How Europe Designed and Evolved The Ariane Rocket Over Last 4 Decades
Posted Dec 27, 2019, 6:11 PM UTC
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Ariane needs to adapt to reuse. Because of spaceX, because we live in a society looking for reuse. The problem is the political aspect. No country in the consortium wants to provide the reusable part and lose revenues. So long as political decisions, fear & denial of failure, and cake slicing attitudes drive ariane. They will have an issue.
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Its cool and I enjoyed it, but its also now a dinosaur. The next decade will be dominated by reusable launch systems and the Ariane rockets will be maintained for security / tech development reasons.
Not necessarily. SpaceX is cheaper not because it's reusable, as refurbishing rockets is costly, but because they're competing against what was basically public and private monopolies that were completely inefficient. But with the new generation of rockets that will come in 2020-2021, things could change quickly.
Though I doubt Ariane has what it takes to compete with the others.
According to SpaceX, the first (and by far most expensive Falcon 9 refurbishment) cost less than half as much as a new stage. That was Block 3, so this ‘refurbishing is expensive’ meme seems pretty outdated.
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It was Gwynne Shotwell specifically. If you’re going to assert that she’s lying, you should be ready to provide some kind of data, right? Without it, your insinuation can be dismissed immediately and without hesitation by anyone reading the thread.
Well it's those factors and because it's reusable. Already flown falcons already cost less to launch on
It’s actually cheaper to buy a GTO launch with Arianespace now than with SpaceX, if you don’t mind sharing the payload fairing with another customer. It costs $45 million to buy one of two berths on a Ariane 6 GTO launch, whilst a reused Falcon 9 will cost you $50+ million and probably put your satellite in a worse orbit (due to recovery-induced performance losses), requiring more propellant to circularise.
I think you mixed up your currencies, that would be 45 million euros not dollars to split the A64 launch in half and would be 5,750kg to GTO and that doesn’t include whatever the final weight of the Sylda dual payload adapter (which masses between 700-850kg on Ariane 5) ends up being. Are you familiar with it?
Falcon 9’s last few GTO launches have been 6,450kg and 6,900kg and had recovered boosters so not sure where you got the idea that you’d need to launch a lighter satellite, can you clarify?
The worse orbit has more to do with the launch latitude. SpaceX can launch fairly heavy satellites to GTO with barge recovery, I'm not sure what the maximum launch mass is on an Ariane VI for a ride-share but I don't think it is outside of SpaceX's capabilities with re-use.
Obviously with SpaceX launching from Florida the inclination change is much greater than ESA from pretty much on the equator though.
Has it been documented that SpaceX is willing to sacrifice performance to save the rocket? We know they sacrifice rockets for larger payloads regularly