"SpaceX required [..] nearly $3 billion [..] The Exploration Company would require a similar amount [..] It is not possible to raise that money from private capital markets right now by promising a great return a decade from now."
In other words: All the investors are looking for a quick buck. Nobody is willing to invest into the longer-term future anymore.
JumpCrisscross · 1h ago
> Nobody is willing to invest into the longer-term future anymore
SpaceX raised private capital. It continues to raise private capital. (It still tapped into public coffers for Crew Dragon, though, because the demand side of that market remains entirely public.)
It could do this because NASA had committed to the Artemis programme. That’s the demand. ESA has no similar promise of returns for a private backer; giving money to these guys strikes closer to a grant or donation than investment.
agos · 48m ago
Right now you can’t say much about NASA long time commitment either
JumpCrisscross · 43m ago
> you can’t say much about NASA long time commitment either
Of course one can. Those plans could change. But they were set and funded and that inertia appears to be saving them [1].
ESA has nothing similar planned. (Beyond collaboration [2].)
Surprisingly good result on a surprisingly low budget. I totally didn't expect a European company to make it. If it phoned home after reentry it means the hard part is done.
notahacker · 7h ago
The Exploration Company know what they're doing and execute fast. Contrary to popular belief on here this is possible from Europe...
tekla · 7h ago
Of course, they rely on SpaceX because Europe doesn't have enough launch capacity to support their launch rate (1/year at best)
notahacker · 6h ago
And? So does everyone else, because Transporter rideshares are cheap and incubating your own rocket programme isn't.
SpaceX relies on Europe and Taiwan for its semiconductors. Does the fact SpaceX can't be adequately served by domestic capacity and their in-house semiconductor programme is just getting started mean they don't execute?! Or is it just a little thing called trade that Americans used to believe in?
JumpCrisscross · 1h ago
> SpaceX relies on Europe and Taiwan for its semiconductors
Used and relies on aren’t interchangeable. (To the extent there is reliance, it’s more on Taiwan than Europe.)
pfdietz · 7h ago
Europe decided that the priority purpose of their launch industry was to provide jobs, not competitive launches.
boricj · 6h ago
The primary purpose of the traditional European launch industry is to provide an independent launch capability for government payloads. Cost is irrelevant because the French government in particular wants to be able to launch payloads into orbit without depending on anyone else to do so.
NitpickLawyer · 3h ago
> Cost is irrelevant
I agree with your overall point, but I think the person you replied to has a point as well. The cost of developing F9 is ridiculously low (considering the industry), so it should have been possible to do by any country / group of countries if the cost was the only problem...
> "According to NASA's own independently verified numbers, SpaceX's development costs of both the Falcon 1 and Falcon 9 rockets were estimated at approximately $390 million in total."
pfdietz · 5h ago
It's failing at that too, in the same sense that maintaining a sailing ship fleet would have failed to provide independent seafaring capability in the latter half of the 19th century.
SpaceX has greatly raised the bar on what can be considered an "independent launch capability." Europe under the current system is greatly limited on what they can imagine doing in space. The equivalent of Starlink is not feasible, for example.
Underlying all this was a failure of vision, an assumption that use of space would be static and change only slowly, if at all, and that launch cost could not be significantly reduced.
mjevans · 5h ago
Wouldn't it be nice if buying a space launch vehicle were like purchasing a car, instead of (a military) aircraft?
For that same matter, maybe that's part of what went wrong with the aircraft manufacturing business in America. The market really should not have been allowed to consolidate that much; to the point where incentives aligned to financial and regulatory capture / stasis (and pilots only certified on one type of flight vehicle), rather than someone skilled to operate a general aviation vehicle. Though with cars we do have a fairly standardized control scheme, at least for the most important parts. Steering wheel, go and stop foot levers.
cpgxiii · 3h ago
> For that same matter, maybe that's part of what went wrong with the aircraft manufacturing business in America. The market really should not have been allowed to consolidate that much ...
Consolidation was an inevitable result of the end of the Cold War and massive cuts to defense spending. The defense industry was _encouraged_ to consolidate because the alternative would have been bankruptcy. Obviously, time has shown that this consolidation was bad for the industry and the government, but a lot has happened in the last 35 years that would not have been foreseen then.
> to the point where incentives aligned to financial and regulatory capture / stasis (and pilots only certified on one type of flight vehicle), rather than someone skilled to operate a general aviation vehicle
The type rating structure really has quite little to do with aerospace industry consolidation (if anything, the industry is too fractured to allow for more generic type ratings). Aircraft, their systems, and their flight dynamics are different enough that trying to create a more general type rating would really be impossible. What you do see are families of aircraft which either completely share a type rating or require very limited additional training to maintain a rating for multiple family types (e.g. all 737s, 757/767, 777/787, A32x/A33x/A35x).
Single piston GA aircraft are really the exception, not because they all share the same behavior (there is a truly wild range of flight dynamics and avionics), but because the GA community (particularly in the US) is so large and established that requiring more training/experience is politically impossible. So long as GA accidents don't kill too many bystanders, this will remain the case.
notahacker · 2h ago
Yep. Two things the space industry and airline industry have in common is that (i) you need to spend an enormous amounts of money to have a remotely viable product, because the physics is hard even without regulation (ii) you don't get that money back unless the product you've spent all that money developing has better unit economics than your competitors for a sufficiently large number of target customers (or your national government steps in to protect you) because there aren't many buyers and the market isn't buying aircraft or payload space because they like the vibe or the aesthetics. That naturally tends towards monopoly (or oligopolies with carefully defined differences in capabilities, some of which turn out to be unprofitable segments...)
"SpaceX required [..] nearly $3 billion [..] The Exploration Company would require a similar amount [..] It is not possible to raise that money from private capital markets right now by promising a great return a decade from now."
In other words: All the investors are looking for a quick buck. Nobody is willing to invest into the longer-term future anymore.
SpaceX raised private capital. It continues to raise private capital. (It still tapped into public coffers for Crew Dragon, though, because the demand side of that market remains entirely public.)
It could do this because NASA had committed to the Artemis programme. That’s the demand. ESA has no similar promise of returns for a private backer; giving money to these guys strikes closer to a grant or donation than investment.
Of course one can. Those plans could change. But they were set and funded and that inertia appears to be saving them [1].
ESA has nothing similar planned. (Beyond collaboration [2].)
[1] https://yellowhammernews.com/u-s-senate-directive-would-revi...
[2] https://www.nasa.gov/news-release/nasa-european-space-agency...
SpaceX relies on Europe and Taiwan for its semiconductors. Does the fact SpaceX can't be adequately served by domestic capacity and their in-house semiconductor programme is just getting started mean they don't execute?! Or is it just a little thing called trade that Americans used to believe in?
Used and relies on aren’t interchangeable. (To the extent there is reliance, it’s more on Taiwan than Europe.)
I agree with your overall point, but I think the person you replied to has a point as well. The cost of developing F9 is ridiculously low (considering the industry), so it should have been possible to do by any country / group of countries if the cost was the only problem...
> "According to NASA's own independently verified numbers, SpaceX's development costs of both the Falcon 1 and Falcon 9 rockets were estimated at approximately $390 million in total."
SpaceX has greatly raised the bar on what can be considered an "independent launch capability." Europe under the current system is greatly limited on what they can imagine doing in space. The equivalent of Starlink is not feasible, for example.
Underlying all this was a failure of vision, an assumption that use of space would be static and change only slowly, if at all, and that launch cost could not be significantly reduced.
For that same matter, maybe that's part of what went wrong with the aircraft manufacturing business in America. The market really should not have been allowed to consolidate that much; to the point where incentives aligned to financial and regulatory capture / stasis (and pilots only certified on one type of flight vehicle), rather than someone skilled to operate a general aviation vehicle. Though with cars we do have a fairly standardized control scheme, at least for the most important parts. Steering wheel, go and stop foot levers.
Consolidation was an inevitable result of the end of the Cold War and massive cuts to defense spending. The defense industry was _encouraged_ to consolidate because the alternative would have been bankruptcy. Obviously, time has shown that this consolidation was bad for the industry and the government, but a lot has happened in the last 35 years that would not have been foreseen then.
> to the point where incentives aligned to financial and regulatory capture / stasis (and pilots only certified on one type of flight vehicle), rather than someone skilled to operate a general aviation vehicle
The type rating structure really has quite little to do with aerospace industry consolidation (if anything, the industry is too fractured to allow for more generic type ratings). Aircraft, their systems, and their flight dynamics are different enough that trying to create a more general type rating would really be impossible. What you do see are families of aircraft which either completely share a type rating or require very limited additional training to maintain a rating for multiple family types (e.g. all 737s, 757/767, 777/787, A32x/A33x/A35x).
Single piston GA aircraft are really the exception, not because they all share the same behavior (there is a truly wild range of flight dynamics and avionics), but because the GA community (particularly in the US) is so large and established that requiring more training/experience is politically impossible. So long as GA accidents don't kill too many bystanders, this will remain the case.
https://www.barnstormers.com/cat_search.php?headline=MIG&bod...
Hilarious.
1. The Exploration Company builds shuttles, not launchers
2. The US had to rely on Russian shuttles for decades after the Challenger drama
Space is hard and sarcasm not useful.