ArianeGroup to cut 2300 jobs
Capitalism in space: Faced with a significant loss of market share, taken by SpaceX, the European rocket manufacturer ArianeGroup has announced it will reduce its staffing by 2,300 jobs by 2022.
A joint venture by European aerospace company Airbus and the French group Safran, it currently employs 9,000 people in France and Germany. Constructor of the Ariane rockets, the European Space Agency workhorse, ArianeGroup also produces ballistic missiles.
Ariane 5 rockets are soon to be replaced by the Ariane 6 which will be an estimated 40 percent cheaper to make, under pressure in particular from Elon Musk’s SpaceX.
But European buyers have so far ordered only three Ariane 6 rockets ahead of the first scheduled launch in 2020.
The article at the link, produced by a French news service, is somewhat amusing. It repeatedly blames the lack of demand for the Ariane 6 on the U.S. government, which provides business to SpaceX. It doesn’t mention that ArianeGroup’s Ariane 6 rocket meanwhile is being built with government funds from the European Space Agency, and once completed in the 2020s will have a launch price that exceeds that of the Falcon 9 today. No wonder it hasn’t garnered many customers.
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 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
Capitalism in space: Faced with a significant loss of market share, taken by SpaceX, the European rocket manufacturer ArianeGroup has announced it will reduce its staffing by 2,300 jobs by 2022.
A joint venture by European aerospace company Airbus and the French group Safran, it currently employs 9,000 people in France and Germany. Constructor of the Ariane rockets, the European Space Agency workhorse, ArianeGroup also produces ballistic missiles.
Ariane 5 rockets are soon to be replaced by the Ariane 6 which will be an estimated 40 percent cheaper to make, under pressure in particular from Elon Musk’s SpaceX.
But European buyers have so far ordered only three Ariane 6 rockets ahead of the first scheduled launch in 2020.
The article at the link, produced by a French news service, is somewhat amusing. It repeatedly blames the lack of demand for the Ariane 6 on the U.S. government, which provides business to SpaceX. It doesn’t mention that ArianeGroup’s Ariane 6 rocket meanwhile is being built with government funds from the European Space Agency, and once completed in the 2020s will have a launch price that exceeds that of the Falcon 9 today. No wonder it hasn’t garnered many customers.
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 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
It’s very much a canard for Ariane to complain about the US gov’t. I’m not aware of any *paid* US gov’t missions flying on Ariane rockets.
Seems silly to complain about business that Ariane never had, nor were they ever going to get.
We can cut Ariane some slack. What SpaceX has done isn’t just a simple innovation in chemical rockets but a paradigm shift. These types of shifts are not things that can always be anticipated.
Now that Ariane is aware of the shift, they can choose to change. But change to what? What is the purpose of ArianeGroup?
Everything depends on how they define their purpose. Since they are not entirely a business, their purpose wont be to act like one. Their purpose could be to serve their government’s interests, in which case the cost of launch and attracting commercial customers might not matter.
The Ariane “case” against SpaceX is pretty much as follows:
1) It costs SpaceX about the same to launch a GEO comsat as it costs us.
2) We barely make any money at current prices.
3) Therefore, SpaceX barely makes any money launching comsats.
4) SpaceX charges more for U.S. government launches than for commercial comsat launches.
5) Therefore, that price difference is government subsidy and the only thing that keeps SpaceX going.
Problem for Ariane? Of these five propositions, only 4) is actually true. U.S. government launches come with a lot of hoop-jumping and paperwork. SpaceX charges about 50% above the standard commercial rate to cover all this. CRS missions to ISS cost about double the standard commercial rate as SpaceX is also providing the payload (Dragon) as well as the launcher. The same will be at least as true of Dragon2.
Other aspects of Ariane’s ludicrous “case” are also self-negating. SpaceX’s increase in launch cadence has been driven mostly by doing more commercial launches – not the pattern one would expect to see if government launches were really the firm’s sole source of real sustenance.
I think, at some level, the worthies at ArianeGroup must understand that this “case” they put out for public consumption is simply garbage. But they’ve been seriously rocked back on their heels even if, unlike the luckless Russians, they haven’t yet been put entirely out of the game. They need to say something for the European general public and the Euro-politicos. This is what they’ve decided to say.