231–240 of 480 posts
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ESA launches French Guiana. Since it is cheaper to launch closer to the equator with the extra speed provided by the earth's rotation.
Really comes in handy to still have a couple of colonies near the equator. It's also better to have the massive amounts of emissions far away from your own population.
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hehe, yes but if it wasnt for german rocket scientists the americans and russians would not have had space agencies (at least not that early)
Well, there was Goddard, Korolev & quite a few others. But it could indeed have taken longer if the military implications were not clearly demonstrated by Von Braun. Still, an interesting possibility of a fully civilian space program from the start & how it would look like & how it would be different. Kinda like in Wings of Honneamise.
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Have there been other rocket launches from continental Europe?
From a sovereignty perspective, does a launch from continental Europe actually matter when Arianespace/CNES/ESA has been launching from France for decades?
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That's legally true, but I think it misses the distinction between formal political status and the legacy of colonialism. French Guiana is an overseas department of France, and its residents have French citizenship and constitutional rights. But that doesn't mean the historical relationship was equivalent to mainland France, or that the effects of that history disappeared when the legal status changed. The same point…
How does it compare to Alaska? Wasn't it purchased as a colony from russians to exploit Alaskan gold with complete disreagrd for opinion of the native population?
This is a huge success, but it I think also tells us that the EU is further decoupling itself from the US. Slowly but steadily. Which is obviously the right thing to do, but it's interesting that it's not just a hypothetical anymore.
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This went both ways https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Osoaviakhim
Yes a good thing to point out, however the American initiative was more successful, was it not? Largely because raw numbers aside, most of the top talent wanted to avoid the Soviets and thus the US was the only logical option. That is, part of what made the American job on this easier is top German talent anticipated some "Operation Osoaviakhim" (or worse) scenario and thus sought out the US as the only way to get ou…
In fact, after the war the USSR has briefly reconstituted the manufacturing of V-2 in Germany, employing thousands of people, before transplanting this entire industry to the USSR. This dramatically lifted the level of Soviet manufacturing and relevant metallurgy.
von Braun's dissertation was on engine design and testing. But when he built the Redstone missile in the USA, he ordered the engine from a US company -- the engine which was already a generation ahead, compared to the imported German engines which the US engineers studied after the war.
Meanwhile, the Soviets have developed even better engines, completely on their own, though with the important parts built using the materials and the equipment brought from Germany.
So it is debatable whether having the German higher-ups and having a greater continuity with German design philosophy was a good thing or a liability.
It is less well known, but France have also imported a significant number of ex-Peenemunde engineers for their program. And their engines developed in a way different from both the American ones and the Soviet ones -- which definitively shows that although internalizing the German know-how was the starting point for everyone, it did not define the path of subsequent development.
Of course, the engines were not the whole story. The Germans took to the USA the advanced prototypes of the inertial guidance systems which were developed for the missiles that were supposed to come after the V-2. And the Soviets got Helmut Gröttrup. This did have its effects in both cases.
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Yeah, in the same way that as a home owner I’d be “obsessed” with my neighbour if he was showing a predilection towards arson. I’d love to be able to go a day without having to see whatever the latest stupidity we’ll have to deal with the fallout from is, I really would.
This obsession started decades ago. Long before any recent politics. It's only gotten deeper and more intense recently.
What specific event and year were IYO the onset of what you're claiming?
When someone emphasizes nationalism a bit too much that's usually only because they don't have enough technical merit to talk about.
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Does it mean that? Europe has had a space agency for a while now. So this story isn't "Europeans finally started to launch for space" but a private European company chose to launch from a continental location. It's funny how we can't be celebrate a European achievement without trying to interpret it into relationship to the US.
> Does it mean that? When the US government funded SpaceX, it was motivated in no small degree by a desire to not be permanently reliant on a geopolitical wildcard (Russia) for getting astronauts into orbit. Now that the US itself has become a geopolitical wildcard, savvy countries know that they need to seek out alternatives to SpaceX under more stable regimes.
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Its not that Europeans havent read Mearsheimer. its that for the best part of three hundred years the whole of Europe has been trying that same realist script until there was nothing left but total ruin across the entire continent. Europeans who created the EU knew about balance of power geopolitics so well, they created this slow bureaucratic mess specifically to stop Germany and France sliding back into the same ol…
I would bet any amount that if you go to a random European city and stop 100 random people on the street you'd be lucky if one person has even heard of Mearsheimer. I think you're also overthinking how the EU got created. I don't think pre-EU Europe was on the brink of violence either. It was more IMO simplistic (but possibly correct, who knows) thinking that it's stronger (economically) as a block. A lot of present…