Remember when USA americans were demanding Europe would just give their money to Elon instead of working on their own stuff? I was wasting my time to explain Elon fans why this is stupid and now we have proof that would have been stupid.
Ariane 6 is Europe’s SLS, Arianespace its ULA. Every launch requires public subsidies to float and cements SpaceX’s global advantage by denying funding to European companies who might one day compete with SpaceX.
Arianespace ≈ ULA, yes. Ariane 6 ≈ SLS, absolutely not. There is no official figure yet, but even the most pessimistic estimates place its per-launch cost at $150m (as opposed to $2b for SLS — with a hazy goal to eventually trim it to $500m). The rumors are that Ariane 6 is already well below $100m.
Both SLS and Ariane 6 are late and over-budget, with little hope of being cost-competitive sans-subsidy. Aside from that, they’re very different rockets.
The ESA and Arianespace provide hundreds of European companies with business, most of those subsidies go directly back to the knowledge economy that in turn generate tax income. It's a win-win really, and I'd rather have that than a private company that is dependent on a whim of one man. Not for something so crucial.
Arianespace is essentially assured launch leadership for SpaceX. It denies Europe economies of scale in launch. At the end of the day, if Europe is happy having a small fraction of its own launch market, whatever, Arianespace keeps people employed.
Europe can toss that money to a bunch of different groups and get the results of the talent is there while maintaining an ability to launch with Ariane 6 in the meantime.
I’m really not. Subsidies aren’t the problem. An uncompetitive rocket is. Ariane 6’s per launch costs are multiples SpaceX’s. Nothing Arianespace makes is competitive without operating—not development—subsidies.
As long as Europe is dependant on Arianespace, it’s less serious about space as a place than as a job description. And its companies will continue being reliant on foreign launch providers.
But there really isn't any difference; they started off in exactly the same place. SpaceX' having its captive client (Starlink) isn't some external factor that favored them and disfavored Arianespace: it's a business choice SpaceX made—a choice with enormous risks* of failure—which Arianespace did not. Arianespace took no risks, tried nothing, achieved nothing. That's the difference.
*(People seem to have completely forgotten how incredibly unpopular the LEO megaconstellation idea was when Musk started working on it, mid-2010's. No one understood the point of it; pretty much everyone was skeptical that it could even find enough business customers to break even).
> SpaceX' having its captive client (Starlink) isn't some external factor that favored them
No, but it's an additional information they had to make their decision.
> Arianespace took no risks, tried nothing, achieved nothing.
If you replace Arianespace by Airbus, your point has merit. Airbus, as a publicly traded company, of which 25% is owned by nation-states, has a different risk appetite compared to a privately-owned company funded by someone with deep pockets.
> when Ariane 6 was designed, there was not enough business to support a reusable launcher
This is Arianespace’s Israel’s propaganda. They couldn’t design a high-cadence launcher because there was no market, assuming you ignore Europe’s smallsat industry that’s constantly ridesharing with SpaceX.
> SpaceX had a different outlook because they had a captive client planning to launch thousands of satellites
SpaceX was working on high-frequency low-cost launch before Starlink was in anyone’s mind. The launch cadence caused Starlink, not the other way.
> assuming you ignore Europe’s smallsat industry that’s constantly ridesharing with SpaceX.
I'm not saying "build it and they will come" is a bad saying, my point is that it's not a very good talking point when you try to sell stuff to European governments.
> SpaceX was working on high-frequency low-cost launch before Starlink was in anyone’s mind. The launch cadence caused Starlink, not the other way.
Before that, they had a sugar daddy billionaire.
Obviously, Arianespace doesn't have that.
> my point is that it's not a very good talking point when you try to sell stuff to European governments
The European smallsat market already exists. The global launch market already exists. This isn’t build it and they’ll come, it’s they built it and they’re going there.
> Before that, they had a sugar daddy billionaire. Obviously, Arianespace doesn't have that
The ESA has poured more money into Arianespace than NASA and Elon combined have put into SpaceX.
Again, Europe is running the track America would have it NASA hadn’t done COTS. That path would have precluded NASA SpaceX and left ULA with a monopoly where they could argue there was no other choice and no market for cheap, frequent launch. Again: Arianespace underwrites SpaceX’s transatlantic dominance. For all the things Elon rails at, notice his silence on Ariane.
"Before that, they had a sugar daddy billionaire. Obviously, Arianespace doesn't have that."
Ariane have ESA as sugardaddy. And SLS has NASA. Both are consuming more more money than SpaceX with less results. The main difference is that nobody pushes them to be more ambitious.
It's unfair. Vulcan2.1 is at the edge of cryotechnology. It might be a poor choice to use hydrogen rather than methane, but the hope was (still is) that gradual improvement will make the technology usable for planes one day.
And Webb was sent on space with Ariane because it is a safe rocket.
Thins new one still very safe so far. Maybe one of the private space companies in Europe will play with more unsafe stuff, move fast and break things soon.
No; Webb was contracted to Ariane 5 when that was still a new rocket (a still unproven and problematic one), because there was a diplomatic cost-sharing compromise that ESA contribute and pay for Webb's launch vehicle.
Ariane 5 has a track record of reliability, but the decision to put Webb on top of it was made long before it developed that track record. It wasn't a consequence of it.
That's deceptive marketing. Most of the fuel (by mass) isn't hydrogen/oxygen; it's the solid propellant in the booster rockets. That's very, very not-green: it's a chlorine-rich mixture that destroys stratospheric ozone.
It would be a waste of time, since you probably would ignore the reality again
it is always the same with Elon fanboys, in their mind the car is self driving but the bureaucrats are preventing it to happen BUT Elon and Trump are now the top guys how can Elon fans still explain the cars are not self driving around without a human inside ? Is Elon too busy with the fascists to handle the evil bureaucrats that prevent for years his self driving AI to be unleashed ?
When were the Americans “demanding” that Europe ‘give up’? The criticisms of Ariane 6 are mostly based around the expendable architecture and high launch costs. The Wikipedia article covers the program’s programs fairly well.
It would have been rational for Europe to spend money on SpaceX. Ariane 6 is 50% pricier per launch. It is not just late to the party but wildly uncompetitive. I don’t think anyone was demanding that Europe “give their money to Elon”, but it would be a rational thing to expect European launches to use the lowest cost provider.
And 60% pricier than Soyuz. What's the big difference between Putin and Musk nowadays? Because if I had to choose the cheapest option, why wouldn't I go with the actually cheapest?
