this post was submitted on 18 Sep 2023
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Have you ever heard o Ariane rockets and ESA?
E.g. upcoming Ariane 6: Up to 21.6 tons per launch, up to 11 launches per year.
Yes, I have. Do you know how much these rockets cost in comparison to reusable rockets? To give you a ballpark, it's about 20 million cheaper for external customers. If SpaceX is launching on their own rocket, the difference is significantly bigger. Estimates are that a Starlink launch costs SpaceX about 15 million. Compare that to 80 million for launching on an Ariane 6, a rocket that has not seen a single successful launch.
It's nowhere near competitive. In fact, it's so bad, that Arianespace has been losing contract over contract to SpaceX. Also attributable to the fact that they are still clinging onto the delay-fraught, single-use Ariane 6.
I'm European, I want the European space industry to succeed. But the odds are stacked against us at this point. Arianespace has blissfully ignored the competition for way too long by resting on government money and discrediting successful competitors.
Until Europe has reusable rockets, there's no point in developing a LEO constellation. It's like trying to build a car when you haven't built the wheel.
OneWeb is already in LEO, and is due to merge with Eutelsat this year.
It's not like the ESA hasn't considered reusable spacecraft, it's that they judged them uneconomical. Reusable engines are in the pipeline, though, this time they did the maths and decided that salvaging those could indeed be more economical.
It's plain simple engineering: Before you send a rocket to space a second time you have to make sure that it's still up to snuff, and inspection of a complicated composite thing can easily be more expensive than new construction.
As to costs: Also as per ESA, SpaceX is practically given free money from NASA in the form of them severely over-paying for launches, and they subsidise the rest of their activities with it.
At some point Arianespace have to realize they're wrong. SpaceX has been reusing the same hardware 10 times or more. They have a flawless success record in recent years, despite the reuse. Wouldn't you say that straight up defies that argument?
And regarding subsidies, sure, SpaceX has received government contracts. So has Arianespace. https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/02/spacex-to-european-competitors-were-not-subsidized-you-are/
At the end of the day it simply doesn't matter: SpaceX is able to offer the same service at a fraction of the cost. I'm a capitalistic world order, that will always result in one company succeeding, while the other goes bankrupt. The only reason Arianespace still exists is that Europe needs independent access to space and is willing to pay for that. Not because they're successfully selling a ton of launches to other countries.
Just to cement this point, Ariane V launched less than 5 times in 2022. Falcon 9 more than 60 times.