News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on Arianespace CEO: Europe won't have reusable rockets for another decade. Parent comment

Re:Arianespace CEO: Europe won't have reusable rockets for a... by panick21_ on Friday May 05, 2023 @01:16PM (#35832311)
> Falcon 1 which was expandable, nothing special and cost ~$100 million was privately funded

Nothing special just the first privately funded rocket to make it to orbit. The first new rocket engine developed in the US for decades.

> (Regardless of Musk's posturing and outright lies)

Musk has always acknowledged and publicly called out for the COTS contracts as being incredibly important and even saving SpaceX.

> For starters, Tesla and SpaceX both only happened due to US government subsidies

Both of those are wrong. Tesla was almost 10 years in before they received a public loan, and the accepted it because it was a slightly better deal then they could have gotten privately but they had other funding options.

SpaceX Falcon 1 didn't happen because of the government. The governments contract did accelerate the Falcon 9 project however.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Arianespace CEO: Europe won't have reusable rockets for a... by orbital-decay on Friday May 05, 2023 @02:33PM (#35833378)
> Nothing special just the first privately funded rocket to make it to orbit.

That would be Pegasus in 1990, though.

> The first new rocket engine developed in the US for decades.

There were plenty of engines developed in the US in that timeframe. Merlin in particular was a "spiritual successor" of the Fastrac, and Kestrel was implemented by the former Beal Aerospace engineers who worked on BA-2 before being hired by SpaceX.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Arianespace CEO: Europe won't have reusable rockets for a... by peterfirefly on Friday May 05, 2023 @03:14PM (#35833907)
Pegasus didn't have much of a path towards bigger payloads, though.

(It's launched from underneath an airplane.)

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Arianespace CEO: Europe won't have reusable rockets for a... by panick21_ on Friday May 05, 2023 @04:49PM (#35834990)
> That would be Pegasus in 1990, though.

Fair point.

> There were plenty of engines developed in the US in that timeframe.

Engines that actually flew or at least fully finished development. As far as I know there are none.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Arianespace CEO: Europe won't have reusable rockets for a... by orbital-decay on Friday May 05, 2023 @07:50PM (#35836546)
BA-810 (by a SpaceX predecessor, huge cheap engine!), Fastrac, RS-68, XRS-2200, TR-106, to name a few. These are only large liquid fuel engines created from scratch which either flew or have been fully tested in the US in a decade before the Merlin-1A. There were many more solids, derivatives, small engines, upper stage engines etc.
[ Parent | on HN ]