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Europe's new heavy-lift rocket, Ariane 6, made its inaugural flight

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Re: Europe's new heavy-lift rocket, Ariane 6, made its inaugural flight

#201

Post by fallingknife »

MrSkelter wrote: post #47
nabla9 wrote: post #2

Ariane 6 exists so that European countries can get independent access to space between now and 2030s. The launch cost is almost 2x the cost of Falcon 9. Both platforms can lift 22t to LEO. 6-10 years from now Ariane Next/SALTO will aims replicate Falcon 9 efficiency and the design will be very similar: reusable, RP-1/LOX, Prometheus engine is similar reusable open cycle engine as Merlin with lots of 3D printed parts.

Falcon’s costs are a fiction. SpaceX benefits from massive taxpayer support and uses facilities built by the military and NASA. It’s not a like for like comparison especially give SpaceX keeping its books private and giving no clear public indication of how reusable its rockets really are or their refurb cost. Given Musks history of creative accounting quoting their PR numbers, the ones they pitch congress, as facts…

You don't actually believe that a rocket that is thrown away every launch could possibly be cost competitive with one that can be reused 20 times, do you?

Re: Europe's new heavy-lift rocket, Ariane 6, made its inaugural flight

#202

Post by okasaki »

pmontra wrote: post #25
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 6-10 years from now Ariane Next/SALTO will aims replicate Falcon 9 efficiency and the design will be very similar …at which point it will be competing with Starship.

It will still be building that knowledge inside Europe. Rocketry in general is deemed to be strategic so it's OK for any country to invest money in that, keep scientists and engineers on the subject, keep the industries alive, etc. It's not only about access to space, it's also about defense.

What's strategic about it?

We give all of our data to US companies and that's ok (?), but for some reason we need to be able to launch our own rockets?

Re: Europe's new heavy-lift rocket, Ariane 6, made its inaugural flight

#203

Post by kranke155 »

cubefox wrote: post #153
kranke155 wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

New Glenn still has to fly though

There is little doubt that it will do so in a few months. The main engines have already been tested successfully on Vulcan, a few months ago.

You’re not really reading what I wrote but ok.

Re: Europe's new heavy-lift rocket, Ariane 6, made its inaugural flight

#204

Post by snowpid »

cubefox wrote: post #149
snowpid wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only opportunity would be for individual countries (like Germany) to fund such rockets alone, but that seems unlikely due to cost (and the fact that they already pay for ESA). Germany does it in its national program. https://www.dlr.de/de/ar/themen-missionen/raumfahrttechnolog...

That's just for small launchers and the funding is only 25 million in total (to be divided by several companies) which is orders of magnitude lower than would be required for a partly reusable Ariane 6 replacement.

start small and start a competition. Then afterwards you get more and more competent companies.

Re: Europe's new heavy-lift rocket, Ariane 6, made its inaugural flight

#205

Post by itishappy »

amelius wrote: post #84
ur-whale wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Also, rocket science is just Newtonian physics. Disagree. The newtonian physics part of flying a rocket is indeed the boring part of rocket science in these days of Ghz computing. But all the engineering (an altogether different - if related - discipline) required is anything but simple. And engineering and all of its sub-disciplines (materials science, propellant research, iterative refinement, operational researc…

I view the things you mention as incremental improvements on stuff that basically worked since the 60s.

If we want to get real pedantic, the Chinese invented rocket powered flight around 1000AD.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huo_Che

Re: Europe's new heavy-lift rocket, Ariane 6, made its inaugural flight

#206

Post by JumpCrisscross »

espadrine wrote: post #194
627467 wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

at this stage I question the resolve of any European leader in actually wanting to achieve anything of note in a consequential manner. it's cheaper but not cost-free to sustain a narrative of "independence" and "alternative to incumbent" when the actual result is just wasting tax payers money for vanity projects with no clear path to actually build a sustainable alternative to the incumbent. ESA has no resources to d…

> it's cheaper but not cost-free to sustain a narrative of "independence" and "alternative to incumbent" The narrative is independent of the price. SpaceX has showed that they may refuse service in various situations, such as drone access to Starlink Internet in a battle during Ukraine war. Thus a government being dependent on them for their space fleet, gambles the possibility of being suddenly unable to guarantee c…

> SpaceX has showed that they may refuse service in various situations, such as drone access to Starlink Internet in a battle during Ukraine war

If the goal is building a European Starlink, Ariane 6 is a step backward. It fundamentally cannot support the required launch cadence and doesn’t build any of the foundational technologies required to get there. (Analogous to Starliner, which was also pitched as a back-up plan.)

Re: Europe's new heavy-lift rocket, Ariane 6, made its inaugural flight

#207

Post by jjoonathan »

sidewndr46 wrote: post #190
InTheArena wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having followed the launch industry for 30 years, I can safely tell you that this is the exact line that every competitor (save RocketLabs and the startups fueled by the SpaceX diaspora of engineers) says whenever they are trying to justify their legacy wasteful rockets. Even Rocketlab's CEO had to "eat his hat" when he finally realized that the cost difference was real, that reusability was here to stay, and they ha…

Given that ULA historically purchased engines from Russia, are you suggesting that it was a direct mechanism for transferring tax revenue to Russia companies?

Yes. The idea was to keep the engines (and engineers) out of the hands of the other likely buyers. You've seen how soviet military surplus gets around: the same channels work for rocket engines, and those engines work in ICBMs just as well as they work in orbital launch platforms.

I don't know how effective this was. Did it backfire by promoting economies of scale in a program that went on to sell to adversaries anyway? Did it murder the domestic engine programs and did that have knock-on consequences? I don't know if the policy was effective, but I do know that stopping "engine proliferation" was a widely given and accepted reason for those programs.

Re: Europe's new heavy-lift rocket, Ariane 6, made its inaugural flight

#208

Post by JumpCrisscross »

basementcat wrote: post #200
yokem55 wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They've had multiple private VC rounds. They also have had several milestone based development contracts from the government to develop capabilities (iss cargo and crew mainly) while charging the government less to do that dev work then their competitors bid.

Several of the investment rounds included participation from In-Q-Tel, the CIA's venture capital arm.

> Several of the investment rounds included participation from In-Q-Tel, the CIA's venture capital arm

Not a significant source of capital. NASA COTS was Hawthorne’s public-money shot in the arm.

Re: Europe's new heavy-lift rocket, Ariane 6, made its inaugural flight

#209

Post by piva00 »

Dalewyn wrote: post #186
Beretta_Vexee wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> SpaceX is a 100% American company. It's a huge fucking problem if you're not American. If you don't want to be subject to American law. If you don't want your technology inspected or tampered with by Americans. If you don't want the transaction to be in dollars (extra-territoriality of US law on all dollar transactions). If you don't want to deal with the problem of American citizens and companies subject to FISA,…

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Because the USA needs NATO and other shit to have soft power and keep its hegemony.

Shit like what you said truly makes me wonder about the state of education in the USA when you don't understand a basic geopolitical principle your country has enacted for 80+ years, with massive benefits.

Re: Europe's new heavy-lift rocket, Ariane 6, made its inaugural flight

#210

Post by protomolecule »

dividedbyzero wrote: post #95
contrarian1234 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are the Europeans wworried that "between now and 2030s" the US will cut off their access to space? I understand things can go wrong and it's good to have a backup plan in the long term... But that's not that many years out. You can go without access for a few years .. It seems like a tiny risk

In the event of another Trump presidency (or a successor in spirit) getting cut off for military purposes is probably more like expected, and in a post-NATO world Russia might get a lot more aggressive towards western Europe. That's probably what is behind most such time horizons right now, but even in the mid to long term, rocket tech will remain highly strategic (e.g. for nuclear weapon delivery), and capabilities…

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