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I was interested in your comment about Ariane 5 having a lot more flights under its belt, as it has seemed like SpaceX has ramped up their launches considerably

I was interested in your comment about Ariane 5 having a lot more flights under its belt, as it has seemed like SpaceX has ramped up their launches considerably, and the article talks about 5-10 launches per year for the new Ariane 6. So I went and looked up the details... For anyone interested, Ariane 5 has had 98 launches (93 successful) and Falcon 9 has had 54 launches (52 successful). However, Falcon 9 has 18 launches in 2017, and is on track for 28 this year (8 completed so far), whereas Ariane 5 had just 6 in 2017 and is on track for 10 this year. It’s definitely true that Ariane 5 has more experience under its belt so far, but that seems to be changing quickly, and with Ariane 6 resetting some of that experience, I think SpaceX are at a significant advantage here.

valuearb 8y ago
Another way to look at it is that the Ariane 5 has 5 failures across less than 200 rocket engine uses (ignoring solids), while SpaceX has 2 failures across 540 rocket engine uses.
- baq 8y ago
  spacex also had a total vehicle and payload loss while standing on the pad with engines off, so your metric should be more like 1/540... but then you want to count test firings at mcgregor and every wet dress rehearsals/static fires.