[HN Gopher] Ariane 6 cost and delays bring European launch indus... ___________________________________________________________________ Ariane 6 cost and delays bring European launch industry to a breaking point Author : xoa Score : 22 points Date : 2023-11-06 19:55 UTC (1 hours ago) (HTM) web link (arstechnica.com) (TXT) w3m dump (arstechnica.com) | elteto wrote: | I remember a long time ago I watched an interview with a high- | level ESA French official that derided SpaceX's efforts on | reusability. It was back when SpaceX was still trying to figure | out how to "land" boosters on the open sea. I remember the smug | and superior attitude of the guy, he was just shy of calling | SpaceX a fraud. Fast forward to today and here we are. I would | love to see what he has to say now. | mytailorisrich wrote: | A bit like the infamous interview of Steve Ballmer (along with | Mike Zafirovski) on the iPhone launch ("it doesn't have a | keyboard!")... | bowsamic wrote: | I mean, Ballmer was kind of right about that, for business | use. As soon as someone wants to reply to an email now they | pull out their laptop. What he didn't realise is that pulling | out your laptop is easy enough that you can lose the keyboard | on the phone. But it did mean that the smart phone did indeed | fail in the way that he expected, in that the business market | that windows was serving at the time did not end up using | their iPhone for business tasks. In fact people clung to | their blackberries for years for that reason, even after the | iPhone became an undeniable hit. The iPhone never became a | significant business machine for text. Of course he also did | not realise that an entire new consumer market would appear | for smart phones too, but if you look back it's not clear | that apple did either. They still pushed a somewhat business | angle, not a "literally everyone" angle | | He was panicking in that interview though for sure, but I | think people give him more crap for it than they should | HPsquared wrote: | Surely a swiping keyboard is faster than the "array of tiny | keys" approach. It's a much lighter touch. | mytailorisrich wrote: | He was very smug and he was proved totally wrong. No phone | has a keyboard now, including for business and taking into | account that people type even more than when they had | Blackberry's "email machines"... he was also wrong about | the iPhone's pricing and the rest is, well, history: | Blackberry, Nokia, and Microsoft were destroyed. | | It's the same logic with SpaceX: a newcomer is doing | something new so obviously they don't know anything and | will fail... until they destroy all the incumbents. It's | always the same process. | tekla wrote: | Im pretty sure this guy claimed SpaceX cheated because the govt | funded them when they were trying to rev up for the COTS | program. | | I wonder what he thinks about the Ariane 6 funding structure. | LtWorf wrote: | Landing still requires a lot of fuel, which needs fuel to be | carried up. It was a waste and still is. | | If they come up with reusable fished from the ocean, that'd be | useful. | tekla wrote: | Nobody cares if some performance is lost when you are good | enough for 99% of payloads and you save tons of money by | retrieving the expensive part of the rocket | elteto wrote: | You have absolutely no idea what you are talking about. It | doesn't require a "lot" of fuel. It depends on the mission | profile. | | And guess what you can do? Run 9 LEO missions with the same | booster and throw it away on the 10th with a GEO mission. | That's freaking incredible. | Dig1t wrote: | It also takes extra fuel to land an airplane. Does it make | sense to just throw the whole plane away after one use to | save the extra landing fuel? | xoa wrote: | Been a long time coming, but hopefully if it happens an implosion | of the Arianespace semi-monopoly will open the way for the EU to | see its own domestic commercial providers grow into genuinely | globally competitive options. The EU should be focused on | generating _demand_ like Commercial Cargo /Commercial Crew did | and then allowing fixed price providers to meet it however they | can, vs trying to micromanage means and distribution. I think a | fundamental mistake of a lot of the old guard, which is really | something repeated over and over throughout modern history, is | somehow failing to recognize a potentially positive sum game when | they see it. There was so much focus on "protecting jobs", as-in | existing jobs doing the same existing thing, as if it was a zero- | sum game where any money spent more efficiently getting to space | would then just mean that the freed up money evaporated. But | massively cheaper, higher cadence access to space opens up | entirely new and improved economic opportunities and in turn a | lot of new potential jobs. The money saved on getting a kilogram | to orbit can turn right around into more kilograms that generate | a more lasting return then the money previously burned up in the | atmosphere. That's "economic growth" in the most fundamental | positive way, delivering humans more value for the same amount of | energy/materials. | | Ariane has turned into a lumbering zombie that is sucking up | financial and political oxygen that much more promising players | desperately need. But the EU (and the world) is plenty big enough | to support their own SpaceX/Rocket Labs/Relativity/etc and next | generation space stations/industry. I'm an American and think our | own space efforts are one area of absolutely justifiable pride, | but it'd be healthy long term if other democracies and groups of | democracies offered some redundancy. | criddell wrote: | > I'm an American and think our own space efforts are one area | of absolutely justifiable pride | | As a public agency, I do see the work of NASA as being "ours", | but I don't feel the same about SpaceX. It's a private company | and could probably be lured away with the right combination of | more money, fewer regulations, and better meme potential. | nickik wrote: | You are totally wrong. SpaceX is deeply entangled with NASA | and DoD. And their primary IP is protected under US | regulation, nobody can 'take it away'. And SpaceX launch site | and team are essentially purely American. Its crazy to | suggested that they could be 'lured away', its a total | misunderstanding of the space industry. | nickik wrote: | > The EU should be focused on generating demand like Commercial | Cargo/Commercial Crew did | | The EU has long given up on Cargo supply to ISS and that budget | is bound in the Orion Service module. | | And Crew wont happen in Europe anytime soon. | | They simply don't have those things, and partly this is because | of their own bad planning and investment. | | > then allowing fixed price providers to meet it however they | can | | The problem is there are no such provider and there wont be | anytime soon. Even if they were, they would be small providers | who can't launch 90% of the value that Europe might want to | launch to orbit in the next decade. | | So sure this is a nice sentiment but its not realistic anytime | soon. | | > Ariane has turned into a lumbering zombie | | It always was. Its just that the American and Russians took | themselves out of the game by pure stupidity. So Europe was | really the only option left. | snakeyjake wrote: | I'm just a passive outside observer currently in the US aerospace | field but the defining characteristics of the ESA seem to be: | | 1. Plowing ahead with an obvious bad idea no matter what because | of bureaucratic inertia, and | | 2. Formulating plans based on requirements that have been defined | poorly if at all with the primary goal being to keep the industry | alive at all costs | | This is also a problem with the Japanese space industry which I, | some time ago (although it seems that little has changed), was | sent over to work with. Describing the nightmare of bureaucratic | inertia over there without understating it by orders of magnitude | requires a level of skill with the English language I am | incapable of reaching and barely comprehend exists. One firm had | an entire building the size of my employer's corporate | headquarters devoted solely to housing workers who gathered and | analyzed metrics on the people who gather and analyze metrics. | | Without exaggeration no engineer could make a decision or perform | any task that requires spending money without approval or | consultation going up multiple levels and no design, even a | simple block diagram, could be created or changed without panels | of panels of people chiming in. | | I've made a dozen decisions today alone, with no oversight or | consultation. | swframe2 wrote: | (a crazy idea I wanted to get feedback on) Wouldn't it be much | easier if everyone licensed tech from space-x? (To build a colony | on mars we need a massive number of flights, why not spread the | costs across several nations? Why spend $2b to $6b per flight on | a space-x competitor; we want redundancy but it seems massively | cheaper to license rather than reinvent. ) ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2023-11-06 21:00 UTC)