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- "The top factors ESA will consider in this first phase of the challenge are each proposer's business plan, technical credibility, and financial credibility."

• rapsey 2y ago
  > This is going to so predictably lead to more of the same—the creation of companies optimized for writing proposals, and for pleasing bureaucrats. The european way. I wonder if the bureaucrats even know this is the inevitable result or if it is the actual plan. Probably just the result of them not knowing any other way of working and forcing it onto everyone they interact with.
  • 9dev 2y ago
    I would love to disagree, but after being involved with Gaia X… they cannot even pin down what Gaia X is, even when prompted to. It’s something about a standard for creating standards for a European cloud, but by now we’re several years and even more meta layers in, millions have been spent, and… nothing has come out of it. It feels like the EU could be so much, if only other people were steering it.
• thawawaycold 2y ago
  lol you don't know the half of it. Working with ESA for anything but the most trivial project is beyond frustrating; it's basically 99% about producing swathes of documentation, which in itself is more akin to philosophy and semantic dissertations over obscure standards than actual technical work. ESA is so risk averse that it's even weird for a space company
  • prettyeyes83 2y ago
    agreed, but what would you argue are the reasons for this mindset? i imagine the main cause is structural, ie. having to deal with all the member states?
    • rapsey 2y ago
      A bureaucrat is not allowed to spend money on anything risky and must never allow for money to be used on something other than the intended use. So the entire process must be micromanaged to death with documentation, which results in the money mostly being spent on the documentation.
    • thawawaycold 2y ago
      not just the members states but also all the other behemoths stakeholders like Airbus, Thales, OHB and so on, which need to make sure that new missions are as easy to adapt to their preexisting flight heritage as possible
  • mauriciolange 2y ago
    A good counterexample is the Arctic Weather Satellite project. It was defined as a new space process at ESA, so documentation required was reduced at the minimum, and risk acceptance was increased. Absolutely successful, on time, on budget, contractors happy, end users happy. But it is a small project and still difficult to replicate at large and to spread the mindset to other sections at ESA. Source: me. I work at that project as ground segment engineer.
• throw84848484 2y ago
  [flagged]
• arlort 2y ago
  > to review startups' business plans How exactly do you imagine a government contract working if it's not reviewed before being granted? > That they're still ambivalent whether they should pursue reusability or not So they shouldn't verify if a proposal is credible because that's too much bureaucracy but they should dictate to the companies how they want to approach the problem rather than letting each company make their own plans and see who comes up with the best proposal?
  • rapsey 2y ago
    The government should be a regulator and set ground rules. It should provide a market and clear requirements. Then leave private business alone to meet those requirements. If they need funding, leave the business to the VC industry.
    • jeeeb 2y ago
      They’re offering to fund 160 million euros to bootstrap private enterprises providing launch services to the ESA. Of course they want to review the business plan to make sure it’s viable before dropping a bundle of government money on some random company.
      • ghaff 2y ago
        To compare, meanwhile Astra just $80 million to relaunch (so to speak).
      • rapsey 2y ago
        Which is completely the wrong way of doing it. They are the market. So define it and leave it to private industry to fund and develop the capabilities to meet their requirements. If they say, we are willing to spend X amount of money on Y number of launches. You can rent our launch sites for tests. Here is a list of requirements. They would see incredible results. But no europe must micromanage and do things in their own bureaucratic way that has always failed.
    • croes 2y ago
• jandrewrogers 2y ago
  “we will continue doing the thing we have always done despite decades of evidence it won’t produce the thing we claim it will produce” At some point, they need to adopt a different strategy. It feels like every European strategy is optimized for the comfort of bureaucrats rather than actual results.
  • rapsey 2y ago
    A bureaucracy can not simplify itself. It is a complex system that can only go one way, ever more complex, until it deadlocks and eventually someone burns it to the ground and starts anew.