Also, nobody outside of SpaceX really knows how much their reusable first stages really saves them. That’s especially true for the Falcon Heavy (which is comparable to the Ariane 6) where the center stage does not / cannot be reused.
The US government is a big customer if that’s what you mean. It does not overpay to use spacex (goes with lowest bidder between them an ULA).
You’re vaguely trying to imply that spacex is only kept alive by the government like Arianespace and that’s pretty dumb. It has at least one US competitor to beat on gov contracts and global competitors on non-gov contracts that it consistently takes the cake from on cost.
> Also, nobody outside of SpaceX really knows how much their reusable first stages really saves them.
The implication being what? It spends a fortune on barges and refurbishing as an elaborate hoax or fraud because its not a significant cost saver?
For heavy, as a sibling pointed out, the center stage is reusable. The recent launches paid extra to sacrifice it for orbital parameters. “At the customers request” on the webcast.
Look, I’m all for competition in the launch space because I don’t like monopoly players, but pretending spacex is like the others living on a government feeding tube is laughable.
Here’s the litmus test. Which company wins bids for non-government contracts?
If it was always going to the lowest bidder, SpaceX would beat ULA on price on most missions and ULA would likely no longer be viable. They make sure ULA wins enough contracts to remain viable, even if that costs more than giving them to SpaceX
Arianespace is a shitshow. Our Yankee analogs are Boeing and Lockheed. They could each absorb unlimited funding to design substandard packaging for peanuts.
The US government funds satellite/space stuff generally. Look at how much money has been spent on DoD polar orbit, MEO (GPS, etc) and geostationary orbit satellite development, construction, launch costs and associated earth station construction over the past 20 years. Mostly from traditional DoD contractors like Boeing and United Launch Alliance. Throwing some money at SpaceX is actually quite "new".
If you stop building any highly technical thing for a long period of time, you lose the institutional knowledge base and engineers/technicians who can do it. The UK had a great deal of trouble and delays when they re-started nuclear submarine construction after a 15+ year gap with the Astute class, because everyone who was involved in that industry had gone and done something else or retired. It's pretty logical from a national-security point of view that the Europeans and ESA want to maintain a minimum level of capability to launch stuff on their own, even if it's not as "good" as a re-usable Falcon 9 / Falcon Heavy.
The US government "funds" SpaceX in the same way you fund Apple when you buy an iPhone or Shell when you buy gas.
They are a customer, they pay for a product/service.
They are not giving money for free just to keep them afloat.
It's a bit different. Without the US gov as a early customer taking lots of risk, they company wouldn't exist. Apple or Shell wouldn't change even if 100,000 customers decided not to buy their products/service anymore.
> The first two Falcon 1 launches were purchased by the United States Department of Defense under a program that evaluates new US launch vehicles suitable for use by DARPA. The first three launches of the rocket, between 2006 and 2008, all resulted in failures, which almost ended the company. Financing for Tesla Motors had failed, as well, and consequently Tesla, SolarCity, and Musk personally were all nearly bankrupt at the same time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX#2005%E2%80%932009:_Falc...
OK, it's like early Apple customers buying the Apple I.
Without those customers taking the risk Apple wouldn't exist today.
Still just a customer buying something, not "funding" in the way you make it sound.
SpaceX only get paid as they can deliver. Europe cover the cost of Arianne 6 development, and will continue to do so.
Falcon 9 will likely have up to 100 launches in 2023. Arianne 6 is planned to have at most a dozen launch when it’s matured, which is still several years away
Maybe I'm reading too much into this, but to me it came across as the gov't giving money to SpaceX just to keep it alive instead of the US gov't actively doing business with a company successfully launching their assets into orbit.
NASA continuing to award Blue Origin contracts is funding BO since they haven't done anything.
Blue Origin is almost completely irrelevant. Jeff Bezos may buy United Launch Alliance, but it likely won't help given Blue Origin's abysmal track record.
Amazon's Project Kuiper (the Starlink competitor) has no affordable launch provider since they're avoiding SpaceX, so it's also dead in the water.
If that’s true there’s likely major managerial or structural issues that are gumming things up.
From [0]:
> As a space reporter, I have spoken with dozens of current and former Blue Origin employees, and virtually none of them have had anything positive to say about Smith's tenure as chief executive. I asked one current employee about the hiring of Limp on Monday afternoon, and their response was, "Anything is better than Bob."
[0]: https://arstechnica.com/space/2023/09/bob-smith-is-finally-g...
It is the platform NASA is using for the upcoming ESCAPADE mission to Mars. And it was used for the CAPSTONE Lunar mission, for example.
As to whether Amazon's Spacelink competitor will be launched depends on whether BO can get their New Glenn rocket - a Falcon 9 competitor - up and running. If they do they should be able to 'launch their own dogfood' just like SpaceX is doing with Starlink on Falcon 9.
The relationship between ESA and Arianespace is not necessarily that fundamentally different to that of NASA and SpaceX. Arianespace is only partially state owned (it's a join venture of two publicaclly traded companies) and in some ways it was the SpaceX of the 80s and 90s.Ariane 4 was very competitive and at some point had the majority of the commercial satellite launch market.
Of course like the rest of Europe stagnation has set in and it was left behind over the last 10-20 years.
Note that they are with... some? success trying to greatly reduce costs as a response to SpaceX. Have you heard of any other launcher company trying that recently?
Airbus owns 50% of Arianespace so it makes sense.
> Have you heard of any other launcher company trying that recently?
I guess the issue is that it's such a big market and there isn't a lot of competition and everything is partially or mostly subsidized by governments (through NASA or ESA) how all have their own agendas which introduces a massive amount of inefficiencies. It's not like Ariane 6 would have ever been developed for entirely commercial purposes.
I think they just gave contracts, not any grants or funding. And they got contract after successful test flight of falcon 9 afaik. I would hardly consider this heavy.
As for the contract, it was a $1.6B contract, not small. And sure, it wasn't a grant, something was expected in return, but in practice, it was essentially the same, SpaceX wouldn't have been able to survive without it, and grant or contract, had they missed the chance, it would have been the end. Also, the US regularly gives new contracts to SpaceX, and I suspect at an inflated price compared to purely commercial launches. In theory, these are not subsidies, but in practice, I can't imagine NASA and the US government not do anything in their power to keep SpaceX healthy as they don't have anything better by far.
They do cost more than commercial launches, but that is because they have extra requirements that commercial customers don't, and that adds a bunch to the total cost to fly those missions.
https://spacenews.com/40006spacex-says-requirements-not-mark...
[1]: https://www.vox.com/2014/5/5/5674744/how-nasa-became-utterly...
Your link says that US had no homegrown option, when it used russian rockets.
The only part that matches “because cheaper”, was atlas rockets using soviet engines, but that also had additional reasoning of keeping russian rocket engineers away from iran and north Korea.
So overall, US definitely will subsidise a US company. (If not spacex, then other company which demonstrates competence) Strategically it is a must have capability. If you depend on others, you open your self up for bunch of risks.
Even if there were superior foreign options NASA/etc. would rather work with an American company as long as it’s not hopelessly behind.
Had Arianespace been required to actually do the same thing, it would likely have cost the government 4+ billion $.
So this 'not small' contract was actually an incredible hart to fulfill and incredibly risky gamble by SpaceX.
SpaceX is the exception here
The other US competitors are kinda behind as well, see the ULA Vulcan, or non-existent
So yeah it's not about being the cheapest, it's about having the capability
The main point is for Europe to have launch capabilities and maintain their skills. That's also the reason why ESA is so inefficient, they are here mostly because of politics.
If it wasn't for that, they would have used US, Russian or Chinese rockets.
I suspect that the US gave a heavy push to SpaceX (they saved them from bankruptcy in the early days) because they were in the same situation with NASA. SpaceX was their chance, and they took it, they are also keeping an eye on Blue Origin, because who knows what will happen next.