![[ Eric Berger ] THIS IS FINE — Some European launch officials still have their heads stuck in the sand](https://external-preview.redd.it/ubOz6UbBt6qHBjCZN2hrMtac3HAWxysWGrFcbEUbX-c.jpg?auto=webp&s=9eabef9b97be8e31279c9d5f3a4500473d2eb109)
arstechnica.com/space/2024/06/some-european-launch-officials-still-have-their-heads-stuck-in-the-sand/
[ Eric Berger ] THIS IS FINE — Some European launch officials still have their heads stuck in the sand
Other major industry newsTheir objection to reusability - that even if it works would obsolete the workers who build the rockets - was too obvious a confession that the whole endeavor was a jobs program. Make work. Digging holes for other idlers to fill. A way to occupy big brain rocket scientists so they don't go work for Iran or someone else with a less benign goal for rockets than discovery.
So the realization that they have no intention of expanding the realm of human knowledge through experiment, empowering people to go farther than ever and explore the final frontier, comes about a decade late here. We knew that.
Their objection to reusability - that even if it works would obsolete the workers who build the rockets - was too obvious a confession that the whole endeavor was a jobs program.
But it also fails as an objection based on the one example we have of reusability. I don't have the numbers and am too lazy to look up the specifics, but I think everyone can agree that the number of Merlin engines SpaceX manufactured in 2015, before reusability worked is a tiny tiny fraction of the number of Merlin engines that they manufacture in 2024, when reusability is in full force.
...now I want numbers... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Falcon_9_and_Falcon_Heavy_launches
So in 2015, they had 7 total launches, and none of their engines were reused (in 2015). 9 Merlins on the booster and 1 on the upper stage means they needed 70 engines in 2015.
In 2023, they had 96 Falcon family lauches. Jan 15th, 1 booster was expended, May 1st, 3 boosters were expended, July 29th, one was expended, October 13th one was expended, December 29th one was expended. That means that they used... 255 Merlins 159 Merlins.
So after SpaceX solved reusability. they needed to manufacture 255 159 engines, compared to before where they needed to manufacture 70 engines. Factor of x3.64 x2.27. Sounds like Merlin engine manufacturing jobs have been exceedingly safe.
Edit: I screwed up the math somewhere and VdersFishNChips corrected me below. Thanks again for the correction.
Translation from French/German: We didn't think reusability would work, so we didn't try. Now that we know it works, we don't want to admit it, so we make a new excuse not to try that allows us to keep doing the same things.
Only because SpaceX created a market and demand by aggressively pushing starlink no one thought possible and hope to repeat in Europe .
Starlink is larger than the entire world satellite industry by a margin of close to 2x already . SpaceX trippled the world launch market to triple their the Merlin engine capacity. That is without Starlink the 70 Merlins that SpaceX made in 2015 is good enough for every launch needed for the entire world .
European and other governmental space programs have no hope to be this innovative and successful and they know that .
Civilian space programs have always been a useful cover for military satellites and missiles which is why innovation is so slow if it happens at all.
Only because SpaceX...
There's always going to be an "only because the company took advantage of things" though. Cars only took off because Ford improved the assembly line. The iPhone took off because they pulled in a bunch of 3rd parties to create apps for their app store. Etc..
So I don't think it is a very good excuse that SpaceX created their own demand here.
It is in context of statement that reusable engines would shrink the engine market , it is not an excuse . The thesis of ESA and others as stated by OP is not to destroy the engine market , which the GP posited is not true because spaceX tripled the supply of Merlin’s despite reuse, that was only possible with massive market expansion which is beyond the scope of rocket arm of European space program so that concern does hold water
Is there truly nothing you could think to use those launches for? Ariane/ESA are government programs, they don't even have SpaceX's constraint of needing whatever they do with the extra capacity to be profitable in terms of cold hard cash. Falcon 9 style reuse ends up saving a max of ~70% per launch (because the first stage is still expended), so call it 50% to be conservative, and assume no change in the launch budget. That's still half a dozen (120 metric tons to LEO) marginally free launches per year for space station modules, earth observation satellites, space exploration missions, etc, even holding the budget constant.
All those payloads need funding a ton of it. The cost of the single use launch is important but a still only small % of a mission like say bepicolumbo (budget of 2Billion launch cost even single use would be 10% ish at 200M) . They know how much they can afford to spend on missions so they know what launch costs matter.
There have been only 3 flagship (horizon 2k+) missions last decade (gaia, Lisa and bepicolumbo) and some more medium and small missions . The market internally does not exist, this is why nobody was trying too seriously for so long.
ESA and other government space programs , need to retain launch capacity for strategic non civilian reasons , but they don't need high capacity or even cheap ones , their mission is not commercial operations and cost of research mission eclipses the launch costs (JWST costed 10B did it matter how cheap the arriane 5 it launched on was ? ) by far so reuse does not matter
Single use rocket has missile applications , which is why stuff like SRBs are found in civilian rockets, launching and testing components that have applications in military use is what these government space programs have as strategic objective. Reuse optimzed for things missiles don't need
Ariane was a major player in commercial launch, especially GTO, for decades until not that long ago. Ariane executives were very arrogant in insisting that they would remain competitive with, even superior to, SpaceX/Falcon. What is this new insistence that Ariane/Europe was never interested in commercial launch? Sour grapes, or something more Orwellian? It is nonsense.
You don't need a lot of launches to save from reuse--only two (with one successful landing in between). SpaceX's first reuse of Falcon 9 was a lot cheaper than a new booster, and they were only launching 7-8 times per year back then (similar to A5 at its peak, less than planned for A6). Kuiper will be launching a lot on Ariane 6, and (also to maintain independent capability) Europe is considering their own megaconstellation.
If cost and competiveness were not a concern, why develop Ariane 6 at all, when Ariane 5 was working so well, just a bit expensive (although still less than Atlas V and Delta IV used to be)? In trying to develop a new, cheaper launcher, Europe shot themselves in the foot by retiring Ariane 5 before its not-much-cheaper successor was ready. Europe threw away 4 billion euro needlessly in developing an expendable rocket with little more capacity than Ariane 5, and which requires larger annual subsidies of 340 million euro. (Developing reuse for Falcon 9 also only cost ~1/4 of Ariane 6 development.)
Military budgets are much larger than space agency budgets, and they can afford developing their own large missiles (such as only used by France among the Ariane funders). The French military budget alone is over 4x CNES and all of ESA combined. Besides, while the Ariane 5 SRB design has a lot in common with a French SLBM, the Ariane 6 boosters are a new civilian design made primarily in Italy and Germany. Other than SRBs, modern launch vehicles, nor the hydrolox sustainer fad, have much in common with missiles.
What is this new insistence that Ariane/Europe was never interested in commercial launch
I am not saying they were never interested or their mission publically always this, I am saying they and other government launch programs in NASA or even ISRO(famously "cheap") were never setup to be commercially competitive or actually for civilian benefit, also why reason SLS cost per launch is on the order of magnitude if not more than Starship R&D budget.
Before falcon 9 and Heavy, all these government providers could pretend to be commercially competitive and pretend single use rockets were the only way to civilian space and being expensive is just how space is done. They no longer can do that, they been caught with their pants down so to speak, this is just elaborate deception they were playing on us, and also why they constantly diss on SpaceX it threatens their operating model.
Absolutely, Military budgets are bigger and historically they always do things on their own and dependency has always been other way around. However having a civilian program to lean on benefits them, it cuts their costs on maintaining talent skilled with regular launches and also subsidizes their research and development needs with commercial revenue even if not profitable. All of that is now going away to cheaper players, and their programs are looking more ridiculous by the day.
SLS is likely to be last rocket NASA will develop in-house, Arianne 6 probably the last one for ESA, taxpayers will not keep funding programs that cost 30-40x unit costs of commercial options readily available plus multi Billion R&D budget in a few years after Starship is widely available.
ESA states that they want to maintain space access independence from American and Russian launchers, but with their expendable launch cadence, that will only ever be technically true, more on paper than anything. If they did develop reusable tho, they could become a truly independent space super power with their own independent science and commercial programs. ESA can claim until they're blue in the face that they want to maintain independence from America, but they have always relied on NASA partnerships to get anything meaningful done, whether that be sending astronauts, probes to deep space, or more. With ISS being brought down soon, ESA astronauts will have to rely on American private stations for long term space access.
Imagine what ESA could do with a reusable vehicle. They could build their own space station. Now THAT is independence.
Space agencies have a long history of struggling to keep programs funded through administrations, the problems for ESA is uniquely complicated because it is multi-national unlike NASA or JAXA.
Politicians get elected (and therefore fund) by showcasing some big flagship programmes, they don't really care about independence or even costs . They need jobs to keep constituents happy, on paper strategic independence to keep military happy and big flagship mission to talk about to people.
Government agencies are optimised for minimising risk and keep politicians happy not costs or real innovation even if that will give them real independence. This is why NASA has facilities in every state , pays 2 Billion per launch for SLS and use 40 year old hardware and be delayed in delivery
Delays are good in this world it keeps jobs for longer , far easier to approve a cost increase of a current project than pass a bill for a new one.
This is what OG conservative people talk about when saying government spending is problematic
Starlink is larger than the entire world satellite industry by a margin of close to 2x already [....]
European and other governmental space programs have no hope to be this innovative and successful and they know that .
It absolutely not necessary to recreate this for an European reusable launcher to be viable.
If we only take the currently planned expenses for 10 yearly Ariane6 launches plus subsidies, we could easily pay for 30-50 launches a year on a reusable rocket.
So without spending an additional Euro we would suddenly have 20-40 launches per year for free.
We could build our own space station and build the moon Village!
I'm not sure I follow your math...
So they expended 7 boosters (each with 9 engines) = 63 engines. Then 96 MVacs for the upper stages. That would be a total of 159 engines (not counting any that might have been scrapped). Did you count MVacs twice by accident?
Your point still stands though.
I'll add to that the 96 upper stages that they've build and are currently building at around one every 2-3 days. And replacement boosters (not sure how many). I'd say building F9s has been and is a fairly safe job in general (for now), not just the engines.
You know... I looked at that number several times and thought it seemed off but didn't check the math. Thanks for the correction. I might try to edit the post when I am not on mobile.
And here lies the fallacy of the whole reasoning.
Paying for nothing or paying for something
It's so much more than that. Whole worlds like grains of sand on an endless shore make "all the money in the world" look like a dust mote in a spring breeze.
But those worlds are very very far away . And there isn't any FTL. We may end up occupying the galaxy but not sure how much it will effect Earths economy. We will most likely just be sharing information. And they won't have much to tell us for awhile. They will be way behind us technologically and mostly just focused on survival.
Perhaps. For a time. But time is long. In the fullness of time they may surpass or at least outlive us, and carry the torch of reason far beyond.
By the time we are travelling between the stars the worlds may be mostly redundant anyway, as we must learn to live between them. But we will not know unless we go while we still can.
Happy cake day.
Their objection to reusability - that even if it works would obsolete the workers who build the rockets - was too obvious a confession that the whole endeavor was a jobs program.
It's not so much about the workers as it is about the entire production facility. Which you need anyway.
The argument is basically the same ULA made to disregard reuse. And it holds up, if you plan to never launch more than 2-3 rockets per year. Because that's a number easily doable with any production process, and if you add reuse, you just add an extra process for that while your production facility is standing still...
The problem here is mostly the lack of ambition to ever do more than a handful of launches per year... Because by now SpaceX proved if you create the platform, the market will follow.
Lot of sweeping generalizations there. Keeping rocket scientists out of Iran feels like a good thing. Not every country wants to participate in non-stop raw dog competition. Some are putting a little more focus on the general welfare rather than no-holds-barred predatory capitalism. If Europe is OK with being 2d or 3rd in space that’s OK, we should let them live.
Doubly obsolete. Two generations behind, if Starship makes Falcon 9 obsolete.
Falcon 9 will fly at least another 10 years
It is ...the actual question is how long till those with the purse strings file an environmental letter against starship....again
If having something better were the only defining factor for obsolescence then NASA wouldn't be spending money on SLS and Starliner, with ULA, or Blue Origin.
Apparently there's more to competition than being a fan boi and believing your rocket is better.
We didn't hear anyone saying Dragon was obsolete while crews launched on the Soyuz.
Yeah, I’m so confused. This isn’t apples and oranges, it’s apples and buoyancy compensators. What the hell are people talking about?
Richard Bowles: "SpaceX primarily seems to be selling a dream"
So the dream is of the "dream come true" variety. Of course fortune has smiled on SpaceX:
- "thanks" to Russia (sanctions and generating a handy demo of Starlink in combat use)
- Europe's blindness to technical evolution.
- The end of the Legacy Space stranglehold on the US administration was everything but inevitable. Thank you Boeing for your thoughtful contributions
- Blue Origin also gave a helping hand with slow BE-4 development (Vulacan) and getting distracted from New Glenn with New Shepard.
However excellent is SpaceX's technical execution, the stars still have to line up to get 300+ consecutive launches without a single failure since 2016, touch wood.
So as seen from here (Europe) its more like a nightmare.
>You can't build a rocket
>You can't land a rocket
>You can't land on a barge
>You can't make Falcon Heavy work
>You can't relaunch the same rocket in a week
>You can't make money on internet satellites
>Starship is too big
>Mars is impossible - YOU ARE HERE
>Nobody will want to travel to Mars
You could also insert a couple of negative moon related statements and a negative orbital re-tanking statement.
The naysayers give me a chuckle sometimes.
It's a work in progress, gonna upgrade it with time.
Of lesser importance:
You can’t dump less water than a rainstorm on the wetlands of Boca Chica.
competition or not, i hope we get to inhabit another planet in my lifetime
I too want to live to see that. And I might see the beginning of it.
What a time to be old. We're just getting to the good part.
The 20 year olds, watching the moon landings probably thought the same thing.
I was 19 that year (1969), and yes, we did.
I hope those 20-year-olds have better fortune than we have had.
NASA and the eternal holding pattern to get man back on the moon, major disappointment
I was 11 in 1969. I hope I get to see the first boot print on Mars (on TV).
It's so weird how our entire modern world is built on the back of dreamers who dared to dream bigger and better, yet some people still think it's silly to do so and would rather stick to the status quo. Humans are funny like that.
What a horrible sight it would be if all of Humanity decided to pick up and go exploring in the same direction at the same time. Eight billion people converging on the same lost amazon city like a plague of meaty locusts, drinking every river dry. Brazil should build a wall to protect the precious ecosystems and cultures.
It's a good thing humanity isn't a grey goo hivemind AI then huh?
He's right that Starship isn't a competitor of A6, A6 has no market already, aside from earmarked launches that are uncompetitively bid
aside from earmarked launches that are uncompetitively bid
and a tantrum from Jeff Bezos (avoiding "Musk's" Falcon 9). But even there, his shareholders aren't having it. What would happen if the Kuiper order fell through?
and a tantrum from Jeff Bezos (avoiding "Musk's" Falcon 9). But even there, his shareholders aren't having it.
Context for others: Despite said Bezos tantrum, the cost effectiveness of using Falcon 9 is so obvious that Amazon shareholders sued to force the company to do so.
I'm curious what's going to happen once Starship drops the price even farther.
Kuiper is more likely to be cancelled as the years go by. OneWeb is struggling and they have a fully functioning 600+ satellite network . At some point Amazon will give up given how far behind they are
Kuiper is more likely to be cancelled
Even if not economic, Kuiper still provides dissimilar redundancy which the Pentagon will want, if only to avoid dependency on a single company, however good/cheap/reliable the Starlink service.
France+India's OneWeb is also pretty much guaranteed to survive on the same principle. It doesn't matter if its carrying only 5% of the traffic at double the price.
Pentagon is paying for starshield their own seperate system , they have starlink as backup They aren't paying for third option, Kuiper is likely to be mostly commercial, unless parts of starshield are going to be on Kuiper , haven't seen anything to indicate that.
I don't disagree OneWeb and perhaps some Chinese and even Russian variant would survive due to geopolitical reasons . I don't think Kuiper will, especially since they refuse to use SpaceX for launch , oneWeb did that to go live.
Nobody is as cheap as falcon and nobody can be as cheap as starship in even 15 -20 years. starlink is built on the ability to have cheap launches , Kuiper is stubborn in not using SpaceX so they can't be economically viable
While tech companies have billions to waste and do so all the time, self driving metaverse etc recently mobile phones etc say 10 years back, amazon will pull the plug sooner than later, public companies do have to answer to shareholders
Pentagon is paying for Starshield their own separate system; they have Starlink as backup
I'll believe this affirmation if you can find a supporting link.
My understanding is that Starshield is just the military interface of Starlink, consisting of satellites that are interconnected with the rest of the network. I'd expect a lot of the data would land through Starlink relays and the Starshield satellites are flying as "unmarked cars" in the midst of Starlink and probably make themselves totally impossible to distinguish by an adverse power.
Whatever the exact status of Starshield satellites, they still depend on the same company, and for day to day communications, the DOD would probably like to have another provider available.
The orbits and shells are very different for starshield (the ones launched so far) nobody is camouflaging anything
if they do this, then starlink would be classified as dual use and that will make it far more difficult to sell overseas.
While it is possible stuff is happening secretly , the public information and physical artifacts ( the satellites and their orbits) say otherwise,
It is your hypothesis of camouflaging is the one harder to prove - everyone will deny whether the network is used this way or not, so short of some damaging leaks no it will be always be like a conspiracy theory
Starshield is its own thing, SpaceX is only providing launch platform and some stuff for the satellites they don't operate or own or control them in anyway. Yes they are dependent on SpaceX for launching new satellites sustainably (they do have other rockets if urgently required for short term say if falcon 9 is grounded )but they don't need or depend on SpaceX to operate their network at all.
The orbits and shells are very different for starshield (the ones launched so far) nobody is camouflaging anything
I'd need to take time to check on all this, but believe that Starshield satellites were mixed in to Starlink launches, so needing to share at least the same orbital plane.
they don't need or depend on SpaceX to operate their network at all.
Again, I'd believe that if confirmed. SpaceX could launch a purely military constellation and have no other involvement neither in manufacture nor operations after deployment. From what I've heard this is not the case for Starshield.
I just found this article that confirms my doubts. SpaceX is involved after deployment:
Kuiper is more likely to be cancelled as the years go by.
Kuiper may be worth its money for Amazon. It will give them a backbone for their world wide infrastructure.
At this point I think he is intentionally publicly burying his head in sand so he doesn't have to admit what's plainly obvious to everyone else- SpaceX is a decade or more ahead of virtually all 'old space' organizations, and their first-line hardware is all two generations obsolete even before its first flight.
Ariane 6-2 will have just over half the payload capacity of Falcon 9 (reusable/ASDS configuration), for about 20% more retail launch cost. Pay more, get less.
You can bolt on two more solid rocket boosters for the Ariane 6-4, that gets you a launch that's about 30% more expensive than Falcon Heavy (reusable/ASDS configuration) but only carries 1/3 the payload.
I'm sure A6 will get customers, but I suspect many of them will only use Ariane because they're not legally allowed to use SpaceX.
The SMART thing to do would be admit that the current expendable tech branch they're working on is a dead end, and completely refocus all efforts on making a rapidly-producible, reusable, liquid-fuel rocket similar to Falcon 9. Find some burnt out SpaceX engineers, explain Europe's legally mandated work/life balance and offer them 6 weeks paid leave and free citizenship. You'll get some takers. They don't seem to be doing that.
So Starship will launch and land and iterate and they'll still be flying Ariane 6's. Perhaps when the day comes that it's cheaper to launch a 10 ton payload on a mostly-empty Starship than it is to fly it on Ariane 6 they will admit they went the wrong direction.
Ariane 6-2 will have just over half the payload capacity of Falcon 9 (reusable/ASDS configuration), for about 20% more retail launch cost. Pay more, get less.
And that's after the ESA subsidy.
You can bolt on two more solid rocket boosters for the Ariane 6-4, that gets you a launch that's about 30% more expensive than Falcon Heavy (reusable/ASDS configuration) but only carries 1/3 the payload.
You don't even have to compare it to FH - it costs quite a bit more and can lift less to LEO than F9. Which is relevant since most of the A6 backlog is Kuiper launches.
The thing is that there is a business case only if you think that we are on the cusp of a new era in space. Its the typical doubts that plague every other introduction on new tech.
Whether we are or not the answer is the same.
If we're not- reusable launches the same boring satellite payloads for half the cost or less.
If we are- there literally won't be a market for expendable rockets anymore because the reusables will be launching on a daily or multiple-times-daily basis.
Not if its seen as a jobs program and the govt continues to subsidise you.
If it's a jobs program then sure. Pay a bunch of engineers for their efforts and pay a bunch of empty suits even more for 'oversight' and 'management' (which the engineers would probably be more efficient without), send taxpayers the bill, and if a rocket or two gets launched that's just an added bonus.
I think the answer is simple, its not about money its about politics clearly the EU justify the funding of obsolete rocket programs because it gives them a sense of ownership and control not giving up to foreigns space agencies and companies, which is stupid but people are stubborn like that.
Exactly, none of those people have the leadership, expertise and the guts to start a relevant and competitive program. It's all boomers securing their pensions.
Someone tell Bernard Arnault to step up to the plate. Relying on gov solutions, especially with EU’s bureaucracy and cost savings is a fools errand.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:
| Fewer Letters | More Letters |
|---|---|
| ASDS | Autonomous Spaceport Drone Ship (landing platform) |
| BE-4 | Blue Engine 4 methalox rocket engine, developed by Blue Origin (2018), 2400kN |
| CNES | Centre National d'Etudes Spatiales, space agency of France |
| CST | (Boeing) Crew Space Transportation capsules |
| Central Standard Time (UTC-6) | |
| ESA | European Space Agency |
| GTO | Geosynchronous Transfer Orbit |
| ISRO | Indian Space Research Organisation |
| JAXA | Japan Aerospace eXploration Agency |
| JWST | James Webb infra-red Space Telescope |
| LEO | Low Earth Orbit (180-2000km) |
| Law Enforcement Officer (most often mentioned during transport operations) | |
| M1dVac | Merlin 1 kerolox rocket engine, revision D (2013), vacuum optimized, 934kN |
| NROL | Launch for the (US) National Reconnaissance Office |
| SLS | Space Launch System heavy-lift |
| SMART | "Sensible Modular Autonomous Return Technology", ULA's engine reuse philosophy |
| SRB | Solid Rocket Booster |
| ULA | United Launch Alliance (Lockheed/Boeing joint venture) |
| Jargon | Definition |
|---|---|
| Starliner | Boeing commercial crew capsule CST-100 |
| Starlink | SpaceX's world-wide satellite broadband constellation |
| hydrolox | Portmanteau: liquid hydrogen fuel, liquid oxygen oxidizer |
| kerolox | Portmanteau: kerosene fuel, liquid oxygen oxidizer |
| methalox | Portmanteau: methane fuel, liquid oxygen oxidizer |
| tanking | Filling the tanks of a rocket stage |
NOTE: Decronym for Reddit is no longer supported, and Decronym has moved to Lemmy; requests for support and new installations should be directed to the Contact address below.
Decronym is a community product of r/SpaceX, implemented by request
19 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 26 acronyms.
[Thread #12973 for this sub, first seen 26th Jun 2024, 22:19]
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Europe should license Falcon 9 second-stage production and buy first stages of Falcon 9.
Like, they have the people and the facilities that would be capable of building second stages (no loss in jobs) and they've got a rather developed launch site in French Guiana. Hell, there's even an empty (?) launch pad that was used for Soyuz (not happening again anytime soon) so they could repurpose this for Falcon launches. As a nice bonus, with the typical launch trajectories out of Guiana, they could even land the first stage on European mainland or the Portuguese Azores, and then refurbish in Europe and ship it back out to South America. No need for a barge.
I think everyone would win. From the jobs program perspective, European money gets spent on building second stages and refurbishing first stages, Europe gets to use euro infrastructure, and they massively leap forwards in capability.
Why would spacex ever do this
Well, good question:
The goal of Starship is to make F9 obsolete. The company's goal is to get the launch of a single full-payload Starship below that of a current F9 launch, making Starship better in literally every single way. This means that as soon as Starship is operational and performing thusly, SpaceX should logically stop selling and operating F9 because it would be losing money.
Now, instead of simply completely shelving F9 and selling the remaining boosters to museums or whatever, why not shop it around for someone who's willing to pay to have their own launch system? Here, everyone would win: SpaceX gets to do what are effectively aftermarket sales on a product that they themselves don't see as profitable anymore and earning essentially "free money" while the Europeans get a reliable and partially reusable rocket system which, while not financially competitive with Starship, still beats out the Ariane series by a significant margin while keeping the workforce and ensuring that there are plenty of comparatively cheap launches for European national security interests or those who are willing to pay a premium not to deal with SpaceX/the USA.
It seems that Europe is not interested in the scientific knowledge that can be obtained by drastically reducing the costs of launches. It seems that what is truly important is launching the rocket, which is perhaps what creates the most jobs.
I think that Ariane 6 is a perfect launcher for EU indeed. There will be 4 institutional launches which are guaranteed no matter what. There will be €300mil/y subsidy and the few more launches will pop up due to various reason, trades and lobbying. Falcon9 hasn't decreased cost of launches for a decade because there is no significant spare capacity in launchers. Starship has lot of promises of hight flight rate, but it will not happen for many more years. Single Artemis mission will consume about 15 Starship launches. Not very likely to get there by 2026. Spare capacity and lower cost? So far billions are pouring in and Musk will need to extort those fromu customers. Maybe Falcon9 will be able to push prices downward once there is a big spare capacity and too many launchers (Falcon, Vulcan, New Glen, Ariane 6, Neutron). But this is still several years away at best as all rockets have huge backlogs of flights. Still, Ariane 6 needs only few commercial launches every year to survive and has huge political support.
Musk does not extort. SpaceX offers best value for money.
1 missing reply
I don't know why people keep bringing up starship when talking about Ariane 6. Ariane 6 is already obsolete thanks to falcon 9, the question we are asking with starship is whether or not Ariane 6 will be super obsolete.