Ariane-6 gets a new government launch contract
The European Space Agency, one European
agency among many
The government rocket of the European Space Agency (ESA), the Ariane-6, yesterday won a new launch contract to place a pair of Galileo GPS-type satellites into orbit for the European Union (EU).
Arianespace announced today at the European Space Conference in Brussels the signature of the launch contract with the European Union Agency for the Space Programme (EUSPA), under the delegation of the European Commission, to orbit the second pair of second-generation satellites of the Galileo constellation (Galileo L18) on board an Ariane 6 launcher. With this signature, the European Commission and the EUSPA are formalizing the launch contract of Galileo L18, following the initial mission allocation to Arianespace made in April 2024.
All told this will be Ariane-6’s fifth launch of GPS-type satellites for the EU, which appears committed to Ariane-6, even though this expendable rocket costs much more than SpaceX’s Falcon 9, in order to promote European sovereignty. Eventually Europe will develop more cost effective private rockets (in about a decade), but until then its access to space will be limited by cost.
And the extra cost is not simply the expendable nature of Ariane-6. Note also the many layers of bureaucracy listed in the quote above. For the European Union there the European Union Agency for Space Programme, working under the supervision of the EU’s European Commission. It signed a deal with Arianespace, which represents the European Space Agency as its commercial rocket division.
That’s four different bureaucracies, two within the European Union and two more related to Europe’s space effort. Each adds cost to the launch, as well as the need for complex negotiations that delay any deal.
Not
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The print edition can be purchased at Amazon or from any other book seller. If you want an autographed copy the price is $60 for the hardback and $45 for the paperback, plus $8 shipping for each. Go here for purchasing details. The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
The European Space Agency, one European
agency among many
The government rocket of the European Space Agency (ESA), the Ariane-6, yesterday won a new launch contract to place a pair of Galileo GPS-type satellites into orbit for the European Union (EU).
Arianespace announced today at the European Space Conference in Brussels the signature of the launch contract with the European Union Agency for the Space Programme (EUSPA), under the delegation of the European Commission, to orbit the second pair of second-generation satellites of the Galileo constellation (Galileo L18) on board an Ariane 6 launcher. With this signature, the European Commission and the EUSPA are formalizing the launch contract of Galileo L18, following the initial mission allocation to Arianespace made in April 2024.
All told this will be Ariane-6’s fifth launch of GPS-type satellites for the EU, which appears committed to Ariane-6, even though this expendable rocket costs much more than SpaceX’s Falcon 9, in order to promote European sovereignty. Eventually Europe will develop more cost effective private rockets (in about a decade), but until then its access to space will be limited by cost.
And the extra cost is not simply the expendable nature of Ariane-6. Note also the many layers of bureaucracy listed in the quote above. For the European Union there the European Union Agency for Space Programme, working under the supervision of the EU’s European Commission. It signed a deal with Arianespace, which represents the European Space Agency as its commercial rocket division.
That’s four different bureaucracies, two within the European Union and two more related to Europe’s space effort. Each adds cost to the launch, as well as the need for complex negotiations that delay any deal.
Not
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The print edition can be purchased at Amazon or from any other book seller. If you want an autographed copy the price is $60 for the hardback and $45 for the paperback, plus $8 shipping for each. Go here for purchasing details. The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
“That’s four different bureaucracies, two within the European Union and two more related to Europe’s space effort. ”
This sounds so . . . European.
Once in a while I have the drifting thought that Europe was moving faster and innovating more when the various countries were at each others throats on a regular basis.
Agreed.
R-7 came from a war ravaged Soviet Union.
Poor Alabamians built Moon rockets
China went from all bicycles towards the First World.
SpaceX began simply enough.
If people aren’t truly hungry—their space efforts come to nought.
There is an old joke about Baptists not doing anything without a committee.
The more folks you involve, the less responsibility each can expect to have–trying to get someone else to carry the baton.
GM, at its height, was an exception because they actually had futurists on the bloody payroll and didn’t have some Glengarry Glen Ross cost cutters yet.
SpaceX is where GM used to be
Once they go public–they’ll be as GM was at its nadir…. that’s my fear.
Oh, not at once to be sure.
john hare,
I think your thought is well-moored, not drifting. And it’s still true. The most innovative European country, right now, is Ukraine. Even Russia’s current circumstances support your view. Russia’s noteworthy lack of comparable innovation is simply more evidence that it is not really a European nation and never has been. It seems incapable of any fundamental departure from the millennium-old czarist playbook and will shortly conclude its run as the last of the old-style imperia.
Jeff Wright,
As someone raised Presbyterian, our joke about the Baptists was that they drank as much as the other denominations, just not in front of each other. I guess that was one thing they didn’t need a committee for.
GM didn’t become moribund because it was a public company, it became moribund because it eventually passed into control of small-minded people who hadn’t built it and thought it could stay on top forever by just doing what it had always done without any adjustments for what was going on in the rest of the world. That was the fate of most once-great US industrial companies founded in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. That’s why most such are now gone and those left are in less than radiant good health – the legacy NASA and War Dept. contractors and the remaining “Detroit” automakers being prime examples.
SpaceX will be fine so long as Musk and Shotwell are running the show there. Shotwell will likely retire at some point in the next 10 years – and she will be a very tough act to follow. Perhaps it will take two or three people, in combination, to do her job. But Musk will be at the SpaceX helm until he’s carried out toes up. That could easily be at least 30 or 40 more years given that both of his parents are still alive at advanced ages and in evident good shape.
After that, SpaceX might well follow the trajectory of other once-great US industrial companies once past their founders’ reigns. But even GM has taken more than a half-century in its slow progress toward complete eclipse and hasn’t quite arrived there yet. The same goes for Ford. Chrysler went a bit more quickly but is now pretty much gone, gobbled first by Fiat before Fiat was, in its turn, swallowed by the hapless Franken-automaker, Stellantis, which is now, in its own turn, shambling toward extinction.
I don’t foresee SpaceX taking any less time to slide downhill into corporate senescence and ruin. So I think the odds are good that SpaceX will still be a major player even a full century hence even if no longer the fount of innovation it is today. I certainly don’t foresee any diminution of its fortunes or dominance during my remaining lifetime – or yours either.
It’s also a question of the underlying structure and strength of the organism, whether person, corporation, or country. Some people have better DNA than others, and live longer, healthier lives despite their habits. Some companies and countries are the same-look at how France has cycled through its various Republics over the decades, while the US has had only one.
There is also, I think, a healthy tension between empowering people to take responsibility, and having effective systems to avoid letting bad actors cause too much damage. NASA and similar organizations fell into the trap of assuming that systems can substitute for hiring the right people and giving them responsibility. Europe is even farther along in that process, which is fine for maintaining the status quo, but the status quo is eroded by entropy, ending in extinction. MSFC is in a similar spot, and once the SLS program ends, if its leadership hasn’t figured out what else it can do, its future looks very uncertain.
What it is doing is returning Americans to the Moon, despite the attempts of you and other newspacers trying to keep us from doing that.
Imagine how much farther America would be if all they naysayers supported Marshall’s efforts instead. We’d have a less toxic space culture, and politicians woul;d not use infighting to make cuts.
If you lot had Marshall’s back–we could have been back to the Moon years ago.
So keep right on fussing about SLS costs—they are rounding errors compared to other things America spends money on.
We have two near trillionaire tech-bros, yet it is my guys in the lead BEO wise.
What’s their excuse?