They had enough issues competing with the Russians as it was. Proton can launch a lot cheaper than Ariane 5 and Soyuz is cheaper still. When they did the math on Galileo constellation launch costs they figured out Ariane 5 was too expensive. That was why the went for Soyuz on Guyana.
Considering how Russia has been behaving recently I am surprised I am not seeing more arguments about stopping to rely on Soyuz for launches of something as critical as Galileo.
The Germans may talk all they want but these EU projects rely on workshare agreements that are proportional to the amount of capital each nation invests into the project. Germany cannot dictate project design or workshare when they are not going to invest much into the project to begin with.
In most of these ESA projects France is the major financial backer. Even Vega, which was initially started by the Italians, ended up having a large chunk of French capital invested.
No Bucks no Buck Rogers.
The smart thing to do right now for competitors is actually not to build a rocket.
The problem that old space has right now is not that they have the wrong rockets, that’s a symptom. The real problem is that all these companies don’t know how to do rocket development cheaply (in less than multi-billion dollar increments) or quickly and they don’t know how to build rockets designed for low cost operations. Simply putting a new bullet point on the empty blueprints for the next generation of rocket doesn’t solve any of those problems. If they can’t build the right thing and if they can’t develop it in a timely fashion at a reasonable cost then they’ll merely fail in a different way.
The way forward is to completely revamp the way things are done and move towards an iterative development pattern with lots of testing. Much of SpaceX’s success is because they continue to push development and continue to test all the time. That’s realistically the only way to achieve low cost development of low cost, reusable launchers. I highly doubt any of the entrenched players will actually be able to make such a jump though.
This shows the value of what Elon calls the forcing function. Without that sort of disruption the established players would continue forever. This is why innovation seldom comes from established companies. It almost always takes a nut case from left field to motivate the established players to compete.
They had enough issues competing with the Russians as it was. Proton can launch a lot cheaper than Ariane 5 and Soyuz is cheaper still. When they did the math on Galileo constellation launch costs they figured out Ariane 5 was too expensive. That was why the went for Soyuz on Guyana.
Considering how Russia has been behaving recently I am surprised I am not seeing more arguments about stopping to rely on Soyuz for launches of something as critical as Galileo.
The Germans may talk all they want but these EU projects rely on workshare agreements that are proportional to the amount of capital each nation invests into the project. Germany cannot dictate project design or workshare when they are not going to invest much into the project to begin with.
In most of these ESA projects France is the major financial backer. Even Vega, which was initially started by the Italians, ended up having a large chunk of French capital invested.
No Bucks no Buck Rogers.
The smart thing to do right now for competitors is actually not to build a rocket.
The problem that old space has right now is not that they have the wrong rockets, that’s a symptom. The real problem is that all these companies don’t know how to do rocket development cheaply (in less than multi-billion dollar increments) or quickly and they don’t know how to build rockets designed for low cost operations. Simply putting a new bullet point on the empty blueprints for the next generation of rocket doesn’t solve any of those problems. If they can’t build the right thing and if they can’t develop it in a timely fashion at a reasonable cost then they’ll merely fail in a different way.
The way forward is to completely revamp the way things are done and move towards an iterative development pattern with lots of testing. Much of SpaceX’s success is because they continue to push development and continue to test all the time. That’s realistically the only way to achieve low cost development of low cost, reusable launchers. I highly doubt any of the entrenched players will actually be able to make such a jump though.
This shows the value of what Elon calls the forcing function. Without that sort of disruption the established players would continue forever. This is why innovation seldom comes from established companies. It almost always takes a nut case from left field to motivate the established players to compete.