France To Mimic Musk With Own SpaceX-Style Launcher, Minister Says (reuters.com) 184
European space company ArianeGroup will develop a reusable mini-launcher to compete with the likes of Elon Musk's SpaceX, French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire said on Monday. Reuters reports: The launcher "must be able to be operational in 2026," Le Maire said during a trip to the ArianeGroup site at Vernon in Normandy, where the engines of Ariane rockets are tested. "For the first time Europe...will have access to a reusable launcher. In other words, we will have our SpaceX, we will have our Falcon 9. We will make up for a bad strategic choice made 10 years ago," Le Maire said.
And it will cost less that 10x the SpaceX launcher (Score:5, Insightful)
It may cost a lot less (Score:3)
Has it not occurred to you that European companies can call on a LOT more engineers with a lot more talent than SpaceX because it has a better educational system and a lot less prejudice? Or maybe it has, which is why you're scared of the competition.
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Unfortunately, all of Europe's best engineers are hard at work building smartphones, microchips and popular social networks ...
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And Linux
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Has it not occurred to you that European companies can call on a LOT more engineers with a lot more talent than SpaceX because it has a better educational system and a lot less prejudice? Or maybe it has, which is why you're scared of the competition.
Really? Top 100 universities in the world. [topuniversities.com] First EU-based one is at position 44. Better educational system indeed.
Guess great engineers come from people being taught, you know, actual science, and not gender studies, after all. Who would have thought that for example Tsiolkovsky's equation is not "just a social construct"?
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So, those best uni's are filled with a lot of students. A lot of them not born in the U.S.
And a lot of those students graduate and go back to their country of origin. At the end of their careers they will do what they can to improve local education.
You already see that happen in China. Besides this, foreign education appears to be perfectly capable of "filling the ranks" in your top uni's. That is an indicator they do something right.
And let's face it, it is the name your uni's have been building up over th
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Britain only recently left the EU, and still works in the EU space sector. So we've got three out of the top seven universities, of which Oxford is in first position. USA ranks something like 18th in the PISA world rankings for science and 6th in maths.
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So, why is it that EU companies haven't already done this? Seriously, if they're the greatest things since sliced bread, surely ONE of them would have developed a reusable launch vehicle of their own long before SpaceX came along.
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They did. HOTOL was developed 20-30 years earlier, but the British decided to defund it for national security reasons.
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The Brits decided to defund it? Looks like the ESA wasn't terribly interested in developing it.
The Brits spent time looking for international cooperation (for which you may read: money from non-Brit sources, like the ESA) rather than actually bending metal until the Government at the time cut off funding.
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There was a vast program study to decide the next generation rocket. The FLPP proposal, made almost two decades ago, was a staged combustion LOX/Methane first stage with LOX/LH2 Vinci engine in second stage, with possible reusable first stage. The politicians in Brussels took one whiff at it, said it cost too much, and funded a program which would instead leverage military solid rocket technology for Ariane 6. This was supposed to be cheaper. It wasn't. This meant the rocket would be manufactured in France
Re:It may cost a lot less (Score:4, Insightful)
I would definitely agree that the average level of education in Europe is far superior to that of the United States.
But you wouldn't staff your aerospace engineering company with average level students. The US has a larger number of more highly regarded engineering Universities than does Europe, so in terms of education that matters, your argument falls flat. (I'm not going to google it for you, but if you disagree feel free to provide your own citations to the contrary).
But to be honest, we all know it isn't an issue of education or intelligence. It's the fundamental approach for these types of pursuits. Doing it the big government way necessitates bureaucracy, which makes things expensive and slow. And France loves their bureaucratie.
Re: It may cost a lot less (Score:2)
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Except that this will be a private company in the EU. That's nothing to do with the state of politics in France or Europe. To quote Wikipedia: ArianeGroup, formerly Airbus Safran Launchers, is a joint venture of the European aerospace company Airbus and the French group Safran formed in 2015.
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The European program will not be competitive against SpaceX unless you take national interest into consideration.
SpaceX has vastly larger economies of scale.
Re: It may cost a lot less (Score:2)
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The founding members of rocket technology were top-class engineers in Russia and Germany. The German engineers were split between the US and Russia, but Russian education was up to the task of getting Russian engineers up to speed a decade earlier than the Americans. And, no, I don't think much of Russian or 1920s/1930s German education, which shows where I'd rank American education at this time.
Those are the founders. Now we move onto the current generation of rocket scientists. Isolated geniuses running t
Re: It may cost a lot less (Score:4, Interesting)
Some of those "German" rocket scientists ended up in France after WW2. Namely one Eugen Sanger and his wife Irene Bredt. Those two people basically invented regeneratively cooled nozzles for rocket engines. They worked with the French team which eventually which did the "precious stones" rocket program. The end result of it was the military Diamant rocket. This rocket was the de facto predecessor for Ariane in technological terms.
With regards to Korolev's death, he did not have a brain hemorrhage, that would be Stalin (a possible side effect of Stalin taking too much Warfarin as prescribed by his doctors in his later years). Korolev had persistent intestinal trouble in his later years and kept delaying a surgical procedure. The Soviet doctors thought he had a severe case of hemorrhoids. They did an exploratory surgery to treat his hemorrhoids, but in the middle of the surgical procedure, the places the doctors operated on wouldn't stop bleeding. They then figured out (way too late) it wasn't a case of hemorrhoids but that he had cancer in his intestines. He did not survive the surgery. An interesting fact is that the head operator for Korolev was the Soviet Minister of Health himself. He basically decided to show off his skills as a surgeon and trained himself do it having little experience with it, but then proceeded to botch it up.
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Has it not occurred to you that European companies can call on a LOT more engineers with a lot more talent than SpaceX because it has a better educational system and a lot less prejudice?
No, and it's not true even if those other things are true, because engineers can cross oceans.
Re: It may cost a lot less (Score:2)
Dont count ones chickens..
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If science and industry in the U.S. had been committed to Metric there would have been no unit conversion problem. Trying to use the Colonial measuring system in the 21st Century is crazy.*
*United States Customary Units are not "Imperial", a British system from the 1840s, they were never part of any formally defined system - they were just inherited from common use from the Colonial Period unchanged. The Bureau of Standards was created to standardize these units, but never defined them beyond setting up rep
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Even so, it might make sense to have "your own" space launch capabilities.
Remember that however high the cost of the European space launch facility, development, maintenance, security (in French Guyana) was, the James Webb Space Telescope will launch on an Ariane 5 rocket.
Considering its total mass of 6,200 kg for a GTO orbit, the other candidates are Falcon 9, Falcon Heavy, Atlas V, Delta IV Heavy, Russia's Angara A5 and Proton M+, Japan's H3, and few Chinese Long March models.
The fact that the more expens
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Ariane 5 "won" for James Webb Space Telescope because back then the only viable alternatives were really Delta IV Heavy and Ariane 5. The Delta IV Heavy program was still shaky with so few launches made with it a lot of people suspected of its reliability. Especially after they discovered severe erosion in the rocket engines at one point in post flight inspection (not that any of the launches failed). Angara A5 is still a test rocket and the largest versions aren't in service yet. Proton M+, well, it is Rus
That's only part of mimicking Musk. (Score:5, Funny)
TFA and comments miss the point (Score:5, Insightful)
As correctly quoted in the TFA main point of this project is to make up for the bad strategic choices that Europe made 10-15 years ago on that topic (and believe me, Europe made bad strategic choices in the past 10-15 years on a LOT of topics).
So this may seem stupid, but if Europe doesn't make the move, when Donald Trump Jr is elected in 2032 and decides to bar the EU from space, what will Europe do?
Don't see this project as a copycat of Musk, see it as a seek to preserve independent access to space.... Oh, and about the efficiency of ArianeGroup, please remember that it's a subsidiary of Airbus that seems to perform a bit better that Boeing in the past years...
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"Oh, and about the efficiency of ArianeGroup, please remember that it's a subsidiary of Airbus that seems to perform a bit better that Boeing in the past years..."
This is a total non-sequitir.
How does it reflect well on the efficiency of a rocket manufacturer that it is part of an organisation that makes aeroplanes that you think are better than another aeroplane manufacturer's ?
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""Oh, and about the efficiency of ArianeGroup, please remember that it's a subsidiary of Airbus that seems to perform a bit better that Boeing in the past years..."" ;) ;) ;) in the pre-previous years...
It also performed "a bit worse"
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Europe has independent access to space already, so the US cutting Europe off will only take business away from US companies. Europe maintains its launch capability as a matter of national security.
The only issue is that the cost is high compared to reusable rockets, which is what this is about fixing. Current costs as subsidised to keep them competitive, so it really is all about saving money.
Good (Score:3, Insightful)
It is a very bad idea to have all your eggs in one basket, particularly if said basket is currently being fought over by mentally questionable individuals in a nation that is highly conservative, insular and in serious danger of becoming a theocracy thanks to the stuffing of SCOTUS.
Having a private company in Europe competing with the assorted private companies in America is good for all of those companies because it means customers get an actual choice. Not just in the launcher, but in the regulations and in the level of freedom to access. Nobody has a stranglehold.
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"Private Company".
You keep using these words, I do not think they mean what you think they mean.
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They would need to reform the whole system. Or just appoint really young judges who were not going to die for decades.
Camel, horse and the design committee. (Score:2)
What Elon Musk designed by a committee would look like. Lawrence B Malloy?
Ha (Score:2)
I wrote this post [slashdot.org] four years ago, and the only mistake I made was giving SpaceX's competitors the benefit of the doubt they'd be able to accomplish their meager aspirations.
Ariane 6 hasn't launched, Vulcan hasn't launched, New Glenn hasn't launched.
The only thing they're going to accomplish by attempting to match SpaceX's capabilities from five years ago in another five years is maintain some independent launch capability for their military.
The commercial market isn't going to care unless the launches are h
France To Mimic Musk... (Score:5, Funny)
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Giving you a golf clap on that one.
Re: France To Mimic Musk... (Score:3)
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What is the point of a fucking private space company
Not everyone on Earth signed up to the "point" of private space companies. Private space companies were not planned by any authority, so they don't have a point in the first place. There was no global strategy around this. There is no point.
There are only three private space companies of note - SpaceX, Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic. Only SpaceX has the goods, and only because NASA is giving them those goods to carry to space.
Why would any country limit themselves to SpaceX, one American company?
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There are only three private space companies of note - SpaceX, Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic.
I think Rocket Lab might contest that statement; they are arguably much more significant that Virgin Galactic. Many successful commercial orbital launches, versus a couple of minutes-long suborbital hops for some rich dudes.
Re:Why??? (Score:5, Interesting)
Virgin Galactic isn't even in the same game. Virgin Orbit is, although they're a well less impressive company than Rocket Lab - I'd put them about on par with Astra. Blue Origin is massive, well funded, and has accomplished embarrassingly little with respect to actual orbital vehicles.
ESA's "Mildly Improved Falcon 9" plans are not just too little too late compared to SpaceX - which will have ditched Falcon series entirely by then for the 1-2 orders of magnitude cheaper Starship - but even compared to RocketLab. Neutron is on the lower end of the Falcon 9 class, but it's a vastly superior, more modern design. The "second stage in tension" thing is a brilliant way to reduce mass. They learned from SpaceX's mistake of assuming fairing to be cheap throwaway parts (they're surprisingly expensive) and integrated them into the launcher. They're going to methalox, which really seems to be the road forward for reusability. They are ditching the possibility of road transport - and in exchange thus it needs to be an obligate-return-to-coastal-landing-sites rocket - but in exchange get a much wider stance, better return aerodynamics, and a better mass ratio from using lower aspect-ratio tanks.
The only thing that makes me wince is the choice to use CF. At least it's only for reuse with the first stage, which has milder reentry conditions. But the history of CF with large orbital rocket stages... hasn't been great. Materials compatibility (often necessitating a mass ratio-hurting liner), thermal compatibility, brittleness (increasing with cold and repeated stress/destress cycles), high unit cost, slow and expensive development iteration.... I mean I totally get why they want to use it, but it does make me wince a bit, just like it did when SpaceX was planning on it for Starship.
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On the other hand, composites have not only a bright future in airplanes, but also a bright present. Future will show whether this was an awful, glorious or simply equivalent choice. Hopefully there will be "independent" space players 10 or 20 years in the future (Starship will start flying "for good" in some 3+ years, one for initial launches and extra development and possibly another two for really ramping up).
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Not only NASA (Score:3)
There are only three private space companies of note - SpaceX, Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic.
You forgot ULA.
Only SpaceX has the goods, and only because NASA is giving them those goods to carry to space.
In 2021, only 6 of 26 SpaceX Falcon launches was for NASA. In 2020, 5 of 25 were for NASA.
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That is the point.
Re: Why??? (Score:3)
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If I were France, I would want to make sure my government has resources and ability to do things without the support of an other nation, even from a strong ally.
I would want the ability to contribute and manage a good set of the space infrastructure we have built without having to ask Aunt America, who will say ask Uncle Elon, if they want to do something.
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1. They're all built by a rival nation that, when the Republicans seize control, will be utterly hostile and closed. That's a single point of failure that is likely to fail.
Paranoia much? EU runs on Russian oil and gas, Putin turns of the tap and lights in EU go out, and you worry about US?
2. SpaceX and other private companies in the US are building launchers with minimal concern for reliability or safety because these cost money. That's not always a good option and there will be contexts where that strategy is going to bite.
They have a great concern for safety and reliability, they're just doing it differently than Old Space.
3. The problem with having madmen in control of organizations (and Elon Musk is not firing on all cylinders, even if those that operate are supercharged) is that things can go wrong in a lot of ways, very quickly. Not even necessarily with the rocket. "Visionaries" have a nasty habit of running companies into the ground. This is another single point of failure. No matter what Americans like to believe, success doesn't come from hard work or brilliant minds. Plenty of geniuses in America work extremely hard and get no further than minimum pay, because it's mostly down to the family you were born into and a whole lot of luck. And luck eventually runs out.
BS. Yes, not every genius will be a millionaire, luck has a lot to do with it (but no, not the luck of "being born a millionaire"), but if your supposed "genius" can't earn you more than minimum pay, then maybe you want to reevaluate if you're as much of a "genius" as you think you are.
4. Europe is capable of taking a brilliant idea and doing it better. Because luck is involved, this doesn't always work out. The A380 is superior to anything Boeing has, and doesn't have any of the engineering defects. Boeing won that contest, not because their planes are safer or more pleasant to fly in (neither is true), but because the A380 came out at precisely the wrong time.
In o
Re: Why??? (Score:2)
and you worry about US?
Those who forget the reasons for why Ariane was created are doomed to learn them again. Perhaps we Europeans are still not keen on being graciously allowed to use US-launched European satellites only for purposes that don't collide with US interests?
Re: Why??? (Score:2, Insightful)
And we've seen this movie before:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik... [wikipedia.org]
Here's the way it plays out;
1. France is pissed that nobody is paying attention to them.
2. France convinces the rest of Europe to fund its latest scheme to restore French pride.
3. Hundreds of millions of dollars later, nothing is produced.
4. ???
5. Profit!
By the way, with all of this talk of single points of failure, how is Ariane supposed to operate if French Guiana decides that it doesn't want to be a European colony anymore? Then where will
Re: Why??? (Score:3)
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how is Ariane supposed to operate if French Guiana decides that it doesn't want to be a European colony anymore? Then where will Europe launch its rockets from?
About 25% of the GDP of French Guyana is derived from the Kourou spaceport. Guyana is rather less in a position to slam the door in Europe's face than the US (who have done it before, which is why the Ariane project was created in the first place) or Russia.
Re: Why??? (Score:2)
Obviously they have something that other countries with money want. Why does Europe get to be their only customer?
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If French Guiana decides to be Guianan (Guianian?) Guiana, then they most probably send the French (or anyone else, for that matter) a check for every lauch, rather than close the borders altogether.
This "if you're not with us, you're against us" mentality should have become quite old-fashioned by now.
Re: Why??? (Score:2)
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Re: Why??? (Score:3)
Florida is not a colony
Well, neither is Guyane, so there's that.
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Yeah I get the feeling you don't understand how France works constitutionally. Fun fact French Guiana is constitutionally just as much part of France as Alaska is of the USA. For heaven's sake it is part of the EU.
Re: Why??? (Score:2)
Re: Why??? (Score:2)
just dont cite conspiracy theories to justify it
Recorded history is not "a conspiracy theory".
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"Paranoia much? EU runs on Russian oil and gas, Putin turns of the tap and lights in EU go out, and you worry about US?" :( ).
There were the steel and aluminum tariffs from the Trump era. I don't think they had any positive economic results, but they weren't really intended for that - they were a "we pretend that we care about you" measure.
Putting tariffs on space launches would serve the same "we pretend to care about you" rhetoric, if and when the next "great leader" is elected as POTUS (or re-elected
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The irony. That's the same logic Kremlin-tools are frequently using when Whataboutery is the best they can do.
But in reality it's not a dichotomy between the US and Russia. If you're in the EU, you ought to worry about both the US and Russia.
Self interest exist everywhere. It doesn't matter if it's between the EU and Russia, Russia and the US, or the US and the EU. The same story with Chi
Re: Why??? (Score:2)
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You forget that most trade is done between companies.
Where the other company is - aka in which country - is irrelevant. Or close to irrelevant.
Relevant is everything involved regarding costs, that includes payment terms, currencies etc. *and* regulations. Probably legal leverage as well.
If I can profitable import from China, and can trust a long term delivery contract, and that the currency stays stable, or delivery terms can be renegotiated then it is no difference than importing from Russia or the US.
E.g.
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Re: Why??? (Score:2)
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But biogas burns about just as well as the main component (methane) is the same. And while is probably not feasible to produce the required amounts of biogas for an extensive network of gas power plants, for cooking it should be sufficient.
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Maybe you wont need gas for heat, but Im sure youll need it for cooking.
Never fear, the innovators that tried to bring us the Ford Nucleon will come up with something!
(though now that I think of it, if I picture a guy cooking on a slab of hot radioisotope encased in a shell of lead and tungsten, that guy speaks Russian and probably has a youtube channel)
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French aren't Coward-Cows. They have enough nuclear grid capacity not to need Putin's fossil farts. The rest of the EU should do the same ... build out clean nuclear power.
France is planning to reduce their share of nuclear power [cnbc.com], as all the other options are cheaper.
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Gas is always cheaper until the price comes back up to historical means. Wind and solar might be cheaper if you ignore you need to pay for backup capacity in the grid.
Re: Why??? (Score:2)
Re: Why??? (Score:5, Insightful)
You're 1 for 5 (Score:5, Interesting)
Comment 1 is accurate and the national protectionism argument is the only real justification for this.
Comment 2 is not coherent. SpaceX has very strong profit drivers to make launches safe and successful. And they have a stellar track record with their approach which data is showing works as better, or better than, the slow-and-steady NASA approach. Remember that Challenger and Columbia happened on NASAs watch, with orders of magnitude slower rate of launches than we do today. Today we do 100+ launches a year without incident.
Comment 3 is nothing but Musk personality bashing bandwagoning. There is no coherent argument here.
Comment 4 is resting on the A380 as an example, when it turned into a giant unprofitable boondoggle to hat didn't even last 15 years... Bad example.
https://travelradar.aero/why-t... [travelradar.aero]
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There are more examples than the A380. The Concorde was revolutionary when it came out but still flopped in the market.
If you want an example of a well run commercial Airbus program which was a hit in the long run look no further than the A300 program which led to the A330. But even that one looked to be doomed for failure in the beginning. It took a long time for sales to pick up.
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"building launchers with minimal concern for reliability or safety because these cost money"
They are not built with minimal concern for reliability, they are built with _economic_ concern for reliability.
Plenty of redundancies make some issues recoverable from (especially when launching at less than maximum weight/performance).
Also, NASA seems to consider the reliability of the Dragon crew capsule good enough.
This works great if you launch "commodity" hardware into space - ISS supplies, 10-in-a-thousands sa
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Musk recently said that SpaceX was close to bankruptcy so everyone had to work over Thanksgiving. Doesn't exactly inspire confidence.
The other issue is that Europe needs to maintain independent launch capability for security reasons. It's funded with taxes, supplemented by income from commercial launches. To maintain that commercial launch income they need to keep the cost competitive, which will also help with reducing the amount of public money needed too.
Re: Why??? (Score:3, Interesting)
And then further tweeted that said bankruptcy would come from a massive global recession and lack of liquid capital while Starlink wasn't significantly profitable. Almost as if he's paying attention to things like inflation, threat of war from Russia, threat of war from China. The list goes on.
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That's missing the point. If you come to rely on a commercial launch facility that the boss says is teetering on the edge, literally days away from collapsing if the workers don't do overtime, you might get some of the blame when things go sideways.
Clearly Musk's email was not intended for public consumption, and he went into damage control mode. The fact remains though, for Europe to rely on a foreign company whose future is uncertain is clearly not acceptable, regardless of the reasons.
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Re: Why??? (Score:2)
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Well the company that is building these rockets and the ESA that oversees the programme and runs the missions are both multi-national ventures.
Another risk is that a country does something catastrophically dumb like brexit, and gets cut out of the programme on security grounds like the UK was with Galileo.
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So what you're saying is that the success of a company is based on luck, the circumstances around that company over which the company has no control. To repeat myself, "Plenty of geniuses in America work extremely hard and get no further than minimum pay, because it's mostly down to the family you were born into and a whole lot of luck. And luck eventually runs out."
That's not blaming anyone, that's simply stating the same thing you're contending Musk said. That the success or failure of his business will b
Re: Why??? (Score:2)
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I get the feeling he was mostly just cracking the whip. He wanted people to work over Thanksgiving and needed something to scare them with. Do it or the company will fail and you will be out of a job.
Re: Why??? (Score:3)
He wanted people to work over Thanksgiving and needed something to scare them with.
I don't believe that be "wanted" anything like that, considering that he himself cut his vacation short. The propulsion VP recently left and it turned out that he had bern misleading the leadership of the company about propulsion progress for a year (I wondered if there would be legal consequences for him from this) and now on Starship's critical path there's an emergency to be solved ASAP. Your take on it is, frankly, quite weird.
Re: Why??? (Score:2)
Even if SpaceX went bankrupt, their technology portfolio and their assets (like Starling) are extremely valuable, and no other space entity, even ones funded by very wealthy governments, are even close. I guarantee you that the investors wouldn't just liquidate it over what is obviously an acute cash flow shortage.
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A380 was an ego project and had an untenable business case from the outset. The A350 on the other hand was a a great piece of engineering and arguably better than the 787 in every way.
The problem with this current goal is that the sights are set way too low. Building and launching their own Falcon9 in five years ignores the fact that the goalposts have already shifted and it is the Starship/SuperHeavy that they need to chase. SpaceX. SpaceX even realizes that the Falcon9 is too small just for their goals of
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For Starship to be economic they need to be able to massively reuse it. That certainly is not proven.
Also developing a Falcon 9 style rocket is enough for their requirements and probably costs a tenth to develop.
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Europe is capable of taking a brilliant idea and doing it better.
LOL, name one. And as the others have pointed out, don't use the A380, which was essentially an EU vanity project with no real market. If there was, Boeing would have done a double-decker 747 decades ago (and yes, they studied the possibility).
European industry is excellent in niche areas. Luxury cars being the most prominent. General purpose machines? Not so much. Europeans buy American and Asian computers. Like everywhere else, they use American software.
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...5. The free market works on the assumption that anyone is free to set up in competition. If you reject the idea of a European private company competing with an American private company...
Arianespace is only partially a "European private company". It is heavily subsidized, with billion-dollar payments to develop Ariane 5 ME and to design Ariane 6, as well as continuing price supports for launches.
SSTO is a no-go. (Score:2)
No one is seriously working on SSTO.
And reuse is definitely working well for SpaceX. It is saving them, their customers and the U.S. people buckets of money.
Re: SSTO is a no-go. (Score:2)
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"Our gravity is too strong."
Also, our atmosphere is too dense.
What SpaceX is doing is "limited re-use" (10 uses until now for each of two boosters, several with 9 uses or less). It doesn't compare to - let's say - the B-52 bombers, all of which are 60 or more years old.
It helps a lot that the boosters do not land in saltwater (which was the way of the Space Shuttle).
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What SpaceX is doing is "limited re-use" (10 uses until now for each of two boosters, several with 9 uses or less). It doesn't compare to - let's say - the B-52 bombers, all of which are 60 or more years old.
B-52 bombers don't compare to a spacecraft, either. They have what you might refer to as a substantially different mission.
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IMHO SSTO is possible, as is reuse. Both in the same aircraft, eh, nope.
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There was a European search engine program. It did deliver something but it never indexed that many pages. I tried it out at one point. The search results were pitiful. I think it is still available at qwant.com. At least I assume that is the one. There were more.
Personally I left Google for DuckDuckGo years ago.