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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

#261

Post by inglor_cz »

Beretta_Vexee wrote: post #167
Reason077 wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SpaceX is a 100% American company. Moody individual notwithstanding, they are no less American than Boeing or ULA or anyone else.

> 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,…

In practice, those who seek launches on commercial markets don't mind all those America-related complications much.

The US isn't really interested in the secrets of some Malaysian or Brazilian TV satellite.

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

#262

Post by FranOntanaya »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #45
Larrikin wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is it a race instead of being of public and international importance to have an alternative to a for profit company?

> Why is it a race instead of being of public and international importance to have an alternative to a for profit company? It’s not a meaningful alternative. The comparison to a Yugo is apt: it’s more expensive and less capable, with its sole advantage being it’s made in Europe and so will get European launches. But anyone launching on it is structurally disadvantaged against a competitor (or peer) who launches on Sp…

Ticket price doesn't tell the whole story, if those euros are staying in Europe instead of leaving the union and funding someone else's space program.

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

#263

Post by inglor_cz »

piva00 wrote: post #209
Dalewyn wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

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.

Unhappy marriages are unstable, even if they make economic sense.

Drag too much resentment into a relationship and people may do the irrational thing.

I was witness to the dissolution of Czechoslovakia. Economically, it didn't make sense to do that. But the Slovaks really resented Czech paternalism and wanted to go their own way.

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

#264

Post by ambicapter »

Rinzler89 wrote: post #108
Xixi wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ariane 6 is quite heavily subsidized, with ArianeGroup getting €340M per year to operate it [1]. With an expected 10 launches per year, that's about €34M/launch. But in the grand scheme of things it doesn't matter: Europe needs to be able to put its own military satellites (or anything else critical) up there. Military satellites sold to third party countries also won't launch themselves... [1] https://europeanspacef…

>Ariane 6 is quite heavily subsidized All major aerospace companies and projects are heavily subsidized in every country otherwise they would never survive or even be born. Like how much profit did NASA make over its lifetime?

Right? At a certain point, governments are the only entities that can afford to send things to space. "Highly-subsidized" here just means "government is 99% of company's market base".

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

#266

Post by realityking »

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,…

[flagged]

This goes both ways. While the US is certainly open to having scientific payloads launched by non-US launch providers (e.g, JWT) it’s strictly not launching military payloads from non-US spaceport or from non-US vehicles.

Given this stance, why should other NATO partners fold their own programs? The situation would entirely different if SpaceX was 20% German owned and the US would allow Ariane to compete for military payloads.

As an aside, both ESA and the German Armed Forces habe used SpaceX in the past and ESA, EUMETSAT, and the UK Armed Forces have planned launches with SpaceX. There is far from a dogmatic perspective in Europe to only use Ariane for launches.

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

#267

Post by nordsieck »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #184
ncruces wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So the entire world should rather be dependent on SpaceX, and be done with it? Arianespace had the lead and lost it, because it kept the old way of doing things. Or are you arguing Ariane 5 was technically behind and wasn't competitive in the '00s? Ariane 6 is not that far behind the other "old space" companies, which the US is struggling to keep around as alternatives to SpaceX. It's not like Boeing and ULA are doin…

> the entire world should rather be dependent on SpaceX, and be done with it? No, compete. There is a menagerie of European space start-ups starved of oxygen by ArianeSpace. Arianespace is Europe’s ULA. Europe with Ariane 6 is about as dependent on SpaceX as Europe without. The difference is whether it will continue to be dependent on SpaceX. Every euro that goes to Arianespace cements SpaceX’s global dominance. > Ar…

> When was Arianespace in the lead?

Before the rise of SpaceX.

> For over 20 years, Ariane rockets dominated commercial launch—by 2004, Arianespace had 50 percent of the global market for commercial launches.

https://www.csis.org/analysis/what-can-we-learn-ariane-futur...

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

#268

Post by jcranmer »

protomolecule wrote: post #210
dividedbyzero wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

[flagged]

If your dream is to restore Russia to its imperial greatness, there's an awful lot of EU countries that need to be gobbled up along the way, so France is quite likely to be willing to help a Russian-Estonia war even without NATO.

NATO is only a threat to Russia insofar as it poses an obstacle to Russia gobbling up its neighbors.

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

#269

Post by delta_p_delta_x »

The bearishness, pessimism, and criticism in this thread—especially by just a handful of prolific commenters—is off-the-charts.

We have people comparing strategic assets and state-owned enterprises to private commercial enterprises. Well done.

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

#270

Post by nordsieck »

jccooper wrote: post #258
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the entire world should rather be dependent on SpaceX, and be done with it? No, compete. There is a menagerie of European space start-ups starved of oxygen by ArianeSpace. Arianespace is Europe’s ULA. Europe with Ariane 6 is about as dependent on SpaceX as Europe without. The difference is whether it will continue to be dependent on SpaceX. Every euro that goes to Arianespace cements SpaceX’s global dominance. > Ar…

From about 1990 to about 2016 Arianespace was the leader in commercial (meaning mostly GEO) launch, and acted like it. (Actually, they still do, just it's less believable now.) In retrospect, I don't think they ever really had the eye of the tiger; mostly they managed to be less terrible than the competition. The US competitors got far too fat at the government teat and didn't even try, and the Russians couldn't keep…

> They'd probably still be king of the (small and expensive) hill without SpaceX.

Maybe.

IMO, ULA's Vulcan is more commercially competitive than Ariane 6.

But both rockets were developed in response to SpaceX, so maybe neither would have been made otherwise. In which case, ULA would be in even more hot water than ArianeGroup, since they wouldn't be able to get engines for Atlas V post Ukraine war.

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