Europe's new Ariane 6 rocket powers into space

Re:Europe's new Ariane 6 rocket powers into space by nordsieck on Wednesday July 10, 2024 @12:11PM (#40928441)

> A rocket that's thrown away was cheaper per flight than the shuttles, which were only partly discarded. It all depends on how much does it cost to build vs refurbish. Falcon 9 was designed to be easily refurbished and Ariane 6 was designed to be cheap to build.

It's not just that the Shuttle was expensive to refurbish. It was also very expensive to build.

Whereas Falcon 9 is much less expensive to build new than Ariane 6.

Ariane 6 was designed to be cheaper to build (cheaper than Ariane 5, that is).

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Re:Europe's new Ariane 6 rocket powers into space by TMWNN on Thursday July 11, 2024 @11:25PM (#40942519)

>Whereas Falcon 9 is much less expensive to build new than Ariane 6.

For context, my understanding is that SpaceX builds one new Falcon 9 upper stage (not reused) every day. I doubt there is another entity on earth building a new rocket every month.

SpaceX has a large fleet of Falcon 9 reusable boosters, but still needs to build one every now and then.

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Re:Europe's new Ariane 6 rocket powers into space by nordsieck on Friday July 12, 2024 @01:01PM (#40947369)

> For context, my understanding is that SpaceX builds one new Falcon 9 upper stage (not reused) every day.

Probably not quite that often. They're aiming to launch ~150 this year (although with the recent RUD, that'll be pretty tough). But yeah - 1 every other day is still very impressive.

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