Is that really true? I thought it was owned 50:50 by Safran and Airbus which are both publicly traded companies.
~25% of Airbus is owned by France, Germany and Spain. France owes ~11% of Safran. So France seems to own only ~10% of ArianeSpace
[1] https://www.arianespace.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/Corpo...
> "Let us say we had ten guaranteed launches per year in Europe and we had a rocket which we can use ten times—we would build exactly one rocket per year. That makes no sense. I cannot tell my teams: 'Goodbye, see you next year!'"
https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/05/ariane-chief-seems-f...
I remember one of the execs of ArianeSpace or ESA just a couple years ago stating on radio with much confidence that SpaceX would never manage to reuse a rocket.
Sure. See the rest of the article. Everyone else has been saying the same for a decade.
Note that the reusable heavy launcher he’s pitching is still aiming to deliver in a decade what SpaceX can do today. It’s not a strategic option, it’s a jobs programme.
If ESA has 100 payloads, it can just book 90 of them on SpaceX and the mandated 10 of ArianeSpace (to keep the political pork happy), and lose only 10% efficiency (considering Ariane flight is twice as expensive as SpaceX).
The problem is that ESA has no scalable payload economy, nobody has a good reason yet to launch that much mass. SpaceX is its own customer with Starlink for scalable launches, but ESA or NASA will not deliver 100 sattelites per year.
It's not a functional back-up. Not for any commercial use case relevant outside the military.
If all you want is a back-up for military launches, the Ariane 5ME was a better, cheaper option that could have bridged the gap to a competitive reusable [1]. The billions of dollars wasted on Ariane 6 would have put Europe into the running for a competitive launch vehicle in the 2030s. Instead, we have Arianespace's CEO pitching another boondoggle to ensure Europe has a Falcon Heavy by the 2030s.
So yes, having 10% launch capability is better than zero. But that 10% could have been bought for much cheaper. And saying 90% of your space industry is subject to foreign control versus 100% is a bit milquetoast, particularly when the alternative would have been R&D to bring that down to e.g. 50%.
True, but the EU has tight rules about government subsidies (TFEU art. 107-109) which don't have equivalent in the US.
> Ariane 6 is obsolete on arrival; ArianeSpace’s CEO admitted as much in asking the ESA to fund a reusable heavy booster like Falcon Heavy [3].
This is true though.
ESA member states contributed €2.815 billion for the development of Ariane 6. Industry contributed €400 million.
Additionally, the member states have agreed to subsidize the Ariane 6 to the tune of €340 million annually.
Not a significant source of capital. NASA COTS was Hawthorne’s public-money shot in the arm.
Then for the Falcon 9, they got the COTS contract for resupply of the station. Or rather they got a contract that would pay money if they were successful in executing. This funding was mostly for the Dragon Space craft, but it also funded Falcon 9. But that was a much smaller number then Ariane 6.
Then SpaceX got Commercial Crew, for 2.6 billion $. That mostly funded Crew Dragon space craft. But it also required human rating of Falcon 9. So those 2.6 billion $ were not assigned X amount for Dragon, Y for Falcon 9. SpaceX was just required to launch people to ISS and bring them back with NASA overview. During this time SpaceX finished the Block 5 version, and that was human rated.
Beyond that SpaceX did most of the development on the re-usability of Falcon 9 on their own money. They used costumer missions to do a lot of the testing. But importantly, SpaceX never got any money from NASA to develop re-usability.
Same goes for Falcon Heavy. SpaceX sold Falcon Heavy to DoD but they didn't get any development contract for the rocket itself. Falcon Heavy was fully developed by SpaceX on their own money.
SpaceX did miss out on a major DoD development funding when they bid Starship and DoD did want it. Other companies like BlueOrigin and ULA got a huge amount of money.
Both Raptor and Starship were mostly on SpaceX as well. A very early version of Raptor, when it was very different from what is now, once got a DoD research contract. Only when there was a competition for Human Moon Lander System, and Starship got selected, was government spending any money on Starship. And HLS is milestone based, so that will help SpaceX a little to pay for Starship. But a lot of that money will go into the customized version of Starship for use as a moon lander.
Starlink is basically fully funded by SpaceX. There never was any development money.
So in totality, SpaceX doesn't really get much development money for rockets or engine. They get money for spacecraft (Dragon 1, Crew Dragon, Cargo Dragon), and they just have to make sure they have a rocket that they can launch on. They could also just buy somebody else rocket, but of course that's not what SpaceX wants to do.
For all this stuff, Starship, Starlink and so on, they did raise like 10 billion $. That the majority of their major developments.
Aviation and space have been a super-highly subsidized environment since day one, on both sides of the Atlantic.
So does ArianeSpace [1]. (It’s majority owned by the French state. EDIT: It’s not.)
> no clear public indication of how reusable its rockets really are or their refurb cost
Refurb rates and turnaround times for Falcon 9 first stages are publicly documented [2]. Refurb costs are more opaque, but they’d have to be multiples of what SpaceX charges to approach Ariane 6’s cost projections.
Ariane 6 is obsolete on arrival; ArianeSpace’s CEO admitted as much in asking the ESA to fund a reusable heavy booster like Falcon Heavy [3].
[1] https://www.space.com/europe-ariane-6-rocket-debut-launch
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Falcon_9_first-stage_b...
[3] https://www.illdefined.space/arianespace-the-only-fish-in-th...