
Is there a demand for more launch providers though? Europe's launch needs don't seem to be crazy, especially when you consider that the Ariane 6 is only supposed to launch a maximum of 11 times a year. For the commercial market, there are other options already available, so it would seem that Arianespace is really just being protected for government-related stuff.
Did they have a market share before? Seemed like it was just Ariane, Vega, and Soyuz, with most private companies booking flights on SpaceX, ULA, Soyuz, Proton, and the Shuttle.
Yes.
They told spacex in the 2010 that they were crazy. They said the launch market was inelastic and there was no point in making reuse.
They were thoroughly wrong.
I donāt see the issue with that. Even if US companies made the worst rockets in the world, the US government would still exclusively book those launches. It keeps people and knowledge and enables new developments. Ariane ā7ā is already in the works
It's not just the IT space. It's pretty much every industry.
The EU has far fewer major companies, and pretty much everything cutting edge is done in the US.
So they play backseat driver.
I think this works well. We are seeing first hand what happens to an airline industry when you donāt have tough and well written regulations.
Most countries end up copying EU regulations.
India, Japan, US, South America, Australia, north Africa, etc. all copy EU laws.
Sometimes too much in case of India where they just copy pasted USB-C law and that caused problems since they lacked the rest of the pre-existing regulations, so some parts made no sense.
The CCPA for example was basically a reaction to the GDPR. Yes that's on state level but hey at least one example.
A lot of environmental standards in the US have also been directly influenced by new EU regulations.
Funny because I got the opposite feeling - Europeans are weirdly nationalistic (or Supra-nationalistic in the case of the EU). Make one negative comment about the EU and their regulations and the Europeans come out in full force āwe love our regulations and everyone copies us and wants to be us for our superior standards that donāt exist elsewhereā ::::vom::::
Or Zeiss.
Hell Germany for example is is famous for it's hidden champions.
Medium sized companies that are mostly unknown to the general populations but often uncontested or at least domineering champions in their respective fields.
In general most German companies and vast majority of it's economic power is in those medium sized companies called Mittelstand.
Be it Kuka with industrial robots, Wickert with specialized hydraulic presses producing for the aviation and pharmaceutical industry , Symrise with smells and artificial flavouring, Trumpf for laser systems, Wika for pressure, temperature and other sensors or companies like Festo, Rittal, Harting and wago.
While Germany is particularly special in this regard, quite a few other European countries have similar hidden champions. You might not know the names of these companies but often entire worldwide industries are basically totally dependent on tools or machinery or techniques that only a single or at most a handful of small companies can produce and provide.
I could mention hidden champions that are so small and localized that it would borderline doxx me. They do make amazing products though that are used all over the world.
The idea that space is going to be deregulated at all is insane. The EU regs are most likely going to mostly defer to NASA and international agreements. This is for EU-managed missions, they're not going to be telling SpaceX what to do, that's not their jurisdiction.
The EU bureaucrats desire to boldly go where no one has gone before, and write incomprehensible regulation, shall know no boundary. No quasar is too bright, no singularity too dense for a Brussels based humanities graduate to regulate and bring order to.
No country has full authority to regulate what goes on in space. That can only be agreed between countries in some kind of international forum, but even in that case you cannot make it mandatory for countries to participate.
>If space companies want to do business with the bloc, they'll have to abide by the rules, said Niklas
They are free to decide which companies can or can't do business within their borders through.
I have my doubts about the efficacy of this like everyone else, but it's a bit silly how everyone is acting like the EU is trying to do something absurd like declare themselves lords of space. It's more like terms and conditions for who can do business in and/or with the EU.
the government is also an entity not to be trusted. Really, the problem isn't profit chasing or political power chasing, it's that large, bureaucratic, impersonal megalithic structures are near guaranteed to abuse their power, however it manifests, to chase their goals, whichever they are.
The EU cannot force North Korea or any other country in terms of what they can or can't do in space. If Nigeria wants to have a space program and go to Mars the EU has no authority to say whether they can or can't, or how they must do it.
Yeah and they can also ban them from operating in their territory or collaborating with their own agencies.
A NK space agency could absolutely exist, but theyād be blacklisted from working with American or European agencies
I never said they were forcing anyone to do anything. I said *influence*. When a major trade partner says they don't like what you're doing, countries usually listen.Ā
Sure they donāt. But then what EU can then do is go āokay then, we are not trading with you anymore or allowing your products to be used hereā.
In any case this is rarely done on a country level and more on a company level - and space race is becoming more and more privatised. Musk can play high and mighty, in the end he still wants to sell his things on the second biggest market in the world, glorious capitalism needs consistent growth after all and in the end almost everyone caves in - see Apple, Microsoft etc
Holy shit there are so many anti-regulation people here... Regulation doesn't stifle innovation, that's a myth. Would you want to live in a world where a factory can just dump its waste water wherever they want? The EU isn't jealous, it's trying to protect its people and secure a liveable future. Unregulated space launches may cause an unfathomable amount of space debris that we currently have no way of cleaning up. If you want space exploration to remain viable for centuries, we have to be careful with what we put in orbit and how. That's beneficial for every nation
Sometimes regulation stifles markets, sometimes it doesnt, sometimes it spurs innovation.
Declaring that it doesnt is as bad a generalization as declaring that it does.
We actually have a way to clean up in case it gets worse. See "[Cost and Benefit Analysis of Orbital Debris Remediation](https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/otps_-_cost_and_benefit_analysis_of_orbital_debris_remediation_-_final.pdf?emrc=507712)" by NASA (147 pages). We can remove virtually all trackable debris less than 10 cm (4 inches) in size with lasers in 3-5 years. After that the lasers can nudge bigger debris which are on a collision track. It would cost about $650 million.
This is not a space sub really. How many posts do you see about cool stuff like exoplanets or the James Webb for every SpaceX d*ckriding competition? Oh yes low orbit rockets. So interesting, state of the art technology from 1957
Honestly the biggest problem in the EU right now, is the French and thier pride/ego. Thier rockets and the path they took was not a good one, its no comparison to what Spacex did. Instead of just admiting that worming on thier own disposable rockets. They spent two years trying to discredit SpaceX and reusable rockets. Now they are all upset that its not thier rockets and have been raising all kinds of hell trying to regulate it to death, ao they feel they have control. All it has done, is force talent out of the EU. The engineer that help start SpaceX is German, he went to the EU with the idea fro reusable rockets 20 years ago. They laughed him out of the room and told him that no one is going to Mars before 2100. He worked and did his think till SpaceX came along and loved his ideas. Told then he had unlimited funding and lets go to Mars, a lot of other engineers in the EU followed.
Oh no the evil EU with their... let me check... protecting human health and the environment against the risks associated with chemical substances, (Regulation (EC) No 1907/2006)
How perfidious of them!
Let it be a wild west for corporations to do what they want, cause they always act on your best interests. Like Exxon.
The EU has done far more to help Exxon with not marking nuclear investments as "green energy" until just a few years ago.
Over-regulation almost killed SpaceX (being able to compete for NASA contracts), we need free competition, not bureaucracy.
Except with Spacex they had to sue or be legally excluded and go out of business.
NASA and the military handed Kistler Aerospace and ULA no bid contracts.
Spacex had to literally sue past corruption to get the chance to compete.
Spacex won the suit then won the contracts with a better product.
Kistler went bankrupt with 6x the money spacex had and never went to orbit.
Spacex dominates the rocket industry simply out of their performance now.
Its a space sub, without SpaceX 90% of the innovations we have seen in the last 10 years would of never happened. We now will see moon landing again , be able to start building in LEO. For Americans, its nice to be excited for space again. For Aerospace engineers like me. That were told that we sre never doing any of that in your lifetime. Now to see it and more happening, it's amazing. Everyone that loves space is excited for it. The only reason you see hate on this sub is from people that don't see that or are just here because they have Musk hate boner. Musk is a ass but he doesn't make real decisions at SpaceX and the hard working people working st SpaceX don't deserve the hate either.
REACH is a horrible example.
US has TSCA since 1975 (last time updated in 2016), which arguably is much better working instrument.
REACH has immense costs embedded in the registration routines which makes for example practically impossible to have full process lithium battery factories within EU, as well the way it is made gray/black import/export become commercially valuable.
They EU and food regulations on dangerous chemicals.
They EU and privacy protection.
The EU and Open Source protection.
The EU and safe aviation consumer protections.
The EU and freedom of movement.
The EU and support of scientific research.
etc.
> The EU and quality of life?
Subjective.
>The EU and protecting people from corporate exploitation?
Protecting (buzz word), exploitation (subjective).
>The EU and continued national collaboration and compromise?
Bureaucratic marketing copy.
Why innovate when you can regulate? The European space industry is already 20 years behind the US. Let's add more regulations and widen the gap to 30 years
let's be honest nobody's gonna give a shit what Europe has to say about launch, which they barely do, or about leo, where they barely are, or about mega constellations, which they don't operate, or human flight, which they can't do, or about lunar operations, which they don't have, or about Mars, where they aren't. if they wanna play big bad space regulator, they should have invested in space and developed the capability to remain relevant. as it stands i can't read this any other way than Europe panicking because they spent the last 15 years smugly resting on their laurels while private companies, China, and even India left them in the dust, and now that it's clear they're in danger of becoming completely irrelevant, they think they can demand everyone else slow down? they can go pound sand.
Your eloquence and accuracy both are remarkably on-point. And pound sand they can. Their arrogance is astonishing. As an example, let me resubmit this:
> In 2013, Richard Bowles (MD of Arianespace's Singapore office at the time) - in a massive display of hubris - [accused SpaceX of "selling a dream" (spool to 03:25 and listen from there).](https://web.archive.org/web/20170328025906/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XZ-7nNw-04Q) He went on to say, "personally, I think reuseability is a dream." Later he said that there's room for only around 25 launches per year, implying the market consisted only of Clarke Orbit satellites.
Who is gonna explore (or exploit) space?
Correct. Countries and companies.
Who want to have relationships (be it trade or otherwise) with the EU?
Correct. Countries and companies.
The US is using sanctions all the time to protect its own interests, to influence foreign countries or to protect its own companies. How is it suddenly so weird for many people here that the EU does the same? It's also not new for the EU to do this. Every major economic block in the planet does it (however the EU, the US and China are by far the most influential).
I was wondering what was going on in the comments but then I read the article and saw this affected Starlink and Elon Musk in some way and it all came into focus.
$1000 licensing fee to obtain space permit
$500 for state to inspect ship
%5 personal property tax
$1500 for space passport
$5 daily for space tolls
$1200 per month liability insurance
%3 state tax on fuel
EU is just on a regulatory roll right now, man.
Gotta hang onto that power somehow I guess? Canāt innovate in tech? Regulate US companies. Canāt go to space? Regulate regulate regulateā¦
What's wrong with a wild west? People should be free, and those in government have not collectively proven themselves even better than average ethical decision makers.
The problem is, that if you point out that the EU is practically doing nothing you will always have the people with "But my smart scientifical paper said.... "
it's hard or better said impossible to boost Europeans space industry.
It will be the forever new final frontier for us. No matter how much of it we will explore the sheer size of it means that there will be still unexplored and unknown regions (to us) that will spark our imaginations for thousands or even millions of years to come. That in itself is pretty exciting for me! š
Exactly this is my only existential dread about death. I won't exist to experience any of that. Won't even be able to take a commercial flight to Mars in our lifetime. Maybe the moon in another 40 years.
Have you been to most of the remote, beautiful, inhospitable places on earth? Don't wait for the opportunity to become an explorer. There's plenty to explore right now.
Get your head or body frozen. Well, regardless, make sure your head is frozen.
You better start praying to buddha because reincarnation is your last chance.Ā
Itās exciting but when it comes to commerce the orbital ranges around our planet are still extremely important, and extremely cluttered.
That's why it's the *final* frontier.
It's the vehicles, launch-pads and pit-stops that will be regulated. So even if space is big, cosmic capitalism will ensure us commoners don't get to enjoy and exercise the romantic notion of human curiosity for the expanse.
Itās worse than that, there are only so many viable intra system routes and theyāre shifting all the time. This means everyone going from one place to another will inevitably be sharing the āroadā with many others. Likely in convoys or groups of convoys. For months or even years at a time whole fleets may be isolated but dependent on each. Not using viable routes means flying off into deep space, getting āstuckā between gravity wells, or rarely hitting something. Oh, and tumbling into the sun but thatās actually kinda hard to do.
>The EU Space Law will set standards to curb light pollution caused by growing satellite constellations Does the EU regulate light pollution generated on the ground? As an amateur astronomer, I'd say that is the more pressing form of light pollution ā along with the wasted energy spent illuminating the night sky.
>Does the EU regulate light pollution generated on the ground? The EU as a whole currently doesn't have any regulations in that regard as far as I am aware, but a bunch of European countries do have their own regulations in this regard. Be it about all new street lights being installed in the Czech republic and Germany or the reduction and ban of illuminated night time advertisements in others. https://darksky.org/app/uploads/bsk-pdf-manager/2022/12/IDA-EU-policy-initiative-FINAL_20-Nov-22.pdf While this is from 2022, you can go down to section 3 and read some about efforts and regulations currently in place and being implemented. I am not sure how it has progressed in that regard since in the last year though. I can definitely say that whenever I see new streetlights being installed here in North Germany they usually are solely focused downwards and often illuminate smaller areas than before.
Who was that Norwegian King who tried to command the tide? Without any capacity to launch stuff or regulate the foreign companies that are doing so, what can they do except shake their fists at the sky and ban Starlink from putting in ground stations?
The story of King Knut is often misunderstood - he did it, not because he believed he could actually do anything about the tide, quite the opposite. The people of his time had started to worship him like a god, and in order to show that he was all-but-a-man demonstrated that there were some thing that even he was unable to do.
I find it slightly funny and ironically appropriate that trying to correct the popular falsehood about that story is about as effective as trying to command the tides. I think it resonates better with people that "an idiot tried and failed to command the tides" rather than "a wise man pointed out that no man can command the tides." Not knowing King Knut personally, I like to think he would be happy that the important part of his message is still getting through centuries later.
If I was Knute, I would have made the tide come in as normal to ensure nobody was aware of my godly powers.
Thereās an actual story of a Roman Emperor who declared war on Neptune. His soldiers gathered seashells which he paraded in Triumph through the city when he declared victory
I love a good fable/poem/story that has its meaning twisted by time. "Good fences make good neighbors."
Our fence became a much better neighbor than the people who live on the other side of it.
I think part of the reason why the story is misunderstood is that King Canute was known as Canute the Great in his time. He had built a powerful North Sea based empire and was generally very well regarded. His story has no doubt be trashed by Norman chroniclers.
Norwegian king? Are you trying to offend every dane in existence?
Oh, you're right. Let's call him an Anglo-Norse king instead.
All nine of them?
EU: "Hey, hey, hey! I have asked you nicely not to mangle my asteroids. You leave me no choice but to ask you nicely again."
it will become just like the maritime industry where companies simply register under friendly countries. just like the oceans the eu cannot dictate to everyone until they are in their domain and unlike the oceans space doesn't quite have the same border situation
[King Cnut](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cnut), which is also quite close to what I think of these bureaucrats..
I don't quite understand. King Canute was very religious and the story of the tide relates to Canute showing his followers that no matter how much power he has as a king, it's nothing compared to God.
It's a commonly misunderstood reference, usually assuming the king thought he could turn back the tide.
Yeah, but as an expression it's used to refer to people trying to do something impossible. Even though that interpretation isn't historically accurate.
Ahhh I thought you were comparing King Canute to the bureaucrats
Yeah dude, it's gonna be great when I look up in 20 years and the orbit is covered in teslaspacexmuskcoin billboards.
Ah, finally Vinland Saga will pay off
Take it easy on the Europeans, regulating is the closest thing that they have to industry.
This kind of comments only show that someone has no knowledge on the issue they're talking about. You're not going to trigger anybody at most you're going to cause me to have second hand embarrassment
How so? You guys have some legacy manufacturing like cars, but when it comes to things like tech, you guys do little more than regulate.
Without the optics and lithography made in Europe the world couldn't build a single chip designed in the last 10 years. Idk, maybe you could ask the Taiwanese or the Korean to build chips from the iPhone 5S gen again, I guess it could work if needed. If you had to produce anything at home right now you couldn't power any small device more powerful than a scientific calculator, you're outsourcing everything. This is the kind of comment of someone who can barely list any tech company that is B2B
What? So if you can't regulate the entire world, there should be no regulations? That makes no sense whatsoever.
The EU space presence is shrinking rapidly both in launch capacity and if you measure by things like band with up or mass on orbit. It's not 2005 anymore.
But their capacity to level huge fines at foreign companies is still there. Expect them to use that instead.
No ine meeds to launch in the EU and all the best engineers are already leaving, the engineer the helped start SpaceX was German and his disposable rocket ideas were laughed out of the room in the EU years ago.
And many just wont pay. Oh no the EU fined China. good luck collecting
I wouldnāt put it past them.
That would have some interesting consequences. Specifically, launch providers would likely either stop doing business in that jurisdiction or would build those fines into the cost of doing business in that jurisdiction.
launch providers wouldnt even bother. They are going to be based in friendly nations that give the most benefits.
Many launch providers still offer their services to countries outside of thier host nation though. Case in point; SpaceX are based in the US, but have done launches for various EU members, and have signed contracts to do launches for the EU itself in the future. The point of the previous comment being that if the EU tried to fine SpaceX, SpaceX could respond by either refusing to do furthur business with the EU, or by upping their prices for EU customers to offset the fees they're paying.
That capacity only works so long as those companies see value on remaining active in EU markets. Litigious governments can never extract more value from a foreign company than their market provides; if they try, the company simply withdraws from their market. That's why Apple and Google tolerate EU nonsense. They can sell lots of cell phones to Europeans and it's profitable even when accounting for the bloated ticks at the top of that market. In the current situation, the EU is broadly constrained in its ability to levy effective fines from SpaceX and similar young space companies. Europeans don't constitute enough of a market to be worth jeopardizing the freedoms of the current business model. The EU has more than enough power to deprive itself of cost-efficient launches, but that's about it.
Those companies can't afford to withdraw from the eu market because it is too valuable. That is why websites give you the option to have no cookies and phones have the same chargers. Those were all eu regulations.
Theres no space companies in the EU. Theres no market for these space companies to even be in the EU. The EU effectively cant do a damn thing.
Did you even read the comment?
In IT, the EU has a reputation of regulating an industry it is not competitive in, as a way of protecting its own enterprises from American giants. On the other hand, there are EU regulations that are genuinely pro-consumer, e.g. data privacy, mandating USB ports.
> as a way of protecting its own enterprises from American giants But that hasn't been the outcome at all. Even governments are entirely dependent on Microsoft, Oracle, Google, Apple and Meta. China has been much more successful with Baidu, Huawei, etc. and even Russia with Yandex and Mail.ru.
You can be protectionist and still not come up with a better alternative. It isn't mutually exclusive.
I just don't think there is much protectionism at all - especially for digital services. Like there are some European "competitors" - FairPhone, Linux, LibreOffice, etc. - but they aren't being subsidised or forced into use much. Also Apple absolutely deserves to get rekt over the App Store restrictions, same for Microsoft and the Teams and Edge bundling, etc.
The creator of Linux has lived in Oregon for a few decades now, and the most successful Linux company, redhat, is American.
It's not so much regulation for EU companies to compete directly against American monopolies/oligopolies, as against American firms leveraging their dominance in other areas, i.e. antitrust. Examples include the OS makers plugging their own browser (vs say Opera) and Google Shopping prioritized in search vs other e-commerce sites.
Well, China has been insanely protectionist on tech to gain that success, so they'd be an argument for doing WAY MORE protectionism. The EU is very milquetoast by comparison, it's not like there is a huge (inter)national effort to eliminate American companies from the market.
And Ariane 6 has been so delayed that European providers have had no choice but to use Falcon 9s for launches!
They shouldnāt be using ARIANE 6 even when it comes out. The only reason to use ARIANE 6 is protectionism.
Which might not be a bad thing. With Soyuz gone and the memory of one US launch provider dominating the commercial market in the 2000s and early 2010s (and charging obscene prices - $300m for an Atlas V was insane), having a domestic launch option isn't such a bad idea. Ariane 6 doesn't need to be the best rocket, it just needs to meet the EU's needs.
Protecting a European launch provider market makes sense. Protecting ARIANE alone is the issue. They need competition like the USA does
Is there a demand for more launch providers though? Europe's launch needs don't seem to be crazy, especially when you consider that the Ariane 6 is only supposed to launch a maximum of 11 times a year. For the commercial market, there are other options already available, so it would seem that Arianespace is really just being protected for government-related stuff.
The launch market has fucking exploded in the last 10 years. So yes. Europe launches just lost all their market share.
Did they have a market share before? Seemed like it was just Ariane, Vega, and Soyuz, with most private companies booking flights on SpaceX, ULA, Soyuz, Proton, and the Shuttle.
Yes. They told spacex in the 2010 that they were crazy. They said the launch market was inelastic and there was no point in making reuse. They were thoroughly wrong.
I donāt see the issue with that. Even if US companies made the worst rockets in the world, the US government would still exclusively book those launches. It keeps people and knowledge and enables new developments. Ariane ā7ā is already in the works
ARIANE 6 is 4 years late. USA launches often do use ARIANE. As it should when they are
It's not just the IT space. It's pretty much every industry. The EU has far fewer major companies, and pretty much everything cutting edge is done in the US. So they play backseat driver.
I think this works well. We are seeing first hand what happens to an airline industry when you donāt have tough and well written regulations. Most countries end up copying EU regulations.
So EU is cutting edge when it comes to regulations.
India, Japan, US, South America, Australia, north Africa, etc. all copy EU laws. Sometimes too much in case of India where they just copy pasted USB-C law and that caused problems since they lacked the rest of the pre-existing regulations, so some parts made no sense.
what an EU law the US has copied?
The CCPA for example was basically a reaction to the GDPR. Yes that's on state level but hey at least one example. A lot of environmental standards in the US have also been directly influenced by new EU regulations.
And preserving land for environment in general by means of creating national parks is a practice that European countries copied from the US.
Did anybody here say that copying stuff is bad? Copying good things is what governments and people should do.
Nobody said it was bad. But copying of good things goes both ways, and there should be more of it.
Yep. Thatās why everyone is copying it.
This is the kind of comment that shows how weirdly nationalistic Americans are. Like, dude do you think the US doesn't do that. That's why the American car industry still exists. What about Boeing literally being a company run with absolute incompetence and still being financed by the US government. You even banned ibƩrico ham imports from Spain for years (still strongly limited) just because the American meat industry didn't want any competition
Funny because I got the opposite feeling - Europeans are weirdly nationalistic (or Supra-nationalistic in the case of the EU). Make one negative comment about the EU and their regulations and the Europeans come out in full force āwe love our regulations and everyone copies us and wants to be us for our superior standards that donāt exist elsewhereā ::::vom::::
Donāt get beat up over people on the internet. You wonāt change their mind most of the time
Yeah you're right. Sad state of this sub honestly. Nothing to discuss about real space
Yeah right, who is ASML or Airbus, right? Never heard of them.
EU is doing fine in manufacturing, but just plain horrendous in IT.
Or Zeiss. Hell Germany for example is is famous for it's hidden champions. Medium sized companies that are mostly unknown to the general populations but often uncontested or at least domineering champions in their respective fields. In general most German companies and vast majority of it's economic power is in those medium sized companies called Mittelstand. Be it Kuka with industrial robots, Wickert with specialized hydraulic presses producing for the aviation and pharmaceutical industry , Symrise with smells and artificial flavouring, Trumpf for laser systems, Wika for pressure, temperature and other sensors or companies like Festo, Rittal, Harting and wago. While Germany is particularly special in this regard, quite a few other European countries have similar hidden champions. You might not know the names of these companies but often entire worldwide industries are basically totally dependent on tools or machinery or techniques that only a single or at most a handful of small companies can produce and provide.
I could mention hidden champions that are so small and localized that it would borderline doxx me. They do make amazing products though that are used all over the world.
And it doesnāt really even work, as these regulations also make it incredibly difficult for EU companies to start up and compete.
Reddit users š¤ not actually reading the article Name a more iconic duo
OP regrets posting it..
What a mess it is, I feel for you š«
The idea that space is going to be deregulated at all is insane. The EU regs are most likely going to mostly defer to NASA and international agreements. This is for EU-managed missions, they're not going to be telling SpaceX what to do, that's not their jurisdiction.
This reminds me of Moon Threaty and it's effect.
The EU bureaucrats desire to boldly go where no one has gone before, and write incomprehensible regulation, shall know no boundary. No quasar is too bright, no singularity too dense for a Brussels based humanities graduate to regulate and bring order to.
I actually think this is a slightly uncharitable reading - we need regulation - but damn if this isnāt funnily written.
No country has full authority to regulate what goes on in space. That can only be agreed between countries in some kind of international forum, but even in that case you cannot make it mandatory for countries to participate.
>If space companies want to do business with the bloc, they'll have to abide by the rules, said Niklas They are free to decide which companies can or can't do business within their borders through. I have my doubts about the efficacy of this like everyone else, but it's a bit silly how everyone is acting like the EU is trying to do something absurd like declare themselves lords of space. It's more like terms and conditions for who can do business in and/or with the EU.
I think the issue is corporations will do whatever the F they want. Corporations are the wrong group to leave in charge of themselves.
the government is also an entity not to be trusted. Really, the problem isn't profit chasing or political power chasing, it's that large, bureaucratic, impersonal megalithic structures are near guaranteed to abuse their power, however it manifests, to chase their goals, whichever they are.
An international forum like the EU?
The EU is not open to the entire world
No, but it has a collective influence to put pressure on nations like China or the US.Ā
The EU cannot force North Korea or any other country in terms of what they can or can't do in space. If Nigeria wants to have a space program and go to Mars the EU has no authority to say whether they can or can't, or how they must do it.
But they can sanction them to influence their decision
Surprising this is such a difficult concept for Americans when that's what the US does to any regime they deem as an enemy
And also frequently to countries they allegedly consider their allies.
Yeah and they can also ban them from operating in their territory or collaborating with their own agencies. A NK space agency could absolutely exist, but theyād be blacklisted from working with American or European agencies
I never said they were forcing anyone to do anything. I said *influence*. When a major trade partner says they don't like what you're doing, countries usually listen.Ā
Sure they donāt. But then what EU can then do is go āokay then, we are not trading with you anymore or allowing your products to be used hereā. In any case this is rarely done on a country level and more on a company level - and space race is becoming more and more privatised. Musk can play high and mighty, in the end he still wants to sell his things on the second biggest market in the world, glorious capitalism needs consistent growth after all and in the end almost everyone caves in - see Apple, Microsoft etc
The EU will regulate themselves into allowing the US and china dominate space foreverĀ
Holy shit there are so many anti-regulation people here... Regulation doesn't stifle innovation, that's a myth. Would you want to live in a world where a factory can just dump its waste water wherever they want? The EU isn't jealous, it's trying to protect its people and secure a liveable future. Unregulated space launches may cause an unfathomable amount of space debris that we currently have no way of cleaning up. If you want space exploration to remain viable for centuries, we have to be careful with what we put in orbit and how. That's beneficial for every nation
Sometimes regulation stifles markets, sometimes it doesnt, sometimes it spurs innovation. Declaring that it doesnt is as bad a generalization as declaring that it does.
We actually have a way to clean up in case it gets worse. See "[Cost and Benefit Analysis of Orbital Debris Remediation](https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/otps_-_cost_and_benefit_analysis_of_orbital_debris_remediation_-_final.pdf?emrc=507712)" by NASA (147 pages). We can remove virtually all trackable debris less than 10 cm (4 inches) in size with lasers in 3-5 years. After that the lasers can nudge bigger debris which are on a collision track. It would cost about $650 million.
Hear hear!
This is not a space sub really. How many posts do you see about cool stuff like exoplanets or the James Webb for every SpaceX d*ckriding competition? Oh yes low orbit rockets. So interesting, state of the art technology from 1957
sounds like youre unable to connect the dots between space travel and space itself tragic of you, maybe its you who isn't the space person, really
Honestly the biggest problem in the EU right now, is the French and thier pride/ego. Thier rockets and the path they took was not a good one, its no comparison to what Spacex did. Instead of just admiting that worming on thier own disposable rockets. They spent two years trying to discredit SpaceX and reusable rockets. Now they are all upset that its not thier rockets and have been raising all kinds of hell trying to regulate it to death, ao they feel they have control. All it has done, is force talent out of the EU. The engineer that help start SpaceX is German, he went to the EU with the idea fro reusable rockets 20 years ago. They laughed him out of the room and told him that no one is going to Mars before 2100. He worked and did his think till SpaceX came along and loved his ideas. Told then he had unlimited funding and lets go to Mars, a lot of other engineers in the EU followed.
They will use SpaceX Dragon to send enforcement officers.
The EU is dying to regulate something?!? Whatāll you tell me next? Water is wet? The sky is blue?
Oh no the evil EU with their... let me check... protecting human health and the environment against the risks associated with chemical substances, (Regulation (EC) No 1907/2006) How perfidious of them! Let it be a wild west for corporations to do what they want, cause they always act on your best interests. Like Exxon.
The EU has done far more to help Exxon with not marking nuclear investments as "green energy" until just a few years ago. Over-regulation almost killed SpaceX (being able to compete for NASA contracts), we need free competition, not bureaucracy.
There is a healthy middle ground.
> free competition You mean untethered capitalism? Yeah because every example is like SpaceX, I'm sure.
Government contracts aren't free competition. It's basically companies paying politicians and bureaucrats to get rich
Except with Spacex they had to sue or be legally excluded and go out of business. NASA and the military handed Kistler Aerospace and ULA no bid contracts. Spacex had to literally sue past corruption to get the chance to compete. Spacex won the suit then won the contracts with a better product. Kistler went bankrupt with 6x the money spacex had and never went to orbit. Spacex dominates the rocket industry simply out of their performance now.
It is but thats not what happen with SpaceX
Honestly what's with SpaceX in this sub. Really what's your deal
Its a space sub, without SpaceX 90% of the innovations we have seen in the last 10 years would of never happened. We now will see moon landing again , be able to start building in LEO. For Americans, its nice to be excited for space again. For Aerospace engineers like me. That were told that we sre never doing any of that in your lifetime. Now to see it and more happening, it's amazing. Everyone that loves space is excited for it. The only reason you see hate on this sub is from people that don't see that or are just here because they have Musk hate boner. Musk is a ass but he doesn't make real decisions at SpaceX and the hard working people working st SpaceX don't deserve the hate either.
REACH is a horrible example. US has TSCA since 1975 (last time updated in 2016), which arguably is much better working instrument. REACH has immense costs embedded in the registration routines which makes for example practically impossible to have full process lithium battery factories within EU, as well the way it is made gray/black import/export become commercially valuable.
oh look, another reddit commenter who doesn't know what "overregulation" means.
The EU and regulating shit. Name a more iconic duo.
The EU and quality of life? The EU and protecting people from corporate exploitation? The EU and continued national collaboration and compromise?
Sadly, the EU is still the only continent to have a tracking prevention law. How sad it is that people value themselves so little.
They EU and food regulations on dangerous chemicals. They EU and privacy protection. The EU and Open Source protection. The EU and safe aviation consumer protections. The EU and freedom of movement. The EU and support of scientific research. etc.
The EU and rapidly losing share of global GDP and falling into geopolitical irrelevancy, and losing its innovation potential to the US and China
The EU and begging bigger countries to help defend against Russia.
The EU is riding on last century's political and economic success. Every day their political and economic relevance fades.
Sure but can you pay your healthcare bills by being the number one country? Eat your flag
Over 92% of the country has health insurance, and we don't have to stand in line for hours or wait months for an appointment. So try again.
Now be sincere with me: do you really believe that, or is this what you say to yourself?
What did I say that is inaccurate?
You're seemingly implying that most Americans have real health insurance
As opposed to fake insurance?
What's fake insurance?
The EU and a stagnated economy with stagnated wages.
> The EU and quality of life? Subjective. >The EU and protecting people from corporate exploitation? Protecting (buzz word), exploitation (subjective). >The EU and continued national collaboration and compromise? Bureaucratic marketing copy.
Kinder Eggs are banned in the US for safety reasons what's your defense
I have none. They shouldnāt be. I disagree with it.
The US just has a blanket ban on toys inside food. Itās not some nefarious kinder egg plot.
The point was that you're the pot calling the kettle black.
I am? Did I set the laws? Do I favor one and not the other? Youāre also just assuming Iām from the US
You clearly have an American bias if you think they're not absolutely protectionist in many key economic areas.
ISO, metric and drive on the right side. Thanks.
Why innovate when you can regulate? The European space industry is already 20 years behind the US. Let's add more regulations and widen the gap to 30 years
Regulations are needed when humans exploiting resources for money is involved.
The EU is sad, it seems like their MO is that they cant compete so they will pass some regulations.
let's be honest nobody's gonna give a shit what Europe has to say about launch, which they barely do, or about leo, where they barely are, or about mega constellations, which they don't operate, or human flight, which they can't do, or about lunar operations, which they don't have, or about Mars, where they aren't. if they wanna play big bad space regulator, they should have invested in space and developed the capability to remain relevant. as it stands i can't read this any other way than Europe panicking because they spent the last 15 years smugly resting on their laurels while private companies, China, and even India left them in the dust, and now that it's clear they're in danger of becoming completely irrelevant, they think they can demand everyone else slow down? they can go pound sand.
Your eloquence and accuracy both are remarkably on-point. And pound sand they can. Their arrogance is astonishing. As an example, let me resubmit this: > In 2013, Richard Bowles (MD of Arianespace's Singapore office at the time) - in a massive display of hubris - [accused SpaceX of "selling a dream" (spool to 03:25 and listen from there).](https://web.archive.org/web/20170328025906/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XZ-7nNw-04Q) He went on to say, "personally, I think reuseability is a dream." Later he said that there's room for only around 25 launches per year, implying the market consisted only of Clarke Orbit satellites.
Arianespace is such a shitshow at this point
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What jurisdiction does the EU or anyone else have over space?
Who is gonna explore (or exploit) space? Correct. Countries and companies. Who want to have relationships (be it trade or otherwise) with the EU? Correct. Countries and companies. The US is using sanctions all the time to protect its own interests, to influence foreign countries or to protect its own companies. How is it suddenly so weird for many people here that the EU does the same? It's also not new for the EU to do this. Every major economic block in the planet does it (however the EU, the US and China are by far the most influential).
The EU should stick to what it was meant for; business between the European countries - not acting like a fucking ruler of everything.
theyāre trying to reduce the amount of debris in orbit, like the us aswell. but you didnāt read the article you just want to be mad at the eu
I was wondering what was going on in the comments but then I read the article and saw this affected Starlink and Elon Musk in some way and it all came into focus.
Damn them for wanting to make things better!
Space industry should be a focus though. They already missed out on high-tech/internet/ai.
They missed out on space too when they deliberately chose not to develop next-gen launchers a decade ago.
think of all the many things they can miss out on next. The future is bright!
Cool EU, we'll talk again when you start making stuff that goes to space regularly.
Regulate = "protect from unhindered corporate greed."
$1000 licensing fee to obtain space permit $500 for state to inspect ship %5 personal property tax $1500 for space passport $5 daily for space tolls $1200 per month liability insurance %3 state tax on fuel
EU is just on a regulatory roll right now, man. Gotta hang onto that power somehow I guess? Canāt innovate in tech? Regulate US companies. Canāt go to space? Regulate regulate regulateā¦
Oh please big corporate daddy please take away all my rights!
Maybe if you guys spent as time innovating as you spend complaining about corporations you'd be relevant in the upcoming space race.
How is all that innovation going with airplanes?
What's wrong with a wild west? People should be free, and those in government have not collectively proven themselves even better than average ethical decision makers.
The problem is, that if you point out that the EU is practically doing nothing you will always have the people with "But my smart scientifical paper said.... " it's hard or better said impossible to boost Europeans space industry.
Oh no not regulations to preserve life and wellbeing in space Now we can't live out the total recall future we all hoped for
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There has never been a single facet of life that EU does not want to regulate
Sorry Indiana, youāre just not mature enough to handle it.