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As the SpaceX steamroller surges, European rocket industry vows to resist

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Re: As the SpaceX steamroller surges, European rocket industry vows to resist

#41

Post by colordrops »

PeterisP wrote: post #34
bosdev wrote: post #27

> Truthfully, if Europe ever did develop a reusable rocket, one that could fly all the missions in a year, this would be unhelpful politically. What would the engine and booster factories sprinkled across Europe do if they built one rocket and then had 11 months off? The member states value the jobs too much. It feels incredibly short-term to me. How many jobs will be created by opening up spaceflight at 1/100 the co…

More to the point, what would the engine and booster factories do if they had 12 months off each year because all the payloads would fly on cheaper reusable rockets? If the jobs are doing something inefficient, they're going away anyway.

Cheaper flights would open up new markets which would increase demand. They didn't build a few passenger jets and call it a day, and the same would be true of cheap access to space.

Re: As the SpaceX steamroller surges, European rocket industry vows to resist

#42

Post by magduf »

khuey wrote: post #23
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #3

> if Europe ever did develop a reusable rocket, one that could fly all the missions in a year, this would be unhelpful politically. What would the engine and booster factories sprinkled across Europe do if they built one rocket and then had 11 months off?

Airbus seems to manage just fine building reusable airplanes.

It's like the thing about the mouse complaining that the cheese was moved.

Airplanes (or "aeroplanes" on that side of the pond) have always been reusable, so Airbus was able to establish itself and build a stable business building them.

Rockets have always been non-reusable (until SpaceX), so ArianeGroup built a stable business around that assumption. Now they're being out-competed by a foreign company that has proven that assumption wrong, and they don't know what to do except demand more subsidies and a monopoly so they don't have to compete.

Re: As the SpaceX steamroller surges, European rocket industry vows to resist

#43

Post by Retric »

magduf wrote: post #37
infogulch wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is like bemoaning plastic factory worker jobs because we've become too good at reusing cups/bags/packaging/whatever and don't need to produce as much plastic anymore. Man that would be a nice problem to have. Mind-bending levels of justification here.

Of all the places in the world, Europe is probably the most ripe for implementing a UBI, which would solve a lot of these problems.

People get rich from government contracts. That's what drives a lot of this stuff not just jobs for voters.

Re: As the SpaceX steamroller surges, European rocket industry vows to resist

#44

Post by no1youknowz »

mschuster91 wrote: post #15
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #3

> if Europe ever did develop a reusable rocket, one that could fly all the missions in a year, this would be unhelpful politically. What would the engine and booster factories sprinkled across Europe do if they built one rocket and then had 11 months off?

This problem will also bite the US launch industry. Hard. Once SpaceX has proven they can do safe crewed flights and Blue Origin goes beyond testing flights, why is there a reason to pay the huge ULA markup any more? ULA, as well as Airbus, has a problem: they're constantly being meddled with by politicians without any idea what they're doing and decide stuff that's totally unreasonable from an economical point but h…

> ULA, as well as Airbus, has a problem

Yep, exactly the same problem as IBM, Blackberry, and many other companies who were at the top and then either stopped innovating or got to big and slow.

Having the bigger companies fail in a respect is a good thing. Have those engineers go back into the free market. Have them create companies and make competition. Push technologies forward and pricing down.

Look at Rocket Lab and their Electron rocket. Pretty amazing if you ask me and didn't really cost that much.

Let the free market sort things out. It always does. Unless of course you start involving the government with their jobs program and you get an SLS rocket that costs $2b each and isn't reusable.

What we need are many more companies providing launch services. Lets get the cost down to $1k to send someone up. Lets get more companies building infrastructure in space, so we have 10, 20 or 50 space stations in LEO.

There's so much up for grabs, but it won't be available if we start protectionist policies.

Re: As the SpaceX steamroller surges, European rocket industry vows to resist

#46

Post by pocketstar »

mschuster91 wrote: post #15
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #3

> if Europe ever did develop a reusable rocket, one that could fly all the missions in a year, this would be unhelpful politically. What would the engine and booster factories sprinkled across Europe do if they built one rocket and then had 11 months off?

This problem will also bite the US launch industry. Hard. Once SpaceX has proven they can do safe crewed flights and Blue Origin goes beyond testing flights, why is there a reason to pay the huge ULA markup any more? ULA, as well as Airbus, has a problem: they're constantly being meddled with by politicians without any idea what they're doing and decide stuff that's totally unreasonable from an economical point but h…

ULA has 100% mission success. The Atlas family has 100% mission sucess since 1957. The ULA markup is justified for a high value mission. BO and spaceX have big shoes to fill when it comea to building industry and insurer trust. The Amos 8 failure was an expensive lesson for spacex.

Re: As the SpaceX steamroller surges, European rocket industry vows to resist

#47

Post by JumpCrisscross »

rory096 wrote: post #39
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> their "vow to resist" seems to mainly involve trying to outperform SpaceX The planned Ariane 6 is cost uncompetitive with the Falcon 9 and variable cost and mass uncompetitive with the Falcon Heavy. There are no plans for a European reusable. The “our mission is different...our culture is different” comment implies a regulatory, not technological, solution.

>The planned Ariane 6 is cost uncompetitive with the Falcon 9 This isn't really true. Ariane 6 is expected to cost €75 million for 5 tonnes to GTO and €90 million for 11.5 tonnes. Falcon 9 costs $50 million for 5.5 tonnes to GTO (reusable) and $62 million for 8.3 tonnes (expendable). Because Ariane uses a "dual-berth" conops, it (generally) flies two payloads per launch, whereas Falcon 9's excess capacity is usually…

> Ariane 6 is expected to cost €75 million for 5 tonnes to GTO and €90 million for 11.5 tonnes. Falcon 9 costs $50 million for 5.5 tonnes to GTO (reusable) and $62 million for 8.3 tonnes (expendable)

Why would someone pay €75 million to launch 5 tonnes to GTO on the Ariane 6 when they can spend $62 million and get an extra 3.3 tonnes of capacity on the Falcon 9?

Based on your numbers, Falcon 9 is $9 million and $7.5 million per tonne. Ariane 6 is €15 million and €7.8 million, respectively. Given €1 is generally worth more than $1, and that the Ariane's prices are still just projections, your numbers don't paint the Arianes favorably.

> Falcon 9's excess capacity is usually left unused

Source? It's been a few years since I was in the launch industry, but even then piggyback slots on Falcon 9s were in heavy demand. Sufficiently so that a number of companies (e.g. Spaceflight [1]) cropped up to broker them.

[1] http://spaceflight.com

Re: As the SpaceX steamroller surges, European rocket industry vows to resist

#49

Post by marsokod »

bosdev wrote: post #27

> Truthfully, if Europe ever did develop a reusable rocket, one that could fly all the missions in a year, this would be unhelpful politically. What would the engine and booster factories sprinkled across Europe do if they built one rocket and then had 11 months off? The member states value the jobs too much. It feels incredibly short-term to me. How many jobs will be created by opening up spaceflight at 1/100 the co…

To me this is a major reason why the reusable launchers were not developed in Europe. The concept was being studied but never gained traction.

One of the reason might have been vanity but if you look at it with the view point of a CEO from a European firm, reusability was a risky gamble:

1) In order to keep your manufacturing quality, one needs to produce a new rocket every two or three months. Beyond that, the people manufacturing it losses knowledge and unless quality assurance is increased a lot, you will losses quality.

2) EU was doing around 12 launches a year, and that was by being very cheap. You could plan on increasing the market share but that starts being difficult as a lot of what remains cannot use a European launcher for political reasons.

3) For the sake of the argument, let say cheaper price double the market share, that leaves 24 launches a year. Based on a manufacturing of 6 launchers a year, this leaves 4 launches per rocket. And that is with very optimistic numbers (doubling of marketshare, no issue with reusability).

4) If you look at the numbers from SpaceX, 4 launches per rocket is where the reusability starts making sense. But ideally, you want more. 5) The Airbus people have shareholders to account to, not a CEO who does not care risking going banqueroute while pursuing a dream to go on Mars.

So yeah, doable but much more difficult than in a market with better access to investment and to huge cash cows named NASA and DoD

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