I think the EU dropped the ball on reusability. But Ariane 5 was an excellent expendable heavy-lift launcher and Ariane 6 follows on the same track.
Not great for mass commercial launches, but good enough for sovereignty and science missions. Why compete with SpaceX? They can already provide more than what the market demands, so much that they have to create their own demand in the form of Starlink.
Europe could join the space race but it is an extremely expensive endeavor and the EU has other priorities. Now the question is which ones. As a French, I am all for nuclear technology, for which France was at the forefront and it seems to get back some traction after decades of neglect.
Ariane 5 wasn't excellent. It was a bad rocket strategically. Ariane 5 grew far bigger then the original designers wanted, because they had dreams of launching the Hermes space plan. But once Hermes was dead they didn't reevaluate the project.
so Ariane 5 was far to big, and while for very large GEO multi sat launches that was ok, they had a very low launch rate and couldn't compete for many missions.
Arianespace always launch more Soyuz then Ariane 5s. To me, if your European launch provider launches more Russian then European craft, its not good.
Ariane 5 was lucky that Progress and other Russian rockets were so mismanaged. They basically didn't have competition.
And Ariane 6 is just a slightly punched up Ariane 5 and in relative to market terms, its even worse. Basically everything that has been learned in the market for the last 15 years is ignored on Ariane 6.
> but good enough for sovereignty and science missions.
Ariane 6 was designed EXPLICITLY WITH STRONG FOCUS ON competing with SpaceX.
Its only now after the 5 billion EUR were spend that people way 'it was all about sovereignty'.
If sovereignty was the only goal, other ways to go about it would have been better. No need to give European Tax $ to Amazon just so they launch on European rocket. They didn't want to give money to SpaceX, so instead they are giving it to Amazon.
I agree with you, Europe should have just embraced SpaceX (or whoever does the launch cheapest) and invested into sats and innovation like space nuclear. That would have actually made sense.
For the cost of Ariane 6 they could have built a reusable nuclear tug and a nuclear reactor for moon/mars.
Yeah it doesn't seem worth it to try and compete with SpaceX at this point, at least in countries allied with the US. Makes more sense to take the future NASA approach and focus on specialized payloads, not launchers.
Not great for mass commercial launches, but good enough for sovereignty and science missions. Why compete with SpaceX? They can already provide more than what the market demands, so much that they have to create their own demand in the form of Starlink.
Europe could join the space race but it is an extremely expensive endeavor and the EU has other priorities. Now the question is which ones. As a French, I am all for nuclear technology, for which France was at the forefront and it seems to get back some traction after decades of neglect.