The Chinese ecosystem is very impressive. They both have tremendous cash and resources flowing into their government owned agencies, and specific funding and competition in their private new space companies. I understand there's tremendous talent and knowledge transfer sloshing around the Chinese ecosystem, say nothing about funding and resources.
But let's be real - EU new space is not competing against the Chinese launch market right now. There's time and room for them to mature.
One major reason why EU capabilities are lagging is because they hitched their geopolitical wagon to the US and assumed that the US launch providers would be sufficient for commercial purposes, and that ESA/Arianespace only had to preserve enough capability to meet truly strategic requirements.
Now the EU is scrambling because they realized that there are unsavoury downsides. Just deciding to cede all European launches to the Chinese is literally just putting themselves in the same shit soup.
And even practically, the EU-USA decoupling is going to take time. And until the EU gets enough strategic autonomy in space, I think the EU is largely going to play nice with the US rules against collaborating with China in space (that means almost no EU payloads are going to be launched by China).
> One major reason why EU capabilities are lagging is because they hitched their geopolitical wagon to the US and assumed that the US launch providers would be sufficient for commercial purposes, and that ESA/Arianespace only had to preserve enough capability to meet truly strategic requirements.
This is just not true.
Ariane Group was a market leader in space launch when SpaceX started launching rockets, and Ariane 6 was designed specifically to help Ariane Group maintain commercial competitiveness with Falcon 9. They just did a bad job of it[1].
The story line of Ariane 5/6 only being there to preserve independent access to space only appeared on the scene after SpaceX conclusively trounced them in the market.
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1. The reasons why this happened are complicated by some of them are:
* For a long time Ariane Group leadership maintained a belief that SpaceX was selling F9 launches below cost and that the USG was subsidizing them with higher cost government launches.
* Ariane Group publicly claimed that reuse was not economically feasible and that that capability in F9 didn't matter.
* Ariane Group has long maintained (and continues to do so) a policy of "economic return" where countries get contracts for subcomponents in rough proportion to the amount of money they contribute to the program. This necessitates a "big design up front" approach, and makes iteration very slow and difficult.
* SpaceX was able to improve Falcon 9's performance far more than anyone probably expected through aggressive iteration, more than doubling its payload to LEO over its lifetime. This was, in large part, due to the Merlin 1D engine doubling the thrust of the Merlin 1C. For context, over 30 years, the Space Shuttle's RS-25 engines increased in thrust by only ~10%.
- "They both have tremendous cash and resources flowing into their government owned agencies, and specific funding and competition in their private new space companies."
Yeah, this gets to the heart of what I raised at the root comment: "What's failing in the EU?" Why aren't there torrents of cash and resources, talent and knowledge, flowing into European tech startups?