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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

#191

Post by protomolecule »

cubefox wrote: post #37
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.

I think it would be, in the long term, more cost effective for ESA to contract two or three private European rocket start-ups, like RFA, to build such reusable launch vehicles. To create some competition in price and development speed. Arianespace (ArianeGroup) seems to be "old space" by now, similar to ULA or Boeing in the US.

SpaceX wasn't the first American rocket startup, other ones failed. What makes you think European startups won't fail?

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

#192

Post by InTheArena »

littlestymaar wrote: post #76
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> SpaceX benefits from massive taxpayer support and uses facilities built by the military and NASA So does ArianeSpace [1]. (It’s majority owned by the French state. EDIT: It’s not.) > no clear public indication of how reusable its rockets really are or their refurb cost Refurb rates and turnaround times for Falcon 9 first stages are publicly documented [2]. Refurb costs are more opaque, but they’d have to be multipl…

> So does ArianeSpace [1]. (It’s majority owned by the French state.) True, but the EU has tight rules about government subsidies (TFEU art. 107-109) which don't have equivalent in the US. > Ariane 6 is obsolete on arrival; ArianeSpace’s CEO admitted as much in asking the ESA to fund a reusable heavy booster like Falcon Heavy [3]. This is true though.

Please note - Airbus has received tens of billions of dollars in launch aid that only in 2018 was ruled illegal and still has not launched a major airframe without this form of government aid.

Aviation and space have been a super-highly subsidized environment since day one, on both sides of the Atlantic.

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

#193

Post by contrarian1234 »

boricj wrote: post #125
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

The French mantra is strategic autonomy. We are allies with the USA, we are not vassals of the USA and we do not want to depend on anybody else to defend our own interests or our own agenda. This is why the French army has independent expeditionary and nuclear deterrent capabilities and why nearly all of our military kit is designed and produced either locally or in partnership with nearby European countries. It's no…

It seems just a ton of money and R&D down the drain developing something already obsolete for some tiny and very theoretical advantage. It seems more sensible to lose a tiny bit of independence for a small window of time and instead use the money to develop an actual state of the art rocket.

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

#194

Post by espadrine »

627467 wrote: post #135
crest wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So because an incumbent exists ESA should give up, let their production and development pipeline rot away and "enjoy" the monopoly until it's too late to change something?

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 commercial services such as Galileo GNSS, or during military operations.

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

#196

Post by GuB-42 »

Reason077 wrote: post #101
pmezard wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are the US sending military payloads with non-US rockets?

The US is sending military payloads with private, low-cost commercial launch provider SpaceX. The success of this model hasn’t gone unnoticed by China, who are funding several private rocket companies (such as Space Pioneer) to develop reusable launch platforms in competition with the state-owned contractor CASC. They are making rapid progress!

The US is sending their military payloads with a US company they have invested in, and most likely have special, undisclosed deals with.

It is not just "a commercial launch provider". I don't expect the US to launch their military payloads with Chinese rockets, private or not, in the same way I don't expect China to use SpaceX for their own military payloads. Same thing for the EU, they prefer to send their military payloads with their own rockets, that is Ariane.

Ariane is private too, it is also a commercial launch provider. It is heavily subsidized by the EU member states and not as competitive as SpaceX, but from a national security perspective, the situation is similar.

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

#197

Post by JumpCrisscross »

pavlov wrote: post #133
londons_explore wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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... I'm very surprised the EU and the USA and SpaceX didn't work out a deal to buy a certain number of F9's to be launched and operated from the EU. The EU would pay a (vey high) price to bu…

> "would agree not to develop a competing rocket design in the next 20 yrs" Isn't the whole point of Ariane to maintain European capability for independent space launches? It would be very hard to spin that up from nowhere after twenty years of complete inactivity.

> would be very hard to spin that up from nowhere after twenty years of complete inactivity

That’s not the only alternative.

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

#198

Post by FredPret »

londons_explore wrote: post #126
panick21_ wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lol, how delusional. ArianeGroup literally just got 5 billion $ plus use of lots of tax payer subsidized infrastructure. That is 4 billion $ more then SpaceX ever got for development of Falcon 9. Falcon 9 got an old shitty broken down launch sites they had rebuild, ArianeGroup got a whole new built launch site for free. But feel free to live in fantasy land. > It’s not a like for like comparison especially give Space…

> Problem is we know how much money SpaceX raised If they wanted to raise money without it becoming public, they could do so easily - for example using directors loans. A better way to guess their expenses is to look at how many employees they have. Lets call it 15,000. Lets put average pay at $150k/year after overheads and taxes. 96 launches in 2023. That puts the salary cost per launch at $23M/launch. It's a very r…

You really think 100% of salaries can be attributed to launch costs of one of their rocket types?

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

#199

Post by TeMPOraL »

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?

Indirect through ULA, but yes; it's not like Russia is in an alien dimension. Trading with it was fine, at least until recently.

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

#200

Post by basementcat »

yokem55 wrote: post #183
Angostura wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where does SpaceX get its development funding from?

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.
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