How SpaceX is shaking it up.
That’s what disruption looks like.
[Update a couple minutes later]
Not to mention what’s happening to ULA.
2 thoughts on “Arianespace”
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How SpaceX is shaking it up.
That’s what disruption looks like.
[Update a couple minutes later]
Not to mention what’s happening to ULA.
Comments are closed.
The Aviation Week article is a gross simplification of the problem Arianespace is facing.
Arianespace started having problems competing in cost in the open market since the fall of the Soviet Union. With Proton, Soyuz, Zenit available in the market, sometimes at half the cost of an Ariane 5 slot, it was certainly not easy. The way they tried to solve this was with the dual-launch architecture and plans to do multiple launches for things like satellite constellations using the Vinci expander cycle engine. The problem was that Ariane 5 had a lot more teething issues than expected which meant much of the money that was originally supposed to be used for upgrades to be spent fixing those issues. They had problems both with the original Ariane 5 and with the ECA version for those who do not remember. This meant the ECB version ended up being pushed further and further and later replaced with the simplified ME version which still has not flown yet despite Vinci expander cycle engine development having been done and finished years ago. Also the same time the constellation market imploded and the satellite market did a lot less launches in the late 90s than expected.
Still the difference in price of using a Russian launcher was large enough the French and Germans started launching on Soyuz (Starsem) and Rokot respectively. Soyuz in particular was a lot cheaper than Ariane 5 and could launch most payloads of interested. This was particularly critical once they started doing the math on how much it would cost to put up the Galileo satellite constellation. The result was what you see today where French Guiana has a Soyuz launch pad and the Starsem business was folded into Arianespace.
It is kind of misleading to compare Arianespace to SpaceX. Arianespace does not manufacture launch vehicles at all. They handle launches from the French Guiana space launch center but the launch vehicles themselves are manufactured by 3rd parties.
As for economics making Arianespace unviable and killing it that is another gross simplification. The EU produced a Green Paper a couple of years back stating it is imperative to have native launch capability in the EU for defense and security payloads among others. So even if the business became economically nonviable there would still be funding incoming from the EU just to keep the capability working. The way Arianespace itself is selling it however is that they want to not need state funding to operate anymore. For that they proposed the Ariane 6 design using a bunch of solids in the first stages which. to me, is a mistake. But I digress.
The fact is Arianespace’s business has held itself together a lot better than most people thought it would. Even when the Russians started competing at much lower prices the fact is it costs a lot less to insure an Ariane 5 launch because it has a much better reliability record. The fact is they still do most commercial launches in the market. I am not certain if SpaceX can significantly change this equation in the short term or not.
The fact is that Arianespace largely owes its relative success over the last 20 years to persistent Russian inability to do proper quality control on their flagship satellite launch vehicle, Proton. If Proton had evolved to the same level of reliability that Ariane 5 has over the same interval, Arianespace’s double payload strategy would not have been sufficient, by itself, to offset the Russian advantages in cost and scheduling. Russia, not Arianespace would now be the dominant player in satellite launch.
SpaceX is particularly scary to Arianespace for several reasons. The most salient is that SpaceX simply refuses to fuck up a launch. As of this morning, SpaceX has launched 10 Falcon 9’s in four years. All have delivered their primary payloads successfully to correct orbits. Of the first 10 Ariane 5 launches – which, by the way, took 5 years – three were complete or partial failures. Arianespace eventually got the hang of things after a fourth failure on mission 14 and things have been fairly unexciting since.
The Russians, Lord love ’em, never did get the hang of things and continue to blow up about one rocket in every dozen or so. The Russians are reassuringly human.
As they contemplate the relative paucity of teething issues encountered by SpaceX, and their unnervingly perfect early F9 launch record, one imagines the executives of Arianespace as Butch and Sundance, looking along their backtrail at the miniscule figures of the uber-posse assembled to pursue them and asking one another, “Who are those guys?” Who? Why your doom, good sirs, your doom. And that’s without even considering the competitive effects of practical reusability.
ULA suffers from all the same structural competitive problems as Arianespace:
1. Like Arianespace, ULA is a monopoly that got way too comfortable in fat times and lacks the capacity to adapt to genuine competition.
2. Like Arianespace, ULA can’t – or at least doesn’t choose to try to – make money solely on its monopoly status and inflated prices. Arianespace, a relative piker, gets 100 million euros in annual subsidies. ULA get a cool $1 billion.
3. Like Arianespace, ULA has finally noticed that SpaceX exists, but still hasn’t grappled realistically with what the coming age of rocket reusability will mean to expendables producers such as itself. Arianespace whistles past the graveyard with the idea that an all-solids, all disposable Ariane 6 that won’t even be ready for seven more years can fend off SpaceX. ULA doesn’t even have a new vehicle in prospect. It seems to think it can somehow soldier on with the same uber-pricey Delta IV’s and problematically-engined Atlas V’s it has proffered since formation in 2006, trusting to a thick briar patch of political alliances and pliable bureaucrats to see them through any challenges.
In addition to these difficulties, ULA also faces the high likelihood of permanent loss of their Russian connection for Atlas V 1st-stage engines. Even should they somehow be able to get the U.S. government to pay for a replacement, it cannot possibly be ready in time to save even their current block buy obligations, never mind support a future ULA as a going concern.
Oddly, it will perhaps be the Russians who provide the strongest competitive challenge to SpaceX going forward. The new Angara has been over 20 years in gestation, but along the way the Russians showed a mock-up of a reusable fly-back version of Angara’s standard booster module. They are far behind SpaceX in actually bending metal for such a thing, never mind testing it on actual launches as SpaceX has now done several times, but at least they have given the problem due consideration. Also, unlike ULA and perhaps even Arianespace, the Russians, under their newly re-centralized, state-controlled space enterprise, don’t have to keep revenues at anything like current levels in order to continue as a going concern. If it takes awhile for bugs to be worked out and reusability established for Angara, the Russian government will cover the tab.