Congratulations! An immensely important achievement, I’d say.
IMO, this success has a great implication for accessibility and sovereignty of the EU. Although ESA can launch from French Guiana, the spaceport is an ocean-away from Europe! That fact alone affects the cost and the launch cadence for Europe greatly.
Now they prove they can launch directly from Norway with their own production from Munich and elsewhere and that has immense potential for the future: much higher launch cadence, significant lower cost and always-on accessibility.
The only way Europe can have a Starlink similar network is to launch it from their own soil and reuse the first stage. Also from the perspective of security, launching spy and other military satellites from EU soil is the only practical possibility in this political climate.
Dont worry the US will hoodwink Europe back into be a compliant vassal of the Empire in a few years when they elect a democrat who pretends to be liberal and acting in good faith, probably AOC(ia).
Why is this downvoted? This is exactly how US foreign policy works. The only difference with Trump is that he says things out loud.
This is 100% what is going to happen. US foreign policy relies on deception and decade long plans. The big plans are ruling the Middle East and squash opposition (Libya, Egypt, Syria, Iraq done, Iran pending).
To that end Russia had to be kept busy, therefore the Ukraine proxy war, which has the additional benefit of tying up the EU and cut it off from Russian natural resources.
It makes the EU dependent on the US as an energy exporter. These plans are old and both parties have diligently executed them.
Even with the Greenland annexation threats there are Democrats who think it wouldn't be a bad idea, but you should not say it out loud.
your statements are wildly misinformed, you can't make claims about geopoltics because you've read a few delusional reddit threads. The US was extremely active in supporting the Syrian opposition, we literally funded the entire operation, like what reality are you living in.
Your opinion on Russia/Ukraine is clearly skewed by NATO propaganda, which I wouldn't blame you for, most people have had their minds colonized by NATO propaganda, after all, NATO has a literal newsletter called "Cognitive Warfare" where they candidly brag about it.
It doesn't matter how much you go on about 'NATO propaganda', the simple truth is that Russia invaded Ukraine, illegally and without reasonable cause, and did so for its own interests.
What's more, Ukraine was nowhere near joining NATO, and in any case Russia's invasion would still have been illegal and reprehensible even if it was.
Most people assume the post-WW2 consensus is a permanent baseline. Historically, there's no evidence to support that expectation, but it's easy to see why the illusion persists. Acknowledging that the current order is temporary is terrifying, particularly for those who thrive under it.
> Even with the Greenland annexation threats there are Democrats who think it wouldn't be a bad idea, but you should not say it out loud.
If you were talking about like, Iraq in 2003 you'd be correct to point out that majority being opposed doesn't mean the entire party was blameless.
This is probably the worst example you could have used to make this point about aggressive US foreign policy having support across party lines. There is absolutely no constituency within the Democrats that have ever wanted this because it came entirely from the fevered mind of Trump and the parody edition of Bush's neocons in the current admin.
The combo of 1. negative polarization and 2. being completely pointless and accomplishing nothing makes this about as unpopular of an idea you could find among Democrats, in public or private.
Iran is also a bad choice to include in your list considering Obama was responsible for the JCPOA.
> The only way Europe can have a Starlink similar network is to launch it from their own soil and reuse the first stage.
Unfortunately I'm not aware of any properly funded euro alternative to starlink that that has progressed beyond the conceptual stage. Even the Canadian company telesat is far behind and has a serious debt problem. The two separate "Chinese starlink" LEO networks being built right now are ahead of telesat in functional satellites in orbit.
The Canadian government recently promised 2.3 billion to telesat for polar area services. Realistically maybe some European nations might have the best chance of success by absorbing telesat and continuing to pay MDA to build the satellites for the network.
IRIS² looks on track? Granted, it is not a SpaceX competitor for consumer Internet. But it is an alternative for applications where reliance on SpaceX is not prudent.
It exists but only in the conceptual / R&D and politics funding stage right now. I hope it succeeds but they're going to need significant amounts of money and real world launch capability to catch up with SpaceX and Amazon Leo in live satellites. The contract for development and design of the satellites was just awarded on August 31st, which is a positive sign.
A non-reusable launcher that can put small payloads into a Polar orbits only, due to launch site latitude and lack of an orbital bus. It's fairly 1960s stuff.
only four countries in the world have private/commercial space launch capacity, and SpaceX towers over everyone else so I'd say this is doing pretty alright compared to the rest of the world
As EV’s have shown, I don’t think they’re gonna be ahead for long and long-term the current technology is just a steppingstone because damaging the ozone layer can’t go on forever with the current technique being used something else. Better has to come forward.
So what should they do nothing? They have to get started somehow if Japan and China can do it so can Europe, and I think long-term once again, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand won’t be far behind…
The Taco section, with the way the present American administration has behaved. Most of our friends/allies are looking to protect themselves andbe prepared to go on without us. All it took was two years of buffoonery.
I think New Zealand is ahead. RocketLab was the second company in the world after SpaceX to get a privately developed launch vehicle to orbit, back in 2017. They've now had 86 successful launches from their NZ launch site.
Yeah, I really hate this revisionism of Elon as an extremely wealthy apartheid emerald mine heir who was a dumb guy who happened to get lucky at paypal and then stole all his money from the government while operating a car and rocket company. There is plenty to criticize about him, but SpaceX dramatically decreased cost to orbit which had reliance on Russian technology at the time.
Musk was raised affluent in apartheid-era South Africa, his father had some connection to Zambian emerald trading/mining, and Musk's companies have benefited enormously from public contracts and policy. He's not stupid.
Musk has benefited enormously from public contracts and policy, but all the questionable ones are in Tesla (and especially originally solarcity, but that got folded into Tesla).
The government contracts that made SpaceX were all open bid, where SpaceX bid an better solution than anything that any of the established companies did, at literally half the price. Falcon 9 was a massive gift to the US government, in that it drove the entire industry to halve the prices they extracted from the government. Dragon was just as good.
That they also built a profitable launch company out of it just highlights how much of an outlier SpaceX is. They sold the US government a dollar for fifty cents, made a profit doing it, and ended up driving half the rockets already flying out of the business.
Yes. Obviously, I wasn't implying he never benefitted from the government. It is just a wild retelling that he started a rocket company, solar company and car company to make huge amounts of money. Also, he was largely estranged from his abusive father since he emigrated to Canada at 17. I am sure he received help and money from his mother at points, but this idea he is some trust fund kid like Donald Trump. People really believe they would be as successful as him if they grew up being abused in an upper class family in apartheid South Africa. It doesn't make him a good person, and there is so much to criticism about him, that I think it actually detracts from legitimate criticism.
Let's not also forget that NASDAQ changed the rules right before listing SpaceX... resulting in forced index fund procurement of sinking equity. Not sure how 'public policy' that is (arguably separate), but in reality global prime market listing rules are pretty high-significance effectively Federal or even international monetary policy. Well done Elon! Can't fault you for execution!
> extremely wealthy apartheid emerald mine heir who was a dumb guy who happened to get lucky at paypal and then stole all his money from the government while operating a car and rocket company.
> SpaceX dramatically decreased cost to orbit which had reliance on Russian technology at the time.
Both can be (and are) true at the same time. Elon hired/partnered the right people and didn't have capacity to mess all the companies he owned into oblivion. His main skill is bullshiting investors, the government and the public.
Except for the fact that SpaceX had a hard time getting any contracts at first because they were all going to Boeing and Lockheed Martin since the 1990s and even when SpaceX came to the market they had to compete at first with ULA and fact that they made it cheaper by orders by magnitude. Except for the fact that Musk almost went personally bankrupt trying to get SpaceX off the ground. Except for all those facts yea sure maybe... haha nope you're still wrong.
If I drive my German-made VW sedan on American roads - how many people consider it an American car, and wonder if Germany has a real car industry or not?
They are right now, but if Japan can do it, and China can do it so can Europe and by the way, so can Australia, New Zealand and Canada they have the abilities they just have to have the will and if they haven’t learned anything recently, they better develop the will. Once again congratulations.
None of the countries you name is even close to SpaceX. Not even close. Their most ambitious prototypes are on par or behind the rocket SpaceX has been flying for a decade commercially.
China and Japan have done it. You may not like the fact they have done it once or twice, they know how to do it from a technical standpoint and that’s only gonna grow in the future particularly China don’t act obtuse.
The fact is that no one cares about reusability. Expendable rockets are cheap enough for governments and commercial entities alike, even for constellation launches. Starlink architecture only makes sense as a justification for the F9 launch cadence, and even then the actual satellites are managed as trains.
Then, it depends on what you need to do. A 3x cost if you deploy a strategic constellation is fine. A 3x cost if you want to launch huge payloads for a Mars trip (I know costs were for LEO, just giving an example) is probably uncompetitive.
Price is not the only characteristic of a product (hence the mention of "strategic constellation").
In a "free market" would you recommend on USA to rely only on a Chinese manufactured essential product for its military (or the reverse, or Europe on Russia, or etc.)?
I am not against great private offers (be it rockets/cloud/etc.). But there should also be some "local" capability for some strategic products, so that if the private providers encounter issues (crazy CEO, tariffs, export regulations, etc.) you are not left without any of that capability.
I'm hopeful that SpaceX's success will lead to European companies following in their footsteps and providing some more affordable alternatives to Ariane's current wildly-expensive rockets.
Who owns how much of the enterprise says little about who contributes to and owns control and know-how of the project. This is even more true for a political project like the Ariane.
Not to diminish France's contribution but without Germany and Italy there would be no Ariane. France could not build one and could not fly one.
The work and know-how is mainly spread between Germany, France and Italy.
The mechanism that ensures it is called "national return". The order volume per country has to correspond to the countries respective monetary contribution.
I worked on the Ariane from 2000 to 2006."National return" was a pain for all the smaller companies and they usually founded subsidiaries in all the other member states to game the system.
Without Germany and Italy, France can build and fly no Ariane. Not even close.
I think we are stronger together. European technology has been critical to many important American space missions, and that should continue to be the case.
An ecosystem where we develop things independently is one where everyone loses.
I dont think the EU is stronger when they get bullied and undermined by trump, or whichever american president decides to dust off trump's playbook in the future
Except its not actually obvious. The US achieved most when they worked mostly by themselves. And the recent explosion in US activity, specially SpaceX is also highly separated from Europe.
There is a very credible argument to be made that excessive cooperation leads to incredibly heavy overly political programs that are completely static and can't adjust because of international agreements.
That doesn't mean working together isn't good but they way they have been has been pretty questionably in many ways (along with a lot of space policy).
Yes, definitely, but being together by choice instead of by necessity is vastly preferable.
Especially given that recent history has shown us that we're back to "power" being the only language spoken.
__
Rel: The ecosystem thing.
I would challenge that, because if there's one thing where the US has had absurd leverage over the EU (and world, for that matter), then it's tech ecosystems.
A healthy ecosystem would not be owned by SV/US alone.
So right now, we're not really "strong together" but rather weakly dependent. That should be remediated, and decoupling like this is exactly the tool for that.
>Especially given that recent history has shown us that we're back to "power" being the only language spoken.
"Power being the only language spoken", never left in the first place in order to get back to it, it's how the world always worked and will always work.
Granted, power wasn't actually the "language spoken", but more accurately it was the stick ensuring the enforcement of the terms agreed within the "language spoken", a lesson as old as time that many in EU forgot after post-USSR collapse and now have to re-learn it, but at a heavy cost and with added interest.
"Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it", couldn't be more true.
They started developing this rocket in the late 2010s, way before the current US craziness (or the current level of craziness anyway). Independent access to space is always desirable for countries that can muster the resources, but this is just one of many companies that appeared back then as a response to SpaceX's initial success.
I'd split it into 2 camps. Elites who realize Europe isn't a unified group or has a military strong enough for defense..
And people who get wet when France says they are going to send soldiers to Ukraine and it never materializes.
The general population has 0 understanding of international relations. It's the United States and China right now. Any other belief comes from someone who has read 0 international relations Realism books.
Its not that Europeans havent read Mearsheimer. its that for the best part of three hundred years the whole of Europe has been trying that same realist script until there was nothing left but total ruin across the entire continent. Europeans who created the EU knew about balance of power geopolitics so well, they created this slow bureaucratic mess specifically to stop Germany and France sliding back into the same old lethal habit. While clumsy positioning between the US and China is a headache in the present moment for Europe, compared to a tedious Union Europeans prefer reawakenings of 1914 in their backyard. Well at least so far.
I would bet any amount that if you go to a random European city and stop 100 random people on the street you'd be lucky if one person has even heard of Mearsheimer. I think you're also overthinking how the EU got created. I don't think pre-EU Europe was on the brink of violence either. It was more IMO simplistic (but possibly correct, who knows) thinking that it's stronger (economically) as a block. A lot of present day Europe issues that might lead to bigger problems are potentially worse because of the EU.
The primary goal of this was to prevent another war by joining european economies together economically. It's not 'overthinking it'. It quite literally is the main reason and you can go and read the speeches from the politicians at the time to confirm this.
Heres a direct quote from the declaration itself
> The solidarity in production thus established will make it plain that any war between France and Germany becomes not merely unthinkable, but materially impossible.
The fact that the european powers (with the exception of russia) are largely at peace with each other and haven't had a major war with each other since the second world war is very unusual given european history.
Definitely far from my expertise but I think you're contradicting yourself.
I am talking about the formalization that is specifically the modern European Union. You are talking as if it's some inevitable consequence of earlier efforts.
> Europeans who created the EU knew about balance of power geopolitics so well, they created this slow bureaucratic mess specifically to stop Germany and France sliding back into the same old lethal habit.
I don't think anything you're saying is strengthening this statement that I had an issue with.
The Maastricht Treaty which is what created modern day EU was driven by other concerns, asking Gemini yields: "To answer your second question: No, everyday Europeans in 1992 were not primarily thinking about WWII.
By the time the Maastricht Treaty was being drafted, the public was reacting to a completely different era of history. They were focused on the collapse of the Soviet Union, the opening of Eastern Europe, and the need to compete economically with the United States and Japan in a rapidly globalizing world. The defining event on the public's mind was the Fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, not the end of WWII."
So you are right that the processes that eventually led to the formation of the EU started after WW-II due to concerns related to that war. But specifically the EU as it stands today with its current structure and agreements was not formed due to those considerations. Europe could have continued with the previous arrangements. At least that's my take and I don't think anything you're saying contradicts it. I'll admit to a certain lack of knowledge so happy to learn more about Europe pre-EU or why what I'm saying is still wrong.
EDIT: I guess one can see how the reunification of Germany was a factor that could have made people consider the world wars. That said the creation of the EU was a major change compared to previous arrangements.
EDIT2: When I read the EU site you linked to I get a strong sense of "backsplaining" as if it was written after the fact to appear like the EU was just part of a process that goes back to WW-II. The title says "History of the EU – 1945-59" but in 1945-1959 there was no EU. Didn't the term European Union only show up circa 1992? So this is perhaps the "history of Europe" but not the history of the European Union? I could be totally wrong. I am not European but I did live through these events and follow the news (well, not WW-II but the fall of the USSR, Germany's unification, and the establishment of the modern day EU). What's of interest to me in the context of this specific question/debate is what were the concerns of the Europeans and their leaders entering into the agreements that formed the modern day EU.
Presuming the EU just appeared out of thin air in 1992/1993 and ignoring the predecessor organisations which were crucial for the formation of the EU is just wrong.
It's also not just about WW2, europe had at that point been at major war with itself in some form or another for well over a thousand years with only very brief periods of peace.
Of course by the 1990s it wasn't top of peoples minds because there had been peace for nearly 40 years, which is testament to the success of the original project, it doesn't mean the original goals had disappeared.
It was a pretty radical step change though? One currency. Freedom of movement and employment. The EU is almost like one country. The only thing really missing is having one military force and then it's basically like the United States of Europe. NATO is close to that. Maybe they don't want to lose all their UN seats though ;)
The modern EU was a decades-long journey, heavily informed by the geopolitical realities of constant horrific European wars, that this person has clearly laid out for you. I don’t understand what you’re trying to argue or achieve anymore.
The EU has clear predecessor initiatives and organizations that lead to its current form. Just like territories became states in the US, or the League of Nations lead to the UN. This isn’t a complicated concept we see it all the time. Something forms, it molds and changes over time, and eventually it becomes something else. But the roots are still clearly understood and are a part of its history.
The European Union is only a little over 20 years old. The economic and political union of Western Europe is an ~80 year old project that directly led to the European Union. You may as well take issue with people talking about England’s colonies prior to 1776 when discussing US history.
The only thing I am trying to achieve is accuracy.
History of everything is a long journey. The OP made a comment re: the EU specifically which I thought was off. And at least so far in this thread my reply seems to have been more accurate.
> Europeans who created the EU knew about balance of power geopolitics so well, they created this slow bureaucratic mess specifically to stop Germany and France sliding back into the same old lethal habit. While clumsy positioning between the US and China is a headache in the present moment for Europe, compared to a tedious Union Europeans prefer reawakenings of 1914 in their backyard. Well at least so far.
This statement isn't talking about "the decades long journey Europe has gone through informed by wars". It is very specifically talking about the creation of the EU (and e.g. its slow bureaucratic mess which are an attribute of the modern EU). I have yet to see any actual support to the idea that the specific step of the formation modern (of the) EU was indeed primarily about Germany and France sliding back into war and that a "slow bureaucratic mess" was the intentional vehicle here. As someone who has lived through these events I have my perspective and it's fine for others to have a different perspective. But if that is the case then I'm still to see that in this thread.
You are painting a picture as if a geographic region inevitably drifts towards the EU, the UN, the USA, etc. This just feels like total nonsense to me to be blunt. These are decisions taken at the time for various specific reasons. Sometimes they go one way. Sometimes a different way. The countries that formed the EU and decided to adopt one currency and open borders (amongst other decisions) took that step for a reason. It was not inevitable. There are and were many other paths forward. And Germany and France going to war, as far as I recall, was not part of the discussion at the time (1992-ish).
Is current day Europe and the EU a product of a history. I mean duh. That was not the point the OP was making.
EDIT: I can see why this would be a sensitive topic for present day Europeans and how the rise of nationalism is a possible threat to the modern day EU. There's definitely ample motivation to paint a certain picture here and tell a certain story. Present day EU was not a given. It passed by a very small margin. Then there was Brexit. It's not a given that there would be more wars in Europe without the EU. Europeans can do what's best for them. Again, my main reason for jumping in is that the comment didn't agree with my memory of the time when all of this was happening, so it feels like a modern day rewriting of what Europe was actually like in the 90's.
> I can see why this would be a sensitive topic for present day Europeans and how the rise of nationalism is a possible threat to the modern day EU.
I am not European, I am from the US. I saw this conversation and saw you being weirdly obstinate. This contrarian position then digging in regardless of response is not productive.
How would you propose I should have replied to support a more productive discussion here?
The original comment was the opposite of my personal experience having followed the events as they happened. The responses to my comment did not really address what I was talking about.
If you make a point (that the formation of the EU is because of X you are very specific about it) then you should be the one who is prepared to demonstrate it somehow. Why is this a problem?
Are you familiar with the topic or you're simply here to tell me that my manners are bad? If you're familiar I'd love to get your input on the actual question.
Why is my position "contrarian"? I am disagreeing with the original comment. For sure. And the reason I am persisting is that this comment seems wrong and I don't want to just let it go. It's important enough. FWIW I asked another random person whether my take on the EU's formation made sense to them (who was around at the time) and they agreed with me. It's definitely possible that I'm missing something profound but if I am then those taking the other position should spell it out. Maybe the OP meant something different. The OP didn't even weigh in.
@jpleyden98 jumps in with: You're just showing your ignorance and lack of knowledge about the history of the EU. Directly linking modern day EU with "European Coal and Steel Community was formed in 1950". I don't think that's right. At the very least it's missing a lot that happened in between.
> Its not that Europeans havent read Mearsheimer. its that for the best part of three hundred years the whole of Europe has been trying that same realist script until there was nothing left but total ruin across the entire continent. Europeans who created the EU knew about balance of power geopolitics so well, they created this slow bureaucratic mess specifically to stop Germany and France sliding back into the same old lethal habit. While clumsy positioning between the US and China is a headache in the present moment for Europe, compared to a tedious Union Europeans prefer reawakenings of 1914 in their backyard. Well at least so far.
Back to the original comment I had a problem with. This isn't some minor detail. It's pretty important. This history matters. At least I think it does.
So ignoring my bad manners and my apparent ignorance. Where is the support to the idea that the Europeans created the EU as it stands today "they created this slow bureaucratic mess specifically to stop Germany and France sliding back into the same old lethal habit" ? I'm happy to learn something new today. When I try with AI it seems to agree with the point I am making: "Treating the 1993 Maastricht Treaty as a simple continuation of the 1950 Coal and Steel Community is a common oversimplification. While the underlying desire to keep Germany anchored to Western Europe remained a constant thread, the actual decisions made in 1993 were driven by a vastly different geopolitical crisis and economic reality.". If the OP just talked about the post-war European integration then I'm in complete agreement. To just project that to modern day EU feels like a very big stretch to me. But a quote from the specific individuals involved in the formation of the EU circa 1992 would definitely help me change my position. Again, this feels like a pretty big deal to me in terms of why the EU exists as it does today and understanding Europe.
EDIT: Also worth looking up the thread to what OP was responding to:
> The general population has 0 understanding of international relations.
And I think he's absolutely right.
Again, not that the wars in Europe don't cast a shadow today. But Europe has moved past that would be my take. Obviously not Putin I guess. But we digress.
The entire thread is a mix of politics/opinions etc. What I was trying to contribute is what the world was actually like during the formation of the EU from my personal experience and that it was not primarily driven by WW-II. Now it's possible my personal experience is wrong but hey, at least it's something that's not pure politics/opinion?
EDIT2:
When you say where we got here is a process over time how is that not something that is just true? Yes, everything today everywhere is a result of the process of history playing over time. The EU was not a predetermined outcome. That is not the question. Is the EU today (and in 1992) primarily concerned with European wars or with the world?
EDIT3:
To repeat what I'm not arguing with:
- Post WW-II sentiments and agreements were definitely driven by trying to ensure that a similar war does not repeat (more specifically around Germany).
- Before the EU was established in 1993 there were various cooperation arrangements in Europe that trace their history back to WW-II and can be seen through the lens of evolution.
- Where I disagree is the persistent weight of WW-II in the decades that followed vs. immediate after the war. More specifically the applicability to today's politics and geopolitics. In my impression the 60's until the fall of the USSR were dominated by the cold war and not the worry of new wars with Germany or France for example. The EU itself is a step function that was not a given and was driven by a wide array of reasons. The EU today also has a wide range of concerns. I also wouldn't compare the EU's formation to the USA or the UN. That said I can see how on some level the erasure of nationalism removes the motivation for wars that stem from said nationalism.
They are - but in cooperation with others. Parts of the Orion capsule of the current Artemis mission program are based on the German ATV, which is a capsule which was developed to supply ISS. On ISS there are German modules like Galileo. German Spacelab was a major component of many Space Shuttle missions. German companies like Zeiss provided optics and laser components for Apollo. To name a few, besides lots of satellites and other things. However after WW2 there were different political decisions, so that Germany won't build its own rockets, but German technology was key to Saturn V and Ariane rockets.
Aside from technology, Germany also got major control centers and mission planning capability in Cologne and Oberpfaffenhofen.
Most components are there, but not the political will to go on a national mission.
I mean, Operation Paperclip and Von Braun were central to the success of the Apollo program. The Soviets had a similar postwar-German-capture program, if I remember correctly.
> One would think that ze germans would be among the first to be conquering space
After the horrors of WWII, Europe decided it would rather do things collectively than each country doing its own thing. This resulted in wonderful things like Concorde, fast rail, Airbus, and Ariane. Europe became more than the sum of its parts.
Multiple European nations gaining their own independent launch capabilities will merely result in the sinking of ESA and ArianeSpace. Look forward to lots of infighting in the near future.
ESA is going to remain on the mission/payload side. ArianeSpace makes sense as a launch services provider handling everything that's not the rocket. ArianeGroup (the company that actually builds the rockets) will just become the French rocket company that will end up competing with the Italian and German ones.
Like most "small rocket companies" they'll come to the conclusion that they need bigger rockets to launch bigger payloads. Rockets that compete directly with Ariane 6. With some luck these will be reusable to, making Ariane 6 and ArianeSpace obsolete.
ESA and ArianeSpace will slowly but surely decay into obsolescence.
You seem to be confused about what organizations do what.
ESA neither launches or builds rockets. They are an end-user, and they own the launch infrastructure in Kourou. Both these roles will exist long after Ariane is gone.
Arianespace does not build rockets. It's a launch services provider, they purchase the rockets from other companies, handle all the logistics and manage the launchpad. It's in no way married to Ariane 6, and it has in the past and still does sell launches on multiple different rockets from different companies. There will be demand for these services even after Ariane the rocket is gone.
ArianeGroup is the company that builds Ariane 6. They are a complex co-owned project between Airbus and Safran, with workshare distributed between France and Germany. They make other things than the Ariane 6, notably the French SLBM. Eventually the Ariane 6 will go away, because it will be obsolete, but that will not necessarily mean that ArianeGroup will go under, because they have an another subsidiary called ArianeWorks developing a new rocket, called Themis.
If national governments can launch their own payloads without having to go through ESA or ArianeSpace it'll undermine the latter's position. They may even become competitors.
Italy accused the French-based ArianeSpace of deliberately taking launches away from the Italian-build Vega rocket in favor of the French-build Ariane rockets. They've now left ArianeSpace and are selling the rockets themselves and using ESA's infrastructure to launch them.
ESA funds and has awarded commercial contracts with ISAR and numerous other launch companies/consortia. Andoya spaceport is optimised for launching to polar orbits and not a realistic competitor to the ArianeSpace spaceport in French Guiana, much like SaxaVord and other spaceports based on the European continent. Vega is also an ESA-funded international collaboration project which actually started off managed by ArianeSpace, and the next generation of Avio-managed Vega rockets will be integrated in French Guiana and flown from ArianeSpace's spaceport...
Coupled or uncoupled, an equal relationship between the US and the EU is much healthier. Europe should have an economy, military and industrial capacity similar to the US.
While in the current case I agree it is the path that should be taken, ideally I would prefer efficient relations, where people cooperate rather than having to duplicate everything because they don't trust their neighbor (should I make my bread because the baker might decide to poison me?!).
But having educated people everywhere is hard, so some people, because they don't get how some stuff works, they try to abuse friends and allies and make things worse (inefficient) for everybody in the process.
Ariane is from the ESA, which is an organization under EU. The claim was that "EU is finally decoupling itself from the USA". My point is: the EU already has Ariane, for instance. It decoupled a long time ago.
Europe has had a space agency for a while now. So this story isn't "Europeans finally started to launch for space" but a private European company chose to launch from a continental location.
It's funny how we can't be celebrate a European achievement without trying to interpret it into relationship to the US.
It's not even the US in general, it's SpaceX specifically. Only the US and China have demonstrated reusable rockets, and only SpaceX demonstrated the actual reuse, the cadence and the economy of scale that it brings.
It means the laws of physics allow it, and anyone willing to invest the time and fiat to accomplish it can. This means the world will no longer need to rely on SpaceX for inexpensive lift to orbit through reusable first stages, which is objectively good. No different then China working towards obviating the need for ASML for EUV semiconductor manufacturing.
Just because you invest in it doesn't mean you end up with hugely cheap and scalable launch.
Europe has already invested far more in rocket then SpaceX did and isn't close.
If your capital efficiency is far lower, it might not be inexpensive. If you can get the scale because you don't have payloads, its going to be more expensive.
There is a incredibly long road between 'rocket can land' and 'cheap and scalable launch'. A long road most people don't see because its not as flashy as landing.
SpaceX was founded on making launches cheap. Arianespace only recently decided to develop reusable launch systems. Up to SpaceX demonstrating it was possible, the dominant approach to cheap launches was in making the expendable rocket cheap to manufacture. Nobody needs to be reminded the shuttle promised cheap access to space and failed at that.
But SpaceX built a cheaper launcher to manufacture as well as gaining reuse. There was no one making an expendable cheaper rocket before SpaceX either.
There are a lot more barriers to things in the real world. China has been dedicating immense effort and brainpower to cloning SpaceX, and they're still not especially close. I think a lot of us (certainly including myself) have no intuition for why this is, because we live in the software world where if you see something that is done then cloning it is generally just a matter of time and effort. But there's certainly some 'secret sauce' at SpaceX that does not seem easy to replicate.
That said I think this is awesome and hope the EU is able to make further advances. I have a very positive view of Musk, but the more competitors there are in space, the more likely we able to accelerate advances and efficiency in that domain. And I think everybody wins in that scenario.
> because we live in the software world where if you see something that is done then cloning it is generally just a matter of time and effort. But there's certainly some 'secret sauce' at SpaceX that does not seem easy to replicate
In software, thanks mostly to the open-source movement, we all have access to the same materials and manufacturing processes.
In manufacturing, there are huge differences in materials and processes that we need to account for. On the flip side, this can allow one to leapfrog the other rather than replicating them - it’s likely the next reusable Falcon 9-class vehicle will use a methalox engine that’ll be easier to maintain compared to Flacon 9’s kerolox ones. China has demonstrated a novel approach to vehicle recovery as well (in addition to landing legs). Future competitors will have access to materials current incumbents didn’t have and can’t easily adopt with their current supply chain.
People also forget SpaceX subverted a lot of the expectations for reusable rockets - they didn’t use parachutes, but opted to carry extra propellant for landing; they didn’t eject the engines, opting instead to reuse the whole stage; and they built landing barges because their rockets would launch towards the ocean, saving fuel for a boost back to the launch site. They also tested capsule landing using the launch abort rockets, but opted for parachutes and splashdowns instead. Still they keep all the RCS motors in the capsule, making their expendable service module very inexpensive in comparison to Boeing’s.
All these decisions point to proven mission architectures so that followers don’t need to explore architectures that were explored and dropped.
> I think a lot of us (certainly including myself) have no intuition for why this is,
It's because space programs are job programs to keep the advanced rocketry tech available for future use. The so-called launch market never materialized. Congresses of launch capable nations are completely fine with couple hundred to low billion dollars divided by couple launches per year doing science and gravity experiments and occasional TV sat launches. Every dollar "saved" is every dollar unspent and diverted away from STEM.
Starlink wouldn't be accounting for like 99.9% of Falcon 9 launches and 99.9999% of man made objects in space if this wasn't the case.
China does what it does because else the world won't take them seriously, which creates artificially lower socio-economic statuses with no benefits to anyone. They have bunch of different lineages of space launch vehicles and production capacities, they don't need reusability per se. Same goes for humanoids - US/CN both have ~zero chance entering heavy industry hard robotics used in car plants, and that leads both into so-to-speak alternative robotics.
Reuse might turn out not to be the future - and its SpaceX has embraced this internally. At least not full reuse, or not the way most people think of a reusable spacecraft as a reusable aircraft. A reusable rocket engine might only have 2-3 flights in it, if that, with some routine inspection and maintenance between them.
3D printing has been a game changer that basically allows you to crank out rocket engines from raw materials, which means that building new ones is cheap and easy. If you look at the Raptor 3 (3D printed), it looks super clean, thanks to the fact that they integrated most of the piping into the 3d printed body, but that means you can't really fix or inspect it.
Which is fine tbh. SpaceX (and Tesla) has been shown to be pragmatic not dogmatic when it comes to new technology. 'Elon time' might be a meme, but Musk both pushes his employees very hard, but probably not harder than possible - and he's willing to take flak for delaying projects, changing scope or outright cancellation.
2-3 flights is still quite a bit of cost-cutting, and some SpaceX Falcon 9 boosters have flown more than 30 times; the median number is about 12, often very soon after the previous flight.
We are not talking about forever spacecraft, and even Falcon 9's reusabilility is partial (the second stage is lost), but even what Falcon 9 has achieved allows for very rapid progress, due to the short feedback loop, including progress in reliability.
There’s absolutely no reason to believe rocket engines can only do two or three flights. SpaceX has demonstrated ten times that with F9 and with Raptor testing.
Ariane 5 was the cheapest option available for a long time, now they're a bit behind. But the ESA is now working on reusable rockets too, it seems, with their Themis program.
Well, there was Goddard, Korolev & quite a few others. But it could indeed have taken longer if the military implications were not clearly demonstrated by Von Braun.
Still, an interesting possibility of a fully civilian space program from the start & how it would look like & how it would be different.
Not only the military aspect. His staff literally were absorbed into the Russian sand US space programs. Von Braun himself famously designed the Saturn V.
>His staff literally were absorbed into the Russian sand US space programs.
Not really in case of the USSR. German group in Russia was isolated and Korolev didn't like competition. Soviet space program started by replicating German rocket, but once all production chains were created, it was off on its own course.
I highly recommend English translation of memoirs of Boris Chertok[0] to anyone interested in the history of Soviet space program.
That was just because the Russian's didn't trust "their" Germans as much as the Americans trusted "theirs". Operation Osoaviakhim was mostly about knowledge extraction, not about cooperation. The other difference was that the "Russian Germans" didn't go to Russia on their own will (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Osoaviakhim).
Once the knowledge was "extracted" the Germans were allowed to return though (good thing Stalin was already dead at that time).
Former Junkers engineer Brunolf Baade then went on to build the first and only German jet airliner for East Germany - which then of course was cancelled as soon as it was ready to enter production: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baade_152).
Americans didn't trust either. But then Sputnik happened and Americans only had oopsnik[0], so they turned to neglected Redstone made by von Braun[1][2]
From a sovereignty perspective, does a launch from continental Europe actually matter when Arianespace/CNES/ESA has been launching from France for decades?
The sovereignty perspective here is the perspective of the sovereignty of the states that make up Europe not the sovereignty of the entity of the EU/Europe.
Though not every sovereign state has an army, see Iceland, Costa Rica, theoretically Japan, etc.
I do not think so, but anyway, it is definitely not a proof that we are further decoupling ourselves from the US, which is the claim made in the root comment. France has launched rockets from France for decades. Being an ocean away does not make Kourou reliant on the US.
I think the opposite because in this specific case we have the US which has the world's strongest navy, and the strongest navy by far in the Atlantic.
My opinion is that there is an implied reliance on the US "allowing" Europe to ship the rockets to Kourou and launch them there.
If our relations ever completely sour, the US might, for example, take over the shipping vessels going to Kourou, kinda like Europe takes over Russian shadow fleet vessels.
Now all of a sudden Europe has no means of launching rockets, except now it can launch to polar orbits. It might seem a stretch, but there is a non-zero chance that could happen, therefore it is better to have an alternative.
“Vulnerable to the US” can mean so many things that it practically loses all meaning. Even with a launchpad in continental Europe, they have many ways to interfere with this project, from disrupting the supply chain to carpet bombing the launch site.
A ship crossing the ocean is much more vulnerable than a launch site with sophisticated air defences.
The US can also decide to “free” and “bring democracy” to the French Guiana because the rich oil deposits of its continental shelf won’t free themselves.
The point is that a slow ship crossing the ocean with hard to replace is very vulnerable in transit.
But French Guiana is a geographically distant ex-colony, so there will always be a higher probability of future inaccessibility. Same applies to New Caledonia, Martinique, etc.
Although you're right about the history of French Guiana, using that term to put on the same level as New Caledonia is nonsense. (Same goes for Martinique.)
I wasn’t talking about the historical aspect. Same applies = the same risk also exists due to geopolitics and distance. Heck, didn’t New Caledonia see a wave of protests that were crushed in the past year or two?
> Heck, didn’t New Caledonia see a wave of protests that were crushed in the past year or two?
Yes, that's why the risk is NOT the same between French Guiana and New Caledonia. Both of them are oversea territories far from the mainland with a colonial past, but their current relationship with the mainland is very different.
Around a quarter of the population of New Caledonia has been calling for independence for decades at this point, with 3 referendum organised during the last 10 years to resolve this issue. Only half of the population was able to vote to the referendums (and some local elections, like Congress of NC), due to local rules than are about to change–this, incidentally, is the cause of the protests you are talking about. On the geopolitical side of things, the independentists are probably propped up by Azerbaijan (https://www.courrierinternational.com/article/geopolitique-n...) and maybe China (https://www.lefigaro.fr/international/ambitions-geostrategiq...).
None of this holds for French Guiana. The risk between these territories is not the same. At all. Putting them on the same level by reducing them to their status as former colonies is nonsense.
Thanks for explaining. But I am not sure how this contradicts my point?
Sure, placing launch infrastructure in French Guiana is probably less risky than setting up shop in New Caledonia. Clearly, the risk profile is not the same for all of Overseas France.
My point is that if the decision is between mainland and Overseas France, the latter introduces elevated risk in the long term in general. French Guiana could be fine today, but it is not impossible that the next few years could see the rise of a populist pro-independence movement that would eventually impact launch infrastructure (similar to how it did for the USSR).
Britain’s Black Arrow could, but it launched from a RAF base in Australia. Definitely not continental Europe, but part of Europe if you consider it from the Eurovision point of view.
A real shame Britain abandoned their own research.
> Have there been other rocket launches from continental Europe?
Yes. A Spanish private company launched the Miura 1 from Huelva (South of Spain) in 2023.
In any case it was programmed to reach only 46 Km high in the first attempt, and suffered damages after landing in the ocean at the expected coordinates.
It seems that a loan to finish its successor, the reusable rocket Miura 5, were granted in April of this year and that its first test flight is expected for the end of 2026, so Germany is not the only European country trying this.
> It's funny how we can't be celebrate a European achievement without trying to interpret it into relationship to the US.
It really isn’t funny. The US shat the bed and for now the repercussions are mainly being felt outside the US. When the US realises what it’s lost it’s going to be too late.
Oh we (the non idiots here) know full well what we lost. If Europe has a larger and more substantial science / technology community, that will just mean more trips/job offers in EU for me, so go Europe !
As an American, I welcome a multi-polar world where Europe pulls its weight when it comes to science, technology and engineering! More so in geopolitical matters. It’s always been very draining for one empire or nation to maintain world peace. The 19th century was Pax Britannica, the 20th, after WW2, was Pax Americana, we can now hope that Pax AmEuropana can offer a counter to the crazy rapid growth of Asia and also find common ground with those nations.
You're arguing US imperialism is the best interest for the whole world. It was definitely after WW2 considering the alternative but the only way to keep the US honest is a little friendly competition.
You may be assuming the author of the comment you’re replying to believes that what is in the best interest of the US is also in the best interest of Europe and the world.
Yeah the world piece like all the wars in the middle east, Vietnam, proxy conflicts all over the world and so on and so on. I'm not blaming the US for all of these wars but they also didn't prevent them. And the US did overthrow many democracies and often made things much worse, Iran being a great example, but there are many others. I could go on.
Peace in Europe was maintained mostly by people in democracies generally wanting to work together. Yes the US had something to do with that as they supported that after WW2 but over the last 50 years, people in democracies generally don't fight each other. And more so by the threat of the Soviet Union that was so clearly the more dangerous option. Its easy to make allies if Stalin is on the other side.
And outside of Europe the US hardly maintained peace.
Nuclear weapons maintained 'peace' between Soviets and the US more then anything else.
And Europe has always pulled its weight in science, technology and engineering.
The US was actually on the right side in that one (just like in Korea). The Communists were not exactly the good guys and their "agricultural and personnel reforms" lead to drastically reduced food production and starvation and death.
Blame the US for real things instead, such as supporting the wrong side in Afghanistan in the '80s or ensuring the survival of the Soviet Union in the '40s.
Tell it to cca 2 millions civilians that died in Vietnam as a direct result of failed US invasion (I really mean just civilians mostly bombed into oblivion, entire human lives list is around 3 million). As in, vast majority of them would be alive is US didn't try their failed adventure. Tonkin gulf is a classic US made up war for power mongering reasons.
Telling 'we're the good guys' while regularly bombing entire villages into oblivion with napalm on some vague suspicions ('we heard some gunshot when flying around so we blasted them' scenarios). My Lai and many others.
If this is how US population views their past fuckups then no wonder we are where we are, objectivity ain't easy if one is on the wrong side, isn't it.
Supporting wrong side in Afghanistan? Against Soviet invasion? Sometimes, often even there are no good sides.
If you guys didn't support Soviet union in 40s (which they vehemently denied since then but its their inferiority complex, the issue with russian mentality since forever), there would be no massive eastern front with most german losses and wehrmacht spread out too thinly, and D day would be crushed like nothing. History would be very different in Europe and globally.
You can go even farther back in time. If the US hadn't massively relieved the famine in Russia in 1920/21 there might have been a chance, Lenin and the Bolshevik regime wouldn't have survived.
I'm sorry but famine help is a good thing, not saving millions of people because it might potentially overthrow a government 'somehow' isn't a great plan.
One can argue FDR later embrace of Soviets was way to early and a direct stab in the back to France and other European powers.
It's not so simple, the rampant corruption under Ngô Đình Diệm, misappropriation of aid, etc. shouldn't just be swept under the rug. Hindsight says remaining capitalist probably would have been better for the average person, but it wasn't so obvious at the time.
Johnson was a warmonger, exaggerating (or possibly faking) the Gulf of Tonkin engagements to justify full escalation was a crime that led to the death of 60,000 Americans, hundreds of thousands more with PTSD, and 2 million+ murdered Vietnamese civilians. Not to mention hundreds of thousands of birth defects caused by agent orange and the still ongoing effort to clean up dioxins from the environment.
That is an objectively incorrect take. A common theme in disastrous US interventions was that they tried to prop-up a failing colonial power, which in this case was France - against the locals who wanted independence. Ho Chi Minh was a French-educated leader who only entered the orbit of the USSR after failing to secure support for Vietnamese independence frome the West.
The US only became actively involved in supporting South Vietnam a decade after it had achieved independence from France in 1955, after the negotiated division into North and South Vietnam in Geneva, and after the last French forces left in 1956.
The cause of that intervention was North Vietnam sending Viet Cong insurgents into South Vietnam, attempting to overthrow the government, and ignoring the South's sovereignty.
That doesn't justify the US's later transgressions while engaged in the war, but their initial support to South Vietnam was neither unjustified nor illiberal.
You can be technically 'right' by some definition and an intervention still not being a good thing.
The Southern regime was incredibly corrupt and dominated by land owners. Look at the Philippines for an example of what happens to a US 'colony' where the land lords are in control.
Communist Vietnam did some bad reforms yes, but they also changed and eventually did a lot of good things, turning the country into what it is today.
The US spent decades of war propping up a regime that was mostly incapable and killed a lot of people in the meantime.
I can't believe people are saying that with straight face. How on Earth can you see all the wars that the US has started or had a hand in igniting and still think that?
I think you maybe believing that War would not have happened or there was some other approach without war, ever? I'm sorry but such beliefs are as wishful thinking as buying the world a coke.
> I can't believe people are saying that with straight face.
That's the consequence of a broken education system when it comes to teaching history. Empires rarely come to terms with what they did, and never while they're in power.
That's nonsense. It's imparted us with incredible prosperity and peace. The US is a much poorer and worse nation due to you and your kind destroying what we built.
When the US government funded SpaceX, it was motivated in no small degree by a desire to not be permanently reliant on a geopolitical wildcard (Russia) for getting astronauts into orbit. Now that the US itself has become a geopolitical wildcard, savvy countries know that they need to seek out alternatives to SpaceX under more stable regimes.
Authoritarian dictatorships will always behave in seemingly irrational ways (from the perspective of sane politicians).
Dictators will always put their personal ambition and "career" first before their country's interests.
If Russia behaved rationally they would have made a deal with Ukraine (decades ago) that protected the rights of the Russian minorities in Ukraine and continued massively profiting from gas and oil exports into Europe.
> they would have made a deal with Ukraine (decades ago) that protected the rights of the Russian minorities in Ukraine and continued massively profiting from gas and oil exports into Europe.
Russia did, many times, last time in 2010.[0]
But the US and the EU didn't like it, so the coup in 2014 happened with American help[1] which overthrew democratically elected president of Ukraine who introduced the law protecting Russian speaking Ukrainian citizens.[2]
The law was repelled right after the coup and Crimeans supported the reunion with Russia.
Parliament did not vote to impeach the president, which would have involved formally charging Yanukovych with a crime, a review of the charge by the Constitutional Court, and a three-fourths majority vote in parliament—at least 338 votes in favor.[0]
In English, impeachment is often used loosely to mean parliamentary removal from office, which happened there. You're the one spreading misinformation with cope about foreign coups when Ukrainians simply kicked your clown out of their house.
I think Trump definitely pushes allies away much faster than ever anticipated, that's probably the only achievement from the current administration.
The alliance still stands, but it's hard to trust the US when the current president is constantly praising violent dictators and doesn't seem to grasp the concept of laws/rules + tries to blame everyone else + threatens to invade EU countries + the requirement to bribe him with funds/crypto to have "alliance".
You can know a guy by the friends he keeps :)
Fyi. I used to always use US tech, the last year I've done my best to adhere to the "European Souvereign Cloud". My current stack on US providers is down from 300 € / month to 35€ / m. And many are following suite ( it's slowly becoming a requirement for tenders for the governement + cities)
This took about eight years of work by a private company (funded by US VC and an ex-SpaceX leader). This wasn't an intentional decision to decouple from the US, if that's what you're implying, but a business decision.
I've always assumed that the reason there aren't many launch sites in Europe because the booster stage falls back to Earth, and generally you want that to be over the sea. People get cross if rockets fall on their houses. If you're using the Earth's axial rotation as a helper that means launching heading east, and in Europe east is pretty much always over land. That's why most spaceports are either by an ocean (USA, Japan) or over a huge area of land no one lives in (Russia).
Not really, the actual issue is delta V, launching near the equator requires less fuel because you are getting all the benefit from Earth's rotation. Mass is almost everything for rocket launches.
Northern launches are done sometimes for high inclination orbits since they reduce the need to maneuver from an equatorial orbit.
A good historical nugget is that the Americans got a huge leg up in the space race by importing the Germans who worked on the V-2 program.
Germans killed Soviets by the millions. If you were a German of value (like a rocket scientist) you were eager to surrender to the Americans before the Soviets could get their hands on you.
If you were the Americans, you distrusted the Soviets already, so it was a win-win.
Yes a good thing to point out, however the American initiative was more successful, was it not?
Largely because raw numbers aside, most of the top talent wanted to avoid the Soviets and thus the US was the only logical option. That is, part of what made the American job on this easier is top German talent anticipated some "Operation Osoaviakhim" (or worse) scenario and thus sought out the US as the only way to get out ahead of it.
von Braun made major contributions to NASA. My understanding is relatively speaking, the Soviets got the scraps. Not that it made no impact, but just to say the impact of the Germans on the American space program should not be understated, and I don't think it would be accurate to assess the fruits of these two competing operations as equivalent.
von Braun and others had a major hand in the Saturn V. Who did the Soviets manage to seize of equal caliber?
USA got the cream of the crop of the managers of the German missile program, while the USSR got the workers, who actually did the work with their hands and built the parts for the rockets. (One exception was Helmut Gröttrup, the head of the V-2’s guidance and telemetry systems.)
In fact, after the war the USSR has briefly reconstituted the manufacturing of V-2 in Germany, employing thousands of people, before transplanting this entire industry to the USSR. This dramatically lifted the level of Soviet manufacturing and relevant metallurgy.
von Braun's dissertation was on engine design and testing. But when he built the Redstone missile in the USA, he ordered the engine from a US company -- the engine which was already a generation ahead, compared to the imported German engines which the US engineers studied after the war.
Meanwhile, the Soviets have developed even better engines, completely on their own, though with the important parts built using the materials and the equipment brought from Germany.
So it is debatable whether having the German higher-ups and having a greater continuity with German design philosophy was a good thing or a liability.
It is less well known, but France have also imported a significant number of ex-Peenemunde engineers for their program. And their engines developed in a way different from both the American ones and the Soviet ones -- which definitively shows that although internalizing the German know-how was the starting point for everyone, it did not define the path of subsequent development.
Of course, the engines were not the whole story. The Germans took to the USA the advanced prototypes of the inertial guidance systems which were developed for the missiles that were supposed to come after the V-2. And the Soviets got Helmut Gröttrup. This did have its effects in both cases.
great comment, just wanted to add a little: all three countries were pioneering rocketry in the 20-30s, more or less in equal measure.
I don't know why this WW2 rocket discussion happened to begin with, but people here don't seem to understand that there is no magical inherent technical skill which is unique and irreplaceable. Experience helps to speed things up, sure, but it can be acquired by any program given time and resources, with no talent blockers.
> USA got the cream of the crop of the managers of the German missile program, while the USSR got the workers
That's a bit oversimplified. The Russians got quite a few important scientists and engineers in other areas (aircraft design, nuclear physics, electronics, radar, optics), they just didn't make as good use of them as the US (e.g. the 'American Germans' essentially won the space race for the US).
Talking about the role of V2 in the development of rocketry in various countries is more or less relevant to the discussion of Isar, because it was a major milestone, and it did influence all rocketry worldwide, in many different ways.
Rocketry may be much more talked about, but in terms of headcount is was a tiny thing compared to the number of German experts who were "invited" into all Allied countries after the war. Just France and UK had brought in about 3 thousand persons each. If one had said that this did not happen, that would have been an error. But simply not bringing this up at all because it is not very relevant to the discussion of Isar is fine, I think.
Debating who "won" the space race, and who "used" Germans "better" is not something that I want to do.
For any unfamiliar with the history, Russia was a mass murdering machine in this era, vaporizing tens of millions of people, including Russians, in very short spans of time without even a second thought.
We all know Germans was. And some people would fling fecal allegations that “so was the US!”. No. German and Russian actions were categorically different than wartime casualties (even brutal, possibly criminal, wartime casualties like fire bombing heavily civilian enemy areas like Dresden)
And in your living memory: Vietnam, Korea, the vile shit we did to Haiti and Chile, the 'Banana Republics', Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, unconditionally supporting Israel and the Gulf States various war crimes and genocides, etc...
And of course, most recently, the sudden and complete excision of life-saving aid to children in Africa, leaving the world's most vulnerable to starve.
And also the total embargo on Cuba, to ensure starvation, with the intention of conquest, resource extraction, and collective punishment.
but God forbid someone on a message board tarnish the US's sterling reputation (relative to some of history's worst) during WWII.
For anyone actually unfamiliar with history, this is a gross exaggregation made with a sole purpose of equalizing nazi crimes with what happened in the soviet union.
History does not work this way, in the early modernity masses were cohesive and industrialized, and so were the crimes and atrocities.
Every developed country got to it, but what makes nazis different is that the regime was built with the sole purpose of commiting atrocities, hence the outstanding scale and character of the matter.
It’s clear by the numbers, but some will just refuse, mostly those with romantic views of Marx or the others, while at the same time arguing “but real communism has never been tried!”
They got a leg up and still the Russians with Sputnik got into space first, on top of splitting Korea and winning in Vietnam and having the nuclear bomb fall into their lap and to top it off they appear to have the Manchurian candidate in the White House.
With fairness to the Soviets, the USSR's reputation for rocket artillery was nearly as impressive as Germany's in WWII. The Allies had less experience scaling and deploying the technology, so they had more to gain by taking in the Peenemünde researchers.
The Russians conscripted more German rocket scientists than the Americans got through Operation Paperclip, both programs were bootstrapped with German expertise. Americans got ~1,600, Russians more like 6,000.
> If you were a German of value (like a rocket scientist) you were eager to surrender to the Americans before the Soviets could...
Misleading. Pretty much all Germans were eager to surrender to the Western Allies - US/UK/France. That became the German government's official top priority in the closing days of the war, and Eisenhower threatened to seal the Western Front (to German soldiers and civilians fleeing the Soviets) when the Germans dragged their heels on his terms of surrender.
True, I just meant that if you had something of value (like rocket expertise) you would be more likely to get favorable terms. And you knew the Soviets would be extra interested in you. Thus the added "eagerness".
But yes the point is on the whole, Germans did not want to surrender to the Soviets. Germans didn't kill millions of American civilians. They didn't level American cities.
So, it was perfectly logical as Germany collapsed for any German to fear the retribution of the Soviet armed forces, who they had every reason to see as filled with a rage and a sense of purpose no American would have been able to contemplate.
Just for context, when Boeing completed the 747 Airbus wasn't even a thing. 5 decades later they have caught up in most categories and even surpassed in some. Who knows, maybe something similar will happen again?
Airbus did not come into existence out of nowhere. It is the result of merging some companies that had some ancestry going back to the time of aviation pioneers.
It's a posterboy project for the EU and for all its insane complexities and French people, it's working! I am watching Belugas land here in Hamburg almost every day :)
Europe is a vibe based concept, a place can be European or not depending on the vibes. Even the east west central etc. are completely vibe based. Portugal for example is Eastern European country, meanwhile Romania is central according to some textbooks.
Congrats! How come European companies still haven't managed to match SpaceX's capabilities? Europe has an incredible talent pool, especially in aerospace, and some of the world’s best expertise in precision engineering, instrumentation, sensors, avionics, and other hard-tech subsystems. A huge amount of the expertise and supply chain for these components is concentrated in Europe.
So what are we missing? Is it mainly systems integration, manufacturing scale, risk tolerance, organizational structure, or the willingness to iterate as aggressively as SpaceX? It feels like Europe has many of the pieces needed to build world-class launch systems, but hasn't yet put them together at the same scale and speed.
Incidentally, the early investment for Isar came from Bülent Altan, the Turkish ex-SpaceX guy who was in charge of the guidance system for Falcon-1, Falcon-9 and Dragon.
There are some (many?) European companies which are considered as least as much as a jobs program as anything else.
In 2018, Alain Charmeau (in)famously expressed frustration with SpaceX in an interview with Der Spiegel and rejected reusability with these words:
“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!’”
A more recent example would be the Future Combat Air System (FCAS) project which was officially cancelled in June 2026, due to (?) industrial rivalry and leadership disputes, with a side order of politics.
That's the only good answer of the thread. ArianeGroup is mainly the SLBM program of France and after that a way to maintain european know-how in rocket building and for nearly 20 years was the main space launch company in the world before Space-X. All those companies success and failures (be that Space-X or ArianeGroup) are linked to their political environment and how much money can be spent on their launch market. Space-X could use the technique of launching many and fail as much because they had the contracts to do it and years of tangential R&D by Nasa. The ecosystem explains everything and the relative intelligence of american or european engineers nearly nothing.
Perhaps this “jobs program” could be seen as preserving industrial capacity? With military contractors, for example, it’s apparently a problem when they’re used to build a stockpile and then they shut down because there are no more orders.
Most of the US space launch startups have failed. And in Europe it is harder to even try.
There was a confluence of several factors which helped SpaceX to succeed, and not the least of these was the employee number one. For many years, Tom Mueller has been working in his free time on rather large liquid fuel amateur rockets, which he was building in his garage and which he was launching from some amateur rocketry facilities in the desert. In terms of regulation it was a relatively accessible hobby in the US. At the time Musk found him, he was working on the original "BFR" -- a very large liquid fuel amateur rocket. So the deal was to invest serious money into the project and scale the same no nonsense approach to a small orbital launch vehicle. They were in LA, the center of US aerospace manufacturing, so through Tom's professional connections and knowledge of who was who in the industry, they were able to source the necessary materials, components, and to find the key personnel for their company. Significantly, NASA has already spent probably a decade or more trying to get somebody to produce a cheap small launch vehicle. This did not directly affect SpaceX, but it did fund the R&D for example at Barber-Nichols, which enabled them to offer a turbopump for SpaceX engine at a much lower cost than it would have been possible otherwise.
At first, Musk and Co thought that they would be able to develop the rocket for a few million dollars. But even in the US regulatory environment it turned out that doing everything in compliance with regulations raised the costs to well over a hundred million dollars.
So, Tom's hobby + Musk's activism + industrial ecosystem in the area + NASA's prior support of component vendors + being at the right time to snag the International Space Station delivery contract were all important for SpaceX thriving where so many others have failed.
This is an article title that needs a ton of caveats (the ESA launch site in French Guiana is indeed part of the European Union, and Russia's Plesetsk Cosmodrome is within continental Europe). Nonetheless the underlying achievement is impressive, and it's very good to see more private operators competing in space flight
If Isar will get a large scale commitment from the government(s) to launch the OneWeb 2.0 constellation, as the European alternative to US, Chinese and Russian systems, they may well become a major launch provider. And of course they are already working on a much larger reusable rocket.
Although the original OneWeb satellites were assembled in the USA, they were developed in Europe and the components were always sourced predominantly from Europe, Canada, and Africa, with only some parts produced by the European companies in the USA, and even fewer parts sourced from the US companies. It is a very European satellite.
Something they might have is a lot of strain gauges around the rocket. They can tell if the rocket is bending and compressing (and how) -- but they are also essentially high-speed microphones. Valves make sounds (cause vibrations) and they are easy to spot if you have high-speed samples of your strain gauges. You can also triangulate distances if you have multiple strain gauges with synchronized high-speed samples.
It's good practice to dump data into several flash memories + transmit live. The live transmit is likely only a small summary of all the data that they capture -- distributed flash memory locations is a cheap way to increase the chances of getting useful data after a boom/crash (put them in orange water tight containers that can float + give them a beep-beep radio transmitter).
FYI Norway is not in the EU. Whether they are European is a matter of perspective and I'm not touching that subject any further! Deutschland is in the EU.
Norway is as close as you can get without formally being a member. It's not just the EEA, it's also a member of essentially all EU programs that aren't closed off for non-member states. That Norway is European is not a matter of perspective.
Do you know any Norwegians? I don't have an opinion but many of my Norwegian relatives think the European thing is not just terminology and is a label from outside. Swedes and Fins too. [edit: I changed a fair bit of wording in the first few minutes of the post]
> Whether they are European is a matter of perspective
What? Scandinavia isn't part of Europe now? The "EU" is an organization, "Europe" is a continent. "European" includes everybody living in Europe (and yes, that even includes the Brits and most Russians).
I shouldn't have to explain this stuff. The Nordic countries are exceptionalist in my understanding from talking to them. It's an easy search to go down this rabbit hole. It's a little different from Catalan wanting to be independent but still European. This is not my area of knowledge I have just been exposed multiple times first hand. Where are my scando fin buddies to chime in? Lulz
Looking at a map Norway is on the same continent as Vietnam so that statement makes no sense. Please have some sort of context and understanding before making such statements. They "seem" to be part of Europe but they have historically wanted to have it both ways: one foot in one foot out. Go research it yourself I am probably totally wrong! HN comments are not a reference source.
There's a clearly defined border between the continents Europe and Asia.
I guess the confusion comes from thinking of "European" as some sort of cultural identity (which frankly doesn't exist, unless you only look at the last hundred years or so, and even that is generous), instead of the people living in the geographical region called "Europe".
OMG these responses are truly reddit empty brain stuff that can't even bother to look up the simplest thing. Little boys with reactions and opinions! Did you hear about my opinion?
I wonder whether the Sámi people have been consulted or compensated for the use of their traditional lands as a rocket launch site. Given Norway’s long history of suppressing Sámi people and their land rights, I'd be interested to know how that was handled.
Just south of the launchpad lies Bukkekjerka, a protected Sami cultural monument. Prior to Christianity, sacrifices were made within a cave facing the sea. In most recent times, for the past half-century, there has been an annual open-air church service, which attracts many from across Andøya – perhaps even some who remember or even resided in the disappeared town of Haugnes.
The sooner Europe cuts itself off from the US crazy billionaires, the better - on all levels (software and manufacture processes are the two biggest issues). Today we already could see the US surrender team crawling up to dictator Putin. Enough is enough - agent Krasnov needs to be isolated.
Americans have to hope that the US will move past trumo and not repeat that mistake, but for europeans its most prudent to prepare for a world where such a corrupt wannabe distator doesnt have have that much leverage over them.
The US and europe would be stronger together if the US acted in good faith. Absent that, decoupling is the right choice
Germany also has a crazy Communist party that is more in the pocket of Russia than AfD is -- but somehow that is almost never mentioned, not even in German media. It's quite big and influential.
What Europe needs to do to spur its tech sector is lower taxes.
A 2018 study shows tax increases significantly reduce innovation. A 1% increase in the top marginal income tax rate leads to a 2% reduction in patents and inventors, while a similar increase in corporate taxes causes even larger declines.
The "Onward and Upward" cube sats were deployed to Sun-synchronous orbits, with a roughly polar inclination.
Similarly, launches from USSF Base Vandenberg take a southerly trajectory, so it can be used for orbits like that.
Rocket launches from continental Europe have been challenging because of the population centers, and the unpopularity of things exploding over their heads, and falling on their houses and businesses. USA and Russia have some quite ideal sites that avoid flying over populated areas.
Velocity is a vector, not simply a rate. Launches and orbits are three-dimensional.
What would be a great technological achievement would be launching from French Guiana (5.2° N) and then making a plane-change maneuver to achieve a polar orbit (90° inclination). All that bonus eastward velocity from the Earth's rotation would turn into a penalty they'd need to compensate for no reason, when they had a spaceport more suitable for that polar inclination.
No. It’s simply about accessibility and sovereignty. Even though the ESA can launch from French Guiana, the space port is an ocean-away from Europe! How much do you think that fact will affect the cost and the launch cadence for Europe?
Now they prove they can launch directly from Norway with their own production from Munich and elsewhere and that has immense potential for the future: much higher cadence, significant lower cost and always-on accessibility.
The only way, Europe can have a Starlink similar network is to launch from their own soil and reuse the first stage. Also from the perspective of security, launching spy and other military satellites from European soil is the only practical possibility in this political climate.
How can it be the first European rocket? There’s the ESA! Are you telling me we have all these organisations and none of them have ever launched from their own continent?
French Guiana is not a colony, it is a region of France. People who live there have the same constitutional rights as anyone living in mainland France.
It has the same status in France as Alaska does in the US.
Guianans tend to get pissed off if outsiders suggest in any way that they are any different as a French region from l'Hexagone (the French mainland). Your banging on about colonies would not be well received there.
That's legally true, but I think it misses the distinction between formal political status and the legacy of colonialism.
French Guiana is an overseas department of France, and its residents have French citizenship and constitutional rights. But that doesn't mean the historical relationship was equivalent to mainland France, or that the effects of that history disappeared when the legal status changed.
The same point applies elsewhere: Guinea became independent from French colonial rule in 1958, but independence didn't magically erase the economic structures, institutions, and inequalities inherited from colonialism. Today, a large share of Guinea's population still lives in poverty despite the country's enormous natural-resource wealth.
So "it's not a colony" is correct as a matter of constitutional law. But using that fact to imply that colonial history is irrelevant to present-day economic and social conditions is a much stronger claim, and one that's harder to defend.
While I agree with your analysis, would you think is the best to use the same generic term "colonialism" for both the situations in French Guyana and let's say Venezuela in the last year? I would prefer more words to differentiate a bit, but maybe that's just me.
How does it compare to Alaska? Wasn't it purchased as a colony from russians to exploit Alaskan gold with complete disreagrd for opinion of the native population?
In the political sense, «Western Europe» is typically taken to be «NATO Europe», and «Eastern Europe» is «Warsaw Pact Europe». Which is different from a strict geographic definition.
You’d have to say which NATO. Czechia is in NATO and was in Warsaw pact.
If you said: Americans usually incorrectly think of Western Europe as those countries not partially or fully under control of the Soviet Union during the Cold War, then I’d agree with you.
You are thinking about Vostochny in Russian Far East. Plesetsk was an early ICBM launch site that started doing orbital launches in 1966. It was the busiest spaceport in Soviet times, and the cumulative number of orbital launches from Plesetsk still probably exceeds those from Florida.
No, I'm thinking of Plesetsk because it is in Europe. It is much nearer to Moscow than Baikonur is. Since the USSR broke up, this is even more the case.
I meant that Vostochny is the one that is supposed to reduce their reliance on Baikonur, while Plesetsk is more like the Russian equivalent of Vandenberg. During Soviet times, Baikonur was the premium spaceport for all the big high-profile missions. Plesetsk was a boring mundane place, where the military launched spy satellites and things like that every week or so for >20 years.
The fact not many launches happen from continental Europe has nothing to do with capabilities of the space industry or lack of expertise, but rather location.
Europe is far from the equator and densely populated so rocket launches from there are more costly, and failures can have a higher risk to life.
Arianne space has had 350+ successful missions after 45 years of operations, with most of those launching from overseas territories.
I don't understand the one country vs all of Europe - given a fixed population, being united in a single country surely makes everything a bit more efficient than being split in many small countries? India is much bigger than "all of Europe".
Congratulations! An immensely important achievement, I’d say.
IMO, this success has a great implication for accessibility and sovereignty of the EU. Although ESA can launch from French Guiana, the spaceport is an ocean-away from Europe! That fact alone affects the cost and the launch cadence for Europe greatly.
Now they prove they can launch directly from Norway with their own production from Munich and elsewhere and that has immense potential for the future: much higher launch cadence, significant lower cost and always-on accessibility.
The only way Europe can have a Starlink similar network is to launch it from their own soil and reuse the first stage. Also from the perspective of security, launching spy and other military satellites from EU soil is the only practical possibility in this political climate.
Dont worry the US will hoodwink Europe back into be a compliant vassal of the Empire in a few years when they elect a democrat who pretends to be liberal and acting in good faith, probably AOC(ia).
Why is this downvoted? This is exactly how US foreign policy works. The only difference with Trump is that he says things out loud.
This is 100% what is going to happen. US foreign policy relies on deception and decade long plans. The big plans are ruling the Middle East and squash opposition (Libya, Egypt, Syria, Iraq done, Iran pending).
To that end Russia had to be kept busy, therefore the Ukraine proxy war, which has the additional benefit of tying up the EU and cut it off from Russian natural resources.
It makes the EU dependent on the US as an energy exporter. These plans are old and both parties have diligently executed them.
Even with the Greenland annexation threats there are Democrats who think it wouldn't be a bad idea, but you should not say it out loud.
No one made Russia invade Ukraine, this is simply the centuries old russian imperialism against Ukraine.
Also, Syria being in that list is silly. The Syrian opposition aren't vassals of the US. The US was never too keen to help them.
your statements are wildly misinformed, you can't make claims about geopoltics because you've read a few delusional reddit threads. The US was extremely active in supporting the Syrian opposition, we literally funded the entire operation, like what reality are you living in.
Your opinion on Russia/Ukraine is clearly skewed by NATO propaganda, which I wouldn't blame you for, most people have had their minds colonized by NATO propaganda, after all, NATO has a literal newsletter called "Cognitive Warfare" where they candidly brag about it.
https://www.act.nato.int/activities/cognitive-warfare/
/s Right, cause it's not like there's any Russian propaganda out there competing with it... /s
It doesn't matter how much you go on about 'NATO propaganda', the simple truth is that Russia invaded Ukraine, illegally and without reasonable cause, and did so for its own interests.
What's more, Ukraine was nowhere near joining NATO, and in any case Russia's invasion would still have been illegal and reprehensible even if it was.
Most people assume the post-WW2 consensus is a permanent baseline. Historically, there's no evidence to support that expectation, but it's easy to see why the illusion persists. Acknowledging that the current order is temporary is terrifying, particularly for those who thrive under it.
If you were talking about like, Iraq in 2003 you'd be correct to point out that majority being opposed doesn't mean the entire party was blameless.
This is probably the worst example you could have used to make this point about aggressive US foreign policy having support across party lines. There is absolutely no constituency within the Democrats that have ever wanted this because it came entirely from the fevered mind of Trump and the parody edition of Bush's neocons in the current admin.
The combo of 1. negative polarization and 2. being completely pointless and accomplishing nothing makes this about as unpopular of an idea you could find among Democrats, in public or private.
Iran is also a bad choice to include in your list considering Obama was responsible for the JCPOA.
> The only difference with Trump is that he says things out loud.
The only problem with Flat Earthers is that they say things out loud. Also, grabbing other people by their **ies.
> The only way Europe can have a Starlink similar network is to launch it from their own soil and reuse the first stage.
Unfortunately I'm not aware of any properly funded euro alternative to starlink that that has progressed beyond the conceptual stage. Even the Canadian company telesat is far behind and has a serious debt problem. The two separate "Chinese starlink" LEO networks being built right now are ahead of telesat in functional satellites in orbit.
The Canadian government recently promised 2.3 billion to telesat for polar area services. Realistically maybe some European nations might have the best chance of success by absorbing telesat and continuing to pay MDA to build the satellites for the network.
IRIS² looks on track? Granted, it is not a SpaceX competitor for consumer Internet. But it is an alternative for applications where reliance on SpaceX is not prudent.
It exists but only in the conceptual / R&D and politics funding stage right now. I hope it succeeds but they're going to need significant amounts of money and real world launch capability to catch up with SpaceX and Amazon Leo in live satellites. The contract for development and design of the satellites was just awarded on August 31st, which is a positive sign.
Europe has always had the Ariane family - it just wasn't really price-competitive and popular as of late.
> Europe can have a Starlink similar network
Please don't, this is madness.
This is a huge success, but it I think also tells us that the EU is further decoupling itself from the US. Slowly but steadily.
Which is obviously the right thing to do, but it's interesting that it's not just a hypothetical anymore.
It is indeed a huge success but it also underlines how far ahead the rest of the world is.
I'd honestly rather like to use this opportunity to talk about that this is a success than returning to our regularly scheduled doomer loop.
A rocket launched into orbit from Norway. That's insane progress and worth celebrating.
> That's insane progress and worth celebrating.
A non-reusable launcher that can put small payloads into a Polar orbits only, due to launch site latitude and lack of an orbital bus. It's fairly 1960s stuff.
only four countries in the world have private/commercial space launch capacity, and SpaceX towers over everyone else so I'd say this is doing pretty alright compared to the rest of the world
As EV’s have shown, I don’t think they’re gonna be ahead for long and long-term the current technology is just a steppingstone because damaging the ozone layer can’t go on forever with the current technique being used something else. Better has to come forward.
So what should they do nothing? They have to get started somehow if Japan and China can do it so can Europe, and I think long-term once again, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand won’t be far behind…
That's essentially what they have done for military/defense.
The United States saves the day. France pretends they are in charge with grand speeches.
I was close to a European immigrant and 2 things she was shocked about:
How rich the United States was. Even our poor had more than her upper middle class family had.
How people in the United States do not take 2 hour coffee and cigarette breaks.
Utter bullshit.
Is this the joke section of the comments?
The Taco section, with the way the present American administration has behaved. Most of our friends/allies are looking to protect themselves andbe prepared to go on without us. All it took was two years of buffoonery.
I think New Zealand is ahead. RocketLab was the second company in the world after SpaceX to get a privately developed launch vehicle to orbit, back in 2017. They've now had 86 successful launches from their NZ launch site.
The EU already had quite a bit of non-EU spaceflight capability, both in terms of rockets and launch sites.
I think you meant non-US?
Although Ariane's rockets are wildly expensive and uncompetitive compared to SpaceX.
Cost decreases with scale. Spacex was also wildly expensive, it grew up thanks to government assistance
No because of reduction of bureaucracy. ESA is the prime example of 1 engineer to 50 managers culture.
This is an inaccurate simplification
> it grew up thanks to government assistance
Please give an example of gov assistance that was not a open contract to every private launch company in the US
Yeah, I really hate this revisionism of Elon as an extremely wealthy apartheid emerald mine heir who was a dumb guy who happened to get lucky at paypal and then stole all his money from the government while operating a car and rocket company. There is plenty to criticize about him, but SpaceX dramatically decreased cost to orbit which had reliance on Russian technology at the time.
Musk was raised affluent in apartheid-era South Africa, his father had some connection to Zambian emerald trading/mining, and Musk's companies have benefited enormously from public contracts and policy. He's not stupid.
Musk has benefited enormously from public contracts and policy, but all the questionable ones are in Tesla (and especially originally solarcity, but that got folded into Tesla).
The government contracts that made SpaceX were all open bid, where SpaceX bid an better solution than anything that any of the established companies did, at literally half the price. Falcon 9 was a massive gift to the US government, in that it drove the entire industry to halve the prices they extracted from the government. Dragon was just as good.
That they also built a profitable launch company out of it just highlights how much of an outlier SpaceX is. They sold the US government a dollar for fifty cents, made a profit doing it, and ended up driving half the rockets already flying out of the business.
Yes. Obviously, I wasn't implying he never benefitted from the government. It is just a wild retelling that he started a rocket company, solar company and car company to make huge amounts of money. Also, he was largely estranged from his abusive father since he emigrated to Canada at 17. I am sure he received help and money from his mother at points, but this idea he is some trust fund kid like Donald Trump. People really believe they would be as successful as him if they grew up being abused in an upper class family in apartheid South Africa. It doesn't make him a good person, and there is so much to criticism about him, that I think it actually detracts from legitimate criticism.
all the questionable ones are in Tesla
Let's not also forget that NASDAQ changed the rules right before listing SpaceX... resulting in forced index fund procurement of sinking equity. Not sure how 'public policy' that is (arguably separate), but in reality global prime market listing rules are pretty high-significance effectively Federal or even international monetary policy. Well done Elon! Can't fault you for execution!
He benefits enormously from the government but then acts like he doesn’t.
> extremely wealthy apartheid emerald mine heir who was a dumb guy who happened to get lucky at paypal and then stole all his money from the government while operating a car and rocket company.
> SpaceX dramatically decreased cost to orbit which had reliance on Russian technology at the time.
Both can be (and are) true at the same time. Elon hired/partnered the right people and didn't have capacity to mess all the companies he owned into oblivion. His main skill is bullshiting investors, the government and the public.
Except for the fact that SpaceX had a hard time getting any contracts at first because they were all going to Boeing and Lockheed Martin since the 1990s and even when SpaceX came to the market they had to compete at first with ULA and fact that they made it cheaper by orders by magnitude. Except for the fact that Musk almost went personally bankrupt trying to get SpaceX off the ground. Except for all those facts yea sure maybe... haha nope you're still wrong.
No, counterintuitively Ariane is non-EU. It launches from South America
French Guyana is part of the EU, actually, in spite of being in South America. (Colonialism!)
EU outermost region to be exact.
Curious fact: France's longest border is with Brazil.
Last time I checked, France was part of the EU
If I drive my German-made VW sedan on American roads - how many people consider it an American car, and wonder if Germany has a real car industry or not?
They are right now, but if Japan can do it, and China can do it so can Europe and by the way, so can Australia, New Zealand and Canada they have the abilities they just have to have the will and if they haven’t learned anything recently, they better develop the will. Once again congratulations.
None of the countries you name is even close to SpaceX. Not even close. Their most ambitious prototypes are on par or behind the rocket SpaceX has been flying for a decade commercially.
China and Japan have done it. You may not like the fact they have done it once or twice, they know how to do it from a technical standpoint and that’s only gonna grow in the future particularly China don’t act obtuse.
The fact is that no one cares about reusability. Expendable rockets are cheap enough for governments and commercial entities alike, even for constellation launches. Starlink architecture only makes sense as a justification for the F9 launch cadence, and even then the actual satellites are managed as trains.
New Zealand has already done it. Rocket Lab may have rebranded as American but it still builds and launches from NZ every few weeks
They are more expensive but the figures I have seen are 3x for Ariane 5 and 2x for Ariane 6 (source : https://spacenexus.us/guide/space-launch-cost-comparison).
Then, it depends on what you need to do. A 3x cost if you deploy a strategic constellation is fine. A 3x cost if you want to launch huge payloads for a Mars trip (I know costs were for LEO, just giving an example) is probably uncompetitive.
Any 2x or 3x cost for the same thing is uncompetitive in a free market.
Price is not the only characteristic of a product (hence the mention of "strategic constellation").
In a "free market" would you recommend on USA to rely only on a Chinese manufactured essential product for its military (or the reverse, or Europe on Russia, or etc.)?
I am not against great private offers (be it rockets/cloud/etc.). But there should also be some "local" capability for some strategic products, so that if the private providers encounter issues (crazy CEO, tariffs, export regulations, etc.) you are not left without any of that capability.
I did mean non-US lmao
I'm hopeful that SpaceX's success will lead to European companies following in their footsteps and providing some more affordable alternatives to Ariane's current wildly-expensive rockets.
The french always had Ariane??
The Ariane is as much German as it is French. It is considerably Italian too.
This is incorrect, ArianeGroup is mostly french, it's a joint venture between Airbus and Safran.
Avio does the Ariane SRBs & it is an Italian company.
It's another 50% joint venture?
Who owns how much of the enterprise says little about who contributes to and owns control and know-how of the project. This is even more true for a political project like the Ariane.
Not to diminish France's contribution but without Germany and Italy there would be no Ariane. France could not build one and could not fly one.
The work and know-how is mainly spread between Germany, France and Italy. The mechanism that ensures it is called "national return". The order volume per country has to correspond to the countries respective monetary contribution.
I worked on the Ariane from 2000 to 2006."National return" was a pain for all the smaller companies and they usually founded subsidiaries in all the other member states to game the system.
Without Germany and Italy, France can build and fly no Ariane. Not even close.
I think we are stronger together. European technology has been critical to many important American space missions, and that should continue to be the case.
An ecosystem where we develop things independently is one where everyone loses.
The opinion of american billionaires is driving this.
I dont think the EU is stronger when they get bullied and undermined by trump, or whichever american president decides to dust off trump's playbook in the future
I think the stronger together argument implies good faith co-operation on both sides
Yeah. Exactly. Thats not a guarantee anymore
It never was a guarantee. But it is worth fighting for cooperation, rather than accepting it cannot be anymore.
> I think we are stronger together
That's pretty damn obvious to everyone with a half of brain, yet here we are being pulled apart.
Except its not actually obvious. The US achieved most when they worked mostly by themselves. And the recent explosion in US activity, specially SpaceX is also highly separated from Europe.
There is a very credible argument to be made that excessive cooperation leads to incredibly heavy overly political programs that are completely static and can't adjust because of international agreements.
That doesn't mean working together isn't good but they way they have been has been pretty questionably in many ways (along with a lot of space policy).
> And the recent explosion in US activity, specially SpaceX is also highly separated from Europe.
If any of this machines use Python or Linux internally, then we could find some obvious connections with Europe and the people at charge of it.
Of course but that isn't part of government to government cooperation. I'm not saying no supply chains reach to other countries.
Yes, definitely, but being together by choice instead of by necessity is vastly preferable.
Especially given that recent history has shown us that we're back to "power" being the only language spoken.
__
Rel: The ecosystem thing.
I would challenge that, because if there's one thing where the US has had absurd leverage over the EU (and world, for that matter), then it's tech ecosystems.
A healthy ecosystem would not be owned by SV/US alone.
So right now, we're not really "strong together" but rather weakly dependent. That should be remediated, and decoupling like this is exactly the tool for that.
>Especially given that recent history has shown us that we're back to "power" being the only language spoken.
"Power being the only language spoken", never left in the first place in order to get back to it, it's how the world always worked and will always work.
Granted, power wasn't actually the "language spoken", but more accurately it was the stick ensuring the enforcement of the terms agreed within the "language spoken", a lesson as old as time that many in EU forgot after post-USSR collapse and now have to re-learn it, but at a heavy cost and with added interest.
"Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it", couldn't be more true.
Always is such a strong word.
Where did I use "always"?
They started developing this rocket in the late 2010s, way before the current US craziness (or the current level of craziness anyway). Independent access to space is always desirable for countries that can muster the resources, but this is just one of many companies that appeared back then as a response to SpaceX's initial success.
Eh, you can split us Europeans up into two camps; those who do not want to see the problem and those who couldn't look away.
The second camp saw the craziness when the later Bush was elected a second time.
one of those bush votes was to ensure he could clean up his own mess.
I’m curious what you mean by this. At face value it seems like a weird rationalization but I get the sense I’m not reading this correctly.
lmao what
I'd split it into 2 camps. Elites who realize Europe isn't a unified group or has a military strong enough for defense..
And people who get wet when France says they are going to send soldiers to Ukraine and it never materializes.
The general population has 0 understanding of international relations. It's the United States and China right now. Any other belief comes from someone who has read 0 international relations Realism books.
Realpolitik sorely lacking
Even the "educated" people on HN have literal incorrect understanding.
It's a difficult problem to solve.
Its not that Europeans havent read Mearsheimer. its that for the best part of three hundred years the whole of Europe has been trying that same realist script until there was nothing left but total ruin across the entire continent. Europeans who created the EU knew about balance of power geopolitics so well, they created this slow bureaucratic mess specifically to stop Germany and France sliding back into the same old lethal habit. While clumsy positioning between the US and China is a headache in the present moment for Europe, compared to a tedious Union Europeans prefer reawakenings of 1914 in their backyard. Well at least so far.
I would bet any amount that if you go to a random European city and stop 100 random people on the street you'd be lucky if one person has even heard of Mearsheimer. I think you're also overthinking how the EU got created. I don't think pre-EU Europe was on the brink of violence either. It was more IMO simplistic (but possibly correct, who knows) thinking that it's stronger (economically) as a block. A lot of present day Europe issues that might lead to bigger problems are potentially worse because of the EU.
You're just showing your ignorance and lack of knowledge about the history of the EU.
Whilst the EU in it's current form did not exist until 1993, it's predecessor the European Coal and Steel Community was formed in 1950 with the Schuman Declaration: https://european-union.europa.eu/principles-countries-histor...
The primary goal of this was to prevent another war by joining european economies together economically. It's not 'overthinking it'. It quite literally is the main reason and you can go and read the speeches from the politicians at the time to confirm this.
Heres a direct quote from the declaration itself
> The solidarity in production thus established will make it plain that any war between France and Germany becomes not merely unthinkable, but materially impossible.
The fact that the european powers (with the exception of russia) are largely at peace with each other and haven't had a major war with each other since the second world war is very unusual given european history.
Definitely far from my expertise but I think you're contradicting yourself.
I am talking about the formalization that is specifically the modern European Union. You are talking as if it's some inevitable consequence of earlier efforts.
> Europeans who created the EU knew about balance of power geopolitics so well, they created this slow bureaucratic mess specifically to stop Germany and France sliding back into the same old lethal habit.
I don't think anything you're saying is strengthening this statement that I had an issue with.
The Maastricht Treaty which is what created modern day EU was driven by other concerns, asking Gemini yields: "To answer your second question: No, everyday Europeans in 1992 were not primarily thinking about WWII.
By the time the Maastricht Treaty was being drafted, the public was reacting to a completely different era of history. They were focused on the collapse of the Soviet Union, the opening of Eastern Europe, and the need to compete economically with the United States and Japan in a rapidly globalizing world. The defining event on the public's mind was the Fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, not the end of WWII."
So you are right that the processes that eventually led to the formation of the EU started after WW-II due to concerns related to that war. But specifically the EU as it stands today with its current structure and agreements was not formed due to those considerations. Europe could have continued with the previous arrangements. At least that's my take and I don't think anything you're saying contradicts it. I'll admit to a certain lack of knowledge so happy to learn more about Europe pre-EU or why what I'm saying is still wrong.
EDIT: I guess one can see how the reunification of Germany was a factor that could have made people consider the world wars. That said the creation of the EU was a major change compared to previous arrangements.
EDIT2: When I read the EU site you linked to I get a strong sense of "backsplaining" as if it was written after the fact to appear like the EU was just part of a process that goes back to WW-II. The title says "History of the EU – 1945-59" but in 1945-1959 there was no EU. Didn't the term European Union only show up circa 1992? So this is perhaps the "history of Europe" but not the history of the European Union? I could be totally wrong. I am not European but I did live through these events and follow the news (well, not WW-II but the fall of the USSR, Germany's unification, and the establishment of the modern day EU). What's of interest to me in the context of this specific question/debate is what were the concerns of the Europeans and their leaders entering into the agreements that formed the modern day EU.
Presuming the EU just appeared out of thin air in 1992/1993 and ignoring the predecessor organisations which were crucial for the formation of the EU is just wrong.
It's also not just about WW2, europe had at that point been at major war with itself in some form or another for well over a thousand years with only very brief periods of peace.
Of course by the 1990s it wasn't top of peoples minds because there had been peace for nearly 40 years, which is testament to the success of the original project, it doesn't mean the original goals had disappeared.
It was a pretty radical step change though? One currency. Freedom of movement and employment. The EU is almost like one country. The only thing really missing is having one military force and then it's basically like the United States of Europe. NATO is close to that. Maybe they don't want to lose all their UN seats though ;)
The modern EU was a decades-long journey, heavily informed by the geopolitical realities of constant horrific European wars, that this person has clearly laid out for you. I don’t understand what you’re trying to argue or achieve anymore.
The EU has clear predecessor initiatives and organizations that lead to its current form. Just like territories became states in the US, or the League of Nations lead to the UN. This isn’t a complicated concept we see it all the time. Something forms, it molds and changes over time, and eventually it becomes something else. But the roots are still clearly understood and are a part of its history.
The European Union is only a little over 20 years old. The economic and political union of Western Europe is an ~80 year old project that directly led to the European Union. You may as well take issue with people talking about England’s colonies prior to 1776 when discussing US history.
The only thing I am trying to achieve is accuracy.
History of everything is a long journey. The OP made a comment re: the EU specifically which I thought was off. And at least so far in this thread my reply seems to have been more accurate.
> Europeans who created the EU knew about balance of power geopolitics so well, they created this slow bureaucratic mess specifically to stop Germany and France sliding back into the same old lethal habit. While clumsy positioning between the US and China is a headache in the present moment for Europe, compared to a tedious Union Europeans prefer reawakenings of 1914 in their backyard. Well at least so far.
This statement isn't talking about "the decades long journey Europe has gone through informed by wars". It is very specifically talking about the creation of the EU (and e.g. its slow bureaucratic mess which are an attribute of the modern EU). I have yet to see any actual support to the idea that the specific step of the formation modern (of the) EU was indeed primarily about Germany and France sliding back into war and that a "slow bureaucratic mess" was the intentional vehicle here. As someone who has lived through these events I have my perspective and it's fine for others to have a different perspective. But if that is the case then I'm still to see that in this thread.
You are painting a picture as if a geographic region inevitably drifts towards the EU, the UN, the USA, etc. This just feels like total nonsense to me to be blunt. These are decisions taken at the time for various specific reasons. Sometimes they go one way. Sometimes a different way. The countries that formed the EU and decided to adopt one currency and open borders (amongst other decisions) took that step for a reason. It was not inevitable. There are and were many other paths forward. And Germany and France going to war, as far as I recall, was not part of the discussion at the time (1992-ish).
Is current day Europe and the EU a product of a history. I mean duh. That was not the point the OP was making.
EDIT: I can see why this would be a sensitive topic for present day Europeans and how the rise of nationalism is a possible threat to the modern day EU. There's definitely ample motivation to paint a certain picture here and tell a certain story. Present day EU was not a given. It passed by a very small margin. Then there was Brexit. It's not a given that there would be more wars in Europe without the EU. Europeans can do what's best for them. Again, my main reason for jumping in is that the comment didn't agree with my memory of the time when all of this was happening, so it feels like a modern day rewriting of what Europe was actually like in the 90's.
> I can see why this would be a sensitive topic for present day Europeans and how the rise of nationalism is a possible threat to the modern day EU.
I am not European, I am from the US. I saw this conversation and saw you being weirdly obstinate. This contrarian position then digging in regardless of response is not productive.
How would you propose I should have replied to support a more productive discussion here?
The original comment was the opposite of my personal experience having followed the events as they happened. The responses to my comment did not really address what I was talking about.
If you make a point (that the formation of the EU is because of X you are very specific about it) then you should be the one who is prepared to demonstrate it somehow. Why is this a problem?
Are you familiar with the topic or you're simply here to tell me that my manners are bad? If you're familiar I'd love to get your input on the actual question.
Why is my position "contrarian"? I am disagreeing with the original comment. For sure. And the reason I am persisting is that this comment seems wrong and I don't want to just let it go. It's important enough. FWIW I asked another random person whether my take on the EU's formation made sense to them (who was around at the time) and they agreed with me. It's definitely possible that I'm missing something profound but if I am then those taking the other position should spell it out. Maybe the OP meant something different. The OP didn't even weigh in.
@jpleyden98 jumps in with: You're just showing your ignorance and lack of knowledge about the history of the EU. Directly linking modern day EU with "European Coal and Steel Community was formed in 1950". I don't think that's right. At the very least it's missing a lot that happened in between.
> Its not that Europeans havent read Mearsheimer. its that for the best part of three hundred years the whole of Europe has been trying that same realist script until there was nothing left but total ruin across the entire continent. Europeans who created the EU knew about balance of power geopolitics so well, they created this slow bureaucratic mess specifically to stop Germany and France sliding back into the same old lethal habit. While clumsy positioning between the US and China is a headache in the present moment for Europe, compared to a tedious Union Europeans prefer reawakenings of 1914 in their backyard. Well at least so far.
Back to the original comment I had a problem with. This isn't some minor detail. It's pretty important. This history matters. At least I think it does.
Let's just add the actual preamble to the Maastricht Treaty that discusses at least some of the rationale: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Treaty_on_European_Union/Prea...
So ignoring my bad manners and my apparent ignorance. Where is the support to the idea that the Europeans created the EU as it stands today "they created this slow bureaucratic mess specifically to stop Germany and France sliding back into the same old lethal habit" ? I'm happy to learn something new today. When I try with AI it seems to agree with the point I am making: "Treating the 1993 Maastricht Treaty as a simple continuation of the 1950 Coal and Steel Community is a common oversimplification. While the underlying desire to keep Germany anchored to Western Europe remained a constant thread, the actual decisions made in 1993 were driven by a vastly different geopolitical crisis and economic reality.". If the OP just talked about the post-war European integration then I'm in complete agreement. To just project that to modern day EU feels like a very big stretch to me. But a quote from the specific individuals involved in the formation of the EU circa 1992 would definitely help me change my position. Again, this feels like a pretty big deal to me in terms of why the EU exists as it does today and understanding Europe.
EDIT: Also worth looking up the thread to what OP was responding to:
> The general population has 0 understanding of international relations.
And I think he's absolutely right.
Again, not that the wars in Europe don't cast a shadow today. But Europe has moved past that would be my take. Obviously not Putin I guess. But we digress.
The entire thread is a mix of politics/opinions etc. What I was trying to contribute is what the world was actually like during the formation of the EU from my personal experience and that it was not primarily driven by WW-II. Now it's possible my personal experience is wrong but hey, at least it's something that's not pure politics/opinion?
EDIT2: When you say where we got here is a process over time how is that not something that is just true? Yes, everything today everywhere is a result of the process of history playing over time. The EU was not a predetermined outcome. That is not the question. Is the EU today (and in 1992) primarily concerned with European wars or with the world?
EDIT3: To repeat what I'm not arguing with:
- Post WW-II sentiments and agreements were definitely driven by trying to ensure that a similar war does not repeat (more specifically around Germany).
- Before the EU was established in 1993 there were various cooperation arrangements in Europe that trace their history back to WW-II and can be seen through the lens of evolution.
- Where I disagree is the persistent weight of WW-II in the decades that followed vs. immediate after the war. More specifically the applicability to today's politics and geopolitics. In my impression the 60's until the fall of the USSR were dominated by the cold war and not the worry of new wars with Germany or France for example. The EU itself is a step function that was not a given and was driven by a wide array of reasons. The EU today also has a wide range of concerns. I also wouldn't compare the EU's formation to the USA or the UN. That said I can see how on some level the erasure of nationalism removes the motivation for wars that stem from said nationalism.
Isn’t Mearsheimer a crank these days anyway?
One would think that ze germans would be among the first to be conquering space with all that german engineering.
They are - but in cooperation with others. Parts of the Orion capsule of the current Artemis mission program are based on the German ATV, which is a capsule which was developed to supply ISS. On ISS there are German modules like Galileo. German Spacelab was a major component of many Space Shuttle missions. German companies like Zeiss provided optics and laser components for Apollo. To name a few, besides lots of satellites and other things. However after WW2 there were different political decisions, so that Germany won't build its own rockets, but German technology was key to Saturn V and Ariane rockets.
Aside from technology, Germany also got major control centers and mission planning capability in Cologne and Oberpfaffenhofen.
Most components are there, but not the political will to go on a national mission.
I mean, Operation Paperclip and Von Braun were central to the success of the Apollo program. The Soviets had a similar postwar-German-capture program, if I remember correctly.
Not that similar
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49583883
Is this sarcasm or do you still live in the 1980s?
> One would think that ze germans would be among the first to be conquering space
After the horrors of WWII, Europe decided it would rather do things collectively than each country doing its own thing. This resulted in wonderful things like Concorde, fast rail, Airbus, and Ariane. Europe became more than the sum of its parts.
I don’t think Germany has favorable place for orbital launches.
For any failure you would need to have an ocean in the direction of launch.
Also not all orbits are equal because then you need more fuel etc.
It is silly to say every country has equal opportunity to go to space because space is only 100km up. That’s not how it works.
Yeah this is just the effect of SpaceX showcasing "space launch is no longer the realm of government efforts only".
They kicked off the wave of commercial space launch - and now, it reached the EU too.
Multiple European nations gaining their own independent launch capabilities will merely result in the sinking of ESA and ArianeSpace. Look forward to lots of infighting in the near future.
ESA is going to remain on the mission/payload side. ArianeSpace makes sense as a launch services provider handling everything that's not the rocket. ArianeGroup (the company that actually builds the rockets) will just become the French rocket company that will end up competing with the Italian and German ones.
Like most "small rocket companies" they'll come to the conclusion that they need bigger rockets to launch bigger payloads. Rockets that compete directly with Ariane 6. With some luck these will be reusable to, making Ariane 6 and ArianeSpace obsolete.
ESA and ArianeSpace will slowly but surely decay into obsolescence.
You seem to be confused about what organizations do what.
ESA neither launches or builds rockets. They are an end-user, and they own the launch infrastructure in Kourou. Both these roles will exist long after Ariane is gone.
Arianespace does not build rockets. It's a launch services provider, they purchase the rockets from other companies, handle all the logistics and manage the launchpad. It's in no way married to Ariane 6, and it has in the past and still does sell launches on multiple different rockets from different companies. There will be demand for these services even after Ariane the rocket is gone.
ArianeGroup is the company that builds Ariane 6. They are a complex co-owned project between Airbus and Safran, with workshare distributed between France and Germany. They make other things than the Ariane 6, notably the French SLBM. Eventually the Ariane 6 will go away, because it will be obsolete, but that will not necessarily mean that ArianeGroup will go under, because they have an another subsidiary called ArianeWorks developing a new rocket, called Themis.
If national governments can launch their own payloads without having to go through ESA or ArianeSpace it'll undermine the latter's position. They may even become competitors.
Italy accused the French-based ArianeSpace of deliberately taking launches away from the Italian-build Vega rocket in favor of the French-build Ariane rockets. They've now left ArianeSpace and are selling the rockets themselves and using ESA's infrastructure to launch them.
ESA funds and has awarded commercial contracts with ISAR and numerous other launch companies/consortia. Andoya spaceport is optimised for launching to polar orbits and not a realistic competitor to the ArianeSpace spaceport in French Guiana, much like SaxaVord and other spaceports based on the European continent. Vega is also an ESA-funded international collaboration project which actually started off managed by ArianeSpace, and the next generation of Avio-managed Vega rockets will be integrated in French Guiana and flown from ArianeSpace's spaceport...
Coupled or uncoupled, an equal relationship between the US and the EU is much healthier. Europe should have an economy, military and industrial capacity similar to the US.
While in the current case I agree it is the path that should be taken, ideally I would prefer efficient relations, where people cooperate rather than having to duplicate everything because they don't trust their neighbor (should I make my bread because the baker might decide to poison me?!).
But having educated people everywhere is hard, so some people, because they don't get how some stuff works, they try to abuse friends and allies and make things worse (inefficient) for everybody in the process.
“Speak softly and carry a big stick”. A Europe that is internally powerful can conduct trade in the fair and liberal way that matches its ideals.
Ideally, yes. But when the baker is running around with a red hat renaming lakes, you have to start kneading if you have any sense.
It’s frustrating to share a planet with poison-pouring bakers and other primates, really, when you see what humanity could be
Are we forgetting about Ariane?
Launched from South America, not Europe.
Ariane is from the ESA, which is an organization under EU. The claim was that "EU is finally decoupling itself from the USA". My point is: the EU already has Ariane, for instance. It decoupled a long time ago.
ESA is a separate entity to the EU.
(When the UK left the EU it was able to remain in ESA because of this separation.)
I don't thin ESA builds Ariane or any production launchers for that manner - Arianespace does.
It's from the European part of South America.
Ariane is an expensive legacy rocket.
If they haven’t gotten the message yet, they never will congratulations, plan on doing more because you’re gonna have to.
I think being a competitor in a market doesn't mean you're 'decoupling' from it, rather you're on equal footing.
Why is this a sign of decoupling? Is any EU technological development decoupling?
Does it mean that?
Europe has had a space agency for a while now. So this story isn't "Europeans finally started to launch for space" but a private European company chose to launch from a continental location.
It's funny how we can't be celebrate a European achievement without trying to interpret it into relationship to the US.
Yes, they've had a space agency, but the only launchers are expensive legacy vehicles.
This launch is a move towards lower cost and more frequent launches, that in the US are provided by SpaceX.
It's not even the US in general, it's SpaceX specifically. Only the US and China have demonstrated reusable rockets, and only SpaceX demonstrated the actual reuse, the cadence and the economy of scale that it brings.
It means the laws of physics allow it, and anyone willing to invest the time and fiat to accomplish it can. This means the world will no longer need to rely on SpaceX for inexpensive lift to orbit through reusable first stages, which is objectively good. No different then China working towards obviating the need for ASML for EUV semiconductor manufacturing.
Just because you invest in it doesn't mean you end up with hugely cheap and scalable launch.
Europe has already invested far more in rocket then SpaceX did and isn't close.
If your capital efficiency is far lower, it might not be inexpensive. If you can get the scale because you don't have payloads, its going to be more expensive.
There is a incredibly long road between 'rocket can land' and 'cheap and scalable launch'. A long road most people don't see because its not as flashy as landing.
SpaceX was founded on making launches cheap. Arianespace only recently decided to develop reusable launch systems. Up to SpaceX demonstrating it was possible, the dominant approach to cheap launches was in making the expendable rocket cheap to manufacture. Nobody needs to be reminded the shuttle promised cheap access to space and failed at that.
But SpaceX built a cheaper launcher to manufacture as well as gaining reuse. There was no one making an expendable cheaper rocket before SpaceX either.
There are a lot more barriers to things in the real world. China has been dedicating immense effort and brainpower to cloning SpaceX, and they're still not especially close. I think a lot of us (certainly including myself) have no intuition for why this is, because we live in the software world where if you see something that is done then cloning it is generally just a matter of time and effort. But there's certainly some 'secret sauce' at SpaceX that does not seem easy to replicate.
That said I think this is awesome and hope the EU is able to make further advances. I have a very positive view of Musk, but the more competitors there are in space, the more likely we able to accelerate advances and efficiency in that domain. And I think everybody wins in that scenario.
> because we live in the software world where if you see something that is done then cloning it is generally just a matter of time and effort. But there's certainly some 'secret sauce' at SpaceX that does not seem easy to replicate
In software, thanks mostly to the open-source movement, we all have access to the same materials and manufacturing processes.
In manufacturing, there are huge differences in materials and processes that we need to account for. On the flip side, this can allow one to leapfrog the other rather than replicating them - it’s likely the next reusable Falcon 9-class vehicle will use a methalox engine that’ll be easier to maintain compared to Flacon 9’s kerolox ones. China has demonstrated a novel approach to vehicle recovery as well (in addition to landing legs). Future competitors will have access to materials current incumbents didn’t have and can’t easily adopt with their current supply chain.
People also forget SpaceX subverted a lot of the expectations for reusable rockets - they didn’t use parachutes, but opted to carry extra propellant for landing; they didn’t eject the engines, opting instead to reuse the whole stage; and they built landing barges because their rockets would launch towards the ocean, saving fuel for a boost back to the launch site. They also tested capsule landing using the launch abort rockets, but opted for parachutes and splashdowns instead. Still they keep all the RCS motors in the capsule, making their expendable service module very inexpensive in comparison to Boeing’s.
All these decisions point to proven mission architectures so that followers don’t need to explore architectures that were explored and dropped.
To be clear, it was NASA that was unwilling to have a ground landing on the abort engines.
I am sure they were concerned the spacecraft exploded during a hover test.
> I think a lot of us (certainly including myself) have no intuition for why this is,
It's because space programs are job programs to keep the advanced rocketry tech available for future use. The so-called launch market never materialized. Congresses of launch capable nations are completely fine with couple hundred to low billion dollars divided by couple launches per year doing science and gravity experiments and occasional TV sat launches. Every dollar "saved" is every dollar unspent and diverted away from STEM.
Starlink wouldn't be accounting for like 99.9% of Falcon 9 launches and 99.9999% of man made objects in space if this wasn't the case.
China does what it does because else the world won't take them seriously, which creates artificially lower socio-economic statuses with no benefits to anyone. They have bunch of different lineages of space launch vehicles and production capacities, they don't need reusability per se. Same goes for humanoids - US/CN both have ~zero chance entering heavy industry hard robotics used in car plants, and that leads both into so-to-speak alternative robotics.
Reuse might turn out not to be the future - and its SpaceX has embraced this internally. At least not full reuse, or not the way most people think of a reusable spacecraft as a reusable aircraft. A reusable rocket engine might only have 2-3 flights in it, if that, with some routine inspection and maintenance between them.
3D printing has been a game changer that basically allows you to crank out rocket engines from raw materials, which means that building new ones is cheap and easy. If you look at the Raptor 3 (3D printed), it looks super clean, thanks to the fact that they integrated most of the piping into the 3d printed body, but that means you can't really fix or inspect it.
Which is fine tbh. SpaceX (and Tesla) has been shown to be pragmatic not dogmatic when it comes to new technology. 'Elon time' might be a meme, but Musk both pushes his employees very hard, but probably not harder than possible - and he's willing to take flak for delaying projects, changing scope or outright cancellation.
2-3 flights is still quite a bit of cost-cutting, and some SpaceX Falcon 9 boosters have flown more than 30 times; the median number is about 12, often very soon after the previous flight.
We are not talking about forever spacecraft, and even Falcon 9's reusabilility is partial (the second stage is lost), but even what Falcon 9 has achieved allows for very rapid progress, due to the short feedback loop, including progress in reliability.
There’s absolutely no reason to believe rocket engines can only do two or three flights. SpaceX has demonstrated ten times that with F9 and with Raptor testing.
Didn’t Blue Origin already reuse a booster?
Ariane 5 was the cheapest option available for a long time, now they're a bit behind. But the ESA is now working on reusable rockets too, it seems, with their Themis program.
No, Soyuz was the cheapest option, but they took themselves out of the running.
Have there been other rocket launches from continental Europe?
Orbital? Maybe not. Sub-orbital and ballistic? Absolutely.
Oh yes, I think everyone remembers Germany's ballistic rockets
"Don't say that he's hypocritical,
Say rather that he's apolitical.
'Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down?
That's not my department,' says Wernher von Braun."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TjDEsGZLbio
hehe, yes but if it wasnt for german rocket scientists the americans and russians would not have had space agencies (at least not that early)
Well, there was Goddard, Korolev & quite a few others. But it could indeed have taken longer if the military implications were not clearly demonstrated by Von Braun.
Still, an interesting possibility of a fully civilian space program from the start & how it would look like & how it would be different.
Kinda like in Wings of Honneamise.
Not only the military aspect. His staff literally were absorbed into the Russian sand US space programs. Von Braun himself famously designed the Saturn V.
>His staff literally were absorbed into the Russian sand US space programs.
Not really in case of the USSR. German group in Russia was isolated and Korolev didn't like competition. Soviet space program started by replicating German rocket, but once all production chains were created, it was off on its own course.
I highly recommend English translation of memoirs of Boris Chertok[0] to anyone interested in the history of Soviet space program.
[0] https://www.nasa.gov/history/history-publications-and-resour...
That was just because the Russian's didn't trust "their" Germans as much as the Americans trusted "theirs". Operation Osoaviakhim was mostly about knowledge extraction, not about cooperation. The other difference was that the "Russian Germans" didn't go to Russia on their own will (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Osoaviakhim).
Once the knowledge was "extracted" the Germans were allowed to return though (good thing Stalin was already dead at that time).
Former Junkers engineer Brunolf Baade then went on to build the first and only German jet airliner for East Germany - which then of course was cancelled as soon as it was ready to enter production: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baade_152).
>as the Americans trusted "theirs"
Americans didn't trust either. But then Sputnik happened and Americans only had oopsnik[0], so they turned to neglected Redstone made by von Braun[1][2]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanguard_TV-3#Reaction
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Explorer_1
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wernher_von_Braun#U.S._Army_ca...
From a sovereignty perspective, does a launch from continental Europe actually matter when Arianespace/CNES/ESA has been launching from France for decades?
There is no sovereignty perspective because Europe isn't even sovereign to begin with. For starters it doesn't even have a common army
The sovereignty perspective here is the perspective of the sovereignty of the states that make up Europe not the sovereignty of the entity of the EU/Europe.
Though not every sovereign state has an army, see Iceland, Costa Rica, theoretically Japan, etc.
Doesn't it matter if this part of France is an ocean away?
I do not think so, but anyway, it is definitely not a proof that we are further decoupling ourselves from the US, which is the claim made in the root comment. France has launched rockets from France for decades. Being an ocean away does not make Kourou reliant on the US.
I think the opposite because in this specific case we have the US which has the world's strongest navy, and the strongest navy by far in the Atlantic.
My opinion is that there is an implied reliance on the US "allowing" Europe to ship the rockets to Kourou and launch them there.
If our relations ever completely sour, the US might, for example, take over the shipping vessels going to Kourou, kinda like Europe takes over Russian shadow fleet vessels.
Now all of a sudden Europe has no means of launching rockets, except now it can launch to polar orbits. It might seem a stretch, but there is a non-zero chance that could happen, therefore it is better to have an alternative.
> Being an ocean away does not make Kourou reliant on the US.
No, but it makes it vulnerable to the US.
“Vulnerable to the US” can mean so many things that it practically loses all meaning. Even with a launchpad in continental Europe, they have many ways to interfere with this project, from disrupting the supply chain to carpet bombing the launch site.
A ship crossing the ocean is much more vulnerable than a launch site with sophisticated air defences.
The US can also decide to “free” and “bring democracy” to the French Guiana because the rich oil deposits of its continental shelf won’t free themselves.
The point is that a slow ship crossing the ocean with hard to replace is very vulnerable in transit.
But French Guiana is a geographically distant ex-colony, so there will always be a higher probability of future inaccessibility. Same applies to New Caledonia, Martinique, etc.
Its not an ex-colony, its part of France and the EU.
It was a French colonial subject as recently as the 20th century.
Regardless, a launch facility within Europe seems much less riskier long term from a geopolitical standpoint.
Although you're right about the history of French Guiana, using that term to put on the same level as New Caledonia is nonsense. (Same goes for Martinique.)
I wasn’t talking about the historical aspect. Same applies = the same risk also exists due to geopolitics and distance. Heck, didn’t New Caledonia see a wave of protests that were crushed in the past year or two?
> Heck, didn’t New Caledonia see a wave of protests that were crushed in the past year or two?
Yes, that's why the risk is NOT the same between French Guiana and New Caledonia. Both of them are oversea territories far from the mainland with a colonial past, but their current relationship with the mainland is very different.
Around a quarter of the population of New Caledonia has been calling for independence for decades at this point, with 3 referendum organised during the last 10 years to resolve this issue. Only half of the population was able to vote to the referendums (and some local elections, like Congress of NC), due to local rules than are about to change–this, incidentally, is the cause of the protests you are talking about. On the geopolitical side of things, the independentists are probably propped up by Azerbaijan (https://www.courrierinternational.com/article/geopolitique-n...) and maybe China (https://www.lefigaro.fr/international/ambitions-geostrategiq...).
None of this holds for French Guiana. The risk between these territories is not the same. At all. Putting them on the same level by reducing them to their status as former colonies is nonsense.
Thanks for explaining. But I am not sure how this contradicts my point?
Sure, placing launch infrastructure in French Guiana is probably less risky than setting up shop in New Caledonia. Clearly, the risk profile is not the same for all of Overseas France.
My point is that if the decision is between mainland and Overseas France, the latter introduces elevated risk in the long term in general. French Guiana could be fine today, but it is not impossible that the next few years could see the rise of a populist pro-independence movement that would eventually impact launch infrastructure (similar to how it did for the USSR).
Reality is fundamentally chaotic after all.
How about a spaceport in Caledonia proper?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SaxaVord_Spaceport
How about the last time South America contested a little parcel of land?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falklands_War
Yes, but most of them in the early 1940s.
Britain’s Black Arrow could, but it launched from a RAF base in Australia. Definitely not continental Europe, but part of Europe if you consider it from the Eurovision point of view.
A real shame Britain abandoned their own research.
I see your point and I guees this venn diagram (on 3) needs an update. https://www.vox.com/2014/9/8/6103453/38-maps-that-explain-eu...
> Have there been other rocket launches from continental Europe?
Continental Europe? yes. The Russian's Plesetsk Cosmodrome is well within the boundaries of the European continent.
Continental Europe outside of Russian influence? no.
But also: European Union? Yes, French Guyana is a regular administrative part of France and a EU territory.
So continental EU :)
A lot, but just not into orbit. For example from the Kiruna space base in Sweden.
And of course the original rocket missiles developed by von Braun and used to bomb London.
> Have there been other rocket launches from continental Europe?
Yes. A Spanish private company launched the Miura 1 from Huelva (South of Spain) in 2023.
In any case it was programmed to reach only 46 Km high in the first attempt, and suffered damages after landing in the ocean at the expected coordinates.
It seems that a loan to finish its successor, the reusable rocket Miura 5, were granted in April of this year and that its first test flight is expected for the end of 2026, so Germany is not the only European country trying this.
> It's funny how we can't be celebrate a European achievement without trying to interpret it into relationship to the US.
It really isn’t funny. The US shat the bed and for now the repercussions are mainly being felt outside the US. When the US realises what it’s lost it’s going to be too late.
Oh we (the non idiots here) know full well what we lost. If Europe has a larger and more substantial science / technology community, that will just mean more trips/job offers in EU for me, so go Europe !
As an American, I welcome a multi-polar world where Europe pulls its weight when it comes to science, technology and engineering! More so in geopolitical matters. It’s always been very draining for one empire or nation to maintain world peace. The 19th century was Pax Britannica, the 20th, after WW2, was Pax Americana, we can now hope that Pax AmEuropana can offer a counter to the crazy rapid growth of Asia and also find common ground with those nations.
What rewards do you think the US is going to gain from this path it has begun to travel? Do you think it was all some noble charity case?
The UK is likely to be an illustrative example, so it's apt you mentioned it
You're arguing US imperialism is the best interest for the whole world. It was definitely after WW2 considering the alternative but the only way to keep the US honest is a little friendly competition.
> You're arguing US imperialism is the best interest for the whole world
Where? Are you replying to the right message?
You may be assuming the author of the comment you’re replying to believes that what is in the best interest of the US is also in the best interest of Europe and the world.
Yeah the world piece like all the wars in the middle east, Vietnam, proxy conflicts all over the world and so on and so on. I'm not blaming the US for all of these wars but they also didn't prevent them. And the US did overthrow many democracies and often made things much worse, Iran being a great example, but there are many others. I could go on.
Peace in Europe was maintained mostly by people in democracies generally wanting to work together. Yes the US had something to do with that as they supported that after WW2 but over the last 50 years, people in democracies generally don't fight each other. And more so by the threat of the Soviet Union that was so clearly the more dangerous option. Its easy to make allies if Stalin is on the other side.
And outside of Europe the US hardly maintained peace.
Nuclear weapons maintained 'peace' between Soviets and the US more then anything else.
And Europe has always pulled its weight in science, technology and engineering.
> Vietnam
The US was actually on the right side in that one (just like in Korea). The Communists were not exactly the good guys and their "agricultural and personnel reforms" lead to drastically reduced food production and starvation and death.
Blame the US for real things instead, such as supporting the wrong side in Afghanistan in the '80s or ensuring the survival of the Soviet Union in the '40s.
Tell it to cca 2 millions civilians that died in Vietnam as a direct result of failed US invasion (I really mean just civilians mostly bombed into oblivion, entire human lives list is around 3 million). As in, vast majority of them would be alive is US didn't try their failed adventure. Tonkin gulf is a classic US made up war for power mongering reasons.
Telling 'we're the good guys' while regularly bombing entire villages into oblivion with napalm on some vague suspicions ('we heard some gunshot when flying around so we blasted them' scenarios). My Lai and many others.
If this is how US population views their past fuckups then no wonder we are where we are, objectivity ain't easy if one is on the wrong side, isn't it.
Supporting wrong side in Afghanistan? Against Soviet invasion? Sometimes, often even there are no good sides.
If you guys didn't support Soviet union in 40s (which they vehemently denied since then but its their inferiority complex, the issue with russian mentality since forever), there would be no massive eastern front with most german losses and wehrmacht spread out too thinly, and D day would be crushed like nothing. History would be very different in Europe and globally.
If you guys didn't support Soviet union in 40s...
You can go even farther back in time. If the US hadn't massively relieved the famine in Russia in 1920/21 there might have been a chance, Lenin and the Bolshevik regime wouldn't have survived.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_famine_of_1921%E2%80%9...
I'm sorry but famine help is a good thing, not saving millions of people because it might potentially overthrow a government 'somehow' isn't a great plan.
One can argue FDR later embrace of Soviets was way to early and a direct stab in the back to France and other European powers.
It's not so simple, the rampant corruption under Ngô Đình Diệm, misappropriation of aid, etc. shouldn't just be swept under the rug. Hindsight says remaining capitalist probably would have been better for the average person, but it wasn't so obvious at the time.
Johnson was a warmonger, exaggerating (or possibly faking) the Gulf of Tonkin engagements to justify full escalation was a crime that led to the death of 60,000 Americans, hundreds of thousands more with PTSD, and 2 million+ murdered Vietnamese civilians. Not to mention hundreds of thousands of birth defects caused by agent orange and the still ongoing effort to clean up dioxins from the environment.
That is an objectively incorrect take. A common theme in disastrous US interventions was that they tried to prop-up a failing colonial power, which in this case was France - against the locals who wanted independence. Ho Chi Minh was a French-educated leader who only entered the orbit of the USSR after failing to secure support for Vietnamese independence frome the West.
The US only became actively involved in supporting South Vietnam a decade after it had achieved independence from France in 1955, after the negotiated division into North and South Vietnam in Geneva, and after the last French forces left in 1956.
The cause of that intervention was North Vietnam sending Viet Cong insurgents into South Vietnam, attempting to overthrow the government, and ignoring the South's sovereignty.
That doesn't justify the US's later transgressions while engaged in the war, but their initial support to South Vietnam was neither unjustified nor illiberal.
You can be technically 'right' by some definition and an intervention still not being a good thing.
The Southern regime was incredibly corrupt and dominated by land owners. Look at the Philippines for an example of what happens to a US 'colony' where the land lords are in control.
Communist Vietnam did some bad reforms yes, but they also changed and eventually did a lot of good things, turning the country into what it is today.
The US spent decades of war propping up a regime that was mostly incapable and killed a lot of people in the meantime.
>As an American, ... maintain world peace
I can't believe people are saying that with straight face. How on Earth can you see all the wars that the US has started or had a hand in igniting and still think that?
What it tends to mean is “prevent the US homeland from being threatened” and “keep US trade flowing”
> “prevent the US homeland from being threatened”
That's another thing that puzzles me. How people claim with straight face that anyone is threatening the US homeland.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Offensive_realism
I think you maybe believing that War would not have happened or there was some other approach without war, ever? I'm sorry but such beliefs are as wishful thinking as buying the world a coke.
> I can't believe people are saying that with straight face.
That's the consequence of a broken education system when it comes to teaching history. Empires rarely come to terms with what they did, and never while they're in power.
That's nonsense. It's imparted us with incredible prosperity and peace. The US is a much poorer and worse nation due to you and your kind destroying what we built.
> maintain world peace
Maintain "world war" (for corpo-profit) -> FIXED
I'm an idiot, what have we lost exactly? Soft Power?
> Does it mean that?
When the US government funded SpaceX, it was motivated in no small degree by a desire to not be permanently reliant on a geopolitical wildcard (Russia) for getting astronauts into orbit. Now that the US itself has become a geopolitical wildcard, savvy countries know that they need to seek out alternatives to SpaceX under more stable regimes.
>geopolitical wildcard
How is Russia a wildcard? What unexpected thing do you think Russia has done?
Authoritarian dictatorships will always behave in seemingly irrational ways (from the perspective of sane politicians). Dictators will always put their personal ambition and "career" first before their country's interests.
If Russia behaved rationally they would have made a deal with Ukraine (decades ago) that protected the rights of the Russian minorities in Ukraine and continued massively profiting from gas and oil exports into Europe.
> they would have made a deal with Ukraine (decades ago) that protected the rights of the Russian minorities in Ukraine and continued massively profiting from gas and oil exports into Europe.
Russia did, many times, last time in 2010.[0]
But the US and the EU didn't like it, so the coup in 2014 happened with American help[1] which overthrew democratically elected president of Ukraine who introduced the law protecting Russian speaking Ukrainian citizens.[2]
The law was repelled right after the coup and Crimeans supported the reunion with Russia.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russia%E2%80%93Ukraine_gas_dis...
[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-26079957
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_policy_in_Ukraine#201...
There was no coup:
There was no impeachment:
Please don't spread misinformation
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolution_of_Dignity#Removal_...
In English, impeachment is often used loosely to mean parliamentary removal from office, which happened there. You're the one spreading misinformation with cope about foreign coups when Ukrainians simply kicked your clown out of their house.
Belgian here.
I think Trump definitely pushes allies away much faster than ever anticipated, that's probably the only achievement from the current administration.
The alliance still stands, but it's hard to trust the US when the current president is constantly praising violent dictators and doesn't seem to grasp the concept of laws/rules + tries to blame everyone else + threatens to invade EU countries + the requirement to bribe him with funds/crypto to have "alliance".
You can know a guy by the friends he keeps :)
Fyi. I used to always use US tech, the last year I've done my best to adhere to the "European Souvereign Cloud". My current stack on US providers is down from 300 € / month to 35€ / m. And many are following suite ( it's slowly becoming a requirement for tenders for the governement + cities)
Germany is the country where AfD is about to win big.
Good friends you're choosing there.
China has it's own launchers which shows it's decoupling from Europe now. It's over for Europe as countries race to be independent from them.
The far right in Europe isn't comparable even to the right in the US fyi.
If AfD about to win BIG? Or are you just skimming the headlines?
I think having more distribution in launch locations and more provider options will ultimately be a net positive in the long run.
o/
This took about eight years of work by a private company (funded by US VC and an ex-SpaceX leader). This wasn't an intentional decision to decouple from the US, if that's what you're implying, but a business decision.
I've always assumed that the reason there aren't many launch sites in Europe because the booster stage falls back to Earth, and generally you want that to be over the sea. People get cross if rockets fall on their houses. If you're using the Earth's axial rotation as a helper that means launching heading east, and in Europe east is pretty much always over land. That's why most spaceports are either by an ocean (USA, Japan) or over a huge area of land no one lives in (Russia).
Not really, the actual issue is delta V, launching near the equator requires less fuel because you are getting all the benefit from Earth's rotation. Mass is almost everything for rocket launches.
Northern launches are done sometimes for high inclination orbits since they reduce the need to maneuver from an equatorial orbit.
A good historical nugget is that the Americans got a huge leg up in the space race by importing the Germans who worked on the V-2 program.
Germans killed Soviets by the millions. If you were a German of value (like a rocket scientist) you were eager to surrender to the Americans before the Soviets could get their hands on you.
If you were the Americans, you distrusted the Soviets already, so it was a win-win.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Paperclip
This went both ways https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Osoaviakhim
Yes a good thing to point out, however the American initiative was more successful, was it not?
Largely because raw numbers aside, most of the top talent wanted to avoid the Soviets and thus the US was the only logical option. That is, part of what made the American job on this easier is top German talent anticipated some "Operation Osoaviakhim" (or worse) scenario and thus sought out the US as the only way to get out ahead of it.
von Braun made major contributions to NASA. My understanding is relatively speaking, the Soviets got the scraps. Not that it made no impact, but just to say the impact of the Germans on the American space program should not be understated, and I don't think it would be accurate to assess the fruits of these two competing operations as equivalent.
von Braun and others had a major hand in the Saturn V. Who did the Soviets manage to seize of equal caliber?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wernher_von_Braun
USA got the cream of the crop of the managers of the German missile program, while the USSR got the workers, who actually did the work with their hands and built the parts for the rockets. (One exception was Helmut Gröttrup, the head of the V-2’s guidance and telemetry systems.)
In fact, after the war the USSR has briefly reconstituted the manufacturing of V-2 in Germany, employing thousands of people, before transplanting this entire industry to the USSR. This dramatically lifted the level of Soviet manufacturing and relevant metallurgy.
von Braun's dissertation was on engine design and testing. But when he built the Redstone missile in the USA, he ordered the engine from a US company -- the engine which was already a generation ahead, compared to the imported German engines which the US engineers studied after the war.
Meanwhile, the Soviets have developed even better engines, completely on their own, though with the important parts built using the materials and the equipment brought from Germany.
So it is debatable whether having the German higher-ups and having a greater continuity with German design philosophy was a good thing or a liability.
It is less well known, but France have also imported a significant number of ex-Peenemunde engineers for their program. And their engines developed in a way different from both the American ones and the Soviet ones -- which definitively shows that although internalizing the German know-how was the starting point for everyone, it did not define the path of subsequent development.
Of course, the engines were not the whole story. The Germans took to the USA the advanced prototypes of the inertial guidance systems which were developed for the missiles that were supposed to come after the V-2. And the Soviets got Helmut Gröttrup. This did have its effects in both cases.
great comment, just wanted to add a little: all three countries were pioneering rocketry in the 20-30s, more or less in equal measure.
I don't know why this WW2 rocket discussion happened to begin with, but people here don't seem to understand that there is no magical inherent technical skill which is unique and irreplaceable. Experience helps to speed things up, sure, but it can be acquired by any program given time and resources, with no talent blockers.
> USA got the cream of the crop of the managers of the German missile program, while the USSR got the workers
That's a bit oversimplified. The Russians got quite a few important scientists and engineers in other areas (aircraft design, nuclear physics, electronics, radar, optics), they just didn't make as good use of them as the US (e.g. the 'American Germans' essentially won the space race for the US).
Talking about the role of V2 in the development of rocketry in various countries is more or less relevant to the discussion of Isar, because it was a major milestone, and it did influence all rocketry worldwide, in many different ways.
Rocketry may be much more talked about, but in terms of headcount is was a tiny thing compared to the number of German experts who were "invited" into all Allied countries after the war. Just France and UK had brought in about 3 thousand persons each. If one had said that this did not happen, that would have been an error. But simply not bringing this up at all because it is not very relevant to the discussion of Isar is fine, I think.
Debating who "won" the space race, and who "used" Germans "better" is not something that I want to do.
For any unfamiliar with the history, Russia was a mass murdering machine in this era, vaporizing tens of millions of people, including Russians, in very short spans of time without even a second thought.
We all know Germans was. And some people would fling fecal allegations that “so was the US!”. No. German and Russian actions were categorically different than wartime casualties (even brutal, possibly criminal, wartime casualties like fire bombing heavily civilian enemy areas like Dresden)
You're right, America didn't intentionally engineer the death of millions until after the war, when it became the undisputed global superpower.
...If you choose to intentionally ignore slavery in the American South, Convict Leasing, and Jim Crow.
see also what the CIA got up to in Indonesia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indonesian_mass_killings_of_19...
And in your living memory: Vietnam, Korea, the vile shit we did to Haiti and Chile, the 'Banana Republics', Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, unconditionally supporting Israel and the Gulf States various war crimes and genocides, etc...
And of course, most recently, the sudden and complete excision of life-saving aid to children in Africa, leaving the world's most vulnerable to starve.
And also the total embargo on Cuba, to ensure starvation, with the intention of conquest, resource extraction, and collective punishment.
but God forbid someone on a message board tarnish the US's sterling reputation (relative to some of history's worst) during WWII.
For anyone actually unfamiliar with history, this is a gross exaggregation made with a sole purpose of equalizing nazi crimes with what happened in the soviet union.
History does not work this way, in the early modernity masses were cohesive and industrialized, and so were the crimes and atrocities.
Every developed country got to it, but what makes nazis different is that the regime was built with the sole purpose of commiting atrocities, hence the outstanding scale and character of the matter.
The Soviet Union was far worse at the time (both before and after the existence of Nazi Germany). It got a lot better after Stalin's death.
It’s clear by the numbers, but some will just refuse, mostly those with romantic views of Marx or the others, while at the same time arguing “but real communism has never been tried!”
The Russian crimes were NOT equal to Nazi germany, and I didn’t state as much. They were very very very bad though.
They got a leg up and still the Russians with Sputnik got into space first, on top of splitting Korea and winning in Vietnam and having the nuclear bomb fall into their lap and to top it off they appear to have the Manchurian candidate in the White House.
Take a deep breath.
If you can't see those points, you need to take several deep breaths.
With fairness to the Soviets, the USSR's reputation for rocket artillery was nearly as impressive as Germany's in WWII. The Allies had less experience scaling and deploying the technology, so they had more to gain by taking in the Peenemünde researchers.
The Russians conscripted more German rocket scientists than the Americans got through Operation Paperclip, both programs were bootstrapped with German expertise. Americans got ~1,600, Russians more like 6,000.
> If you were a German of value (like a rocket scientist) you were eager to surrender to the Americans before the Soviets could...
Misleading. Pretty much all Germans were eager to surrender to the Western Allies - US/UK/France. That became the German government's official top priority in the closing days of the war, and Eisenhower threatened to seal the Western Front (to German soldiers and civilians fleeing the Soviets) when the Germans dragged their heels on his terms of surrender.
A relatively brief treatment can be found here - https://history.army.mil/portals/143/Images/Publications/cat...
True, I just meant that if you had something of value (like rocket expertise) you would be more likely to get favorable terms. And you knew the Soviets would be extra interested in you. Thus the added "eagerness".
But yes the point is on the whole, Germans did not want to surrender to the Soviets. Germans didn't kill millions of American civilians. They didn't level American cities.
So, it was perfectly logical as Germany collapsed for any German to fear the retribution of the Soviet armed forces, who they had every reason to see as filled with a rage and a sense of purpose no American would have been able to contemplate.
Just for context, when Boeing completed the 747 Airbus wasn't even a thing. 5 decades later they have caught up in most categories and even surpassed in some. Who knows, maybe something similar will happen again?
Airbus did not come into existence out of nowhere. It is the result of merging some companies that had some ancestry going back to the time of aviation pioneers.
Almost nothing starts from 0, its not a very smart idea to ignore generations of experience and wrong decisions.
Tesla also started with musk joining already well working EV startup, didn't it.
Nothing was "started" by him joining. Name was the same and they were already producing car(s). He did bring his skills for fraud and puffery though.
It's a posterboy project for the EU and for all its insane complexities and French people, it's working! I am watching Belugas land here in Hamburg almost every day :)
Plesetsk is also european soil.
Kourou as well, although maybe a different definition of European.
Would maybe call it European territory but not soil. But yeah, as you say it's how you define it.
They're using "Europe" as political shorthand for Western Europe
Europe is a vibe based concept, a place can be European or not depending on the vibes. Even the east west central etc. are completely vibe based. Portugal for example is Eastern European country, meanwhile Romania is central according to some textbooks.
Portugal is not Eastern European and it would be incredibly rare for Europeans to identify it as such. Have you been to Europe in your life?
It's mostly a meme https://old.reddit.com/r/PortugalIsEastEurope/
Yeah, Romania being central Europe - impossible nonsense. Because Czech Republic is in central Europe!
Yeah, just like Toronto is American soil
Congrats! How come European companies still haven't managed to match SpaceX's capabilities? Europe has an incredible talent pool, especially in aerospace, and some of the world’s best expertise in precision engineering, instrumentation, sensors, avionics, and other hard-tech subsystems. A huge amount of the expertise and supply chain for these components is concentrated in Europe.
So what are we missing? Is it mainly systems integration, manufacturing scale, risk tolerance, organizational structure, or the willingness to iterate as aggressively as SpaceX? It feels like Europe has many of the pieces needed to build world-class launch systems, but hasn't yet put them together at the same scale and speed.
Probably the biggest thing is that capital in the EU is far more conservative.
Incidentally, the early investment for Isar came from Bülent Altan, the Turkish ex-SpaceX guy who was in charge of the guidance system for Falcon-1, Falcon-9 and Dragon.
Very interesting, thanks.
It looks like he was an angel investor in Isar, and then co-founded a VC firm that continued to invest in Isar: https://alpinespace.vc/
> So what are we missing?
There are some (many?) European companies which are considered as least as much as a jobs program as anything else.
In 2018, Alain Charmeau (in)famously expressed frustration with SpaceX in an interview with Der Spiegel and rejected reusability with these words:
“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!’”
https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/05/ariane-chief-seems-f...
from the original
https://www.spiegel.de/wissenschaft/technik/alain-charmeau-d...
A more recent example would be the Future Combat Air System (FCAS) project which was officially cancelled in June 2026, due to (?) industrial rivalry and leadership disputes, with a side order of politics.
That's the only good answer of the thread. ArianeGroup is mainly the SLBM program of France and after that a way to maintain european know-how in rocket building and for nearly 20 years was the main space launch company in the world before Space-X. All those companies success and failures (be that Space-X or ArianeGroup) are linked to their political environment and how much money can be spent on their launch market. Space-X could use the technique of launching many and fail as much because they had the contracts to do it and years of tangential R&D by Nasa. The ecosystem explains everything and the relative intelligence of american or european engineers nearly nothing.
Perhaps this “jobs program” could be seen as preserving industrial capacity? With military contractors, for example, it’s apparently a problem when they’re used to build a stockpile and then they shut down because there are no more orders.
Most of the US space launch startups have failed. And in Europe it is harder to even try.
There was a confluence of several factors which helped SpaceX to succeed, and not the least of these was the employee number one. For many years, Tom Mueller has been working in his free time on rather large liquid fuel amateur rockets, which he was building in his garage and which he was launching from some amateur rocketry facilities in the desert. In terms of regulation it was a relatively accessible hobby in the US. At the time Musk found him, he was working on the original "BFR" -- a very large liquid fuel amateur rocket. So the deal was to invest serious money into the project and scale the same no nonsense approach to a small orbital launch vehicle. They were in LA, the center of US aerospace manufacturing, so through Tom's professional connections and knowledge of who was who in the industry, they were able to source the necessary materials, components, and to find the key personnel for their company. Significantly, NASA has already spent probably a decade or more trying to get somebody to produce a cheap small launch vehicle. This did not directly affect SpaceX, but it did fund the R&D for example at Barber-Nichols, which enabled them to offer a turbopump for SpaceX engine at a much lower cost than it would have been possible otherwise.
At first, Musk and Co thought that they would be able to develop the rocket for a few million dollars. But even in the US regulatory environment it turned out that doing everything in compliance with regulations raised the costs to well over a hundred million dollars.
So, Tom's hobby + Musk's activism + industrial ecosystem in the area + NASA's prior support of component vendors + being at the right time to snag the International Space Station delivery contract were all important for SpaceX thriving where so many others have failed.
This is an article title that needs a ton of caveats (the ESA launch site in French Guiana is indeed part of the European Union, and Russia's Plesetsk Cosmodrome is within continental Europe). Nonetheless the underlying achievement is impressive, and it's very good to see more private operators competing in space flight
Congrats to my country! After a lot bad news around car industry, a good hope for another heavy industrial branch.
If Isar will get a large scale commitment from the government(s) to launch the OneWeb 2.0 constellation, as the European alternative to US, Chinese and Russian systems, they may well become a major launch provider. And of course they are already working on a much larger reusable rocket.
Although the original OneWeb satellites were assembled in the USA, they were developed in Europe and the components were always sourced predominantly from Europe, Canada, and Africa, with only some parts produced by the European companies in the USA, and even fewer parts sourced from the US companies. It is a very European satellite.
I'd rather see something owned by the people, not private.
I'd rather Germany had been first on the Moon, instead of the US.
Disclosing a preference isn't necessarily insightful commentary on achievements.
*Privatized profit. The ~210mil € of public funding wasn't private. It is now I guess, lol.
EDIT: Title has been updated so my comment seems out of context.
> "The findings identified an unintended opening of the vent valve
How do they figure things like this out, after a rocket goes "boom"?
Telemetry?
Something they might have is a lot of strain gauges around the rocket. They can tell if the rocket is bending and compressing (and how) -- but they are also essentially high-speed microphones. Valves make sounds (cause vibrations) and they are easy to spot if you have high-speed samples of your strain gauges. You can also triangulate distances if you have multiple strain gauges with synchronized high-speed samples.
It's good practice to dump data into several flash memories + transmit live. The live transmit is likely only a small summary of all the data that they capture -- distributed flash memory locations is a cheap way to increase the chances of getting useful data after a boom/crash (put them in orange water tight containers that can float + give them a beep-beep radio transmitter).
This is such a breath of fresh air
Not for the Sami people who have to inhale the rocket exhaust blast.
Istar's Spectrum rocket does not use RP-1 (kerosene), like Falcon 9 and Electron, which burns very dirty.
They are using liquid propane, which burns extremely cleanly, especially when combined with their liquid oxygen.
There is a lot of noise, but that should be the only pollution generated by this launch.
Oops, correct spelling is Isar.
Interesting that it uses Propane fuel and "weaves" the rockets with carbon composite.
Isar Aerospace launch into orbit [video] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ss1DUqLjecc (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49580325)
Thanks for that video. Super cool that they got pro streamers NSF involved.
Really interesting that they will be launching from Canada as well.
Really beautiful with the rocket shining brightly upon the mountains as it lifts off
FYI Norway is not in the EU. Whether they are European is a matter of perspective and I'm not touching that subject any further! Deutschland is in the EU.
Norway is as close as you can get without formally being a member. It's not just the EEA, it's also a member of essentially all EU programs that aren't closed off for non-member states. That Norway is European is not a matter of perspective.
Do you know any Norwegians? I don't have an opinion but many of my Norwegian relatives think the European thing is not just terminology and is a label from outside. Swedes and Fins too. [edit: I changed a fair bit of wording in the first few minutes of the post]
> Whether they are European is a matter of perspective
What? Scandinavia isn't part of Europe now? The "EU" is an organization, "Europe" is a continent. "European" includes everybody living in Europe (and yes, that even includes the Brits and most Russians).
I shouldn't have to explain this stuff. The Nordic countries are exceptionalist in my understanding from talking to them. It's an easy search to go down this rabbit hole. It's a little different from Catalan wanting to be independent but still European. This is not my area of knowledge I have just been exposed multiple times first hand. Where are my scando fin buddies to chime in? Lulz
Looking at a map Norway is on the same continent as Vietnam so that statement makes no sense. Please have some sort of context and understanding before making such statements. They "seem" to be part of Europe but they have historically wanted to have it both ways: one foot in one foot out. Go research it yourself I am probably totally wrong! HN comments are not a reference source.
There's a clearly defined border between the continents Europe and Asia.
I guess the confusion comes from thinking of "European" as some sort of cultural identity (which frankly doesn't exist, unless you only look at the last hundred years or so, and even that is generous), instead of the people living in the geographical region called "Europe".
This is false. Europe and Asia are on the same continent on the same tectonic plate.
Your 2nd point is spot on. This is where the cultural distinction matters.
> Europe and Asia are on the same continent on the same tectonic plate.
By that definition India would be its own continent because the country largely sits on its own tectonic plate.
Also Europe and Asia are continents, they're not on the same continent (same landmass: sure).
Talk to the geologists I don't get to decide and neither do you.
You heard it here first folks, 'Norway is no more European than Vietnam.'
Lol. Yah this is not a great discussion. My point is that I don't get to decide if Norway is Europe. Keep me out of this!
Norway is even more European than Canada and Israel!
Despite not being in the EU, Norway is European without the slightest doubt.
Source?
OMG these responses are truly reddit empty brain stuff that can't even bother to look up the simplest thing. Little boys with reactions and opinions! Did you hear about my opinion?
All the scandinavians I met in France clearly think they are as much european as me, I don't know where you find yours.
Yeah in general it’s good advice to not existentially challenge the Germans.
Congrats! didn't know german has this ability before.
I wonder whether the Sámi people have been consulted or compensated for the use of their traditional lands as a rocket launch site. Given Norway’s long history of suppressing Sámi people and their land rights, I'd be interested to know how that was handled.
Interesting:
https://www.cryopolitics.com/2022/10/06/on-norways-auroral-e...
In this house we believe the first Neanderthal did not consent
Did the Sami compensate the Indo-Europeans they displaced?
The first thing that came into my mind was the fragile ecosystem up there. All considered this doesn't sound like a very thoughtful process.
And of course as pointed out elsewhere, Norway isn't even EU. I wonder how happy people were if rocket launches were done in rural Western Europe.
Made with imipolex g?
Fantastic job!
i was under the impression that the closer you launch from the equator, the less sustained force you need. wrong?
Right. You get a free ~1000mph from the equator.
Depending on the inclination - not much help to launch into a polar orbit for example.
The Germans also launched the first rocket to make it to space on June 20th 1944, though it wasn't privately made.
Space, yes. Orbit, no. From what I understand, orbit is much harder to achieve. Pedantic, but still.
The sooner Europe cuts itself off from the US crazy billionaires, the better - on all levels (software and manufacture processes are the two biggest issues). Today we already could see the US surrender team crawling up to dictator Putin. Enough is enough - agent Krasnov needs to be isolated.
I don’t think America is so far gone. We have issues sure, but I for one still believe that we can be better.
Trump be damned, Europe and America are stronger when they work together.
Americans have to hope that the US will move past trumo and not repeat that mistake, but for europeans its most prudent to prepare for a world where such a corrupt wannabe distator doesnt have have that much leverage over them.
The US and europe would be stronger together if the US acted in good faith. Absent that, decoupling is the right choice
Or maybe Europe just thinks if you can't beat 'em, join 'em:
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/05/world/europe/germany-afd-...
Germany also has a crazy Communist party that is more in the pocket of Russia than AfD is -- but somehow that is almost never mentioned, not even in German media. It's quite big and influential.
Idk, to me it looks like the German green party is very anti Russian...
What Europe needs to do to spur its tech sector is lower taxes.
A 2018 study shows tax increases significantly reduce innovation. A 1% increase in the top marginal income tax rate leads to a 2% reduction in patents and inventors, while a similar increase in corporate taxes causes even larger declines.
The study is quite rigorous too:
https://open.substack.com/pub/maximumprogress/p/tax-cuts-and...
Why are they on X? As a European company, should they not be posting instead from W Social?
What's W social?
One can hope they can repurpose this to a shield for Ukraine
> from European soil
When someone emphasizes nationalism a bit too much that's usually only because they don't have enough technical merit to talk about.
Launching far off the equator makes it more difficult and is therefore a bigger technological achievement.
The selection of launch site takes the orbital inclination into account.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun-synchronous_orbit
The "Onward and Upward" cube sats were deployed to Sun-synchronous orbits, with a roughly polar inclination.
Similarly, launches from USSF Base Vandenberg take a southerly trajectory, so it can be used for orbits like that.
Rocket launches from continental Europe have been challenging because of the population centers, and the unpopularity of things exploding over their heads, and falling on their houses and businesses. USA and Russia have some quite ideal sites that avoid flying over populated areas.
You are still ~500 m/s short compared to launching on an equatorial orbit from the equator.
Velocity is a vector, not simply a rate. Launches and orbits are three-dimensional.
What would be a great technological achievement would be launching from French Guiana (5.2° N) and then making a plane-change maneuver to achieve a polar orbit (90° inclination). All that bonus eastward velocity from the Earth's rotation would turn into a penalty they'd need to compensate for no reason, when they had a spaceport more suitable for that polar inclination.
Try this related concept: https://youtu.be/sod3ofdUYTw?si=U7dz_LcRQ0M44tAU
And the spherical cow jumps frictionlessly over the Moon!
No. It’s simply about accessibility and sovereignty. Even though the ESA can launch from French Guiana, the space port is an ocean-away from Europe! How much do you think that fact will affect the cost and the launch cadence for Europe?
Now they prove they can launch directly from Norway with their own production from Munich and elsewhere and that has immense potential for the future: much higher cadence, significant lower cost and always-on accessibility.
The only way, Europe can have a Starlink similar network is to launch from their own soil and reuse the first stage. Also from the perspective of security, launching spy and other military satellites from European soil is the only practical possibility in this political climate.
Europe is a continent, not a nation.
How can it be the first European rocket? There’s the ESA! Are you telling me we have all these organisations and none of them have ever launched from their own continent?
They launch from Guiana afaik
French Guiana to be exact, which is a different country
Edit: Misread
They meant French Guiana is a different country to Guyana... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Guianas
Europe isn't on or remotely near the equator, which is somewhat favorable for launches.
> The German company Isar Aerospace launched its Spectrum rocket from Andøya Space Center in northern Norway today
To speculate, they could be targeting a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molniya_orbit
ESA launches French Guiana. Since it is cheaper to launch closer to the equator with the extra speed provided by the earth's rotation.
Really comes in handy to still have a couple of colonies near the equator.
It's also better to have the massive amounts of emissions far away from your own population.
French Guiana is not a colony, it is a region of France. People who live there have the same constitutional rights as anyone living in mainland France.
It has the same status in France as Alaska does in the US.
It's a colony even if it's legally part of France.
(Had to check: free movement does apply to Guianans, but in the other direction it's not part of Schengen)
Guianans tend to get pissed off if outsiders suggest in any way that they are any different as a French region from l'Hexagone (the French mainland). Your banging on about colonies would not be well received there.
Ireland is not part of Schengen as well for example, it is because that is much harder to practically achieve for folks living on islands.
Ireland is not part of Schengen because the UK never was (and they wanted to keep the Common Travel Area).
France has only one citizenship, everyone holds the same French passport so everyone has the same freedom of movement within the EU.
It's not in Schengen, like most overseas territories in the EU, to limit illegal immigration into the EU (see Ceuta as well).
I don't thing the term "colony" holds. It is anachronic and refers to a system that no longer exists.
That's legally true, but I think it misses the distinction between formal political status and the legacy of colonialism. French Guiana is an overseas department of France, and its residents have French citizenship and constitutional rights. But that doesn't mean the historical relationship was equivalent to mainland France, or that the effects of that history disappeared when the legal status changed.
The same point applies elsewhere: Guinea became independent from French colonial rule in 1958, but independence didn't magically erase the economic structures, institutions, and inequalities inherited from colonialism. Today, a large share of Guinea's population still lives in poverty despite the country's enormous natural-resource wealth.
So "it's not a colony" is correct as a matter of constitutional law. But using that fact to imply that colonial history is irrelevant to present-day economic and social conditions is a much stronger claim, and one that's harder to defend.
While I agree with your analysis, would you think is the best to use the same generic term "colonialism" for both the situations in French Guyana and let's say Venezuela in the last year? I would prefer more words to differentiate a bit, but maybe that's just me.
How does it compare to Alaska? Wasn't it purchased as a colony from russians to exploit Alaskan gold with complete disreagrd for opinion of the native population?
Alaska is a colony is well, and so is the rest of North America.
We don't think of the US and Canada as colonies because the vast majority of the native population was genocided.
They mostly died from European diseases without ever meeting a European. It wasn't even planned or known by the European "visitors".
Everywhere is a colony if the out of Africa theory is to be believed. The native peoples displaced by Europeans migrating from Asia.
A better comparison is with Hawaii.
For what it's worth, Metropolitan France used to claim Algeria wasn't a colony either.
Becoming French was an amazingly good reward for being pirates and slave traders.
>Really comes in handy to still have a couple of colonies near the equator.
>It's also better to have the massive amounts of emissions far away from your own population.
That's the dumbest comment i read since a long time, thanks.
A fully loaded Falcon 9 carries less kerosene than 1 (one single) A380. What level of concerntrolling is this?
For satellites that should be in Sun-synchronous orbit Andøy is a great place to launch from
The French used to launch their rockets from Algeria. Their first satellite was launched from there. Since then they moved to (French) Guiana.
The UK launched from Australia.
And Russia launches some rockets from Plesetsk, in Europe.
Article says Western Europe, but Norway is in Northern Europe.
“First rocket to launch from Europe outside Russia” would have been perfectly correct.
In the political sense, «Western Europe» is typically taken to be «NATO Europe», and «Eastern Europe» is «Warsaw Pact Europe». Which is different from a strict geographic definition.
That is also not correct anymore as Northern countries were reallocated to include the Baltics in UN as an example.
You’d have to say which NATO. Czechia is in NATO and was in Warsaw pact.
If you said: Americans usually incorrectly think of Western Europe as those countries not partially or fully under control of the Soviet Union during the Cold War, then I’d agree with you.
> How can it be the first European rocket?
Not at all. You've missed the "Private" in the headline. And that it apparently is.
It isn't. Plesetsk is in European Russia and was built to prevent overreliance on Baikonur
You are thinking about Vostochny in Russian Far East. Plesetsk was an early ICBM launch site that started doing orbital launches in 1966. It was the busiest spaceport in Soviet times, and the cumulative number of orbital launches from Plesetsk still probably exceeds those from Florida.
No, I'm thinking of Plesetsk because it is in Europe. It is much nearer to Moscow than Baikonur is. Since the USSR broke up, this is even more the case.
I meant that Vostochny is the one that is supposed to reduce their reliance on Baikonur, while Plesetsk is more like the Russian equivalent of Vandenberg. During Soviet times, Baikonur was the premium spaceport for all the big high-profile missions. Plesetsk was a boring mundane place, where the military launched spy satellites and things like that every week or so for >20 years.
Really sad to see that Europe is so far behind.
Consider India, once single country vs all of Europe: 88 orbital launches successfully reached orbit using Indian built rockets starting in 1980.
This is out of 104 individual liftoffs.
Over 46 years of successful launches.
It’s the national equivalent of:
How long it takes you to ship this project? Two weeks.
And if you get help from Alice, Bob, and Charlie? Then it’s a year.
Advancement of a culture is not only measured by rocket launches.
The fact not many launches happen from continental Europe has nothing to do with capabilities of the space industry or lack of expertise, but rather location.
Europe is far from the equator and densely populated so rocket launches from there are more costly, and failures can have a higher risk to life.
Arianne space has had 350+ successful missions after 45 years of operations, with most of those launching from overseas territories.
As a European, I'm glad functioning sewage systems took priority over an orbital launch capability.
I don't understand the one country vs all of Europe - given a fixed population, being united in a single country surely makes everything a bit more efficient than being split in many small countries? India is much bigger than "all of Europe".