Can it survive without a radical restructuring?
Nope. SpaceX is disrupting space programs all over the world.
4 thoughts on “ESA”
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Can it survive without a radical restructuring?
Nope. SpaceX is disrupting space programs all over the world.
Comments are closed.
I am less optimistic than the article author about the workshare being distributed over anything other than where the investment comes from. EADS and Airbus are one good example. Time and again the CEOs of Airbus have said the operations should be centralized in France. Even when the CEO was German. If it was centralized, for one thing, the mess with the A380 design probably never would have happened in the first place, costs would be reduced as well. In the long run capital intensive projects demand as much state aid as possible and what will happen is that it will be distributed as much as they possibly can to milk all that government and state money.
A good case in point in this is Boeing. They did not have the same political constraints as Airbus yet they still moved a lot of their operations outside of Washington State and in the case of the 787 they ended up outsourcing parts and components from everywhere, including Japan and Europe, in order to get as much aid as they possibly could.
It would be nice if these kinds of corporations were run in a more lean fashion. But everything seems to point elsewhere. Hopefully SpaceX can counter this trend but even they seem to be suffering from pressures like this and have been opening facilities and offices elsewhere.
Regarding launcher technology and competitiveness you have to remember that the next generation Long March family of rockets and Angara are starting to become available. In Angara’s case they have already done a rocket launch and in the case of Long March they have recently done a dress rehearsal. Long March 7 is probably going to have a launch over the next year.
The Chinese also built a new launch site a lot closer to the Equator at Wenchang:
http://www.popsci.com/next-generation-chinese-space-vehicles-begins-its-long-march-standing
The Russian Angara uses the RD-191 LOX/Kerosene staged combustion engine with 470 klbf thrust which is around the thrust level what Elon said is SpaceX’s target for their next generation LOX/Methane staged combustion Raptor engine. The Chinese Long March is going to use a staged combustion YF-100 LOX/Kerosene engine with a lot lower thrust level. Around what Merlin-1D thrust level. Still both engines are more technically advanced than what SpaceX is using right now.
While the US Government market is safe from competition the comsat market is a different matter. ITAR might still be an issue though. Still a lot of future demand is going to come from Asian and South American countries wanting to launch satellites and you can bet they are not going to bother about trifles like that. All they will want is whoever can launch the satellite the cheapest.
Even without SpaceX the truth is Arianespace has lost a lot of commercial market share ever since the fall of the Soviet Union when the Russians with ILS and Sealaunch started offering more economic launch services with Soyuz, Proton, and Zenit among others. The competition is going to be become more fierce, especially the Chinese competition. The Russians still have launch site issues.
I also forgot to say that after Long March 7 comes online the Chinese are going for the Long March 5 family which will have YF-120t engines with similar thrust levels to Angara.
Put any launch system on mars and earth can no longer compete on cost to LEO with the same system. Could that be Elon’s end game? [twirling evil mustache.]