Even though this is not impressive compared to SpaceX, it is still essential that we have multiple actors building rockets. The competition makes sure that SpaceX needs to push the boundaries. Our future as a multi-planetary species is not dependent on a single actor.
I'm hoping for some space race. It would be great if the United States would transfer a part of MIC funding to space exploration.
SpaceX came to be because of all of the knowledge, skills, industry, and people produced by NASA and the US taxpayers.
So it is crucial for Europe to maintain and develop its knowledge and industrial base, but indeed they should also adapt to compete because that's the only way to survive in the long term.
> Arianne 6 is not about competition, but about strategic independence at the first place
That’s what the Starliner folks said. The fault in their argument was ignoring scale effects.
Ariane 6 buys Europe zero practical launch independence, other than maintaining the workforce (and accompanying skill set). If SpaceX blocks Europe, it’s game over for any constellation operator and, in all likelihood, the European commercial space sector.
Ariane 6 hopes to do 10 launches per year by 2030. That’s a few weeks’ Falcon 9s today. Each Ariane 6 launch requires subsidies to be competitive, and that’s assuming Arianespace’s forecasts hold. (They haven’t.) Every one of those euros could be used, instead, on R&D.
Ariane 6 uses cryogenic fuel. It has no landing system, mass-manufacturing site or refurbishment elements. That means that none of the foundational technologies for reusable launch are being worked on. (Ariane 5E would have been a strategic hedge. But Paris wouldn’t have it.)
It is completely irrelevant how much Falcon 9 cost if political leadership of USA is unreliable and unstable. Flacon 9 could be flying for free, but if you could lose access to it any time, it is like it does not exist.
> Flacon 9 could be flying for free, but if you could lose access to it any time, it is like it does not exist
The point is Ariane 6 enables nothing new. If SpaceX blocks Europe for some reason, with or without Ariane 6, Europe isn't going to have a LEO constellation. Keeping Ariane 5 (5ME [1]) and developing a reusable platform would have been a smarter use of resources. (It aso wasn't particularly daring, either, over the last decade.) Instead, the ESA gets stuck with SLS but for Brussels.
Falcon 9's fuel is cooled slightly, if not cryogenic (RP-1 becomes denser when cold), and of course Starship uses cryogenic methane. And they both use liquid oxygen, although that's an oxidizer, not a fuel.
You can't have that strategic independence in the long term is your capability falls more and more behind others in terms of technology and costs. This also has a ripple effect on your industry at large: Would European companies use this European independent launch capability if it was costly and obsolete? No. Would the European military be able to compete against adversaries? No.
An extreme illustration: would you say that Spain had strategic independent seafaring capability if it had maintained fleet a galleons to this day?
> Would European companies use this European independent launch capability if it was costly and obsolete?
If USA will go hermit mode like at the end of 19th century, then they will have no other choice. And we certainly have signs of US wanting to go into isolation.
SpaceX is the only medium-heavy lift provider in the West with free space on their manifest right now. Sure they're constantly launching Starlink, but their entire offering is that if someone else needs to launch a payload, they'll just repurpose a launch that would otherwise be carrying Starlink (since external launches come with a profit, while Starlink launches are at internal cost).
Vulcan's capacity for a year or so is already booked, and Ariane 6 is also fully booked for several years out. Others in the class are approaching first flight, but still lacking enough information to book a launch on.
Ariane 6 is booked for years, SpaceX use most of their launches to put Starlink satellites in orbit. They have a lot of capacity to sell more launches, actually.
Not here. If you’re bootstrapping a modern navy you don’t start by building galleons. Ariane 6 is the prettiest space galleon there ever was. That doesn’t translate into meaningful R&D for a reusable booster. (For example, cryogenic fuels aren’t great for reuse. So dump the engine. Their production cycles are artisan versus assembly line. Et cetera.)
This isn’t a story of European incompetence. It’s one of excellent engineers being wasted by an extractive monopoly. We had the same problem in America in ULA; we never figured out how to reform them. We got lucky in a reboot.
Yeah this is ESA's see-we-have-domestic-launch-capability pointless SLS tier project basically, my tax dollars at work.
I'm really puzzled at the lack of investment into any kind of reusable launch vehicle that could even come close to competing with SpaceX. Launching on this expensive relic of the past makes zero sense unless your payload is a military spysat.
I don't find it surprising. The orbital launch industry is small, but it requires large risky long-term investments. Until a few years ago, SpaceX revenues were relatively flat at ~$2 billion/year. There has been significant growth since then, but more from Starlink than from external customers.
If you're interested in money, there are better investment opportunities around. And if your angle is national security, the ~€500 million/year needed for a program such as Ariane 6 is little more than a rounding error.
We do have a minor space race between the Artemis program and the Chinese Lunar Exploration Program.
It's not as high-profile as the race to the first moon landing, but America's new ambitions to returning to the Moon are at least in part fueled by not wanting to be upstaged by the Chinese. Now both are aiming for putting humans on the moon again before 2030, and both have plans for at least one moon base (that each originally announced to happen before 2030)
I don't think it is that impressive anymore. We've been building rockets for decades. Making them return to Earth is peanuts compared to building a self driving car. You can even make a simulation that is 99% accurate without much effort. Also, rocket science is just Newtonian physics.
Of course, building a rocket requires a shit-ton of resources, so if anything is impressive then it's the management of those resources.
The newtonian physics part of flying a rocket is indeed the boring part of rocket science in these days of Ghz computing.
But all the engineering (an altogether different - if related - discipline) required is anything but simple.
And engineering and all of its sub-disciplines (materials science, propellant research, iterative refinement, operational research, logistics, 3d printing, computing, simulation, structural engineering, etc...) is both where the complexity lives and where the greatest progress in rocket science has been made.
Software engineers have a lack of self-esteem when comparing to other STEM disciplines. The reason we see more fuck-ups in software than in other fields is not because software engineers are stupid, but because software is inherently difficult.
Software engineers are not stupid, but in other STEM disciplines they have a reputation of making themselves look stupid because of beliefs like "it's just newtonian physics".
I'm hoping for some space race. It would be great if the United States would transfer a part of MIC funding to space exploration.