Chinese company lands a reusable Falcon-9 analog

arstechnica.com

5 points·huhtenberg··5 comments

Europe has managed, again, to self-destruct along the way. Last Russia carried out more launches than Europe and India was just behind.

Europe has been relying on the US for a lot of its space activities and was caught unprepared by the US becoming an unreliable partner. It takes some time to regroup a whole industry.

Not so. Europe has the Guiana Space Centre and Ariane. Arianeespace was the world's first commercial launch service provider.

But in a very European fashionthey were slow to innovate and to adapt and were completely blown out of the water by SpaceX (long before the US "became an unreliable partner", which is not super relevant here). Now China is catching up and had 10x more launches than Europe in 2025, and Europe is not.

They never had to innovate the same way NASA never had to. Both take low risk development paths because if they invested in something like reusable rockets before the idea was proven and it didn’t pan out there would be a political shitstorm and everyone would lose their heads. And jobs.

Well they did have to innovate once SpaceX showed up, didn't they? But they played a Nokia, instead...

And soon they'll a double whammy of Chinese launchers on the global market.

Arcane has become a launcher for EU government agencies at higher cost. But the commercial market is lost.

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