The only missions where Ariane 5 had even a shot at competing was if you have the perfect set of costumers want to launch 1 big and 1 'small' GEO sat. But even

The only missions where Ariane 5 had even a shot at competing was if you have the perfect set of costumers want to launch 1 big and 1 'small' GEO sat. But even in that case, dedicated launching was cheaper. This dual launching was also a huge cost on Arianespace and its costumers. Waiting for both sats to be ready was a huge problem. And increasing as SpaceX came up, finding that set of costumers got harder and harder. So it wasn't a defend-able niche. > And Ariane still got paying customers, so their prices cannot be that outrageous, can they? Ariane has always launched more Sozus then Ariane 5. Vega is mostly used for non-commercial stuff. Ariane 6 has received large commercial contract from Amazon. The reason for this is that Amazon needs basically every single available heavy launch vehicle in the next 5 years to be legally complaint for their sat internet. Before that Ariane 6 did have lots of issue, already complaining that their manifast was not allowing them to set up the necessary production. In a purely commercial competition, an Ariane 6 is like 50% more expensive compared to SpaceX Falcon 9. And likely more in many cases. That isn't 'outrageous' but it isn't good either. The Ariane 5 was 2-3x as expensive. I also believe that on those prices Ariane Group isn't making much money, while SpaceX just set such as high price because they can.