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nordsieck

> Ariane is one generation behind SpaceX, but that still puts them on second place.

The first doesn't imply the second.

Ariane 6 is behind:

* ULA's Vulcan

* SpaceX's F9/FH

* SpaceX's Starship (who knows when it'll start launching payloads)

* Blue Origin's New Glenn (supposed to be launched in September)

in terms of raw performance as well as $/kg.

There are also a number of other rockets like RocketLab's Neutron and Relativity's Terran R that seem like they'll outcompete Ariane 6.

The medium/heavy lift market is getting much more crowded than it has been in the past.

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Two operational, and a bunch of dreams.

Right now, Europe has a functioning rocket program under their own control.

I think it's understandable for an engineering community to talk about the tech, but people seem to be forgetting the geopolitics.

> Two operational, and a bunch of dreams.

Lol.

Starship has successfully launched more than Ariane 6. The only reason they aren't launching payloads right now is because they want to nail down reuse first.

There's less info on New Glenn, but a lot more footage has come out since David Limp took over. And the DoD thinks Blue Origin has a good enough shot at launching this year that they added them to NSSLv3.

> Right now, Europe has a functioning rocket program under their own control.

> I think it's understandable for an engineering community to talk about the tech, but people seem to be forgetting the geopolitics.

Sure.

But that would have also been true if they'd just kept Ariane 5.

A lot of people are dumping on Ariane 6 because ArianeGroup spent a bunch of money and time to make a rocket that's not that much better than the previous one. When they could have made an actually competitive rocket instead.

You must have some wild dreams. Starship and New Glenn are basically as dreamy as Ariane 6. Starship is essentially operational as an expendable launcher already, and NG is starting the paperwork for first launch.

Ariane 6 will serve fine as an "assured access to space" for the local market (which is important), and good on them for finally getting it off the ground. But it's design goal was "Falcon 9 competitor" and it certainly isn't.

Ariane 6 has flow successfully. New Glenn is missing in action, and Starship still has a long way to go before it is ready to actually put payloads in orbit. Ariane 6 is ahead of both, given it has actually flown and delivered satellites to orbit.

Starship oughta be delivering payloads to orbit within 12 months.

They had that before Ariane 6 that cost 5 billion $.

Europe again has one functioning rocket - after it had 3: - Soyuz from Kourou, which understandably is no longer politically viable now. - Ariane 5 - Vega/Vega C (which keeps crashing in its latest iteration) Not I good track record I'm afraid.

Not to mention the quite cheap flight-proven Indian rockets & a whole bunch of traditional + private Chinese companies, some actively trying to clone Falcon 9 or even Starship.

> Not to mention the quite cheap flight-proven Indian rockets & a whole bunch of traditional + private Chinese companies, some actively trying to clone Falcon 9 or even Starship.

It seems like most of the world has decided not to fly on Chinese rockets, so those aren't really competition.

But I totally agree with regard to India: PSLV and GSLV are both good, competitive rockets. It'd kind of a shame that they don't launch more often. It makes me wonder if there's some sort of organizational dysfunction going on. It does sound like they're going to be launching OneWeb going forward, though, which is nice.

> It seems like most of the world has decided not to fly on Chinese rockets, so those aren't really competition.

The Chinese market is so large that this does not matter: https://payloadspace.com/2023-orbital-launches-by-country/

India's space program/industry, though significant, is much smaller than China's. SpaceX makes up 90% of USA's launches at present.

    US: 109.
    China: 67.
    Russia: 19.
    Europe: 3.
    Other: 25.

Relying on a company which is headed by a famously unreliable narcissist seems like a bad choice though, I wouldn't really count those SpaceX options as proper alternatives

EDIT: I would like downvotes to explain their reasoning.

It's a tired ad hominem, all the evidence shows that SpaceX is by far the most reliable operator in the space industry right now.

When the question is "should we trust this guy?", judging the character of the guy based on past behavior and statements is not a fallacy.

What exactly has Musk actually done that goes so far beyond the pale of typical corporate shenanigans that it would register as not being trustworthy to governments? At most he has had overly optimistic timelines, overly optimistic social media statements about future capabilities, a bunch of business ideas that didn't pan out and some QA issues in a car manufacturer. This is pretty par for the course for every business.

The whining about him being untrustworthy stems almost entirely from him having different political views (and not being afraid to voice them), and the stream of mostly unsubstantiated hit pieces and awful reporting regarding Starlink in Ukraine.

With the way you guys talk about it though, he might as well have personally caused the crash of more than two full passenger jets.

I wouldn't downplay the Starlink Ukraine thing the way you're doing. But if you're still a Musk apologist after all these years, there's nothing I can say to convince you.

For many of us, the whole diver pedophilia accusation was enough, and that pales in comparison to everything that came after.

Why wouldn't I downplay the Starlink Ukraine thing, when everything about it from the media has been at best misleading?

The usage of Starlink to control drones wasn't allowed because that is not a civilian-style use case and thus would require the US government to provide authorization (remember that Starlink was initially provided directly by SpaceX without going through typical US government aid processes). The reports about outages buried the lede that the terminals with the outage were ones provided and paid for by third parties that had decided to stop paying for them, and the reports themselves mentioned that Ukraine had swapped them out. The usage of Starlink in Crimea had always been disallowed to prevent Russian usage, and to be in compliance with US policy at the time. Ukraine had made the unreasonable request of having it enabled with a day's notice, which was obviously too fast for a decision to be made, it was enabled a few months later when things had been properly worked out with both governments (this was still well before the story ever became public). As for Russia using captured Starlink terminals, the DoD has also come out in support of SpaceX's efforts to mitigate it, making it clear that it isn't an easy problem to solve, as they need to somehow distinguish between third party terminals in use by Ukraine, from terminals captured or black-market imported by Russia being operated in Ukraine.

There's nothing you can say to convince me because you likely have nothing to say that is backed up by facts. I'm not saying you have to like him, I'm saying that there's nothing he or his companies have done that makes them any less trustworthy or any more untrustworthy, compared to any other company the government works with. You'd have to be able to point to something worse than even what Boeing has done, considering that the US govt continues to consider Boeing to be an important defense partner.

And that’s before we start counting in China and, soon, possibly, India.

Ariana 6 might be the stupidest civil aerospace project in the world after Boeing’s Starliner.

> And that’s before we start counting in China

China is... weird.

Most of the rockets they launch are small hypergolic rockets (Long March 2-4) with clear ICBM heritage. Which are multiple generations "behind" Ariane 6.

They do have some more modern cryogenic rockets, but they can't seem to scale those operationally. Presumably it'll happen eventually. But who knows when that'll be.

> Most of the rockets they launch are small hypergolic rockets

They’re decently far along on their reusable booster [1], with a methalox engine being developed by a private company [2].

Of course, everything looks cute until it flies. But that programme is arguably ahead of anything ArianeSpace is working on.

[1] https://spacenews.com/china-to-debut-large-reusable-rockets-...

[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longyun_(rocket_engine)

HN is amazing:

Europe does something

> Aha it's bad why did they even try

Europe doesn't do anything

> Aha Europe always late, never innovate, Europe bad

I mean maybe what they do is not good, and also not doing anything is bad too?

I don't see the contradiction what you seem to be implying.

Just because something must be done, doesn't mean that anything done should be celebrated. One can still do the wrong thing, and people can comment on that.

Also HN is not a single entity. Even if you would see some contradiction between attitudes (which I don't see here) it could be still explained by the fact that many different people post on HN and they have different opinions, thoughts and values.

As an European, this project is quite typical for Europe. Technically behind the times, serves French strategic interests, non-competitive on the private launch market.

"Doing something" isn't a goal in itself. Ariane 6 in context of the 2020s is similar to programming a new MySpace app for Symbian OS right now. Hard work, costly, needs a lot of qualified workforce, and the product has very limited audience.

So the entire world should rather be dependent on SpaceX, and be done with it?

Arianespace had the lead and lost it, because it kept the old way of doing things. Or are you arguing Ariane 5 was technically behind and wasn't competitive in the '00s?

Ariane 6 is not that far behind the other "old space" companies, which the US is struggling to keep around as alternatives to SpaceX. It's not like Boeing and ULA are doing much better.

We should be critical of Arianespace, and find ways to get it to improve, but just throwing everything at SpaceX will do nothing to keep them honest.

"So the entire world should rather be dependent on SpaceX, and be done with it?"

That is not what I said. We badly need (real) alternatives.

But French-government-need-driven development is bringing us nowhere. Paris is happy to have six launches a year and doesn't feel the need to finance and support anything beyond that. The rest of the EU doesn't seem to have any strong motivations either.

Yes, the US old space is exactly as bad.

> doesn't feel the need to finance and support anything beyond

Where did you get that idea from? They are financing the development of Ariane Next - Europe's version of a Falcon Heavy - just as the other ESA members do.

> the entire world should rather be dependent on SpaceX, and be done with it?

No, compete. There is a menagerie of European space start-ups starved of oxygen by ArianeSpace.

Arianespace is Europe’s ULA. Europe with Ariane 6 is about as dependent on SpaceX as Europe without. The difference is whether it will continue to be dependent on SpaceX. Every euro that goes to Arianespace cements SpaceX’s global dominance.

> Arianespace had the lead and lost it

When was Arianespace in the lead?

> Ariane 6 is not that far behind the other "old space" companies

Granted. Not a great show for €5bn.

The space start-ups are starving, because nobody sees any business opportunities there, and because governments don't care about rockets beyond baseline national security needs. If somebody actually wanted a reusable rocket, the real issue would be engineering, not funding. Even a small country like Finland could run two programs the scale of Ariane 6 with the money it's currently using to support Ukraine.

> space start-ups are starving, because nobody sees any business opportunities there

I’ve raised money for and invested in space start-ups. There is a lot of opportunity. There are even more vapid PowerPoint decks.

> If somebody actually wanted a reusable rocket, the real issue would be engineering, not funding

It’s absolutely a problem of funding. You need to be able to tell a group of highly-demanded engineers with other life options that they will have access to the materials and resources repeated destructive validation of exorbitantly-expensive kit requires.

That doesn’t mean any numpty with a few billion can do it. But, like, Europe could. (It hasn’t because that would threaten Ariane 6.)

> Even a small country like Finland could run two programs the scale of Ariane 6 with the money it's currently using to support Ukraine

But they don’t.

The lack of funding reflects the lack of interest. For-profit investors don't see the business opportunity and governments don't see the need. There are other uses for the money, and the people with money don't want better rockets that much. Rockets are not particularly expensive, but they are also not particularly relevant.

IMO, a big problem is that SpaceX makes it difficult to enter the market. They keep their prices very low, and have an amazing reliability record. Which makes it tough to close a business case around medium/heavy lift rockets. Especially taking into account development risk.

And it's not any easier trying to make a small-lift rocket. They suck the volume out of that market with their Transporter and Bandwagon launches.

> lack of funding reflects the lack of interest. For-profit investors don't see the business opportunity

Not true. Launch and propulsion are amply funded. (If you have a good idea in the space, and capacity to execute, I’d love to connect.)

> Rockets are not particularly expensive, but they are also not particularly relevant

Hell of a lot more to launch than just rockets. And there is demand, today, for non-SpaceX launch providers.

Plenty of capital stands ready for this sector. And hundreds of millions are deployed every quarter. (Yes, private capital, occasionally in the billions.) SpaceX crowds out the market, yes, but Arianespace suffocates it by providing the same crowding effect with none of the utility in pay-off. And part of SpaceX’s wake comes in the form of commodification, particularly at the low-mass end. (To be clear, I think smalsat launch is overblown.)

From about 1990 to about 2016 Arianespace was the leader in commercial (meaning mostly GEO) launch, and acted like it. (Actually, they still do, just it's less believable now.)

In retrospect, I don't think they ever really had the eye of the tiger; mostly they managed to be less terrible than the competition. The US competitors got far too fat at the government teat and didn't even try, and the Russians couldn't keep Proton from 'sploding.

They'd probably still be king of the (small and expensive) hill without SpaceX. But they'd be in hot soup today, if some sort of LEO constellation market had come around without Falcon, 'cause they wouldn't even have started on Ariane 6 and Ariane 5 isn't well suited for that, and "Europeanized" Soyuz, which they'd use for that, would be unavailable due to Russian imperialism.

> They'd probably still be king of the (small and expensive) hill without SpaceX.

Maybe.

IMO, ULA's Vulcan is more commercially competitive than Ariane 6.

But both rockets were developed in response to SpaceX, so maybe neither would have been made otherwise. In which case, ULA would be in even more hot water than ArianeGroup, since they wouldn't be able to get engines for Atlas V post Ukraine war.

> When was Arianespace in the lead?

Before the rise of SpaceX.

> For over 20 years, Ariane rockets dominated commercial launch—by 2004, Arianespace had 50 percent of the global market for commercial launches.

https://www.csis.org/analysis/what-can-we-learn-ariane-futur...

>"Doing something" isn't a goal in itself.

Almost all space activity, with the exception of satellite launches, is useless. Let's say we build a Mars and Moon colony, then what? You do it, because you want it as a goal in itself. If you don't grasp that, you don't understand anything about space.

The same fundamental problem also applies to the idea of an economy that is 100% productive and that consumption is evil. If you get rid of consumers, you can also get rid of the producers. You can get rid of the economy. No human existence can be justified under the guise of "productivity" unless that productivity leads up to some consumptive activity.

"If you don't grasp that, you don't understand anything about space."

That's quite a self-confident, if not arrogant, take, which also misinterpretes my words.

Ariane 6 is a launcher, not a Moon base. Launchers should strive to be economical, because there is a real orbital economy, as you admit, and because the entities which launch them may be cash-strapped.

You yourself wouldn't buy a car or a bicycle that would have to be discarded after the first trip.

Or if your point is that Ariane 6 is basically a white elephant project, well, that would be pretty damning.

You could probably have said the same about Airbus at some point. But now we are pretty happy we don't have to rely on Boeing.

Airbus hasn't been making excuses about how they don't need to compete with Boeing for a decade. They've been focusing on being actually competitive.

Also there is real competition downmarket for regional jets

You’ll find no complaints out of me on ESA’s scientific missions. ArianeSpace is simply a shitshow. And this isn’t a European problem—I’ll call out ULA and Boeing at keeping them company.

It's bit like the "too big to fail" that happens to banks, but "too strategic to fail", which is common in aerospace with dual civilian/military applications.

Companies in that space can have islands of inconceivable incompetence that remain surprisingly stable.

Nonsense. The issue here is that they're doing the wrong thing. SpaceX proved reusable rockets were the future at about the same time Arianne 6 got funding to begin development (2016). They should have cancelled the project and started again with a reusable rocket at that point. Of course they didn't because of politics, but it does mean they did a stupid thing and spent a ton of money on a rocket that was obsolete before it left the drawing board, just like SLS.

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