6 ms·

Ariane 6 cost and delays bring European launch industry to a breaking point

49 points by xoa 3y ago

elteto 3y ago
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 3y ago
  A bit like the infamous interview of Steve Ballmer (along with Mike Zafirovski) on the iPhone launch ("it doesn't have a keyboard!")...
  - bowsamic 3y ago
    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 3y ago
      Surely a swiping keyboard is faster than the "array of tiny keys" approach. It's a much lighter touch.
      - bowsamic 3y ago
        Have you used those tiny keyboards? They were quite amazing
        pmontra 3y ago
        The T9s were... I'm happy that they disappeared. The qwertys were not bad. I'm swiping on my phone to the amazement of my friends that were never able to learn to do it. That beats tapping keys. However a physical qwerty was better than tapping on a qwerty displayed on a touchscreen. Unfortunately it takes 1/3 or 1/2 of the phone and it's there even when it's not needed.
      - mytailorisrich 3y ago
        And that's this narrow view that perhaps made incumbents missed the big picture. I think the real insight Apple had is that, with phones becoming smartphone, internet, videos, apps, etc people would want a bigger screen rather than a keyboard and a smaller screen even if a physical keyboard might be a bit better to type (and I'm not even sure of that). A radical idea proved a winner. A bit like with SpaceX... I fully expect Arianespace to be like Nokia was, very slow, a lot of bureaucracy, and no-one dreaming of anything really new. The irony is that since they launch from the coast of French Guyana reusable boosters that can land on sea platforms sound like the perfect solution for them...
    - mytailorisrich 3y ago
      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 3y ago
  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.
  - nickik 3y ago
    Lots of different ESA and Arianespace made lots of arrogant and wrong statements over the years, trust me as somebody that has followed it. Their claims about illegal subsidies were always utterly hilarious. It was literally just them appealing to European nationalism without any evidence. They were basically saying to convince clueless ESA member-state politicians of nonsense. There is a reason they haven't even tried to bring this to the WTO, they knew they were full of shit.
- LtWorf 3y ago
  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 3y ago
    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
  - Dig1t 3y ago
    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?
    - LtWorf 3y ago
      This comparison would make sense if planes were leaving orbit.
      - Dig1t 3y ago
        I would love to hear an explanation as to why that makes a difference?
        LtWorf 3y ago
        Planes work by heating up air and then going fast enough to fly? While rockets have to eject stuff and move the centre of mass outside of themselves. Also they need to leave the gravity well while planes don't do that? It's completely different.
  - elteto 3y ago
    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.
- Gibbon1 3y ago
  That sort of thing re-reinforces my believe that Musk it's some genius it's that managers like that French guy are blocking progress and creating negative value. Where Musk is usually too nutty and ADD to get the way for long.
xoa 3y ago
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 3y ago
  > 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 3y ago
    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.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
snakeyjake 3y ago
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.
- lainga 3y ago
  We have seen the EU, Japan and (as sibling comment says) almost the US space industries have these problems. Can you think of any national space industries which do not? Maybe NZ due to the presence of Rocketlab and nobody else?
- xenadu02 3y ago
  FWIW we barely avoided that here in the USA. I half believe that Congress didn't think anyone would meet the COTS milestones or they'd have never approved it. SpaceX delivered a product so much cheaper with excellent reliability and on-schedule that even the worst of the worst pork-barrel lobbyist-friendly sycophants in Congress couldn't justify cutting them out. But they still tried to keep them out of military contracts. It took some political grease (eg spreading facilities across multiple states to make jobs) and a lawsuit to be allowed to even bid on those contracts. Even so... we are still wasting money on SLS which is comically behind schedule and over budget. If it ever flies expect NASA to pay 10x what an equivalent SpaceX Starship launch costs. Defense and space procurement is the least efficient research, jobs, and welfare program ever devised.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
swframe2 3y ago
(a crazy idea I wanted to get feedback on) Wouldn't it be much easier if everyone licensed tech from space-x? A space tech franchise haha? (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. )
- nickik 3y ago
  Its not a crazy idea, its a smart idea. There are two things that aim against it, export regulation. These could be overcome but it would require a lot of politics and cooperation. Second, Europe has NIH syndrome and until reticently were 100% convinced that they were simply superior and would never have even considered it even if the US was open to it. But not reinventing the wheel on the engines and things like that would make a lot of sense. Its just not practical in the current environment.
  - wkat4242 3y ago
    It's not NIH. It's independence from geopolitics. Don't forget Trump's America First movement shook our confidence in our decades-long alliance. And I don't just mean militarily (NATO)
    - nickik 3y ago
      This was long before Trump. And the thing is, depending on how you do the agreement. Europe could produce the engines themselves, they only would need plans and help with manufacture. This isn't unprecedented in the space industry. Its how India and China worked with Russian engines. And it also happens between commercial companies. In case of a complete breakdown of relation Europe could continue to manufacture the engine. This would allow for in-depended access and still produce jobs in Europe. This could serve for both a large, medium and small rocket. Additionally it could allow for learning to do landing. Also, Europe has a decent second stage engine that they could have combined with that first stage. Europe has to get away from solid fuel boosters and hydrogen main engines, its totally the wrong architecture and moving away from it would have been smart. Sadly they domed themselves with the Ariane 6 and Vega designs. If not the US, you could have done the same with something like the RD-191 or something like that.
helgee 3y ago
I owe my career to the incompetence and greed of Arianespace. For my master's thesis I reverse engineered launcher ascent simulations for ESA because Arianespace was unwilling or unable to answer basic questions such as "how much payload can rocket X transport to orbit Y which is not GTO" without charging an obscene amount of money and needing months of lead time. A few years later at one of the Lunar X-Prize startups, my team and I sat together with Arianespace's mission analysts and we had to explain to them why you cannot have a 24-hour launch window when you want to fly to the Moon. The bloody thing moves! After SpaceX published the video from the first successful grasshopper flight it was clear to me and basically everyone else I talked to in the industry that an expendable Ariane 6 was DOA. But the pork must flow... The corruption, nepotism, and incompetence runs deep in the European space industry. ESA is an organization where people get passed over for promotion because they are "too technical" or don't belong to the right old boy network. Geo return (the geographic return rule) excacerbates all these problems by creating quasi-monopolies. As an example, the market leader for astrodynamics software in Europe is at the top because their national delegation heavily invests in programs that benefit them and not much else. Thus, they "need" to win a lot of contracts to balance the scales and make a luxurious living by repackaging the same old Fortran77 garbage over and over again. </rant>
- mdorazio 3y ago
  Maybe a dumb question, but why do you need to launch directly to the moon instead of launching to earth orbit then doing a transfer? How much better is the direct method delta v?
  - thmsths 3y ago
    I don't know if one trajectory is more efficient than the other, but space propulsion systems are quite tricky and if I remember correctly the X prize was trying to incentivize doing things on a budget to "democratize" access to the moon. It was basically the cubesat of moon rovers. If you think of technical decisions through that lens, it therefore makes sense to ask your launch provider to do as much of the work as possible since they already have a second stage capable of getting you there, instead of designing a bigger payload with a more capable propulsion.

49 points by xoa 3y ago

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 3y ago
A bit like the infamous interview of Steve Ballmer (along with Mike Zafirovski) on the iPhone launch ("it doesn't have a keyboard!")...
- bowsamic 3y ago
  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 3y ago
    Surely a swiping keyboard is faster than the "array of tiny keys" approach. It's a much lighter touch.
    - bowsamic 3y ago
      Have you used those tiny keyboards? They were quite amazing
      - pmontra 3y ago
        The T9s were... I'm happy that they disappeared. The qwertys were not bad. I'm swiping on my phone to the amazement of my friends that were never able to learn to do it. That beats tapping keys. However a physical qwerty was better than tapping on a qwerty displayed on a touchscreen. Unfortunately it takes 1/3 or 1/2 of the phone and it's there even when it's not needed.
    - mytailorisrich 3y ago
      And that's this narrow view that perhaps made incumbents missed the big picture. I think the real insight Apple had is that, with phones becoming smartphone, internet, videos, apps, etc people would want a bigger screen rather than a keyboard and a smaller screen even if a physical keyboard might be a bit better to type (and I'm not even sure of that). A radical idea proved a winner. A bit like with SpaceX... I fully expect Arianespace to be like Nokia was, very slow, a lot of bureaucracy, and no-one dreaming of anything really new. The irony is that since they launch from the coast of French Guyana reusable boosters that can land on sea platforms sound like the perfect solution for them...
  - mytailorisrich 3y ago
    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 3y ago
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.
- nickik 3y ago
  Lots of different ESA and Arianespace made lots of arrogant and wrong statements over the years, trust me as somebody that has followed it. Their claims about illegal subsidies were always utterly hilarious. It was literally just them appealing to European nationalism without any evidence. They were basically saying to convince clueless ESA member-state politicians of nonsense. There is a reason they haven't even tried to bring this to the WTO, they knew they were full of shit.
LtWorf 3y ago
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 3y ago
  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
- Dig1t 3y ago
  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?
  - LtWorf 3y ago
    This comparison would make sense if planes were leaving orbit.
    - Dig1t 3y ago
      I would love to hear an explanation as to why that makes a difference?
      - LtWorf 3y ago
        Planes work by heating up air and then going fast enough to fly? While rockets have to eject stuff and move the centre of mass outside of themselves. Also they need to leave the gravity well while planes don't do that? It's completely different.
- elteto 3y ago
  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.
Gibbon1 3y ago
That sort of thing re-reinforces my believe that Musk it's some genius it's that managers like that French guy are blocking progress and creating negative value. Where Musk is usually too nutty and ADD to get the way for long.

xoa 3y ago

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 3y ago
> 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 3y ago
  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.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

snakeyjake 3y ago

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.

lainga 3y ago
We have seen the EU, Japan and (as sibling comment says) almost the US space industries have these problems. Can you think of any national space industries which do not? Maybe NZ due to the presence of Rocketlab and nobody else?
xenadu02 3y ago
FWIW we barely avoided that here in the USA. I half believe that Congress didn't think anyone would meet the COTS milestones or they'd have never approved it. SpaceX delivered a product so much cheaper with excellent reliability and on-schedule that even the worst of the worst pork-barrel lobbyist-friendly sycophants in Congress couldn't justify cutting them out. But they still tried to keep them out of military contracts. It took some political grease (eg spreading facilities across multiple states to make jobs) and a lawsuit to be allowed to even bid on those contracts. Even so... we are still wasting money on SLS which is comically behind schedule and over budget. If it ever flies expect NASA to pay 10x what an equivalent SpaceX Starship launch costs. Defense and space procurement is the least efficient research, jobs, and welfare program ever devised.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

swframe2 3y ago

(a crazy idea I wanted to get feedback on) Wouldn't it be much easier if everyone licensed tech from space-x? A space tech franchise haha? (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. )

nickik 3y ago
Its not a crazy idea, its a smart idea. There are two things that aim against it, export regulation. These could be overcome but it would require a lot of politics and cooperation. Second, Europe has NIH syndrome and until reticently were 100% convinced that they were simply superior and would never have even considered it even if the US was open to it. But not reinventing the wheel on the engines and things like that would make a lot of sense. Its just not practical in the current environment.
- wkat4242 3y ago
  It's not NIH. It's independence from geopolitics. Don't forget Trump's America First movement shook our confidence in our decades-long alliance. And I don't just mean militarily (NATO)
  - nickik 3y ago
    This was long before Trump. And the thing is, depending on how you do the agreement. Europe could produce the engines themselves, they only would need plans and help with manufacture. This isn't unprecedented in the space industry. Its how India and China worked with Russian engines. And it also happens between commercial companies. In case of a complete breakdown of relation Europe could continue to manufacture the engine. This would allow for in-depended access and still produce jobs in Europe. This could serve for both a large, medium and small rocket. Additionally it could allow for learning to do landing. Also, Europe has a decent second stage engine that they could have combined with that first stage. Europe has to get away from solid fuel boosters and hydrogen main engines, its totally the wrong architecture and moving away from it would have been smart. Sadly they domed themselves with the Ariane 6 and Vega designs. If not the US, you could have done the same with something like the RD-191 or something like that.

helgee 3y ago

I owe my career to the incompetence and greed of Arianespace. For my master's thesis I reverse engineered launcher ascent simulations for ESA because Arianespace was unwilling or unable to answer basic questions such as "how much payload can rocket X transport to orbit Y which is not GTO" without charging an obscene amount of money and needing months of lead time. A few years later at one of the Lunar X-Prize startups, my team and I sat together with Arianespace's mission analysts and we had to explain to them why you cannot have a 24-hour launch window when you want to fly to the Moon. The bloody thing moves! After SpaceX published the video from the first successful grasshopper flight it was clear to me and basically everyone else I talked to in the industry that an expendable Ariane 6 was DOA. But the pork must flow... The corruption, nepotism, and incompetence runs deep in the European space industry. ESA is an organization where people get passed over for promotion because they are "too technical" or don't belong to the right old boy network. Geo return (the geographic return rule) excacerbates all these problems by creating quasi-monopolies. As an example, the market leader for astrodynamics software in Europe is at the top because their national delegation heavily invests in programs that benefit them and not much else. Thus, they "need" to win a lot of contracts to balance the scales and make a luxurious living by repackaging the same old Fortran77 garbage over and over again. </rant>

mdorazio 3y ago
Maybe a dumb question, but why do you need to launch directly to the moon instead of launching to earth orbit then doing a transfer? How much better is the direct method delta v?
- thmsths 3y ago
  I don't know if one trajectory is more efficient than the other, but space propulsion systems are quite tricky and if I remember correctly the X prize was trying to incentivize doing things on a budget to "democratize" access to the moon. It was basically the cubesat of moon rovers. If you think of technical decisions through that lens, it therefore makes sense to ask your launch provider to do as much of the work as possible since they already have a second stage capable of getting you there, instead of designing a bigger payload with a more capable propulsion.