[HN Gopher] Ariane 6 cost and delays bring European launch indus...
___________________________________________________________________
Ariane 6 cost and delays bring European launch industry to a
breaking point
Author : xoa
Score : 22 points
Date : 2023-11-06 19:55 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (arstechnica.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (arstechnica.com)
| elteto wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| A bit like the infamous interview of Steve Ballmer (along with
| Mike Zafirovski) on the iPhone launch ("it doesn't have a
| keyboard!")...
| bowsamic wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Surely a swiping keyboard is faster than the "array of tiny
| keys" approach. It's a much lighter touch.
| mytailorisrich wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| LtWorf wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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
| elteto wrote:
| 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.
| Dig1t wrote:
| 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?
| xoa wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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.
| nickik wrote:
| > The EU should be focused on generating demand like Commercial
| Cargo/Commercial Crew did
|
| The EU has long given up on Cargo supply to ISS and that budget
| is bound in the Orion Service module.
|
| And Crew wont happen in Europe anytime soon.
|
| They simply don't have those things, and partly this is because
| of their own bad planning and investment.
|
| > then allowing fixed price providers to meet it however they
| can
|
| The problem is there are no such provider and there wont be
| anytime soon. Even if they were, they would be small providers
| who can't launch 90% of the value that Europe might want to
| launch to orbit in the next decade.
|
| So sure this is a nice sentiment but its not realistic anytime
| soon.
|
| > Ariane has turned into a lumbering zombie
|
| It always was. Its just that the American and Russians took
| themselves out of the game by pure stupidity. So Europe was
| really the only option left.
| snakeyjake wrote:
| 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.
| swframe2 wrote:
| (a crazy idea I wanted to get feedback on) Wouldn't it be much
| easier if everyone licensed tech from space-x? (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. )
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2023-11-06 21:00 UTC)