As the SpaceX steamroller surges, European rocket industry vows to resist

https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/07/as-the-spacex-steamroller-surges-european-rocket-industry-vows-to-resist/

by Tomte • 8 years ago

113 117 8 years ago

quotemstr• 8 years ago

My first instinct was amusement, seeing ESA's blatant denial and sour-grape-ization of SpaceX. But then I remembered that we all work on projects which someday will be similarly obsolete, and I can only hope we handle the situation a bit more gracefully and effectivity.

JumpCrisscross10• 8 years ago

if Europe ever did develop a reusable rocket, one that could fly all the missions in a year, this would be unhelpful politically. What would the engine and booster factories sprinkled across Europe do if they built one rocket and then had 11 months off?

mschuster91• 8 years ago

This problem will also bite the US launch industry. Hard.

Once SpaceX has proven they can do safe crewed flights and Blue Origin goes beyond testing flights, why is there a reason to pay the huge ULA markup any more?

ULA, as well as Airbus, has a problem: they're constantly being meddled with by politicians without any idea what they're doing and decide stuff that's totally unreasonable from an economical point but helpful for their (or their party's) reelections. Airbus employs 130k people, Boeing 140k and Lockheed 100k, and in addition there are a lot of people in the supplier companies. That's a lot of voters, and the companies are often enough big employers on a regional/local level.

Which means: SpaceX and Blue Origin will conquer the entire commercial sector plus an enormous amount of US government work. EU-founded projects will (politically mandated) stick to Airbus, but the political inability of Airbus to innovate will lead everything else go to SpaceX/BO. And the taxpayer will have to "save" them... or have to deal with hundreds of thousands people out of jobs.

JumpCrisscross10• 8 years ago

This problem will also bite the US launch industry

I don't think so. ULA was formed in 2006 [1]. Before that, the U.S. launch market was competitive within itself and with the Russians. The Falcon 9 first flew in 2015 (EDIT: "first flew commercially in 2013") [2], returning the American market to a competitive state. American aerospace engineers are used to working in a competitive culture. If ULA doesn't become competitive, either itself or by splitting, there are plenty of launch start-ups beyond SpaceX and Blue Origin hiring away that talent.

In contrast, the European market has no similar tradition of competition in launch services. The reaction to SpaceX isn't to consider a novel platform. It's to plod on with the old and raise the gates around European launch buyers.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Launch_Alliance

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falcon_9

no1youknowz• 8 years ago

ULA, as well as Airbus, has a problem

Yep, exactly the same problem as IBM, Blackberry, and many other companies who were at the top and then either stopped innovating or got to big and slow.

Having the bigger companies fail in a respect is a good thing. Have those engineers go back into the free market. Have them create companies and make competition. Push technologies forward and pricing down.

Look at Rocket Lab and their Electron rocket. Pretty amazing if you ask me and didn't really cost that much.

Let the free market sort things out. It always does. Unless of course you start involving the government with their jobs program and you get an SLS rocket that costs $2b each and isn't reusable.

What we need are many more companies providing launch services. Lets get the cost down to $1k to send someone up. Lets get more companies building infrastructure in space, so we have 10, 20 or 50 space stations in LEO.

There's so much up for grabs, but it won't be available if we start protectionist policies.

pocketstar• 8 years ago

ULA has 100% mission success. The Atlas family has 100% mission sucess since 1957. The ULA markup is justified for a high value mission. BO and spaceX have big shoes to fill when it comea to building industry and insurer trust. The Amos 8 failure was an expensive lesson for spacex.

khuey• 8 years ago

Airbus seems to manage just fine building reusable airplanes.

magduf3• 8 years ago

It's like the thing about the mouse complaining that the cheese was moved.

Airplanes (or "aeroplanes" on that side of the pond) have always been reusable, so Airbus was able to establish itself and build a stable business building them.

Rockets have always been non-reusable (until SpaceX), so ArianeGroup built a stable business around that assumption. Now they're being out-competed by a foreign company that has proven that assumption wrong, and they don't know what to do except demand more subsidies and a monopoly so they don't have to compete.

hinkley2• 8 years ago

Increasing supply often increases demand. Cheaper rockets will mean more trips which means you will still be building rockets.

But I think your model is a bit of hyperbole. You’re downplaying the statistical model that goes with this. Launching a rocket is Russian roulette. The odds are quite different when you want to launch a rocket once versus a dozen times.

(1 - p)^n = the odds that I still have a rocket after n launches, where p is the odds of it blowing up on any given launch. The asymptote is at 0 and it gets there pretty fast.

The good news is that the cost benefit analysis has a similar problem.

Let’s say you want to reuse a $10M part once. Right now it costs you $20M for two flights. You create a $11M version that costs $1M to refurbish. That’s $12M for two flights or $6M per flight. You got a 40% cost improvement. So now you go for 3 flights. Now you have a $12M part that costs $1M to refurb. That’s $14M for three flights or $4.66M per flight.

From 1 to 2 you saved $4M per flight. From 2-3 you saved an additional $1.33M per flight. From 3 to 4 you’d save $0.66M per flight, by adding another $1M to your up front costs.

The bean counters are probably going to push back here. Opportunity costs you see. They’re going to demand you reduce costs, find revenue neutral ways to improve profits. For instance if you can cut 25% off the refurb costs that’s a better cost improvement than getting to 5 launches. While that makes getting to five more appealing, it also takes time. So you can imagine what the gap between five and six will be filled with. Cheaper rocket, lower refurb costs again.

If they have money to spend at this point they’ll give it to the lobbyists or marketing department. You aren’t the best investment they have anymore. Increased revenue is.

drcode• 8 years ago

I'm encouraged to see that their "vow to resist" seems to mainly involve trying to outperform SpaceX, as opposed to asking for legislation/regulation to give their rocket program special status.

EDIT: At least that was the gist of this article, it seems like other sources suggest they may pursue legislative avenues as well.

JumpCrisscross10• 8 years ago

their "vow to resist" seems to mainly involve trying to outperform SpaceX

The planned Ariane 6 is cost uncompetitive with the Falcon 9 and variable cost and mass uncompetitive with the Falcon Heavy. There are no plans for a European reusable. The “our mission is different...our culture is different” comment implies a regulatory, not technological, solution.

hayd2• 8 years ago

They are putting payloads into space, so it's the same mission. What the hell does "culture" have to do with anything? Really, there's a culture against re-useablility? No.

It's fine (or at least honest) to admit they're a protectionist block and are looking into regulation to ensure French contacts are safe.

But the mission is the same (put things into space), and the culture is irrelevant.

rory0965• 8 years ago

The planned Ariane 6 is cost uncompetitive with the Falcon 9

This isn't really true. Ariane 6 is expected to cost €75 million for 5 tonnes to GTO and €90 million for 11.5 tonnes. Falcon 9 costs $50 million for 5.5 tonnes to GTO (reusable) and $62 million for 8.3 tonnes (expendable).

Because Ariane uses a "dual-berth" conops, it (generally) flies two payloads per launch, whereas Falcon 9's excess capacity is usually left unused. The two rockets are thus of comparable cost to a satellite customer, with pros and cons for each — Ariane is more reliable, but you have to work around the other customer's schedule.

The worry is that Ariane 6 won't be competitive with future rockets, like New Glenn or BFR.

cryptonector• 8 years ago

I remember the early 90s, when some EU bigwig (Modi? I forget) made a lot of noise about wanting to catch up to the U.S. economically.

rory0965• 8 years ago

Stéphane Israël has repeatedly called for European governments to stop competing any satellite launches and guarantee them all for Arianespace, as well as to increase direct subsidies.

http://www.france24.com/en/20150620-interview-stephane-israe...

http://aviationweek.com/space/arianespace-esa-we-need-help

Alain Charmeau has as well:

Even as Charmeau decries what he calls subsidies for SpaceX from the US government, he admits that Ariane cannot exist without guaranteed contracts purchased by European governments. To make the Ariane 6 vehicle viable, Charmeau said Ariane needs five launches in total for 2021 and eight guaranteed launches for 2022.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/05/ariane-chief-seems-f...

MrBuddyCasino• 8 years ago

The typical french reaction. I hope Germany will push back. Anyone remember the European search engine competitor "Quaero", another stillborn EU project?

kurthr• 8 years ago

As I understand it, they don't have to ask for regulation since they already are state subsidized and a monopoly in Europe. However, they may have to culturally justify it to retain that position.

ffsc• 8 years ago

Not necessarily a monopoly. European states can still launch on other nations rockets. However, Arianespace is pushing for "European First" legislation to keep institutional payloads on domestic launchers.

yellowcherry• 8 years ago

I have no idea what this headline is supposed to mean.

"Vows to resist"

Resist what, exactly?

AimForTheBushes• 8 years ago

SpaceX and other low cost space companies. If I read the article correctly, they plan on doing this by not innovating.

simion314• 8 years ago

Isn't the article mentioning that they are working on 2 new rockets and that the plan is to not compete in SpaceX niche?

I assume that we do not know that much about the innovation due to much smaller PR budgets.

romwell• 8 years ago

The headline is horrible.

"Steamroller surges"? Really? Has the author seen a surging steamroller? That's not what steamrollers do. It's hard to stop a steamroller, yes, but its moves aren't sudden. It doesn't suddenly accelerate. You can see the steamroller a mile coming. It starts slowly and goes slowly.

And as you noted, you don't usually resist steamrollers. That's a silly thing to do.

Reminds me of the singing octopus from Orwell's examples of how not to write:[1]

The sole aim of a metaphor is to call up a visual image. When these images clash — as in The Fascist octopus has sung its swan song, the jackboot is thrown into the melting pot — it can be taken as certain that the writer is not seeing a mental image of the objects he is naming; in other words he is not really thinking.

[1]http://www.orwell.ru/library/essays/politics/english/e_polit...

rdtsc• 8 years ago

Even, so, Charmeau rejects comparisons to SpaceX, because he maintains that the company is heavily subsidized by the US government.

Isn't ESA subsidized by the member governments? I'd understand if the criticism was coming from a private entity and they'd be complaining about SpaceX getting preferential treatment, but coming from a state sponsored agency it seems odd.

JumpCrisscross10• 8 years ago

Isn't ESA subsidized by the member governments?

"ArianeGroup is subsidized by its member governments." Furthermore, "SpaceX does not have a monopoly on [American] launches, as Arianespace does in Europe" and "had to compete with the US-based United Launch Alliance from the beginning to break that company’s monopoly on military and civil space missions" [1].

[1] Ars Technica

greglindahl8• 8 years ago

Ariane 5's commercial launches are directly subsidized by the EU. But it's a muddled story all around: if SpaceX rents an unused launch pad from NASA instead of spending $1 billion to build a new one, is that a subsidy? Was NASA's competition for commercial cargo to the ISS a subsidy?

marsokod9• 8 years ago

Agreed, if one could take into account all the subsidies, I am sure we would be at similar levels. The commercial cargo contract was on par with the ATV program, but the prospect is much bigger, with better financial stability.

And where should we stop counting subsidies? Are the government funded studies made by research institutes counted? They benefit a lot to the companies.

ferongr• 8 years ago

if SpaceX rents an unused launch pad from NASA instead of spending $1 billion to build a new one, is that a subsidy

No, it's called renting. If it was unused then the presumably low price SpaceX pays for it is the right one. This is actually efficient capitalist allocation of resources. If SpaceX was not allowed to pay a rent for the launch pad, capital would be used inefficiently on building one, instead of being spent on R&D. Furthermore, the depreciation and abandonment of the launch pad itself would result in a waste of tax-payer money.

marsokod9• 8 years ago

ESA has much less money than NASA and the DoD, and is free to chose a launcher from another country as well.

Are the European space companies subsidized by ESA and the other European space agencies? Yes. Is it much different from the subsidies in the US? Not really. Is the US space market bigger than the European market? Definitely!

WhompingWindows2• 8 years ago

SpaceX was "subsidized" by the govt even as they provided services to the govt in exchange for money. That's called business, and the customer here is the government. It's also in the best interest, long term financially, to have an American space launch company, so we don't have to give money to the Russians or Europeans to launch our astronauts or satellites. Language matters, subsidy vs. contract is an important distinction

marsokod9• 8 years ago

In government contracts in the aerospace and defence, the semantic distinction blurs a little bit.

Government contracts are often inflated on purpose so that the work can leak towards other projects. Every country does that.

Quinner• 8 years ago

I'm always stunned by the degree to which "resisting" consists of haughty dismissiveness of SpaceX and whining about subsidies (which Arianespace itself receives in spades). I wonder if these people will be able to swallow their pride when SpaceX eats their lunch and they have to go work for the Americans.

greglindahl8• 8 years ago

If you'd like to read some more progressive thinking by a European, here's an interview with the CNES (French space agency) Director of Launchers:

https://satelliteobservation.net/2018/06/02/cnes-director-of...

In which he talks about about a realistic path to a reusable rocket that could compete with Falcon 9. But it wouldn't launch until 2028-2030.

JumpCrisscross10• 8 years ago

a realistic path to a reusable rocket

Technologically realistic. Politically unfeasible. ArianeGroup's factories provide high-paying jobs across Europe. Re-tooling them will not be possible for another generation.

Source: I worked with launch start-ups. Their dismissal by EU politicos was resounding, particularly in contrast to the American and other countries' responses.

greglindahl8• 8 years ago

I figure that the opinion of the CNES Director of Launchers is pretty good when it comes to understanding European rocket politics, but if you want to claim you're a bigger expert, ok.

bosdev• 8 years ago

Truthfully, if Europe ever did develop a reusable rocket, one that could fly all the missions in a year, this would be unhelpful politically. What would the engine and booster factories sprinkled across Europe do if they built one rocket and then had 11 months off? The member states value the jobs too much.

It feels incredibly short-term to me. How many jobs will be created by opening up spaceflight at 1/100 the cost? How many new types of satellites, technology, human transport will be created?

JumpCrisscross10• 8 years ago

How many jobs will be created by opening up spaceflight at 1/100 the cost?

The old jobs were under your directive. The new jobs are not.

narrator2• 8 years ago

How many jobs would be created by having only 2% of the population in agriculture instead of >50% in the 19th century?

PeterisP• 8 years ago

More to the point, what would the engine and booster factories do if they had 12 months off each year because all the payloads would fly on cheaper reusable rockets? If the jobs are doing something inefficient, they're going away anyway.

colordrops• 8 years ago

Cheaper flights would open up new markets which would increase demand. They didn't build a few passenger jets and call it a day, and the same would be true of cheap access to space.

infogulch• 8 years ago

This is like bemoaning plastic factory worker jobs because we've become too good at reusing cups/bags/packaging/whatever and don't need to produce as much plastic anymore. Man that would be a nice problem to have. Mind-bending levels of justification here.

magduf3• 8 years ago

Of all the places in the world, Europe is probably the most ripe for implementing a UBI, which would solve a lot of these problems.

marsokod9• 8 years ago

To me this is a major reason why the reusable launchers were not developed in Europe. The concept was being studied but never gained traction.

One of the reason might have been vanity but if you look at it with the view point of a CEO from a European firm, reusability was a risky gamble:

1) In order to keep your manufacturing quality, one needs to produce a new rocket every two or three months. Beyond that, the people manufacturing it losses knowledge and unless quality assurance is increased a lot, you will losses quality.

2) EU was doing around 12 launches a year, and that was by being very cheap. You could plan on increasing the market share but that starts being difficult as a lot of what remains cannot use a European launcher for political reasons.

3) For the sake of the argument, let say cheaper price double the market share, that leaves 24 launches a year. Based on a manufacturing of 6 launchers a year, this leaves 4 launches per rocket. And that is with very optimistic numbers (doubling of marketshare, no issue with reusability).

4) If you look at the numbers from SpaceX, 4 launches per rocket is where the reusability starts making sense. But ideally, you want more. 5) The Airbus people have shareholders to account to, not a CEO who does not care risking going banqueroute while pursuing a dream to go on Mars.

So yeah, doable but much more difficult than in a market with better access to investment and to huge cash cows named NASA and DoD

jlmorton• 8 years ago

Alain Charmeau spelled this out explicitly to Der Spiegel:

Charmeau said the Ariane rocket does not launch often enough to justify the investment into reusability. (It would need about 30 launches a year to justify these costs, he said). And then Charmeau said something telling about why reusability doesn't make sense to a government-backed rocket company—jobs.
"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," he said. "That makes no sense. I cannot tell my teams: 'Goodbye, see you next year!'"

http://www.spiegel.de/wissenschaft/technik/alain-charmeau-di...

HeadsUpHigh5• 8 years ago

If you look at the numbers from SpaceX, 4 launches per rocket is where the reusability starts making sense.

Shotwell mentioned that SpaceX actually saved money even on their first reused booster which was broken down and inspected to pieces. So I think your number doesn't stand. The Falcon 9 has a unique cost structure compared to other rockets, completely aimed towards making reusability work out as quickly as possible.

grecy• 8 years ago

This mentality is what's holding back the establishment in any field from doing anything radical. The status quo is worth trillions and trillions of dollars, and a lot of people will fight very, very hard to keep it that way, even when it's horribly inefficient, outdated and just plain stupid.

Electric cars? Nope, we've invested too much in ICE R&D and need to pay it back over another 100 years.

Solar? Nope, we promised the private coal plants decades of profits.

Public Healthcare (In the USA)? Nope, waaaaaay too many billions being made on insurance.

etc. etc.

Which is why we need to ignore what the establishment things and just do our own thing whenever possible, or at least support anyone trying to go clean slate.

19968• 8 years ago

And this is also why the establishment rightfully fears disruption: because they could have done marginal improvements for a long time: they chose not to for valid strategic reasons. But then there is a competitor which leapfrogs all that and who threatens to just wipe them out!

Once it happens, as usual, the establishment begs/lobbies for political protection (think about jobs!) which will often be granted. But political favors can just at best slow their demise.

Reusable spacex rockets will be to the EU spatial industry what uber was to its taxis: turning them immediately irrelevant, and unsavageable as an industry.

A better example might be the high administrative costs of the US healthcare system. Obamacare couldn't cut all these jobs during a downturn, so they were preserved. But even now, for a lot of people it makes more sense to opt out of that craziness and just get healthcare abroad. This sector is ripe for disruption. Maybe not now, but in 10 years even more so.

Tuna-Fish• 8 years ago

This is not just about having makework jobs. In order for the engines to be both cheap an reliable, there needs to be continuous line production. An engine put together by workers who build rocket engines for their living is better than one built by people who make rocket engines 1 month of a year, and for the line to work properly there are limits on how slowly things can be built. This means that if your engine demand goes too low, the quality suffers or price skyrockets.

The financial basis of SpaceX reusability is conditioned on having access to a lot of launches, and increasing the market even further by making launches cheaper. If SpaceX ended up only doing 12 launches a year each year from now on, they would lose money from reusability instead of saving it, because they would have pay ~as much to maintain the Merlin line as they do today, and that is probably most of the cost of making rockets. In order for them to make bank, they need to be able to maintain the line, and grow launches to consume all of it. (Hence, StarLink.)

Alternatively, they can produce all the first stages they ever intend to make, a good enough stockpile of Merlins for the second stages, and then shut down the line and get paid for launches without the expense of making rockets. This is what I suspect they'll do, except that at that point they will not shut down the line but will change it to make Raptors instead. Both for Raptor engined upper stages on Falcon 9:s, and eventually BFR.

In any case, Arianespace probably doesn't believe they can raise the launch count enough for reusability to be useful.

robszumski• 8 years ago

This also exposes the shrewdness in using a rocket with 9 or 27 of your engines, instead of 2 or 3, which allows you to keep a continuous pace with a smaller sized production line vs having to stand it up and down.

This is all aside from the reliability/engine out gains.

MR4D• 8 years ago

Quoting Charmeau from the article,

  "I think we are in different worlds,” he said. “In the US, they think and they speak like this. Our mission is different. Our culture is different.”

Yes. Yes we do.

As a fun analogy, I'd love to think what would have happened if AT&T had kept their operators and not put in electronic switches.

Commerce would still be back in the 1950's, and everyone would work for AT&T. We'd be making nowhere near as many calls, and business would operate much slower than today, meaning innovation & collaboration would be much slower than today.

But that's the choice

rbanffy4• 8 years ago

First-mover advantage is usually overrated. SpaceX is incurring in huge risks to prove a market hypothesis. When it's proven, other companies will follow. Blue Origin is right behind them.

SpaceX is following a series of failed initiatives - the Shuttle, SSTOs like the DC-X and Venturestar - and trying lots of seemingly crazy things in the process. Let's not get carried away by survivorship bias.

hinkley2• 8 years ago

Every team has a couple people who want to do better, but they can’t get budget for the work from management. When a threat comes the cost benefit analysis shifts, and now those people find a sympathetic ear.

xoa• 8 years ago

This was an interesting article on an area I'd long meant to read about but never had, and there is some great history there. However, I got a very real feeling of "skating to where the puck is not where it is going" sense the farther I read. In particular, the article spends a certain amount of time on the under-development Ariane 6 series and Vega-C. But the comparisons were all to the existing Falcon 9. I wish Mr Berger had asked them at all about the BFR and the implications of a functional high performance methalox engine, because I think that has the potential to be a much bigger leap forward then seems to be generally discussed yet. Methane doesn't give quite the thrust of kerosene or the ISP of hydrogen, but from an economic and chemical-rockets-in-space perspective its got a lot going for it, not all of it immediately obvious. It doesn't coke at rocket temperatures, yet another bonus for more reusability. My understanding is that it's much easier to store then LH2 and the conditions are a closer match for LOX which potentially simplifies a number of steps. It can potentially be harvested or synthesized elsewhere in the solar system more easily. And even the cost factor shouldn't be ignored once the context is reusability, RP-1 isn't actually cheap (it's highly refined, I saw estimates north of $16/gallon). Fuel may be the least expensive part of an expendable rocket to the point it's not generally worried about, but for a reusable rocket a couple of million dollars extra per launch is real additional margin over time.

I'm certainly no expert by any means, but organizations like ArianeGroup comparing under development rockets to existing ones feels as though really sums up some of the issues with Old Space in a nutshell. It seems like they're thinking in terms of building a rocket where that one design might then be used essentially unchanged for 30-50 years despite there being clear theoretical improvements to be had. But that's not how the fully private enterprises seem likely to operate. SpaceX put a fair amount of effort into the Falcon Heavy for example, and it was spectacular. Except now apparently they've decided that it's effectively already obsolete, that BFR is going better then expected which mean FH will serve as a limited use minor stopgap and then be scrapped as a design. Even now I don't know if that sort of aggressiveness has really gotten into the consciousness of older style organizations yet.

I guess if they're comfortable with basically becoming a jobs program and massively subsidized strategic fallback for the EU that is in fact potentially sustainable a long time. Polities can have different levels of very long term priorities that are different from the faster pace of industry, there's nothing wrong with that. But it's a position that has risks too if the gap opens up too far, because it takes a very long time to make up that ground (if ever).

sqdbps• 8 years ago

It's hard not to make the connection between this example of a clueless self entitled tantrum and the naked resentment towards a US rival by a euro bigwig complete with the instinct to seek government subsidizes and assistance against said US rival with the scrutiny US technology companies are receiving in the region.

narrator2• 8 years ago

What I love about space is it is a great example of peaceful competition between nations. We need more of that.

paul• 8 years ago

The denial is strong. Reminds me of how cell phone makers responded to the iPhone:

“The development of mobile phones will be similar in PCs. Even with the Mac, Apple has attracted much attention at first, but they have still remained a niche manufacturer. That will be in mobile phones as well,” Nokia chief strategist Anssi Vanjoki told a German newspaper at the time.

Back in the day, smartphones were pretty much defined by devices like the Palm Treo, and Palm CEO Ed Colligan doubted some computer maker was going to just waltz in and eat his lunch.

“We've learned and struggled for a few years here figuring out how to make a decent phone,” Colligan said. “PC guys are not going to just figure this out. They're not going to just walk in.”

solarkraft• 8 years ago

This article is honest, but holds back a bit about how incredibly lost the european space industry is now.

PunchTornado2• 8 years ago

My God this makes me ashamed at being European.

Who are these guys and in which century do they think they are? Innovate and compete or resign and make room for others who can do it. I'm sure there are enough European engineers who can build reusable rockets.

marsokod9• 8 years ago

Oh yes there are enough of them. But to compete you need fair rules and open access to your competitors market, and that is not the case currently. What they are asking for is only the same protections as the US companies currently enjoy.

HeadsUpHigh5• 8 years ago

I'm sorry, what? What protections are you talking about? Nasa has booked flights on non-USA rockets many times in the past. SpaceX has received no subsidies( i.e. free money) but only contracts from the government which Ariane is now asking to be locked by law( and let's not even talk about subsidies).

growlist• 8 years ago

Let's not forget who masterminded the moon missions after all: it wasn't an American.

swatkat• 8 years ago

>> “Are you buying a Mercedes because it is cheap?”
>> Ranzo, sitting nearby, chimed in and referenced the India-based maker of the world’s least expensive car. As he put it, “We don’t sell a Tata.”

Not with that attitude ;) There's nothing wrong with cheap spaceflight, as long as they're human-rated for crewed missions. I hope they also know that Tata owns Jaguar Land Rover.

syntaxing• 8 years ago

I recommend to read the book "Why Nations fail" if you're interested in how some countries become rich or stay in poverty. One of the key ideas is something called creative destruction. There is always something destroyed when something new is created (there are always losers and winners). When there is uncertainty, there is an opportunity. The fear of losing is what makes certain companies (and countries) not adopt a new technology since it challenges their current standing and this circle tends to lead to the collapse of a company's ecnonomy.

As the SpaceX steamroller surges, European rocket industry vows to resist

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