You must have some wild dreams. Starship and New Glenn are basically as dreamy as Ariane 6. Starship is essentially operational as an expendable launcher already, and NG is starting the paperwork for first launch.

Ariane 6 will serve fine as an "assured access to space" for the local market (which is important), and good on them for finally getting it off the ground. But it's design goal was "Falcon 9 competitor" and it certainly isn't.

Ariane 6 has flow successfully. New Glenn is missing in action, and Starship still has a long way to go before it is ready to actually put payloads in orbit. Ariane 6 is ahead of both, given it has actually flown and delivered satellites to orbit.

Starship oughta be delivering payloads to orbit within 12 months.

Europe again has one functioning rocket - after it had 3: - Soyuz from Kourou, which understandably is no longer politically viable now. - Ariane 5 - Vega/Vega C (which keeps crashing in its latest iteration) Not I good track record I'm afraid.

They had that before Ariane 6 that cost 5 billion $.

> Two operational, and a bunch of dreams.

Lol.

Starship has successfully launched more than Ariane 6. The only reason they aren't launching payloads right now is because they want to nail down reuse first.

There's less info on New Glenn, but a lot more footage has come out since David Limp took over. And the DoD thinks Blue Origin has a good enough shot at launching this year that they added them to NSSLv3.

> Right now, Europe has a functioning rocket program under their own control.

> I think it's understandable for an engineering community to talk about the tech, but people seem to be forgetting the geopolitics.

Sure.

But that would have also been true if they'd just kept Ariane 5.

A lot of people are dumping on Ariane 6 because ArianeGroup spent a bunch of money and time to make a rocket that's not that much better than the previous one. When they could have made an actually competitive rocket instead.