Arianespace CEO: Europe Won't Have Reusable Rockets For Another Decade (space.com) 123
Arianespace CEO Stephane Israel says Europe will have to wait until the 2030s for a reusable rocket. Space.com reports: Arianespace is currently preparing its Ariane 6 rocket for a test flight following years of delays. Europe's workhorse Ariane 5, which has been operational for nearly 30 years, recently launched the JUICE Jupiter mission and now has only one flight remaining before retirement. Ariane 6 will be expendable, despite entering development nearly a decade ago, when reusability was being developed and tested in the United States, most famously by SpaceX.
"When the decisions were made on Ariane 6, we did so with the technologies that were available to quickly introduce a new rocket," said Israel, according to European Spaceflight. The delays to Ariane 6, however, mean that Europe lacks its own options for access to space. This issue was highlighted in a recent report from an independent advisory group to the European Space Agency. Israel stated that, in his opinion, Ariane 6 would fly for more than 10 years before Europe transitions to a reusable successor in the 2030s.
Aside from Arianespace, Europe is currently fostering a number of private rocket companies, including Rocket Factory Augsburg, Isar Aerospace, PLD Space and Skyrora, with some of these rockets to be reusable. However the rockets in development are light-lift, whereas Ariane 6 and its possible successor are much more capable, medium-heavy-lift rockets.
"When the decisions were made on Ariane 6, we did so with the technologies that were available to quickly introduce a new rocket," said Israel, according to European Spaceflight. The delays to Ariane 6, however, mean that Europe lacks its own options for access to space. This issue was highlighted in a recent report from an independent advisory group to the European Space Agency. Israel stated that, in his opinion, Ariane 6 would fly for more than 10 years before Europe transitions to a reusable successor in the 2030s.
Aside from Arianespace, Europe is currently fostering a number of private rocket companies, including Rocket Factory Augsburg, Isar Aerospace, PLD Space and Skyrora, with some of these rockets to be reusable. However the rockets in development are light-lift, whereas Ariane 6 and its possible successor are much more capable, medium-heavy-lift rockets.
Visionaries: 1 Dinosaurs: 0 (Score:2, Insightful)
We cannot however assume that Musks will just appear to save us - and Europe is still waiting for one ).
So there is no shame that we let the bureaucracies lead technology development, but Europe must also work out how to help a Musk emerge there.
When you do have a Visionary, the Dinosaurs need to be forced aside.
The US must now cancel SLS.
Re: Visionaries: 1 Dinosaurs: 0 (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem with Europe is they basically think like rsilvergun. That is to say, to them the product isn't the rocket, the product is and always must be the job, and what is made from that job is just a bonus if it happens to work out, but it doesn't really need to so long as you at least participate. And if something does happen to succeed, they'll either nationalize it or encumber it so badly that it basically is nationalized. That's why they're far behind both the US and South East Asia.
Re: Visionaries: 1 Dinosaurs: 0 (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: Visionaries: 1 Dinosaurs: 0 (Score:2)
Also, the building I work in is older than the USA. It is next to a university that was there before the the continent was discovered. We know how to handle things. Consider us old wise and slow. Now get of my lawn. Oh wait, I don't have a gun. I will have to use my fists.
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And if something does happen to succeed, they'll either nationalize it or encumber it so badly that it basically is nationalized.
Ok, actual examples of this happening?
I'm just looking at the record of nationalizations by EU countries since the union's founding. The greatest number of nationalizations were failed banks after the 2008 financial crisis. There have been several cases of government services that were privatized and then were nationalized after the new business failed -- Germany's government printing office for example. There were a couple national security related nationalizations -- the UK nationalizing its atomic weapo
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That kind of thinking leads to 100% unemployment.
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Most EU countries have no difficulty providing temporary accomodation for the homeless, and longer term accomodation within their social security systems. Perhaps if they pay Elon Musk to launch rockets on their behalf, he can provide Americans with additional jobs to alleviate the US homelessness crisis.
I'm assuming your comment is based upon US homelessness, and yes, my comment was sarcastic.
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Re: Visionaries: 1 Dinosaurs: 0 (Score:2)
If you don't care about the jobs then you're a monster.
If you didn't have to have a job to survive then this wouldn't be true.
You've never needed a job to survive. Not now or ever. What, are you an ant or something? Without a queen you just fall over and die?
Squabbling over spaceflight while people are being driven into homelessness here on Earth is doing something while forgetting why you're doing it. If it's not to make a better world then fuck off.
There's a LOT of reasons we're doing it, and none of them require your approval. If you don't like it, go complain to your queen.
Re:Visionaries: 1 Dinosaurs: 0 (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Visionaries: 1 Dinosaurs: 0 (Score:4, Interesting)
Not saying it's lies, but without backup its claims mean nothing.
Re:Visionaries: 1 Dinosaurs: 0 (Score:4, Interesting)
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Re:Visionaries: 1 Dinosaurs: 0 (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Visionaries: 1 Dinosaurs: 0 (Score:4, Informative)
1. OTRAG was not reusable. Not even remotely. Pretty much the opposite of designing for reusability.
2. OTRAG was not at all mature.
3. OTRAG was probably a grossly impractical design. Captures the imagination, but it's the opposite side of the coin to going too far in terms of weight reduction and propellant/engine performance. The huge number of heavy stages (which it will rain down across its range) have to be highly reliable, as does the huge number of separations, as does the differential throttling, yet the necessity for each stage to be low cost means that you can't tolerate any cost inflation for growing complexity to ensure said reliability. The much heavier rocket means a bigger, more expensive "Stage Zero", increasing all challenges from propellant loading to booster integration/alignment to payload integration to fueling to the pad surviving launch thrust. Which on its own probably offsets any mass-production advantages, and then some. Also, they overestimate how much you can have outer and inner cores be similar (to its credit, SpaceX made this same error, which is why the Falcon Heavy sounded a lot easier to do on paper than it turned out to be in practice - other rocket manufacturers have found the same challenge as well) - the stresses on the cores are very different, depending on their locations. And the staging design for the big version looks extremely iffy, even for a highly reliable, precisely aligned design. And then you have the issue that since they're all separate tanks, they'll shut down unevenly, so you have to carry extra propellant in all tanks and ditch a lot of unburned propellant. Which means a lot of extra mass still. And extra mass isn't just an inconvenience when it comes to the rocket equation, it's devastating.
OTRAG was certainly innovative. But it probably deserved to die.
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A big, lazy, politically-shackled, bureaucratic dinosaur like ESA or Boeing can never compete with a driven entrepreneur like Musk. We cannot however assume that Musks will just appear to save us - and Europe is still waiting for one ). So there is no shame that we let the bureaucracies lead technology development, but Europe must also work out how to help a Musk emerge there. When you do have a Visionary, the Dinosaurs need to be forced aside. The US must now cancel SLS.
The thing about being first at something, like Musk+SpaceX are with partially reusable launch vehicles, is that it is spectacular, headline grabbing and provides you with prestige. People like you will even build a cult of personality around the likes Musk. However, history is also full of trailblazing designs that fell by the wayside because all the 2nd generation designs learned from what you did raised more capital because you proved a risky concept and the went on to produce something better. The develo
Re:Visionaries: 1 Dinosaurs: 0 (Score:4, Insightful)
Unfortunately for you it is very much succeeding.
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You have written that as if Spacex is failing. Unfortunately for you it is very much succeeding.
I did not say that, I just said that being the first at something isn't necessarily a guarantee you've won the right to dominate your industry for all eternity and throughout the universe. Just look at what happened to Apple. They were the first with a game changing new type of mobile devices but they got hammered by the second generation Android devices from Google. Apple is still 'doing fine' but it's Android that has 90% market share. SpaceX is doing fine, that does not guarantee that their competitors a
domination just on Earth, and for a few decades (Score:4, Insightful)
"being the first at something isn't necessarily a guarantee you've won the right to dominate your industry for all eternity and throughout the universe"
No sane person can think of domination in terms of "eternity" and "universe". Sorry, your post makes no sense.
As for Mr Musk's mental health - a bit off-topic, no?
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As for Mr Musk's mental health - a bit off-topic, no?
It's entirely relevant to the discussion at hand. Either Musk's cult of personality is necessary for the corporations he's been involved with to flourish, or it's irrelevant in which case he could STFU and operate more effectively.
If these corporations' success is all about Musk, the bus factor is wholly unacceptable.
T[e]SLA holders seem justifiably concerned about his mental stability, and as a result his tweets have repeatedly affected the value of their shares. I don't see why people with some stake (rea
not all geniuses are humble... (Score:2)
Sometimes you can't have your cake and eat it.
Sure, it'd be nice if a guy who routinely disrupts whole industries were humble.
Evidently, you feel offended he's not... Try to see the bigger picture.
Re:Visionaries: 1 Dinosaurs: 0 (Score:4, Informative)
> Apple is still 'doing fine' but it's Android that has 90% market share.
Apple has 50% market share in the US, [48% of global smart phone revenue, and 85% of profits.](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-02-03/iphone-grabs-record-smartphone-profit-share-of-85-for-apple)
If that's your idea of "doing fine" and not "absolutely clobbering everyone else" then you are insane.
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> Yeah, sure, go cherry pick US numbers because they look better.
Are you illiterate?I literally included global numbers for revenue and profit in one of the only two sentences you had to read in my post.
> Globally the stats are, Android 68,6%, iOS 30,6%
And? First off, parent claimed Android had 90% of the market which you've just demonstrated was a lie.
Second, having a ton of market share doesn't matter a whole lot when little of it is profitable. Apple has always been about making a higher-end device
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Just look at what happened to Apple. They were the first with a game changing new type of mobile devices but they got hammered by the second generation Android devices from Google.Apple is still 'doing fine' but it's Android that has 90% market share.
That's a lousy argument you're making. Apple is the most successful company in the world, with a market cap of $2.7T. Google is worth $1.4T. Your market shares appears to be wrong:
Worldwide:
Android 71.9%
Apple 27.4%
US:
Android 41.8%
Apple 57.8%
https://www.bankmycell.com/blo... [bankmycell.com]
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If you can't make a comment without lying in it about your *directly preceding comment*, then responding is not going to lead to useful discussions, is it?
Sheesh, it is a wonder you can turn on a computer, let alone type.
You are describing Howard Hughes. (Score:3, Interesting)
And people idolized him plenty. Also, there is some thematic similarity between building the worlds largest cargo plane out of timber (the 'Spruce Goose'), and building the world's largest rocket out of stainless steel.
If you want a prediction for the future from the past, Hughes went on to develop manic hypochondria and died in isolation.
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Elon Musk doesn't understand rocketry? That's odd for someone that OK'ed ALL major decisions in SpaceX. Boy you really let your SouthAfricanManBad hatred color your view.
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Or, better, STFU you sad, jealous moron.
SpaceX is Second Gen (Score:5, Interesting)
However, history is also full of trailblazing designs that fell by the wayside because all the 2nd generation designs learned from what you did raised more capital because you proved a risky concept and the went on to produce something better.
True but I'd argue SpaceX is that second-generation design. They use existing rocket and IT technology but have combined them in a new way to achieve a second-generation design that far exceeds the capabilities of first-generation throw-away rockets. It's essentially the same as Apple did with the iPhone - this combined existing technology to produce a new device that had far more functionality than just a mobile phone or a Pocket PC.
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They use existing rocket and IT technology but have combined them in a new way to achieve a second-generation design that far exceeds the capabilities of first-generation throw-away rockets. It's essentially the same as Apple did with the iPhone
Except not, because there was at least one phone that had everything the iPhone had but not quite as pretty. Nobody was reusing rockets before SpaceX. So no, not at all.
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Apple was first to combine existing tech into one phone and have strong financial backing... and a pre-existing fan base...
Like the reusable rockets, it's a logical progression. NASA had the space shuttle for decades, where only really the shuttle itself was reusable. The rockets, not so much.
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Space Shuttle (Score:2)
Nobody was reusing rockets before SpaceX.
Have you really never heard of the Space Shuttle?
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this combined existing technology to produce a new device that had far more functionality than just a mobile phone or a Pocket PC.
What made it more than just a web browser was native apps, not web apps, i.e. web pages. Wasn't even Apple that did that first even on the iPhone.
Business plan: use the Soyuz pad (Score:2)
Now a very simple plan for EU to really make progress, and not disappear quickly from the launcher market:
1) allow private companies to compete.
2) fund the 3 best of those companies, divide the funding to promote competition.
3) Allow the best competitor to get to use the Soyuz launch pad that is now sitting empty in Kourou.
This will cost 5x less than funding a new ESA project, and will get results much faster, if done correctly like the USA did.
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Money is something that evaporates rather quickly once success goes away.
Usually, by then it's too late to change.
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A big, lazy, politically-shackled, bureaucratic dinosaur like ESA or Boeing can never compete with a driven entrepreneur like Musk.
Some facts: Modern liquid fueled Rocketry is almost 100 years old at this point, and We have to remember that there are costs to retreiving and refurbishing a re-useable Rocket engine.What they are in the case of Musk's folly is not known.
The reuseable engine concept requires very specific launch envelopes. This limits where the satellites can go.
Musk might be a visionary, but The fail-safe Flight Termination System on his visionary Rocket does not work. People living in Port Isabel might have some con
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Musk really flushes out them jealous demented idiots who would always have done things better but have somehow ended up sitting on life's sidelines, whining to themselves, about him.
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Musk bad. Musk rocket FTS not work perfect. Musk rocket performance not perfect on FIRST FUCKING FLIGHT. So Musk Rocket bad. Musk bad.
Usk fan ignore everything I wrote for making a Musk Straweman.
But it does expose that you are a full fledged cultist. A dn for all of your passion, you have absolutely no technical knowledge.
Musk really flushes out them jealous demented idiots who would always have done things better but have somehow ended up sitting on life's sidelines, whining to themselves, about him.
Un huh, wanna know what he also flushes out? People like you who fly into a rage if anyone dares question his perfection.
"Life's sidelines?" Oh dear Muskovite, I fear you are mistaken. Would you like to see my Curriculum vitae?
Your zeal is more religious than anything else, and like all religions, fades to v
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Wah, Musk bad! Wah, I am brilliant! Wah, you love Musk! Wah the FTS failed! Wah!
How unusual for you.
How pathetic.
You looked smart, but then you started typing... (Score:2)
"...there are costs to retreiving and refurbishing a re-useable Rocket engine." - In principle, this is the same as a jet engine. Both engine types use fast rotating parts to mix fuel and oxidizer and produce heat, pressure, vibration, and thrust. We use airliners constantly. Jet engines have a certain number of hours of operation and then required inspections and maintenance. It took some time to figure this all out, and now all jet engine makers are very skilled at setting the maintenance requirements. S
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Musk spouts a lot of shit, but he sure is good at flushing out the demented woke.
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Have you been in a coma? Musk-led Spacex have just launched the biggest rocket ever, that is more capable than SLS, cost a fraction of the cost to develop and is re fucking usable.
Re fucking use the biggest rocket SpaceX just launched, and get back to us
I actually suspect that the problems will get worked out, but let's not get carried away, eh?
Capitalism go Brrrr (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Capitalism go Brrrr (Score:5, Insightful)
But damn can it make new things literally as fast as humans can work.
And it's very happy to hurt a lot humans along to way to achieve this level of efficiency.
Which boils people's positioning on the political spectrum down to this question: which do you value most? business efficiency or kindness?
Also, I know I sound like I'm putting it in black and white terms and it's not that simple - as in, too much kindness leads to freeloading, a stagnating society and poverty for everybody, too much business efficiency leads to poverty for the 99%, and the right answer is somewhere in-between.
But I wish Americans who reply to stories like this one with the usual "Ah! Of course! It's Euro-bureaucracy again!" passive-aggressive posts realized the slider is much too far on the business side in their country, and they themselves are the vicitims of the brutal ultra-capitalist society that brainwashed them into rooting for the cause of their dog-eat-dog life.
Yeah Europe has its fault. Yes, it doesn't always move fast. But that's a small price to pay for the privilege of living in a society that isn't run by psychopaths and won't let you die like a dog in a ditch.
a false dilemma (Score:2)
this post is not even wrong.
Sorry, but it's more of a rant...
Re:Capitalism go Brrrr (Score:5, Insightful)
You can't have "too much" business efficiency. It's meaningless.
Yes, you can. It is called externalized cost or negative externality. Exploit people, society, environment that are not strong / powerful / rich enough to stop your business, and make them bear the cost of your business doing. It is usually done by corrupting the government enough so that the officials listen to your money instead of the people, or be the government official yourself.
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Maximum business efficiency is slavery, company towns, 80 hour weeks, child labor, women burning to death in factory fires, and Pinkertons gunning down anyone who puts their head up. To the extent that being working class is bearable, it's because of restraints placed on "business efficiency", and those restraints were paid for in blood.
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Wow... You really drank the kool aid.
I'll leave this here: slave-run plantations were the most efficient businesses ever: all profits, very little running costs. So you're all for extreme business efficiency are you?
These folks disagree https://fee.org/articles/slave... [fee.org]
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Just being pedantic here, but you'd have to feed, clothe and house those slaves. On your own dime.
That's pretty cheap, if you don't care how happy they are about the conditions. Humans can survive in some fairly abysmal situations.
Set them free, and you'll have (under)paid workers that now have to sort all of that out themselves, on what little you can get away with paying them. #WageSlavery
I think what really has shifted the economics of slavery to make it unaffordable is medical and funerary costs, it's not housing and food at all. There's a bunch of regulations about disposing of the dead now. Also, we banned actual slavery of anyone but convicts in this country, and through trial and error (and lobbying and subsequent legislation) we've arrived at a point whe
Re: Capitalism go Brrrr (Score:3)
you can't compare client states like Australia with an actual country like the USA.
Basically all of that stuff in Western Europe and Australia is heavily dependent on and only possible due to the USA.
Their external defence is guaranteed by the USA which saves a massive amount of money.
Their trade is significantly cheaper and easier because of the U.S. Navy. The U.S. Navy is what stops large scale piracy and forces free navigation. China claims basically the entire South China Sea. Pirates would be using hel
Re:Capitalism go Brrrr (Score:5, Informative)
Listen, everyone got their problems with capitalism. But damn can it make new things literally as fast as humans can work. This government owned sloth's definition of "quickly" is a decade.
Worth noting that SpaceX took 12 to 13 years to actually build and land a reusable rocket. So, a decade would be faster than SpaceX did it.
Re:Capitalism go Brrrr (Score:4, Insightful)
What you mean to say is, it took SpaceX 13 years from being founded to landing a rocket.
As far as I know the actual development for reusability started about 5 years prior to the landing.
It's been over 7 years since that landing, and Ariane are suggesting it will take at least another 10 to replicate a method that has already been proven.
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Reusability starts with an engine suitable to landing a rocket stage. SpaceX was founded around a preliminary design for such an engine: the Merlin. In that sense, SpaceX have been working on reusability since its inception.
Re:Capitalism go Brrrr (Score:4, Interesting)
SpaceX have been working on reusability since its inception.
Correct, but SpaceX also was working on surviving, something that Arianspace will not need to.
Also, Arianspace need not start from scratch. There are a lot of mistakes that they can avoid by just watching Falcon 9 Youtube videos.
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As far as I know SpaceX wasn't founded with the intention of landing rockets using retro-propulsion, it was founded with the intent to make space launch more economical in general.
They started with the one-engine Falcon 1 and intended to make a Falcon 5 before eventually scaling up to the Falcon 9, going with 9 engines mainly for economies of scale and redundancy.
They even tried parachute landings for the booster before they went for retro-propulsion, so I don't believe that was the plan from day 1.
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Then by accident they ended up with an engine and a stage architecture that is conducive to landing. Having a simple, reliable, restartable engine and having lots of engines on the first stage were critical for propulsive landing to be the success it turned out to be.
The point is, that time spent developing the Merlin is part of the whole reusability story, whether it was intended to be or not.
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SpaceX was designing for reusability from the start.
The bigger issue is that SpaceX spent a lot of money failing. They had many problems that resulted in the loss of the vehicle and/or payload. That's fine, it gets you to your goal faster, but you have to have investors willing to go along with it.
Arianespace mainly exists to ensure the EU has independent access to space. The goal is not to compete with SpaceX directly, it's to ensure that Europe isn't reliant on Elon Musk or anyone else. Therefore throwing
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What you mean to say is, it took SpaceX 13 years from being founded to landing a rocket.
As far as I know the actual development for reusability started about 5 years prior to the landing.
It's been over 7 years since that landing, and Ariane are suggesting it will take at least another 10 to replicate a method that has already been proven.
SpaceX filed a patent for a re-usable rocket engine in 2004. Presumably, they probably worked on that for a few years before the patent. So, I'm going to stick by the idea that SpaceX was working on reusability right from the start. Their original goal was to reduce the costs of spaceflight, and reusability has always been the holy grail of that particular quest. As far as the length of time to replicate rocket methods, SpaceX has been working on Starship for about 11 years now. The Saturn V took about 7 ye
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Von_Braun_Ferry_Rocket
Von Braun (Score:3)
Von Braun was moved to the USA in 1945 and continued to work there for the rest of his life. So by 1952 this would be America working on reusable launchers NOT Europe.
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It should also be noted that SpaceX developed the reusable first stage cheaply and without having a known example of a working reusable first stage. The cost of development was less than a fifth of the amount of money that the US government or the ESA would have needed to spend to create a reusable first stage. Generally speaking, governments are less efficient at research compared to private companies (boldly stated without any facts or data -- lol).
Maybe the ESA could just purchase the Falcon rocket te
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Um, first off, SpaceX had to start from scratch. Second, their statement "When the decisions were made on Ariane 6, we did so with the technologies that were available to quickly introduce a new rocket" is clear BS. That means they were working on Ariane 6 since before SpaceX started working on Falcon 9? How is it that SpaceX was able to "quickly introduce a new rocket" before them?
Stop making excuses for them.
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I'm not making excuses, just responding to the comment about the person from Arianespace thinking that 10 years is a reasonable amount of time to develop a rocket. The SpaceX example shows that it is a reasonable amount of time.
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Over time you'd *expect* some technical feat to become quicker and cheaper to achieve. Artemis is supposed to cost half of what Apollo did, and while it will almost certainly go far over budget, you also have to factor in that it's far more technically ambitious.
A lot is going to come down to execution. Ariane 6 is *supposed* to be a lot cheaper than Ariane 5. Falcon Heavy and most especially Starship are *supposed* to become even cheaper than Ariane 6 is *supposed* to be. But there's a lot of unhatched
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Remember the Space Shuttle was supposed to be a dirt cheap reusable launch vehicle, but they could never achieve economies of scale to drop launch costs below $600 million in current dollars.
That's because that's not where they spent their effort. Instead the shuttle was designed to meet the needs of the military on one hand, and to produce pork on the other.
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Right. Mission creep is certainly *an* economic failure mode, but it's not the only one. Overestimating the launch volume is another. And even if you get that volume, you may overestimate economies of scale and diseconomies of scale. It could even be something as loosey goosey as your corporate culture isn't really good at sustaining qualtiy work at the required tempo. There's a lot of ways to fail in that business.
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Listen, everyone got their problems with capitalism. But damn can it make new things literally as fast as humans can work. This government owned sloth's definition of "quickly" is a decade.
Name the government/culture in europe that isn't capitalistic.
No? Looks like capitalism has failed bigly
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Vatican city.
wat
That shit has been a moneymaking venture since the beginning.
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It's just not capitalistic, as in mechanism and market.
You think because their advertising makes references to god that they're not capitalistic? Money has controlled the Vatican always.
Re:Capitalism go Brrrr (Score:4, Funny)
Mostly a worst-of-both-worlds type combination, granted, but a combination.
The lack of medical bankruptcy we have here is just awful. I could be living large by profiting off that!
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Social Democrats aren't really socialists, except to Americans who think in black and white.
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FTFY (Score:2)
Arianespace CEO: Europe Won't Have Reusable Rockets For Another Decade
At least, not from Arianespace. They are like "old space" in the US: invested in the way of doing things that has been around for 50 years. Some company may well provide reusable rockets sooner. It just won't be Arianespace.
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It seems unlikely any private enterprise would be able to get started and get it finished inside 10 years either. That's not even a failing of Europe - it's a hard (and expensive) problem so 10 years is actually about as long as it's likely to take.
Virgin got quite close, but they lost investment when their first proper try at it failed (and have, IIRC shutdown now). It seems there's not the investment money or appetite here for such endeavours. That's a problem unique to everyone-outside-the-US, as best as
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Virgin's problem is that the market for small launchers has quite a lot of competition, and their system didn't offer enough benefits to convince investors that it was worth continuing to fund development.
It looks like the market is headed more towards medium and large launch vehicles that deploy a number of satellites at once. While small payload launchers can have some advantages for satellites that are destined for less frequently used orbits, it's not clear how big the market is. Unsurprisingly, there i
Article is incomplete (Score:5, Interesting)
In addition to the small launcher initiatives listed in TFA, ESA is working with Arianespace on Ariane Next, which will have a reusable first stage. This work includes demonstrators (Callisto, Themis) and a new engine (Prometheus), projects that were started years ago.
ESA has also just started PROTEIN, a study for a fully-reusable heavy launcher.
The timeline from the title is basically correct, given current funding levels. And that's where the problem lies. ESA has enjoyed a stable market for decades, which meant development of new rockets could be carried out at leisure. The decisions for Ariane 6 were made in the 2010-2014 timeframe, when SpaceX was a young startup and it was not clear at all their approach would bear fruit. Speeding up development hasn't happened because no funding was available. This is basically a political problem.
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> hasn't happened because no funding was available.
Can you compare the project funding they get vs. the SpaceX spend from startup to the first landing?
I am curious how that compares.
It's also important to keep in mind that ESA is additionally a jobs program.
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It isn't ESA, but given the EU's propensity to throw even more money at problem, is probably within an order of magnitude or two. https://medium.com/geekculture... [medium.com]
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Arianne Space have a captured market for prestige and national security launches that European wants to keep in house as much as possible. That will always be the case, but there's a problem right now. Ariane 5 is getting phased out and Ariane 6 isn't quite ready yet. Some of the stuff that's slated to be launch by Ariane 6 have been reallocated to SpaceX because the vehicle cannot wait for 6 to work out its issues.
Back in the '00s during the previous GEO satellite refresh cycle, they captured the market
tried to avoid any delay... (Score:5, Interesting)
So they opted for "technologies that were available to quickly introduce a new rocket".
Now they have an odd combination of old-school technologies and a delay.
Imagine where SpaceX will be in ten years...
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So they opted for "technologies that were available to quickly introduce a new rocket". Now they have an odd combination of old-school technologies and a delay. Imagine where SpaceX will be in ten years...
If SpaceX just stuck to the launch business and maybe messed about with a small but ambitious side hobby like a lunar colony they might be in a good place in a decade. However, like most other enterprises whose CEOs have a captain Ahab like obsession with a insanely expensive hobby project (like a colony of one million libertarian nutters on Mars by 2050) that is unlikely to create any significant revenue and that is supposed to be paid for with other people's money, SpaceX will likely collapse. The one bri
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They already have 1.5 million Starlink customers. That's revenue of nearly 2 billion a year. That number will likely go up to 10, if not 20 million customers within a few years.
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They already have 1.5 million Starlink customers. That's revenue of nearly 2 billion a year. That number will likely go up to 10, if not 20 million customers within a few years.
That works out to about $27 billion a year. That sounds like a lot of money but we are talking about a colony of *one million* living in a domed city on Mars by 2050, a colony that is going to struggle to be self sufficient for a long time. Sustaining this level of off planet settlement is going to cost quite a lot more than ~30 billion dollars a year. Even if Elon manages to put people in a colony on Mars by 2050 I doubt it will top 50 people by the time his self imposed deadline expires. A million strong
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You kind of missed the business reason for Starlink's existence. It's literally there to print money for SpaceX to do other things.
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You kind of missed the business reason for Starlink's existence. It's literally there to print money for SpaceX to do other things.
However much money SpaceX makes with it's other activities it will never pay for a domed metropolis of one million libertarian nutters on Mars by 2050, a metoropolis that creates no worthwhile revenue. The only way to pay for that is to burn other people's money and that assumes a very large supply of people willing to sink money into a financially unsound venture.
Has the EU got the stomach for crashed rockets? (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm far from an Elon Musk fan boy, but to give him his dues, despite coming close to the brink, he stuck by Space X's development of reusable and landable rockets, through countless rapid unscheduled deconstructions. And continnues to do so, to develop Starship
I don't think any state bureaucrat has the balls to push any experimental rocket development program through to fruition, let alone any EU bureaucrat. One malfunction, and Branson pulled the plug on Virgin Orbit.
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One malfunction, and Branson pulled the plug on Virgin Orbit.
I think that was an opportunity to exit, and it was clear that ol' Musky had won the billionaire space race.
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bureaucrats (Score:2)
Bureaucrats like the status quo. It is comfortable. It has a routine. The same papers to push every day.
That is why bureaucrats, and to the extent that EU is a bureaucracy, are followers, not leaders. They had to wait until Musk posed an obvious threat to decide to change their daily routine.
Musk is not every entrepeneur. Neither was Andy Grove, or many others who were actually immigrants that could never have succeeded in their native high viscosity economies. These are extraordinary entrepeneurs. B
Why don't they just rent Falcon 9s? (Score:2)
This nationalism (or sub-continentalism, is it?) is a bit much.
Get over it.
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ESA already have to divert some of their launch from Ariane 6 (not available) to SpaceX because their cargo cannot wait.