Ariane Chief Seems Frustrated With SpaceX For Driving Down Launch Costs (arstechnica.com) 165
schwit1 shares a report from Ars Technica: Like United Launch Alliance, the [France-based] Ariane Group faces pricing pressure from SpaceX, which offers launch prices as low as $62 million for its Falcon 9 rocket. It has specifically developed the Ariane 6 rocket to compete with the Falcon 9 booster. But there are a couple of problems with this. Despite efforts to cut costs, the two variants of the Ariane 6 will still cost at least 25 percent more than SpaceX's present-day prices. Moreover, the Ariane 6 will not fly until 2020 at the earliest, by which time Falcon 9 could offer significantly cheaper prices on used Falcon 9 boosters if it needed to. (The Ariane 6 rocket is entirely expendable). With this background in mind, the chief executive of Ariane Group, Alain Charmeau, gave an interview to the German publication Der Spiegel. The interview was published in German, but a credible translation can be found here. During the interview, Charmeau expressed frustration with SpaceX and attributed its success to subsidized launches for the U.S. government.
When pressed on the price pressure that SpaceX has introduced into the launch market, Charmeau's central argument is that this has only been possible because, "SpaceX is charging the U.S. government 100 million dollar per launch, but launches for European customers are much cheaper." Essentially, he says, launches for the U.S. military and NASA are subsidizing SpaceX's commercial launch business. However, the pay-for-service prices that SpaceX offers to the U.S. Department of Defense for spy satellites and cargo and crew launches for NASA are below those of what other launch companies charge. And while $100 million or more for a military launch is significantly higher than a $62 million commercial launch, government contracts come with extra restrictions, reviews, and requirements that drive up this price.
When pressed on the price pressure that SpaceX has introduced into the launch market, Charmeau's central argument is that this has only been possible because, "SpaceX is charging the U.S. government 100 million dollar per launch, but launches for European customers are much cheaper." Essentially, he says, launches for the U.S. military and NASA are subsidizing SpaceX's commercial launch business. However, the pay-for-service prices that SpaceX offers to the U.S. Department of Defense for spy satellites and cargo and crew launches for NASA are below those of what other launch companies charge. And while $100 million or more for a military launch is significantly higher than a $62 million commercial launch, government contracts come with extra restrictions, reviews, and requirements that drive up this price.
Isn't Arianespace government-subsidized? (Score:5, Interesting)
This really seems like a case of the pot calling the kettle black. Which company is more heavily subsidized by their respective government(s), overall?
Re: Isn't Arianespace government-subsidized? (Score:2, Insightful)
Actually it would be such a case if this was about ULA who was being paid multiple times what spaceX was for the same thing. Ariane and the traditional companies like Boeing had a sweet sweet deal all these years, that's why they have trouble competing
Re: Isn't Arianespace government-subsidized? (Score:5, Interesting)
They've suffered from the same program that NASA itself has, albeit to a lesser extent: they're jobs programmes. Part of their rationale for existing is the number of people they employ, and how their business operations are spread around politically-convenient areas. Same story for both Ariane and UAW. As Charmeau put it:
"Let us say we had ten guaranteed launches per year in Europe and we had a rocket which we can use ten times - we would build exactly one rocket per year. That makes no sense. I can not tell my teams: "Goodbye, see you next year!" "
In any normal business, in a competitive environment, focused on its bottom line, this would mean that you need to downsize 90% of your staff. If you're over capacity, you don't just stay over capacity for the heck out of it, or build hardware that's 1/10th as labour efficient just to justify keeping as many employees on the books as possible. It's an absurdity, but that's been the way the launch industry has operated for the past decades. Improved designs have been bad specifically because they'd streamline the industry.
But they got away with that specifically because there was such a capital barrier to entry in their industry. Lots of small companies had tried and failed. Some because their designs didn't really pan out, but some simply because they just couldn't get enough cash. Established players became dismissive of upstarts as a result - but it was really just a matter of time.
This lesson should be applied to a lot more capital-intensive industries than just rocketry. Thinking of capital barriers to entry as your uncrossable moat is a dangerous attitude.
Re: Isn't Arianespace government-subsidized? (Score:5, Informative)
SpaceX's success is a mix of factors. Part of it is that they did take a good design approach - combining both reusability and disposability and mass production into a single rocket line. Many identical (or near identical engines per rocket), and many rockets produced, means a very large number of engines, meaning you get good at making them, cheaply. Very similar upper and lower stages, and again a large number of rockets, means - again - you get good at making them cheaply, and can quickly go through development iterations. Any accidents in the development process, while painful, only take out a single disposable launch vehicle and its payload (accidents are much more painful for obligate-reusable rockets). Eventually you get a good, cheap-to-manufacture rocket with a lot of flight hours. If you can then have that same rocket then become reusable... the game is changed.
Most new "game changer" designs have called for just one of the above philosophies. OTRAG, for example, was based around the idea that mass production of identical stages as cheaply as possible. It was to have terrible performance (and certainly no reusability), but be so cheap to make that it would overcome this. Skylon, on the other end was to go high-tech and be so affordably reusable that you could use it like an airplane. OTRAG, for its part, would have been inherently limited in its ability to lower launch costs (if at all) due to the veritable skyscraper of stacked stages you have to build, which are trashed each time. Skylon would have gotten almost no mass production benefits, a much slower learning curve, and any accident would have taken out a launch vehicle that is not cheaply replaceable. SpaceX's choice of the middle ground rather than going hard toward either philosophical extreme really seems to have been the wise choice.
That of course doesn't mean that SpaceX's approach is the only one that could have worked. For example, I kind of like the idea of launching rockets as floating spar platforms. It means you have to build them capable of withstanding saltwater exposure (more restrictive alloy and design selection) and deal with engine-water interactions at launch. But it means you have no diameter restrictions due to overland transport (make it as big as you want!), nor any pads to damage if something goes wrong - just tow, fill, and go. As an example. But what matters is, SpaceX's approach turned out to be a good one. And this combined with the "we can't fire people" environment that its competition operated in, once SpaceX had crossed that capital moat, the writing was on the wall.
Re: Isn't Arianespace government-subsidized? (Score:4, Interesting)
Thing is Skylon is progressing and should it get to flight then SpaceX would be under the same pressures as Ariane and ULA are now.
A better gamble than Ariane 6 would have been to go full on with Reaction Engines/Skylon. However Brexit has probably screwed that option now. With space in Europe going down the pan over the row about Galileo, where I predict the next step is the UK government will stop UK firms exporting the tech needed to run it to Europe because they are sticking to the rules about none EU countries being able to access it, crippling the system before it even goes live.
Re: Isn't Arianespace government-subsidized? (Score:5, Interesting)
Falcon 9/Heavy has already achieved most of Skylon's cost reductions without requiring $10 billion to develop, and can improve further if fairing reuse works out. Worse, BFR is expected to achieve around the same recurring cost per flight as Skylon while having the ability to deliver 9 times as much payload, and also being able to use in orbit refueling to deliver the full payload to higher orbits without using an expendable upper stage. And BFR doesn't require any revolutionary new technologies, making it much more likely to actually hit those cost targets, and will be flying much sooner even with delays.
If they can turn Skylon into a staged vehicle, they might be able to compete, but still won't be pressuring SpaceX like they are doing to the competition now.
Links for the parent comment (Score:4, Informative)
SpaceX Payload Fairing Survives Despite Missing Recovery Net by 'a Few Hundred Meters' [gizmodo.com]
In-orbit refueling [nextbigfuture.com]
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Re: Isn't Arianespace government-subsidized? (Score:2)
Thing is Skylon has not had $10 billion dollars. In fact it has had less money that SpaceX. It recently got $125 million (might have be GBP) to develop the engine. But hey don't let facts get in the way.
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Those pesky facts:
Reaction Engines got £60 million, about $80 million, to develop a test engine to demonstrate the basic propulsion cycle. That does not get Skylon anywhere close to flight hardware. The first test flights are roughly 7 years into the future, should someone decide to pour another $10 billion dollars (closer to $12 billion really) into development, at which point Skylon's launch costs will be an order of magnitude higher than BFR's. Good luck getting those billions.
The SSTO Skylon being
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Oof. I thought that unit cost for Skylon was unrealistically high. Turns out it's from a Reaction Engines paper published at IAC 2014, which assumed a 5 billion Euro subsidy for 50 vehicles. It's actually one of the lower numbers in the paper. Others:
~$11 B in airframe development cost
~$6 B in engine development cost
~$700 M in upper stage development cost
~$1.3-2.1 B per spaceport
PDF: https://forum.nasaspaceflight.... [nasaspaceflight.com]
stop UK firms exporting the tech needed to run it? (Score:2)
Don't dream too much, Brexiter ;-) :-)
Galileo encryption module is just a module. It will be supplied by another European industrial. There are many fully capable guys which are probably already fighting to catch the money.
"Crippling the system before it even goes live" is, erm, a wild dream
Re: stop UK firms exporting the tech needed to run (Score:2)
I am not remotely a Brexiter, I am the total opposite in fact. I don't respect the outcome of the second referendum on Europe because the Brexiters never respected the first, and role on a third.
In the meantime sure the module could be replaced. Any ideas how to do that on satellites in orbit?
"...and deal with engine-water interactions..." (Score:2)
This, all the more than in France and the US at least, ICBMs have been designed and validated for underwater launches from nuclear submarines, for dozens of years -in other words : this know-how for "engine-water interactions at launch" definitely exists...
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ICBMs are launched from launch tubes. High pressure nitrogen like in an air gun shots the missile out of the water. The missile is inside of a plastic shell. The shell gets dropped with explosives: then the rocket engine fires.
So no: there is absolutely nothing in common with a rocket that is floating in salt water and has to fire its engines under water to lift off.
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Just as a visual for the parent's comment: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
You can see the rocket "breach" the water and pause for a split second before the main engine ignites.
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Yes, obviously, and as you likely see: it was inside of a capsule.
OR at least: the engine ignited OUTSIDE of the water, so there was no engine/water interaction.
Re: Isn't Arianespace government-subsidized? (Score:4, Interesting)
Your logic only works if every staff member is capable of doing the job of every other staff member, which is fine for picking strawberries, but not for mechanical engineering and manufacturing. It is not an absurdity, you need at least a certain amount of engineers and other specialists to design complicated systems and also enough workers to build parts and assemble the rockets. If it takes a month to build a rocket, then the same amount of personnel is required for manufacturing for 10 launches per year as for just one launch since the manufacturing would be serial, not parallel.
Apparently you don't know the difference between low and high volume manufacturing and between skilled and unskilled jobs.
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This lesson should be applied to a lot more capital-intensive industries than just rocketry. Thinking of capital barriers to entry as your uncrossable moat is a dangerous attitude.
The lesson that came to my mind when I read TFA, was "develop a product to canabalize your own market, because if you don't, somebody else will."
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The lesson also might be, "redefine the market, or make a new market".
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> Thinking of capital barriers to entry as your uncrossable moat is a dangerous attitude.
Cable TV companies, for instance.
> In any normal business, in a competitive environment, focused on its bottom line, this would mean that you need to downsize 90% of your staff.
So be a smaller company, that gets more done cheaper. Or put some of that excess staff on R&D, and see what else can be done. New methods of propulsion, more reliable, longer lasting, and self-maintaining life support systems. Put th
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Actually it would be such a case if this was about ULA who was being paid multiple times what spaceX was for the same thing. Ariane and the traditional companies like Boeing had a sweet sweet deal all these years, that's why they have trouble competing
Trouble, or lack of incentive?
Re:Isn't Arianespace government-subsidized? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Isn't Arianespace government-subsidized? (Score:5, Funny)
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Being that governments are the high user of Space Crafts, subsidizing really isn't benefiting them. Because they are paying them out of tax payer money to save on a launch out of tax payers money?
You also make it sound like government subsidies are a bad thing. One of the highest markets for subsidies is the Agriculture industry which helps to make sure American Food supply is there, and supporting farmers for bad seasons. So they will be able to operate the next season.
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You also make it sound like government subsidies are a bad thing.
No, I talked about subsidies because Charmeau complained that SpaceX was able to offer lower prices to European customers than Arianespace because the cost of SpaceX’s US government launches are supposedly subsidizing part of the cost for those other launches. In this context, it’s irrelevant whether you consider subsidies good or bad... the point is the Ariane program is hugely subsidized, so complaining about any SpaceX subsidy is hypocritical.
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But as someone else said, this may be sour grapes. SpaceX built cheap, reliable, reusable rockets. They put quite a bit of time and money into those three aspects. It's paying off now. Ariane's huge disadvantage at this point is that they sunk everything into single-use rockets, and it's (probably) too late now to catch up.
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There were European proposals for reusable rockets, but the ESA member states refused to fund them. One of those proposals in the FLPP was to have a LOX/Methane reusable flyback first stage with an expendable upper stage. Sounds familiar?
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the point is the Ariane program is hugely subsidized, so complaining about any SpaceX subsidy is hypocritical.
No, that is not the point.
The point is (at he claims so) that Space X sells launches in the US for 100M to government and for 50M to european customers. And that has a name, it is called dumping.
Obviously the European Space Agency is subsidized: it is a fucking government organization. But it is supposed to write a black zero at the end of the fiscal year. Which it can't if it gets put out of busine
Re:Isn't Arianespace government-subsidized? (Score:5, Insightful)
It's only dumping if SpaceX is offering launches below the cost of the launch. If SpaceX is breaking even or worse, making a profit at $50M, it's not dumping.
SpaceX charges $62M for a commercial launch. The only reason they charge $100M for a government launch is because a government launch comes with a whole pile of conditions that SpaceX feels costs them an extra $38M to fulfill.
Presumably, at $50M, they're still making money, perhaps attracting a lot of commercial interests. It's more of an "introductory rate" to EU customers. The problem is Ariane can't compete - they don't have a rocket capable of such cheap costs, and the one in development costs 25% more. Even at $62M for "regular rate" it's still too cheap. (Even the governmental rate is cheaper than ULA and others).
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Of course they can't compete with the cost.
But the article claims that Space X is selling below cost and makes it even harder (no idea if that is true).
Anyway, there is no one on the planet who can compete with Space X launch costs at the moment.
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Yes. It *is* arguably a problem with how the government is spending its money. If you've ever worked in the defense industry (I spent 7 years with a military contractor, until I got frustrated and quit) you'd see that this is exactly how it is. Doing work for the government vs commercial requires a massively larger amount of overhead. Whether it *should* or not is an interesting but separate debate.
Re: Isn't Arianespace government-subsidized? (Score:5, Informative)
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Go to http://www.aircraftspruce.com/ [aircraftspruce.com]
Look at the various choices for aircraft batteries. Be clear that all of these are various sizes of lead plates inside a plastic container and bathed in sulfuric acid.
Look at the prices for "certified" or STC'd batteries, vs the "experimental" batteries.
That is the cost of your government paperwork.
(and it is approximately 2x)
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This is why we have corn byproducts in our gasoline to say nothing of our food.
When industry starts looking for places to stuff output from subsidized agriculture, perhaps it's time to cut back on the subsidies eh?
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"...and someday we'll tell our children that we burned our food for fuel..."
Re: Isn't Arianespace government-subsidized? (Score:2)
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Well, sort of. But ICBMs are solid-fueled, because they have to be ready all of the time. Conventional rockets are liquid fueled and take half an hour to load with fuel, minimum, before launch.
Now, if you know how to make one you are a good deal on the way to make the other. But they're not really the same.
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I actually like that better than detonating the payload 3,00ft above ground to demonstrate how much damage can be done.
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This really seems like a case of the pot calling the kettle black. Which company is more heavily subsidized by their respective government(s), overall?
The City of Romulus, which runs Detroit Metro airport, built a new, giant parking structure and extended lot as part of a modernization and new terminal.
The surrounding private lots still charged less, enough so peoe put up with the inconvenience of a mile+ extra bus ride.
So the city added a 30% "Government is grossly inefficient" tax on those lots that it, itself, of course didn't have to pay.
I'm sure France would try to do the same to SpaceX if it could. This is not the thing to do if we are ever to get
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ESA is not France. It is European. ... but well with current "dumping practice" the WTO probably jumps Space X, who knows ;D
The CEO happens to be a French, and the launch site is technically in France, French Guiana (South America).
So, no: France can't just raise a tax. And Europe neither. Imagine the outcry if Europe would put a "sales tax" on a launch made by an american company on american soil, just because the customer is a European? WTO would jump us
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64% of the capital investment is from France, with another 20% coming from Germany. Rest is peanuts spread across a dozen other countries.
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And, how is that relevant?
Subsidizes come mostly from ESA: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
There France and Germany are on par regarding contribution.
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ESA gets a lot of state money, but it is the European Space Agency so the NASA lookalike, but with a much smaller budget. There is some support for the development of the Ariane rockets from and through ESA and European states. However, SpaceX does a vast number of launches for the USA military and state, while the EU does not subsidize the flights by paying higher prices for their launches. For example, for the Galileo (GPS) satellites, the EU use Soyuz rockets from Russia starting from the Korou. So indee
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To me it reads that they both got subsidies, its just SpaceX spent theirs more wisely. Nothing was stopping Ariane from designing a more efficient rocket before now. They only started doing it after SpaceX started eating their lunch. That is their fault.
Re: Isn't Arianespace government-subsidized? (Score:2)
I would recommend going to the WTO and let them clarify who is subsidizing whom with how much. Anyway, both sides will subsidize their space access as an strategic asset. Especially with Trump in the White House the EU will not stop supporting ESA and Arianespace.
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Ariane is also heavily subsidized. However, they are complaining that SpaceX is subsidized by a government with a larger budget, which allows them to do economies of scale, which, in turn makes them more competitive for their non-subsidized commercial market. In particular, that their market is too small to make reusable rockets worthwhile, because NASA isn't there to guarantee them a significant amount of launches.
Still sounds like whining to me. Especially since I doubt that European governments will allo
Think of the Ada (Score:5, Funny)
Excuses (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm from Europe and I'm thoroughly embarrassed by this guy. Yes, SpaceX is subsidized by the US government, but his company is subsidized by European governments. And his claim that it's only the subsidies that drive the costs down is ludicrous. Sure, subsidies help with development costs, but it's not like SpaceX doesn't make a profit off of commercial launches.
I do agree that a monopoly by SpaceX would be bad (which btw. even Musk agrees with), but the cure for that is to be innovative yourself, not to cry about others.
The main difference I see here is that SpaceX is an actual company that can make decisions based on what the best for the company is, while Ariane is the typical state-originating pseudo-company where politics plays a way too direct influence.
SpaceX provided actual innovation in a field that was stagnant for a long time. The correct answer here is to be innovative yourself in different ways, not to whine about it. And who knows, maybe a different company will out-innovate SpaceX in the next couple of years. But from the looks of it that company isn't going to be Ariane.
It's a philosophy problem (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: It's a philosophy problem (Score:2)
But maybe I am just too biased against this attitude as a researcher.
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If they're stuck in this position because they focused on reliability, then maybe they can sell reliability?
While what you say makes a kind of sense, the trouble with this approach is that (1) SpaceX's failure rate is no where near 10%, and (2) they will have many more launches than Ariane and thus be finding problems more rapidly and improving more rapidly, thus ending up on a path to improve reliability faster than ariane. They can also examine their equipment post-fight to see which parts are seeing the most wear etc, which Ariane cannot do because they dump theirs into the ocean each time.
Re:Excuses (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm also embarrassed by him. Ariane is our equivalent of ULA. A dinosaur. And we have no SpaceX or Blue Origin in the wings, and an environment that I don't think would ever create one. Ariane will never adapt. It's structurally incapable of it. And it doesn't help that Europe spends a small fraction as much on space as NASA does. So we can't endlessly make up for inefficiency with pork.
And yes, in general SpaceX puts in bids a lot higher for the government than they do for private companies, but so? They can make their bids whatever they want. The government is choosing them because they're still cheaper than ULA. Whatever ULA bids, SpaceX will undercut them - even though that undercutting is still a windfall for SpaceX. What alternative does the US government have? Maybe there will be a serious drive-down-costs bidding war when (if) Blue Origin ever makes it onto the scene in a serious way. Maybe. I'm not a big Blue Origin optimist - but at least they're not ULA.
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Don't worry. If those yankees dare to endanger our superior European industry we will fine them and break them up and do all the other things we Europeans do.
Hey Rei, (Score:2)
You're my favorite Slashdotter. And I'll be in Reykjavik May 27, May 28 and June 7... may I buy you lunch?
(Sorry to spam a bunch of your posts, but I wanted to be sure you saw my invite.) Reply to GPSpilot1@NOsPam.gmail.com.
And you're right... it's ridiculous that we can't type a thorn here.
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we have no SpaceX or Blue Origin in the wings, and an environment that I don't think would ever create one.
What do you think about Skylon? SABRE will be tested here in Colorado very soon...
Whatever ULA bids, SpaceX will undercut them - even though that undercutting is still a windfall for SpaceX. What alternative does the US government have?
Why would the US government even want an alternative to that terrific situation? : )
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You missed the point.
Space X sells flights to the US government for 100M and the exact same flight for an European customer for 50M. So obviously Adriane/ESA can not compete with that, and that is not a question of costs or price, but: dumping
The correct answer here is to be innovative yourself in different ways
Yes, but they can't do that if Space X bankrupts them. If you had read further: the market at the moment is to small that ESA can invest into reusable vehicles. Because then the workers at ESA would
Zut Alors! (Score:5, Funny)
Our beezness plan eez faileeng par ce-que les maudits americains! We must faaaaart in zehr zheneral deerection!
Re:Zut Alors! (Score:5, Funny)
We must faaaaart in zehr zheneral deerection!
Indeed, they are [esa.int] designing a methane engine now.
Re:Zut Alors! (Score:4, Funny)
"Ok take a nap.... Zen fire zee missilez!!"
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"Ok take a nap.... Zen fire zee missilez!!"
And Russia's like : "ARRRHHHHH MOTHERLAND!!!!"
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"But they'll all be dead soon........... fucking kangaroos."
Essentially, it is the same old Boeing "success" (Score:1)
story that is in most economics 101 textbooks - if the market is of the right size and unregulated, a huge government subsidy can help a company take the lead and stay there. Boeing dominated the aerospace market in the 60s and the 70s because of what would now be considered under WTO rules illegal subsidies, and killed off most other aerospace companies. That was the case until Airbus was created and sponsored by three European governments -- and the monopoly market of Boeing became the Boeing-Airbus duopo
Subsidised industry == Industrial polictics (Score:5, Insightful)
One of the most significant differentiators is that when governments control the funing paths of industry they also control decision making in the industry.
SpaceX is independent and makes their own decisions. They just happen to have written a screw the feds contract that brings more money in.
NASA is a government run industrial institution. It's priorities are set by politicians. But in order to maintain funding other decisions are made to favor the politicians. For example where are the NASA jobs going to be located? The answer is a political one. Where are parts going to be developed, tested, assembled etc. All political answers.
The politically driven process is inherently more expensive. Simply because the most efficient and cheapest way to conduct business is usually not the chosen path.
With the Ariane 6 the proposal on the board is that Ariane plans to buy out the government stake in the company. Thus freeing it to directly compete on a level footing.
All credit to the government sponsored space programs over the decades. They created the seed tech and the science that is now being capitalized by the private industry.
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I'm totally going to have to steal this wording at some point ;)
Might actually be honest accounting (Score:5, Insightful)
SpaceX is independent and makes their own decisions. They just happen to have written a screw the feds contract that brings more money in.
I wouldn't be so sure of that. I run a small manufacturing company and I've build products for government contracts. I also happen to be a certified accountant. The amount of administrative burden for a government job can in some cases easily double the cost. Particularly for military work. While I'm not privy to the inner workings of SpaceX, I could see a military launch easily adding many millions of dollars of administrative costs for legitimate reasons not controlled by SpaceX.
Now I know that a bunch of your are thinking that this is government inefficiency at work (and sometimes it is) but most of the time it is simply procedures put in place to ensure the government actually gets what they are paying for. These procedures are developed based on previous experiences. Private enterprise routinely tries to screw the government as hard as possible (and they often succeed) and government fights back by making extremely detailed requirements to ensure that doesn't happen or to at least minimize the problem. It's not an easy problem to solve especially when the number of qualified suppliers for a complicated product (like a rocket) are few.
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In an ideal world that would be true. But what we see in reality is the worst of both worlds. It's not truly government enterprise because they outsource everything to private companies (who do need the profit margin) but it also isn't as efficient as the free market because those contracts are chosen for political reasons instead of efficiency reasons, and the requirements imposed on those companies are incredibly onerous and drive costs through the roof.
I think that you could have an efficient government
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Actually, you're missing the largest piece of what makes government operations inefficient: the lack of incentives for efficiency.
The cost of misaligned incentives is much larger than the cost of a profit margin. There are a nearly infinite number of ways to organize and run an operation of any signficant size, even more so when the purpose of the operation is to accomplish highly-technical tasks. This means there are huge numbers of choices to be made, every one of which involves balancing of various concerns, so incentives are critically important. The OP mentioned on particularly nasty set of bad incentives that nearly always exist in politically-controlled processes, but there are lots of others.
I'd like to emphasize a this point with a very specific example.
I was hired on to write automated tests for a piece of software used to do cognitive testing (to see if people were suffering from dementia in this case). I went about the project as I would any other piece of software, making sure I covered all the API's, that the interface accepted proper values, and it correctly displayed results.
The "quality manager" (very different person from the development manager that had hired me) had no understandin
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What was the motivation and competence of the people who did?
s/did/created them/
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The politically driven process is inherently more expensive. Simply because the most efficient and cheapest way to conduct business is usually not the chosen path.
Where are all the lefty slashdotters who should be jumping in to point out that government is inherently more efficient than private enterprise because it doesn't have to add a profit margin to its costs?
They are in a health care thread where that's actually true. Its also true that without the space race (a government/political event), private industry would likely be nowhere with space tech. But industries mature and require different amounts of regulation and guidelines at different points. Its almost as if being ideological about such points ensures that you are wrong part of the time, but that can't be it...
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The politically driven process is inherently more expensive. Simply because the most efficient and cheapest way to conduct business is usually not the chosen path.
Where are all the lefty slashdotters who should be jumping in to point out that government is inherently more efficient than private enterprise because it doesn't have to add a profit margin to its costs?
They are in a health care thread where that's actually true.
I don't believe that's true. It's hard to say for sure, because no rich nation has tried a free market health care system since medicine came into its modern form and capability. The US has a particularly nasty mixture of regulated and market structures, with government payers effectively establishing price floors rather than ceilings, providers being forced to provide care for free which they must amortize across their paying patients, the fact that this free care is all emergency service rather than prev
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A truly free market health care system would have to allow providers to turn people away when they cannot pay.
For that you have health insurance.
What has a free market, on the side providing the services, to do with not having a health insurance for the people who require the services?
A free market is supposed to drive the prices down. Obviously a free market (with no regulations) can not work in the health sector: you would pay everything to help your little daughter if the asshole doctor demands it. That
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Since you specifically brought up healthcare, I have to respond with the exact same thing I said above. It is to apropos not to.
I was hired on to write automated tests for a piece of software used to do cognitive testing (to see if people were suffering from dementia in this case). I went about the project as I would any other piece of software, making sure I covered all the API's, that the interface accepted proper values, and it correctly displayed results.
The "quality manager" (very different person fro
boo hoo (Score:5, Insightful)
waaaaaahhh!
Is this guy serious? Because ArianeSpace isn't subsidized out the wazoo by the EU? So because SpaceX got (far less) subsidies and managed to make better rockets with them, you're going to cry about it?
A simple message for you and your employees (if they aren't on strike right now): Adapt or die. Disruption has come to the launch market, and you can either get your costs down or not win contracts.
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A simple message for you and your employees (if they aren't on strike right now): Adapt or die. Disruption has come to the launch market, and you can either get your costs down or not win contracts.
Well spoken. Of course, you will say the same when China, India or any of the other emerging players in this game come and undercut your industry, yes?
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BFR is on track to undercut all Chinese rockets on cost. By an order of magnitude. Your fantasy is wholly detached from reality.
Re:hahahahah ur funny (Score:5, Funny)
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> The Chinese rockets will be excellent. They'll be using someone else's designs.
Before you knock China's rockets too hard you might want to look at what they are actually doing. Unlike the US, they have manned launch capability today. They have orbited the moon several times and dropped a rover on the moon in 2016.
As a US based space nut, I dare say they are closer to walking on another world than we are.
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Everything!? Even cloth?
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Moot point (Score:5, Informative)
Falcon 9 FT [wikipedia.org] payload to LEO: 22,800 kg
Ariane 64 [wikipedia.org] payload to LEO: 20,000 kg
A64 launch cost [wikipedia.org]: 90 million Euro = US$106 million
Even at $100 million, SpaceX is charging the U.S. government less than Ariane would be.
Re:Moot point (Score:5, Informative)
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They're talking about FH, not F9.
Hey Rei, (Score:2)
You're my favorite Slashdotter. And I'll be in Reykjavik May 27, May 28 and June 7.... may I buy you lunch?
(Sorry to spam a bunch of your posts, but I wanted to be sure you saw my invitation.) Reply to GPSpilot1@NOsPam.gmail.com.
And you're right... it's ridiculous that we can't type a thorn here.
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I believe that generally speaking launch costs are constant for any particular rocket, regardless of target orbit. Basically you have the cost of the rocket, the cost of ground support and other logistics, and way down at the bottom at somewhere around 5% you have the cost of the fuel - the only the only part that changes significantly based on target orbit.
Once there's competition in the heavily reusable rocket market, so that the rocket is no longer the overwhelming fraction of the cost, and those saving
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BFR will arrive about the same time as Ariane's F9 competitor. Current estimates are roughly 150,000 kg for $7M for BFR.
Ariane will be limited to European Intelligence services launches exclusively (unless there's a mandate by their governments that non-secret missions keep Ariane alive as a jobs program). It should just be absorbed into the military.
Even then nobody else will be able to cost-justify non-BFR launches.
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By then, Blue Origin might have evolved New Glenn into a fully-reusable system that can compete with BFR for smaller payloads. Of course, they have to actually reach orbit first.
Just a quick question... (Score:2)
....what technical advances has Ariane brought to the space-launch process, again?
crybaby... (Score:2)
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Maybe it's just me, but when I picture commercial launch services offered by North Korea, the image that immediately comes to mind is the Druuge starships from Star Control II ;)
Hey Rei, (Score:2)
You're my favorite Slashdotter. And I'll be in Reykjavik May 27, May 28 and June 7... may I buy you lunch?
(Sorry to spam a bunch of your posts, but I wanted to be sure you saw my invitation.) Reply to GPSpilot1@NOsPam.gmail.com.
And you're right... it's ridiculous that we can't type a thorn here.
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It matters not. India and other countries can not compete with SpaceX, because India doesn't have a big pool of rocketry scientists who have experience developing reusable, relaunchable craft.
That is the whole point of SpaceX. Manufacturing will not be the most important thing SpaceX does, unlike all other space launch companies. They focus on efficiency, lower costs, and lower waste.
Anything India does, will come from its government, who's focus is going to be employing manufacturing labor.
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who's focus is going to be employing manufacturing labor
Hae? That does not make sense.
Their focus is to employ scientists.
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> India and other countries can not compete with SpaceX, because India doesn't have a big pool of rocketry scientists who have experience developing reusable, relaunchable craft.
A decade ago SpaceX didn't have any scientists with experience developing reusable relaunchable craft. It would be unwise to trust the depth of this moat.
Both China and India have the same goal for their space programs. They need energy, and space based solar power has the promise of transforming them to 21st century economies.
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The difference is that the rocket industry has competition (even if not particularly good competition)
The high end, long range, electric vehicle market does not.
I honestly don't think Tesla will be able to survive if a credible competitor ever emerges, but I do hope to be proven wrong (and this isn't actually a statement about the cost of a Tesla, it's more about their abysmally low quality, their flat out lies in every aspect of their marketing, and their blatant disregard for their customers) I think the