Ariane 6

Remind me again of the Ariane 5 success-rate for the first 20 launches?

Why are you so eager for ESA to fail? If you like space exploration, more suiccessfull spaeships is better than fewer successful spaceships. Fanboi crap accomplishes nothing.

I'm no fan of Musk as a person, but I hope his space endeavors are a huge success. I hope the ESA, NASA, the Chinese program, the Russians... I hope everybody whop is trying to move the ball forward in space succeeds.

I'm not playing your zero-sum game.

Having more spaceships is better than having fewer spaceships!

I also hope I will learn to proofread before posting, Sorry about that,

HE WILL NOT DEVEDE US

Any space program that isn't trying to do reuse is just a waste of time & money

Unless it is your time or money, why do you care?

Also, bullshit.

We have done reusable once before -- it turned into the single most expensive way to put a kilogram of payload into orbit ever flown. "Reusable" is not, in and of itself, a Holy Grail of space-faring greatness. It is one way to go, and as the tech improves, it may turn out to be the best way to go, in most applications. I am totally in favor of anybody who wants to go for that, going for it.

But there is no harm, and potentially some advantage, in continuing to explore different options, and to have competing and interacting different programs. There will be applications where tossing something up on a throw-away booster is going to be the way to go. In transport around the Earth, ships, trains, planes and trucks are all moving cargo and making money -- there is no One True Way that ios best in every application. That may well be the case in space as well.

And if not, if reusable turns out to be the more economical alternative in all situations, the tech will carry the day on its own merits, without fanbois denigrating other approaches.

More spaceships is better.

The point is that there is no way for them to incrementally turn the Ariane 6 into a reusable vehicle
If they don't plan for that in the start, then they will be stuck with nothing.

They need to get started on engines suitable for a reusable vehicle today.

(((rockets)))

>The point is that there is no way for them to incrementally turn the Ariane 6 into a reusable vehicle

OK.

>If they don't plan for that in the start, then they will be stuck with nothing.

Unless it turns out there is a market for rockets that are not reusable. Maybe you are right, maybe the tech is now to the point where reusable really is going to be massively more cost effective. But we heard that song once before... So having several concepts flying, and may the best ship win, seems like a wonderful plan for space buffs. Why does it rustle your jimmies so much?

>They need to get started on engines suitable for a reusable vehicle today.

Unless-- you know -- they wind up wit something competitive that is not reusable. We'll see what happens.

More spaceships is better than fewer spaceships.

HE WILL COME INSIDE US

>implying science isn't about nitpicking other peoples shit

Eurofag here.
This might be what's wrong in EU in it's entirety. The democratic process is absolutly distorted. People do not vote for what they want. People vote for people who vote for other people who have something to say. But lobbyists are connected directly to people who make the decisions.

In this example I have a strong feeling the companies that produce rockets do not only propose new project, but dictate them. And so they become short sighted conservatists trying to keep everything as it is. They avoid new ideas like Hollywood.

I'd say the same regressive "partnership" works between US govt and ULA.

op getting BTFO

>More spaceships is better than fewer spaceships.
I think we could be friends

arianespace are currently the biggest provider of commercial space flight such as satellite launches. spacex is nice and all, but i am not particularly fond of this "vision to colonize mars" shit. yeah, okay, it's a nice vision, but there's just so many steps between where we are now and where we need to be to colonize mars, it just seems megalomaniac to publicly announce it as a goal. what is wrong with building a nice space flight provider yet, economically speaking? just take one step at a time, don't fucking rush things. which brings me to:

hello there, fellow eurofag. i understand you are frustrated with our political process. i understand you are also likely quite young and feel like things should be going quicker. of course then you will idealize someone like elon musk, a "doer" who "doesn't care about conventions" and such millenial catchphrases.

i have been dealing with regulation, european and more domain specific, for quite some time now. i can assure you that you should be quite happy for what we have since, although it might at times seem like an overreach in regulation, it is the reason for a lot of the comparative steadiness in our economic and educational systems. you might not be aware of this, but except for the top 15%, the US are quite fucked in terms of education - that isn't to say they don't have good educational systems, what i'm saying is that the number of people having access to top education is relatively small compared to the european average. not even speaking of central and northern europe, which is head and shoulders ahead of the european average as well.

the tl;dr, i guess, would be this:
yes, things in europe tend to move slower. yes, this can be frustrating in certain domains where it might feel like other global regions are outperforming us. on the whole, though, we are looking quite good and future proof at that.

>I honestly can't see how ESA think they can compete with Musk. Anyone care to defend them?

The ESA's gamble is that Elon's ambitions for re-usability will not be realized at a pace that makes expendable rockets non-competitive - but they do need to lower their launch costs to compete with SpaceX's lower rates. Time will tell if the gamble pays off.

As an addendum to 2020 is only three years away. SpaceX can make a lot of progress by 2020, but it's not likely they'll have all the kinks worked out to make rapid re-usability at low cost pan out by then.

>yes, things in europe tend to move slower
It's not about speed. Unfortunately I'm not as young as you presume. I also am happy, that we are not that fucked as US population is.

It's not about speed or too much regulations. It's about who steers the ship and where it is heading. And usually we are just a decade behind USA on course to corporate dystopia.

>don't fucking rush things
It's about 45 years since last human on the moon. We could be kangs by now, but we just became a cancer of this planet. The lack of collective conscious decisions is disturbing. The democracy by proxy is a failed system that tends to get hijacked.

Ignoring what you said entirely, I think that out of all the possibilities in the universe, one exists in which intelligent life survives until it runs out of the energy to operate

Thats just wishful thinking at this point
They are hoping that more rocket blowups happen, and more launch pads are destroyed to delay their plans

The Muslims & Blacks will destroy European education/health care soon enough