At the very, very lowest prices that Ariane 5 ever offered, they were close to SpaceX in only one specific very hard to find setup. They needed 2 Geo sats that wanted to launch at the same time and likely only the cheaper of those two actually had a price comparable to SpaceX.
Ariane was lucky that space launches were contracted so many years in advanced in the past. They had many years of contracts already lined when SpaceX was only just scaling and had huge backlogs.
Even by 2014 it was totally clearly to literally everybody in space, that Ariane 5 had to go. It had no future, even with all possible help, ESA and national launches and insentient launches from EU firms it cost would wildly spiral out of control.
That said, Ariane 6 is only a slight incremental improvement (in reality its mostly upgrades that were already planned for Ariane 5 anyway). It was designed to compete with SpaceX as it was in 2014.
Hence why European space people are already planning and pushing for more money to build a next generation rocket. Despite Ariane 6 being a new rocket then Falcon 9, its already outdated.
However Europe (and everybody else) was incredibly lucky that Amazon decided to compete with Starlink and to do so they had to basically buy every single available heavy lift rocket launch for the next half decade. Lucky for them nobody everybody outside of SpaceX sucks, so nobody sucks. Ariane 6 can compete with ULA even when they can't compete with SpaceX.
> And the only real customer so far for cheap, low orbit launches using re-usable rockets is SpaceX itself for Starlink.
Its kind of funny when people claim things that are so easy to verify to be false:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Falcon_9_and_Falcon_He...
SpaceX has already flown 2 commercial flights to low orbit this just year and its February. And their re-usability is not just for low orbit, they reuse the rockets if the go to GEO as well.
Ariane 5 flight rate was never more then 7 a year, SpaceX is planning more then 10 purely commercial LEO, MEO and SSO missions just in the next few months.
- Transporter-6
- OneWeb Flight #16
- OneWeb #17
- O3b mPOWER
- WorldView Legion 1 & 2
- O3b mPOWER 5 & 6
- Transporter-7
- SARah 2 & 3
- Ax-2
I'm sick of doing this, you get my point. Ax-2 is planned for May. You can continue down the list for the rest of the year.
So your statement is almost hilariously wrong, and totally wrong.
The problem is just that SpaceX is launching so often and so many Starlinks that people get confused by it in comparison to what was normal the last 20 years.
Its seems you have formed your opinion based on a bunch of Arianespace propaganda. The have been focused on spreading a a bunch of false narrative the last 5-10 years.