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For Arianespace, this is now the third failed launch of a Vega rocket in the last eight attempts:
Arianespace's medium-lift Vega-C rocket failed to reach orbit on its second mission, resulting in the destruction of the two satellites on board.
The rocket, developed by the European Space Agency (ESA), built by Italian company Avio, and operated by Arianespace, took off on Tuesday at 8:47 p.m. ET from the Kourou space base in French Guiana, carrying the Neo 5 and Neo 6 satellites for for Airbus' Pléiades Neo Earth-imaging constellation.
[...] Tuesday's mission marked the first time Vega-C carried a commercial payload, so it is unfortunate that the mission ended in failure. ESA is counting on Vega-C to deliver European payloads to orbit and maintain its presence in the growing space industry by virtue of possessing its own launch vehicle.
ESA is also getting ready to debut Ariane 6, the next-generation launcher to follow Ariane 5. Ariane 6 was originally slated for launch in 2020, but has suffered numerous delays, and is now scheduled to fly in 2023. "With Vega-C and Ariane 6, Europe will have a flexible, independent solution for a fast-changing launch market," Daniel Neuenschwande, ESA's director of Space Transportation, said in a statement in June.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by bloodnok on Tuesday December 27, @11:17PM
If you want to compare like with like, then SpaceX is so dissimilar to the ESA that there is going to be no easy comparison. Better to compare ESA with NASA, or the Vega rocket with something similar that was funded by NASA, though I don't think anything qualifies at the moment (comparing SLS to anything is pointless).
SpaceX has taken such a different approach to building orbital launch capability, and so successfully, that all the existing big players look stupid.
SpaceX has taken an agile approach to the whole process with certification following testing, rather than having their engineers follow a heavy process with certification/validation at each step.
If you can build a rocket engine for a couple of million, and turn them out at 5 a week, then blowing 1 or 2 up doesn't seem like such a big deal. If it takes you 4 months to build a single engine at a cost of 10s or 100s of millions you are going to be a lot more careful, a lot slower, and your costs will continue to rise.
Their agility, coupled with scale (huge numbers of launches, huge numbers of rocket engines built, huge numbers tested to destruction, etc) is the key to their success.
SpaceX builds stuff, lets it fail, learns, and builds improvements. They don't get caught up in heavy specifications, and are quick to eliminate inefficiencies not just in the rockets, but in their manufacturing process. Then when they think it works, they get it certified. Until NASA and the ESA do something similar they and their contractors have no hope of competing.
Unless Musk does something wildly stupid it will be very hard for anyone to catch up, at least for the next couple of generations of vehicle.
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The Major