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The bid includes large players such as Airbus Defence and Space, Eutelsat, and SES:
A consortium of nearly every major European satellite company announced Tuesday that it plans to bid for a proposed satellite constellation to provide global communications. Essentially, such a constellation would provide the European Union with connectivity from low-Earth orbit similar to what SpaceX's Starlink offers.
The bid, which includes large players such as Airbus Defence and Space, Eutelsat, SES, and Thales Alenia Space, comes in response to a request by the European Union for help in constructing a sovereign constellation to provide secure communications for government services, including military applications.
[...] At present, Europe estimates the cost of this constellation at about 6 billion euro and desires it to be ready to provide global coverage by the year 2027. Both the budget and the timeline for this project are likely very ambitious, given the amount of coordination needed and the unlikelihood that Europe's Ariane 6 rocket will have the spare launch capacity to get hundreds of satellites into low-Earth orbit starting in the mid-2020s. The Ariane 6 rocket will not debut until 2024 at the earliest.
However, European officials felt as though they had to make this move. Fundamentally, the continent faced a difficult choice. Europe seeks to remain a major player in spaceflight activities, which increasingly includes satellite-based communications. However, European officials did not want to be beholden to Elon Musk and his Starlink constellation, which already provides secure global communications like those to be delivered by IRIS². European government leaders are already wary of relying on SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket for the launch of some if its satellites. Officials were similarly disposed toward Amazon's Project Kuiper constellation.
China is also developing its own megaconstellation, but Europe clearly did not want to hand over its secure communications to a global rival with questionable intent. That left OneWeb. But this network is partially owned by the United Kingdom—which very publicly exited the European Union a few years ago—and may not have the capacity to meet all of Europe's needs.
[...] The real challenge is coordinating all of this. There are serious questions about how all of these big partners can work together and whether the bureaucracy of the European government can get this project moving forward expeditiously toward the 2027 target date.
(Score: 5, Touché) by mhajicek on Saturday May 06, @08:13AM (5 children)
Large satellite constellations come after reusable rockets in the tech tree.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 3, Informative) by gnuman on Saturday May 06, @11:03AM (3 children)
It's not out of order -- it's concurrent.
https://www.euronews.com/next/2022/07/05/move-over-spacex-arianegroup-to-make-europes-first-reusable-and-eco-friendly-rockets [euronews.com]
https://www.ariane.group/en/news/susie-the-reusable-space-transporter-european-style/ [www.ariane.group]
Also, keep in mind, there is nothing preventing ESA from using SpaceX to launch their constellation. Maybe ego, but probably not on ESA side. ESA has in the past used Soyuz for some of their projects.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by ElizabethGreene on Saturday May 06, @03:14PM (1 child)
The Susie project sounds interesting but I must confess a bit of an aversion to a lifting body 7-crew transport re-entry capable space tug. That's a lot of cats to shove in one bag and when the US did it we got the Shuttle. That sexy-beast black-hole-money-pit crew-killer set our space program back by more than a decade. I hope they focus on being good at one thing instead of ok at many things.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by gnuman on Sunday May 07, @01:00PM
Like many things at ESA, it received some meager funding for a prototype. It will take time to see what they can deliver. Susie is not so much a space shuttle and more of a ESA version of Orion.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by takyon on Sunday May 07, @04:21AM
Increasing the launch rate for the Ariane 6 would probably make it more competitive. It could be the real goal here.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 06, @11:08AM
More so if you're planning human bases on Mars (or the Moon).
[1] Get some centrifuge in orbit or some other artificial gravity system and put various animals and later humans in them for months and see what happens for the various target gravity.