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And likely neither will Russia, China, India, Japan or anyone other than the US - with maybe the exception of New Zealand. The writing has been on the wall for

• marian_ivanco 3y ago
  China is definitely working hard to have it, maybe copy-paste approach but it is. We in Europe are definitely not cutting edge in general, maybe robotic space exploration but this is changing also rapidly. The problem is Arianespace and France. It's the similar issue to HLS. It's just a way to distribute money without any meaningful vision. Years of denial and ridiculing of SpaceX. The sad part is there is still no vision even when the world moved on.
  • jlpom 3y ago
    Robotic space exploration, like our rover that crashed on Mars not a long ago?
    • ragebol 3y ago
      How about Rosetta en Philae? But yes, also that rover.
  • weneedasfollows 3y ago
    Maybe a EU level spending package of 1 trillion, for a resilient and equitable space exploration would solve the problem
    • bluescrn 3y ago
      Why not, the money printers are still warm, just hit the 'solution to anything!' button again?
    • mutatio 3y ago
      Sarcasm I assume? This would merely be a redistribution of taxpayers money with no end product. EU has form in this.
• throwawayrocket 3y ago
  New zealand will be the no 2 space power in the near future. Thanks to Ex PM Jacinda Ardern, brightest woman of the world.
  • scanny 3y ago
    Why is that? Also isn’t Rocketlab a US owned company ?
    • RowanH 3y ago
      Founded by a Kiwi. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocket_Lab https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocket_Lab [Edit not sure what it's got to do with Jacinda though..]
  • vosper 3y ago
    Rocket Lab's success has basically nothing to do with Jacinda Ardern?
  • throw-4e451c8 3y ago
    And South Africa the no 1 space power, I guess. SpaceX was founded by someone from there.
  • boeingUH60 3y ago
    Rocket Lab is now a US-based company. I get that many people like Jacinda Ardern, but attributing Rocket Lab’s success to her is just weird. Rocket Lab couldn’t even get enough funding in New Zealand, which is why they had to relocate to the USA.
• 8note 3y ago
  > The writing has been on the wall for where rockets were going for ten years, policy makers absolutely have failed, Policy makers made it happen in the states through what they funded.
• lenkite 3y ago
  I think its perfectly fine that a private space company massively funded by billionaires and massive investment funds show the way before government space companies tread the path. Expecting govt funded organizations to innovate will only happen in times of nation-to-nation competition or in times of War. Usually, risky innovation is frowned upon and there is little understandings of mistakes. Learning from many failures - the SpaceX approach - is not tolerated for tax-payer funded companies. And doing it in a decade or two is actually fine. Tech will stabilize by then and there will be more skilled people to hire. Why the rush ?
  • sofixa 3y ago
    Pardon my French, but complete and utter nonsense. > Michael Griffin. Griffin later estimated that SpaceX was around 85% funded by the federal government, mostly through his NASA awards, with the remaining 15% funding split between Elon Musk and other private investors. He felt the amount of government funding was "excessive in his view" compared with what he originally envisioned for the commercial space program. From SpaceX's Wikipedia page. The Falcon 1 which was expandable, nothing special and cost ~$100 million was privately funded, the rest relied on very generous subsidies. (Regardless of Musk's posturing and outright lies) On the contrary, outlandish and expensive (like aerospace) moonshot bets with uncertain financial benefits often happen due to government help, even in times of "unlimited money" which are far from the norm. For starters, Tesla and SpaceX both only happened due to US government subsidies; Airbus, the by far best civilian airplane manufacturer today, only exists because of European government pressure and funding. Bombardier only managed to design the C-series with Canadian government funds. All recent developments in renewables were off the back of massive subsidies for their adoption.
    • zpeti 3y ago
      A subsidy is not the same thing as NASA ordering private contracts for actual “products” Spacex didn’t get money handed to them (unlike the corn and oil industries). It got orders to complete certain tasks that NASA thought it might do better than itself. Boeing and many others got these types of orders too. It explains nothing about why spacex succeeded. This “Elon did spacex thanks to government” is a serious misrepresentation of what happened, and if it was true, why is the government funded EU space program struggling so much?
• Reason077 3y ago
  > ”with maybe the exception of New Zealand” While much of Rocket Lab’s team is still based in New Zealand, they are now a US-based company and their Neutron reusable medium-lift rocket will be built in the US and launch from the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport (MARS) in Virginia. As far as I know they do not have any plans to launch reusable rockets from New Zealand.
  • dogma1138 3y ago
    I don’t think RocketLab had plans to ever commercially launch rockets out of NZ. Its latitude is really not optimal for anything other than polar orbits and it’s too far from any potential customers which would increase the cost considerably.
    • Reason077 3y ago
      > "I don’t think RocketLab had plans to ever commercially launch rockets out of NZ." Not only do they have plans to, they have already launched multiple commercial missions on their Electron rocket from NZ! > "Its latitude is really not optimal for anything other than polar orbits" I don't think latitude is the major reason. Rocket Lab's Ahuriri Point launch site is at about 39.2 deg S, not that much different to the Wallops Island, Virginia site at 37.8 deg N. Baikonur Cosmodrome, by comparison, is at 46 deg N! > "it’s too far from any potential customers which would increase the cost considerably." Yeah, this is the real issue.
      • skykooler 3y ago
        It seems to me that if you’re spending millions of dollars on a satellite launch, the cost of shipping your satellite to New Zealand is tiny in comparison.
        • sidewndr46 3y ago
          I think the concern is the possibility of damage in transit. I think most of the ESA & NASA's scientific missions effectively get final assembly on site, followed by a pre-launch check, then clearance to be placed in the final stage's payload chamber.
• zpeti 3y ago
  > Europe is absolutely at the cutting edge of technology. Cutting edge of technology is industry creating or industry changing technologies. The US has dominated these since the 80s, but arguably even before that with railways, and after all the atom bomb was invented by immigrants in the US. The web, social media, smartphones. And now space industries and generative AI. And why is this? Lots of network effects, but also places like the EU have it completely backwards in terms of policy. Policy doesn’t create innovation. It might support it, but real innovation comes from freedom and letting innovative people roam free. The US government is doing it best to stop this but still hasn’t managed it luckily. I just don’t see how europe is at the cutting edge of anything, any companies they lead their field are downstream of leading US industries. I don’t know if it’s possible to recreate what the US does. Probably not. But what EU bureaucrats try and do basically fails every time.
  • kranke155 3y ago
    deepMind was only recently overtaken by OpenAI. And I'd chalk that up as a maybe. Europe does have a lot of midtier industrial companies that do world-tier work. This includes Defense, Air transport (Airbus), Automotive, Pharmaceutical (BioNTech RNA vaccine coming from EU work) and I'm sure many other sectors.
    • deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
• BiteCode_dev 3y ago
  Also, the US administration didn't got it right, because Nasa didn't do it. They had spacex to do it for them, while half of american society is insulting the elon musk. Let's not pretend any administration got it right. Just like the french administration had nothing to do with Pasteur creating the vaccine against rabies, the German administration has nothing to do Gutenberg creating the press and italian administration has nothing to do with Salvatore Sanfilippo creating redis. At best, administrations from the past may be somewhat credited to foster an environment favorable for something like this to happen. And even that is a stretch, given most administrations don't design anything, but rather react politically to whatever is the current situation.
  • robomartin 3y ago
    This is an important comment. Governments, politicians, love to take credit for what other people accomplish, when, in reality, at best, they might provide money. Imagine a scenario where you start a company that solves a really difficult problem --taking years of hard work-- and then a VC who provided funding takes credit for the effort. Even worse, the news organizations give the VC credit for the results. That's what politicians do.
    • Mountain_Skies 3y ago
      In general, but Kennedy set the goal for a manned Moon mission, which was a very expensive and risky undertaking. LBJ and Nixon kept what Kennedy started going, but had Nixon won in 1960, it's doubtful that he would have focused on the same goals for space.
      • robomartin 3y ago
        Sure, yet, they didn't "do it". They provided the means. They can take credit for that, justly so. They cannot take credit for the work of the massive numbers of people who did the actual work that got it done. I feel that's a very important distinction. It's like taking credit for cooking a meal at a restaurant just because you paid for it. The other side of it is what politicians do when things go wrong: They blame the people doing the work. Well, if they take credit for the success they should be equally liable for all failure. That, of course, will never happen. Same thing with the economy. When things get better, they did it. When things are bad, the prior administration was at fault. They all do this, regardless of which political party they might align with. You know, just like three year old kids.
• bluescrn 3y ago
  The US won't have the tech in 10 years either if current levels of political tribalism continue. Seems that a lot of people want to see Elon destroyed over Twitter/politics. See the incredibly negative reaction to the Starship launch attempt compared to the much more positive reaction to previous test flights that ended with a boom. And if they destroy our current best hope for the future of space exploration in the process of going after Elon, they don't care, it's 'a win for the environment', or acceptable collateral damage to take down an 'evil multibillionaire' (Maybe Elon should even consider stepping away from SpaceX? - but then projects as ambitious/risky as Starship would likely be dropped)
  • deleted 3y ago
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  • jackmott42 3y ago
    Elon brought that on himself. Fortunately SpaceX will be fine even without him at this point.
    • consumer451 3y ago
      Elon going all-in on politics is one of the most disappointing and surprising events in my adult life. Certainly a good lesson in hero worship though. Agreed on SpaceX at this point. Although it would be different, not sure there is a business case for Mars for example.
      • panick21_ 3y ago
        What do you mean going 'all-in' on politics. He still doing the exact same thing as before, running SpaceX and Tesla. By 'all-in' you mean make a few statements on twitter about his opinion? Because that is very different definition for 'all-in' then I have. Going 'all-in' would be to try to get elected president or some dumb shit like that.
        • consumer451 3y ago
• kranke155 3y ago
  Why are you saying this as if the US public sector made a reusable rocket? As far as I know, the US public sector (mostly?) funded SLS.
  • jackmott42 3y ago
    All rockets in the US have been built by private companies. All of them have had some degree of public funding, even Falcon9 and Starship.
    • simonh 3y ago
      That's true, but what matter for technology development is who is specifying the design criteria. For most of the history of US rocket development it's been NASA. They designed the Saturn V, the Shuttle, SLS, and sub-contracted out manufacturing to private industry. The contractors certainly had a lot of input into the detailed design of the rockets, but the overall criteria and design concept were defined by NASA. With COTS NASA switched to contracting out for launch capacity without defining how it must be achieved. This allowed SpaceX the freedom to engineer their rockets as they saw fit.
• pb7 3y ago
  >Europe is absolutely at the cutting edge of technology. What technology? Do you have any examples, especially enough to make such a broad statement?
  • farseer 3y ago
    This European machine has no equivalent in the World. You are prolly using a product made by this beast. https://www.asml.com/en/products/euv-lithography-systems/twinscan-nxe-3600d https://www.asml.com/en/products/euv-lithography-systems/twi...
    • Am4TIfIsER0ppos 3y ago
      Is that germany's earth eating machine? Oh! It's a sillicon wafer machine.
    • giobox 3y ago
      ASML is the obvious answer, but the list drops off sharply IMO after this, especially in comparison to the US. Also, around half of ASML's headcount is located outside of Europe.
      • throwaway50614 3y ago
        Not just headcount, also - and most importantly - the patents and IP.
• dabluecaboose 3y ago
  > Europe is absolutely at the cutting edge of technology. Unless that technology is launch vehicles, in which case they'll whinge and whine and eventually contract someone else to do it for them and pretend they have a competent space program.
• panick21_ 3y ago
  > with maybe the exception of New Zealand. This has to be said over and over again. RocketLab is an US company. And RocketLab large Neutron rocket will launch from the US and will be built in the US. > Europe is absolutely at the cutting edge of technology. Not in rocket technology.
  • soperj 3y ago
    It was founded in New Zealand, with a New Zealand headquarters, by a New Zealander.
    • dotnet00 3y ago
      Rocketlab HQ is in California, their condition for being allowed to launch from New Zealand is that only US persons deal with the ITAR stuff. They are an American company.
      • soperj 3y ago
        It is now, for business purposes. It was started in New Zealand by a New Zealander with New Zealand investors. It even got an investment from the NZ government. Their first rocket was named after the Maori word for 'Space'. Before acquiring SolAero last year, they had 525 employees in New Zealand and 150 in the rest of the world. January this year was the first time they actually launched from the US. All normal things for American companies clearly...
        • jasonwatkinspdx 3y ago
          It's a straight up fact that the holding company for RocketLab, Rocket Lab USA, traded on NASDAQ as KRLB, is a US company. Stop injecting nationalistic cheerleading into places it's not necessary.
          • soperj 3y ago
            Lol. Not from New Zealand. It's like saying Burger King is Canadian now that it merged with Tim Horton's and the headquarters is in Toronto. I didn't even inject this into the conversation, I was responding to someone saying "over and over again" that it was an American company, like it matters when over 90% of it's launches are still in the country that it was founded in.
• next_xibalba 3y ago
  > Europe is absolutely at the cutting edge of technology. Lolwut!? Which technology? Certainly not space tech. Certainly not AI. To what, then, are you referring?
  • George83728 3y ago
    All manner of cutting edge industrial and manufacturing technology. Not the glamorous consumer-facing stuff, but stuff like industrial automation equipment and software from the likes of Siemens, ASML's EUV lithography tech, etc.
    • EliRivers 3y ago
      Indeed. I understand that if you want the world's most advanced chip-making machines, it's ASML or nobody.
  • epups 3y ago
    SAP (got this answer from a German once)
    • mardifoufs 3y ago
      I think Europe is at or near technological cutting edge.... But absolutely not because of SAP. SAP is a big tech corporation but they are the definition of enterprise tech. And that's rarely on the cutting edge of anything.
      • fafzv 3y ago
        You are replying to a joke, or so I hope
    • moffkalast 3y ago
      That's like being the best at being boring.
  • questime 3y ago
    30,000$ Handbag technology, 100,000$ watch technology etc.
• orbital-decay 3y ago
  Everybody except SpaceX is struggling to make their launch vehicles reusable, including the US companies. And even SpaceX hasn't been able to get the full reusability, not for the lack of trying. Which hints at that the reusability might be a niche solution that worked for SpaceX in particular, and maybe for some other companies which have been particularly lucky to be in a sweet spot and have a combination of factors. Policy is one of them, sure - but not the only one. I'd also like to remind that the reusability isn't limited to the SpaceX style VTVL. There are also potentially promising things like VTHL flyback boosters, but they are untested and nobody is currently positioned to throw money away to test smart solutions hypothesized in 60s, because the margins for the failure are non-existent in the industry.
  • dotnet00 3y ago
    To say that "SpaceX hasn't been able to get full reusability, not for lack of trying" is a huge stretch when they've only just gotten around to the first orbital flight tests of the vehicle they designed for that purpose. Similarly, the only other company that has even tried to make a proven launch vehicle reusable is Rocketlab. So suggesting that others are struggling, when they either haven't even tried yet or are still working on getting to orbit, is ridiculous. On top of that, the argument that reusability doesn't work for others for any reasons other than policy also doesn't really fit. Launch prices for all other rockets are higher, even the ones developed to better compete with F9 are only in the ballpark of its launch price and completely uncompetitive on launch cost and cadence.
    • orbital-decay 3y ago
      > To say that "SpaceX hasn't been able to get full reusability, not for lack of trying" is a huge stretch when they've only just gotten around to the first orbital flight tests of the vehicle they designed for that purpose. I was referring to the original plan for the Falcon 9 to be fully reusable, which didn't work out for the second stage. > others ... either haven't even tried yet or are still working on getting to orbit That's exactly my point, though. They either didn't figure out how to make it work economically in their particular case, or spent too many years building a working system with a slow methodology. Sure, reusing the hardware provides clear benefits and everybody understands that, but only if you can pull it off and make the ends meet. Evidently not everybody can do that, even in the US where they have the same policy as others. So clearly the policy is not the only differentiator. For non-US companies this is especially true - besides the good policy, you have to have the infra (supply chain closeness and quick turnarounds, quick transportation network which is a special pain point for Russian cosmodromes and the issue for French Guiana or any potential sea launch systems as well), good location (east-facing shore close to the equator with good trajectory options - Russia and Europe don't have that), access to the markets (Russia is cut off and China doesn't have the proper access to the global launch market). Russian launchers in particular also have different cost breakdown traditionally (expensive compact upper stages; that's why the IRDT mission was trying to return the upper stage in 2001-2004 to explore the reusability possibility; AFAIR the experiment partially succeeded, but they still weren't able to make the ends meet with that). In fact, the only other country which has more or less everything in place for the SpaceX-style floating platform landing reusability (you can't compete in VTVL by only having the landing pad flyback) is Japan, but they're too heavily invested into "cheap" LH2 on the country level to make a mental switch to the reusable systems.