Ariane 5 kind of looked like the Space Shuttle, minus the shuttle of course. But it had two large solid rocket boosters and a huge hydrogen tank in the center, just like the STS. Ariane 6, with its smaller boosters, is more in line with other conventional rockets.
I should have looked this up, but this seems like a cool way to get full coverage while keeping launch parameters roughly similar. 23.2Km, 56 degree inclination, LAN separated by 120 degrees, 8 satellites per plane. I'll try to replicate this in the future.
Yeah! My current constellation was also going to be 3 planes (I finished my 2 planes currently) at 10000Km and 5 satellites per plane. 2 polar planes and 1 equatorial plane.
Except the did blow it up. It and every other rocket not named Falcon, New Glenn, or Super Heavy has blown up their first stage as a planned part of their mission.
He’s not wrong, even if he was a little abrasive in how it was said. If the Europeans don’t have a reusable rocket they are going to lag behind the others and be forced to pay to try and keep up. That’s just the simple math. If they aren’t refocusing to get a resizable rocket then they are going to badly fall behind.
He’s wrong. Just because there’s one product in the world, developed by the richest man on the planet, that is "better," it doesn’t mean everything else is shit. For the European Union, having independent access to space is crucial. As an institution, they don’t need >100 launches a year.
Would it be ideal if the European space industry had already developed its own reusable launcher? Probably. But these are two separate issues.
No he’s right, the reusable rockets from spacex have made all other obsolete. It’s why everyone else who is serious is looking into their own reusable rockets. It’s much cheaper and allows for more launches. Europe having access to independent launch sources is important, but having an aging system will see them lag behind. America has been uncoupling from Europe at an increased rate, they’re going to need independent space resources. Being decades behind everyone else though will only hurt them in the short and long term.
It's really simple, ESA is forsemost a space science, and research institute rather than being a space taxi, secondly, you have far easier time iterating and making better rockets from the technologies being developed here
My point is that, SpaceX or Blue Origin's main and basically every private company's only aim is to develop best rockets which are also cheap so they also have large commercial value
While, aim of these space organisations like NASA, ISRO, ESA, JAXA is first and foremost is R&D and research satellites, which takes the most effort and resources followed by rockets
Are you sure it's me who should find something better to do with my life, armchair critic Canadian poster who is for some reason personally offended by European space policy?
They have multiple companies working on reusable vehicles, with launches coming up pretty soon. Your "they'd have to go back to the drawing board" comment doesn't make any sense given that context. They've been working on them for years.
Are they behind? Yeah, obviously. But to imply they're still being shortsighted and not even working on it is lazy and disingenuous.
The Ariane 6 program was already launched long ago. A lot of investment and research went into it. It would have been stupid to abandon it on its last development year only because SpaceX made reusable rockets.
You are right however that reusable rockets are the future. ESA has at least 2 reusable rockets in development, it’s not something you can just clap into existence. ESA doesn’t have the billion subsidies NASA and the US government gave SpaceX in contracts.
A lot of investment and research went into it. It would have been stupid to abandon it on its last development year only because SpaceX made reusable rockets.
This is a prime example of the "sunk cost fallacy." Spending yet more on an approach shown to be suboptimal or obsolete is wasteful. I'm sure it's no coincidence that SpaceX is famous for not suffering said fallacy.
In this case it doesn't apply. Because stopping Ariane 6 would have left Europe without a launcher.
Imagine if they said OK we stop development in 2020 and focus on reusable rocket. They would have a 10-15 year window without any launcher. That would have incurred in a lot of delays for a lot of other subsidiary projects where autonomy and sovereignity are crucial (can't trust other companies with the launch).
In this case it doesn't apply. Because stopping Ariane 6 would have left Europe without a launcher.
I disagree, for Ariane 5 was terminated prematurely, even when excluding consideration of booster reuse - as witnessed by the period Europe was indeed without a (heavy) launcher between 5 and 6.
They would have a 10-15 year window without any launcher.
And that highlights another problem: With booster reuse demonstrably feasible, that is a terribly long development time. New Glenn exists now and Starship is likely operational by the end of 2026. From all I see, European developers are targeting booster reuse for vehicles only up to the size of the existing Falcon 9 - by the mid-late 30s. Falcon 9 is likely obsolete by 2030.
Also you might forget the Kourou advantage. Just launching from Kourou in comparison to the cape brings you an almost 200kg payload advantage (I think the exact number is around 170kg). And that's not even taking into account the advantage you have on top of that for sending payloads into a geostationary orbit since you're at only 5° north.
It's not just a matter of Mars, but economy. That extra 200 Kg makes little difference in the $/kg to orbit, especially when considering the costs of shipping rockets to South America. Meanwhile, reuse and larger vehicles make major differences in the per kg costs.
With SpaceX and Blue Origin currently employing reuse, Rocket Lab and Relativity coming up, the Chinese fielding three hopefuls right now - not to mention Stoke and SpaceX shooting for full reuse - the way forward is clear. In my opinion, Arianespace misstepped badly by opposing reuse for so long. If the continent wants to be competitive as they once were, they must move faster toward it, IMO.
The Ariane 6 program was already launched long ago. A lot of investment and research went into it. It would have been stupid to abandon it on its last development year only because SpaceX made reusable rockets.
Ariane 6 got funding in 2016, and F9 landed in 2015. But yes they are working on reusable rockets now. better late than never.
Nobody ever claimed reusability is impossible, only that it makes no financial sense unless you launch a lot. SpaceX had to come up with Starlink to generate more demand, the launch market just isn't that big, especially back when Ariane 6 started development.
It is also why Musk dreams of Mars colonies, there's no need for hundreds of Starships otherwise, assuming they ever get it to work in the first place.
3 to 5x? Sounds like someone believes the propaganda numbers.
The 3-5x is factually true, you can easily look it up.
The rest of your comment is accurate, but it doesn’t invalidate the original point. ESA will get left in the dust with the economies of scale being deployed in the US. China realized this a long time ago and started copying.
Financially it makes no sense to have a reusable rocket to launch 12 times a year, as the use case was when the Ariane6 project was launched. The whole infrastructure is designed for this cadence and is in absolute numbers quite cheap. One boat making round trips between Bremen and Kourou via Rotterdam and Bordeaux with all the hardware is exactly 1 month, hence the 12 launches per year. The numbers with $/kg payload you keep mentioning are only valid because of the ~100 launches per year SpaceX does. Reusable rockets as a single item are much more expensive.
Would Europe as a whole find the need to launch >100times a year, probably, but definitely not with an Ariane 64. Would be a combination of rocket sizes like small launchers, Vega and Ariane62.
But in any case, all these projects are ongoing. Right now, we are lucky to have Ariane6.
At the end of Ariane 5s life time, Arianespace couldn't find enough dual payloads to launch, so was launching a lot with only half capacity (that's why the rocket was lifting so fast from the pad as everyone remembers). Ariane 5 unlike Ariane 6 was not flexible and couldn't be downgraded. So financially it didn't make a lot of sense. All of that to say, 10-15 years ago, why would ESA suddenly need a rocket to launch 100 heavy payloads a year (meaning every 3 days) when at the same time was hard to find bigger payloads with enough frequency?
Where I join you, is of course ESA should have created a better environment much earlier for the european space industry to develop new launcher technologies meaning technological building blocks.
behind other space programs
Meaning, one (US)? The chinese program is advancing fast, but only in the last 5 years.
PS: I have to add, your way of discussing things is quite toxic. If you always open a discussion like you did before, I'm not sure it helps you getting your points across.
In 2013, Ariane executive Richard Bowles said SpaceX's planned "reusability is a dream". (3:42 in this video).
only that it makes no financial sense unless you launch a lot
Which was also plain wrong, and at this point is also a lie. SpaceX was achieving significant savings from the very first time they reused a Falcon 9 booster. The refurbishment for SES-10 cost "substantially less than half” a new first stage according to SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell. It is absurd that the burden of proof continues to be put on the necessity or economics of reusable launch vehicles. For virtually any other vehicle without a warhead, be it plane, train, car, ship, or horse, a single use version is ridiculous.
Before you try to bring up development costs, Europe spent over 4 billion euro developing Ariane 6 (which is a derivative of Ariane 5 and Vega, rather than a clean sheet design). SpaceX spent about half that developing their entire Falcon family (Falcon 1, Falcon 9, and Falcon Heavy) and making Falcon 9/Heavy partially reusable. (Europe is also subsidizing Ariane 6 commercial launch prices with 340 million euro per year.)
Do you have any figures for the amount of money that was saved? Genuine question because everybody repeats this, but there are no hard figures out there aside from hearsay and true me bro
Old article, but Fairings were 6 mil and about 10%, launch costs were 10%, Second stage was 20%, and first stage was 60% of the total cost.
So that gives us around 60 million for a new build stage, 2nd stage value of around ~12 mil, And first stage value of ~36 mil.
Claimed internal cost of F9 now is somewhere between 15 to 20 mil, and given the increase in scale second stage has probably dropped in price some. So call it 10 mil for the second stage, Fairing reuse is claimed to be around 1-3 million, and 1-3 for First stage refurb. So they save somewhere around 30 million on the first stage, and 3-5 mil on the fairings.
Such an American attitude… it got the job done which is the most important - being able to have an independent access to space. Anything else for ESA is secondary.
The question is what that "independence" is worth to Europe (or India or Japan or whoever)? At some point, launch costs (or low cadence, the OTHER elephant in the room for throwaway rockets) become so prohibitive that you can't afford the project, whether it's getting a GNSS upgrade or another LEO ISP into orbit.
The access is worth launch costs of 100 million Euros. Especially as we can neither trust Russia, China, India to deliver our systems. We can’t fully trust the US either
Yes, I recognize that if only ONE alternative is available, it's a bad deal... but (as Amazon is discovering) even if multiple alternatives are theoretically available, if the block 4 Galileo is projected to be in production before there can be enough Ariane 6s built to launch half the block 3s, 500 Euros per launch isn't enough to upgrade the constellation to block 3. Even with 3 other launch options (one potentially reusable) Amazon is still falling behind the monopoly by stubbornly using them as little as possible, and Ariane isn't going bail them out no matter what the cost.
Grok has reddit accounts and is spouting objectivist brainrot all over. Maybe not this dude specifically, but it isn't worth engaging with these people even if they are real. They aren't posting in good faith
Because EU countries budgets are in massive crises - especially France - with a war raging on their eastern front, they will need to drastically increase defense spending.
So wasting billions of euros on legacy space programs to preserve procurement contracts for corrupt companies owned by old money families is an insult to tax payers and workers.
Either leverage reusable tech or develop it yourself.
The Ariane program should have died ten years ago.
Go look up the attitudes of the people who kept it alive. Statements like "reusable is impossible", "any reusable program is going to fail", etc.
I care because I don't want to see billions of taxpayers dollars being literally burned into vapor being celebrated.
It's like a multi-billion dollar sports team celebrating coming in last in their league.
The fact that it uses legacy military companies for manufacture and there's a war going on is literally a benefit lmfao a lot of the same technologies go into
Ballistic missiles and other rocket artillery. You're getting too caught up in the ITS A BUSINESS GOTTA MAKE PROFIT AND BE CHEAP AS POSSIBLE!!!!
You realize it's literally cheaper for me to buy a seat on a Russian rocket than it is with SpaceX... until we get fully published figures, you don't even know if it's a massive savings or if its a marginal savings. I hope its massive savings, but again we don't know what fully goes into a refitting and Elon bulllshits everything
You literally sound like a petulant child wanting something they don't have vs accepting the current reality and that things take time. Would you rather them scrub all launches and spend the next 15-20 years developing a reusable vehicle? Or are you hoping they just buy spacex rides/a private company that throws shit at the wall comes in swinging hard with only 3-5 years of dev.. SpaceX has created some painful people online.
Ok so the crazy part about what you are saying here is that missile technology is PRECISELY where europe has fallen behind - like DECADES behind the US and China on military tech.
Both offensive land attack missiles as well as defenisve anti-air missiles are basically non-existent in the euro area (UK storm shadow and nlaw are exceptions... but UK is no longer in EU so...).
As a result, europe spends more than 50% of its military procurement on US systems like patriots, himars batteries (germany's rocket artillery just puts two of them on one truck...) and basically every other large rocket systems.
Follow these guys, task and purpose, binkov and caspian report if you want to learn more about where euro military tech is....
I don’t know how critical reusibility is going to be for it, but surely it has its place somewhere, the JWST was launched on an Ariane 5 despite F9 being mature and available but they deemed the A5 as the only vehicle suitable, it maybe a similar case here
Falcon 9 wasn't available, and Falcon Heavy would probably have been required. The agreement to launch on Ariane 5 was finalized in 2007, and planning for that goes back to at least 2004. Falcon 9, let alone Falcon Heavy, didn't exist at the time. Falcon 9 first flew in 2010, and that was different, smaller vehicoe than the current (Block 5) Falcon 9. Block 5 and Falcon Heavy first flew in 2018.
JWST could have launched just as well on Delta IV Heavy, or maybe Atlas V 551 (payload mass to Earth escape on Atlas V is unclear). But aong with instrumentation, the launch on Ariane 5 was part of ESA's contribution to JWST.
If Falcon Heavy existed, it could have launched JWST. The fairing size is often cited, but it likely wouldn't have been a deal breaker. First, the space within the Falcon fairing is the same width as the Ariane and ULA fairings; the issue is length. SpaceX has been working with anothet company and NASA to develop a longer fairing for Falcon Heavy, which they made a protoype of last year. That could have been done years ago if needed. (It's not like the JWST launch was on short notice.) Even the long Ariane 5 fairing needed special vent modifications to support JWST. (And on a couple of launches in 2020 or 2021, its fairing had a minor issue with off-nominal separation that they had to work through prior to launching JWST.)
Congratulations to Ariane and ESA on a successful launch!
I've always liked the look of the Ariane 5 and now 6, they have a sort of look to them unlike a lot of other rockets.
Ariane 5 kind of looked like the Space Shuttle, minus the shuttle of course. But it had two large solid rocket boosters and a huge hydrogen tank in the center, just like the STS. Ariane 6, with its smaller boosters, is more in line with other conventional rockets.
Is this a MEO constellation that they are adding to?
Correct. Slightly higher than GPS and on 3 planes. Nominal constellation size is 30 sats.
I should have looked this up, but this seems like a cool way to get full coverage while keeping launch parameters roughly similar. 23.2Km, 56 degree inclination, LAN separated by 120 degrees, 8 satellites per plane. I'll try to replicate this in the future.
Launching your own constellation on KSP? :)
Yeah! My current constellation was also going to be 3 planes (I finished my 2 planes currently) at 10000Km and 5 satellites per plane. 2 polar planes and 1 equatorial plane.
Well, it’s expensive but at least it works.
ariane might not have reusability but they got vibes and aura farming
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Don't they know you're supposed to blow up atleast 16 rockets first to really be called successful?
Except the did blow it up. It and every other rocket not named Falcon, New Glenn, or Super Heavy has blown up their first stage as a planned part of their mission.
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Ah yes, a reliable heavy lift launcher is just so easy and outdated that only 4 institutions/countries in the world have them. GTFOOH
He’s not wrong, even if he was a little abrasive in how it was said. If the Europeans don’t have a reusable rocket they are going to lag behind the others and be forced to pay to try and keep up. That’s just the simple math. If they aren’t refocusing to get a resizable rocket then they are going to badly fall behind.
He’s wrong. Just because there’s one product in the world, developed by the richest man on the planet, that is "better," it doesn’t mean everything else is shit. For the European Union, having independent access to space is crucial. As an institution, they don’t need >100 launches a year.
Would it be ideal if the European space industry had already developed its own reusable launcher? Probably. But these are two separate issues.
The EU would absolutely love to do 100+ launches a year. They cannot afford it because their vehicle is too expensive...
Even the US government doesn't do 100+ launches a year while having access to SpaceX.
The US isn't 27 different countries who want their own spy and communication satellites for cheap launch prices.
As if the launch prices was even remotely relevant for spy satellites.
Communication satellites are commercial activities, they can go to the lowest bider regardless of nationality.
No he’s right, the reusable rockets from spacex have made all other obsolete. It’s why everyone else who is serious is looking into their own reusable rockets. It’s much cheaper and allows for more launches. Europe having access to independent launch sources is important, but having an aging system will see them lag behind. America has been uncoupling from Europe at an increased rate, they’re going to need independent space resources. Being decades behind everyone else though will only hurt them in the short and long term.
It's really simple, ESA is forsemost a space science, and research institute rather than being a space taxi, secondly, you have far easier time iterating and making better rockets from the technologies being developed here
Ariane used to have a big commercial business as a "space taxi". The extra launches lowered the cost of ESA launching space science stuff.
My point is that, SpaceX or Blue Origin's main and basically every private company's only aim is to develop best rockets which are also cheap so they also have large commercial value
While, aim of these space organisations like NASA, ISRO, ESA, JAXA is first and foremost is R&D and research satellites, which takes the most effort and resources followed by rockets
Plus, in many cases, aim is to get autonomy.
They are so fucked that they are going to be priced out of building their own rockets at this rate.
My point was simply that they have invested in the wrong tech and every launch they commit to it digs them deeper into the hole they are already in.
Did that make you feel better?
If you can't take criticism of a multi-billion dollar project, you should go do something else with your life.
Europe is BADLY losing the space race and basically throwing money into an incinerator supporting legacy rocket programs.
Does it feel good to speak truth to the power of the sclerotic corporate interests keeping this wasteful spending in place?
Yes, yes it does!
Are you sure it's me who should find something better to do with my life, armchair critic Canadian poster who is for some reason personally offended by European space policy?
They have multiple companies working on reusable vehicles, with launches coming up pretty soon. Your "they'd have to go back to the drawing board" comment doesn't make any sense given that context. They've been working on them for years.
Are they behind? Yeah, obviously. But to imply they're still being shortsighted and not even working on it is lazy and disingenuous.
The Ariane 6 program was already launched long ago. A lot of investment and research went into it. It would have been stupid to abandon it on its last development year only because SpaceX made reusable rockets.
You are right however that reusable rockets are the future. ESA has at least 2 reusable rockets in development, it’s not something you can just clap into existence. ESA doesn’t have the billion subsidies NASA and the US government gave SpaceX in contracts.
This is a prime example of the "sunk cost fallacy." Spending yet more on an approach shown to be suboptimal or obsolete is wasteful. I'm sure it's no coincidence that SpaceX is famous for not suffering said fallacy.
In this case it doesn't apply. Because stopping Ariane 6 would have left Europe without a launcher.
Imagine if they said OK we stop development in 2020 and focus on reusable rocket. They would have a 10-15 year window without any launcher. That would have incurred in a lot of delays for a lot of other subsidiary projects where autonomy and sovereignity are crucial (can't trust other companies with the launch).
It was the right call.
I disagree, for Ariane 5 was terminated prematurely, even when excluding consideration of booster reuse - as witnessed by the period Europe was indeed without a (heavy) launcher between 5 and 6.
And that highlights another problem: With booster reuse demonstrably feasible, that is a terribly long development time. New Glenn exists now and Starship is likely operational by the end of 2026. From all I see, European developers are targeting booster reuse for vehicles only up to the size of the existing Falcon 9 - by the mid-late 30s. Falcon 9 is likely obsolete by 2030.
Not everyone wants to colonize Mars.
Also you might forget the Kourou advantage. Just launching from Kourou in comparison to the cape brings you an almost 200kg payload advantage (I think the exact number is around 170kg). And that's not even taking into account the advantage you have on top of that for sending payloads into a geostationary orbit since you're at only 5° north.
It's not just a matter of Mars, but economy. That extra 200 Kg makes little difference in the $/kg to orbit, especially when considering the costs of shipping rockets to South America. Meanwhile, reuse and larger vehicles make major differences in the per kg costs.
With SpaceX and Blue Origin currently employing reuse, Rocket Lab and Relativity coming up, the Chinese fielding three hopefuls right now - not to mention Stoke and SpaceX shooting for full reuse - the way forward is clear. In my opinion, Arianespace misstepped badly by opposing reuse for so long. If the continent wants to be competitive as they once were, they must move faster toward it, IMO.
Ariane 6 got funding in 2016, and F9 landed in 2015. But yes they are working on reusable rockets now. better late than never.
Nobody ever claimed reusability is impossible, only that it makes no financial sense unless you launch a lot. SpaceX had to come up with Starlink to generate more demand, the launch market just isn't that big, especially back when Ariane 6 started development.
It is also why Musk dreams of Mars colonies, there's no need for hundreds of Starships otherwise, assuming they ever get it to work in the first place.
3 to 5x? Sounds like someone believes the propaganda numbers.
Spacex does not need starlink to make Falcon 9 reusability profitable.
The 3-5x is factually true, you can easily look it up.
The rest of your comment is accurate, but it doesn’t invalidate the original point. ESA will get left in the dust with the economies of scale being deployed in the US. China realized this a long time ago and started copying.
Go do some research. It could be more than 5x the cost per payload kg. I was being conservative.
Why do you think the leaders in space are ALL going reusable?
And yes, the director of the ESA when this rocket was being developed called reusability "impossible".
Financially it makes no sense to have a reusable rocket to launch 12 times a year, as the use case was when the Ariane6 project was launched. The whole infrastructure is designed for this cadence and is in absolute numbers quite cheap. One boat making round trips between Bremen and Kourou via Rotterdam and Bordeaux with all the hardware is exactly 1 month, hence the 12 launches per year. The numbers with $/kg payload you keep mentioning are only valid because of the ~100 launches per year SpaceX does. Reusable rockets as a single item are much more expensive.
Would Europe as a whole find the need to launch >100times a year, probably, but definitely not with an Ariane 64. Would be a combination of rocket sizes like small launchers, Vega and Ariane62.
But in any case, all these projects are ongoing. Right now, we are lucky to have Ariane6.
That's excellent logic. Not at all the thinking that got europe at least a decade behind other space programs.
How could it *possibly* make sense to use a rocket multiple times if it has to sit in a hangar for a few weeks in between launches!!!?!
Who said anything about storing launchers?
At the end of Ariane 5s life time, Arianespace couldn't find enough dual payloads to launch, so was launching a lot with only half capacity (that's why the rocket was lifting so fast from the pad as everyone remembers). Ariane 5 unlike Ariane 6 was not flexible and couldn't be downgraded. So financially it didn't make a lot of sense. All of that to say, 10-15 years ago, why would ESA suddenly need a rocket to launch 100 heavy payloads a year (meaning every 3 days) when at the same time was hard to find bigger payloads with enough frequency?
Where I join you, is of course ESA should have created a better environment much earlier for the european space industry to develop new launcher technologies meaning technological building blocks.
Meaning, one (US)? The chinese program is advancing fast, but only in the last 5 years.
PS: I have to add, your way of discussing things is quite toxic. If you always open a discussion like you did before, I'm not sure it helps you getting your points across.
In 2013, Ariane executive Richard Bowles said SpaceX's planned "reusability is a dream". (3:42 in this video).
Which was also plain wrong, and at this point is also a lie. SpaceX was achieving significant savings from the very first time they reused a Falcon 9 booster. The refurbishment for SES-10 cost "substantially less than half” a new first stage according to SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell. It is absurd that the burden of proof continues to be put on the necessity or economics of reusable launch vehicles. For virtually any other vehicle without a warhead, be it plane, train, car, ship, or horse, a single use version is ridiculous.
Before you try to bring up development costs, Europe spent over 4 billion euro developing Ariane 6 (which is a derivative of Ariane 5 and Vega, rather than a clean sheet design). SpaceX spent about half that developing their entire Falcon family (Falcon 1, Falcon 9, and Falcon Heavy) and making Falcon 9/Heavy partially reusable. (Europe is also subsidizing Ariane 6 commercial launch prices with 340 million euro per year.)
Do you have any figures for the amount of money that was saved? Genuine question because everybody repeats this, but there are no hard figures out there aside from hearsay and true me bro
https://www.inverse.com/innovation/spacex-elon-musk-falcon-9-economics
Old article, but Fairings were 6 mil and about 10%, launch costs were 10%, Second stage was 20%, and first stage was 60% of the total cost.
So that gives us around 60 million for a new build stage, 2nd stage value of around ~12 mil, And first stage value of ~36 mil.
Claimed internal cost of F9 now is somewhere between 15 to 20 mil, and given the increase in scale second stage has probably dropped in price some. So call it 10 mil for the second stage, Fairing reuse is claimed to be around 1-3 million, and 1-3 for First stage refurb. So they save somewhere around 30 million on the first stage, and 3-5 mil on the fairings.
Such an American attitude… it got the job done which is the most important - being able to have an independent access to space. Anything else for ESA is secondary.
The question is what that "independence" is worth to Europe (or India or Japan or whoever)? At some point, launch costs (or low cadence, the OTHER elephant in the room for throwaway rockets) become so prohibitive that you can't afford the project, whether it's getting a GNSS upgrade or another LEO ISP into orbit.
The access is worth launch costs of 100 million Euros. Especially as we can neither trust Russia, China, India to deliver our systems. We can’t fully trust the US either
Yes, I recognize that if only ONE alternative is available, it's a bad deal... but (as Amazon is discovering) even if multiple alternatives are theoretically available, if the block 4 Galileo is projected to be in production before there can be enough Ariane 6s built to launch half the block 3s, 500 Euros per launch isn't enough to upgrade the constellation to block 3. Even with 3 other launch options (one potentially reusable) Amazon is still falling behind the monopoly by stubbornly using them as little as possible, and Ariane isn't going bail them out no matter what the cost.
Why does that matter so much to you? Do you not care about the mission or what they're doing?? This is so weird man
Grok has reddit accounts and is spouting objectivist brainrot all over. Maybe not this dude specifically, but it isn't worth engaging with these people even if they are real. They aren't posting in good faith
Because EU countries budgets are in massive crises - especially France - with a war raging on their eastern front, they will need to drastically increase defense spending.
So wasting billions of euros on legacy space programs to preserve procurement contracts for corrupt companies owned by old money families is an insult to tax payers and workers.
Either leverage reusable tech or develop it yourself.
The Ariane program should have died ten years ago.
Go look up the attitudes of the people who kept it alive. Statements like "reusable is impossible", "any reusable program is going to fail", etc.
I care because I don't want to see billions of taxpayers dollars being literally burned into vapor being celebrated.
It's like a multi-billion dollar sports team celebrating coming in last in their league.
The fact that it uses legacy military companies for manufacture and there's a war going on is literally a benefit lmfao a lot of the same technologies go into Ballistic missiles and other rocket artillery. You're getting too caught up in the ITS A BUSINESS GOTTA MAKE PROFIT AND BE CHEAP AS POSSIBLE!!!!
You realize it's literally cheaper for me to buy a seat on a Russian rocket than it is with SpaceX... until we get fully published figures, you don't even know if it's a massive savings or if its a marginal savings. I hope its massive savings, but again we don't know what fully goes into a refitting and Elon bulllshits everything
You literally sound like a petulant child wanting something they don't have vs accepting the current reality and that things take time. Would you rather them scrub all launches and spend the next 15-20 years developing a reusable vehicle? Or are you hoping they just buy spacex rides/a private company that throws shit at the wall comes in swinging hard with only 3-5 years of dev.. SpaceX has created some painful people online.
Ok so the crazy part about what you are saying here is that missile technology is PRECISELY where europe has fallen behind - like DECADES behind the US and China on military tech.
Both offensive land attack missiles as well as defenisve anti-air missiles are basically non-existent in the euro area (UK storm shadow and nlaw are exceptions... but UK is no longer in EU so...).
As a result, europe spends more than 50% of its military procurement on US systems like patriots, himars batteries (germany's rocket artillery just puts two of them on one truck...) and basically every other large rocket systems.
Follow these guys, task and purpose, binkov and caspian report if you want to learn more about where euro military tech is....
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wvtMWqXr_Kg
My god are you so anal?
I don’t know how critical reusibility is going to be for it, but surely it has its place somewhere, the JWST was launched on an Ariane 5 despite F9 being mature and available but they deemed the A5 as the only vehicle suitable, it maybe a similar case here
JWST's launcher was procured in 2015, many years before the launch. F9 was not yet mature back then, and Falcon Heavy had not flown yet.
Falcon 9 wasn't available, and Falcon Heavy would probably have been required. The agreement to launch on Ariane 5 was finalized in 2007, and planning for that goes back to at least 2004. Falcon 9, let alone Falcon Heavy, didn't exist at the time. Falcon 9 first flew in 2010, and that was different, smaller vehicoe than the current (Block 5) Falcon 9. Block 5 and Falcon Heavy first flew in 2018.
JWST could have launched just as well on Delta IV Heavy, or maybe Atlas V 551 (payload mass to Earth escape on Atlas V is unclear). But aong with instrumentation, the launch on Ariane 5 was part of ESA's contribution to JWST.
If Falcon Heavy existed, it could have launched JWST. The fairing size is often cited, but it likely wouldn't have been a deal breaker. First, the space within the Falcon fairing is the same width as the Ariane and ULA fairings; the issue is length. SpaceX has been working with anothet company and NASA to develop a longer fairing for Falcon Heavy, which they made a protoype of last year. That could have been done years ago if needed. (It's not like the JWST launch was on short notice.) Even the long Ariane 5 fairing needed special vent modifications to support JWST. (And on a couple of launches in 2020 or 2021, its fairing had a minor issue with off-nominal separation that they had to work through prior to launching JWST.)