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Ariane 6 Cost and Delays Bring European Launch Industry to a Breaking Point
Ariane 6 cost and delays bring European launch industry to a breaking point [arstechnica.com]
European space officials will convene on Monday and Tuesday to discuss the future of space policy for the continent. The "Space Summit" gathering in Seville, Spain, will encompass several topics, including the future of launch.
[...] In the decade since [the Ariane 6] agreement was reached there have been at least three factors that have precipitated a crisis in European launch. One is the rise of SpaceX, which, through its reusable Falcon 9 rocket, has come to dominate the commercial market with prices about half those offered by the Ariane rockets. Because it has optimized for speed, SpaceX can also launch far more frequently and efficiently than Europe.
Secondly, the Ariane 6 rocket has been delayed from its original goal of launching in 2020. Now, if hot-fire tests late this year go well, it is possible that the Ariane 6 rocket could make its debut launch by mid-2024, or about four years late. With the retirement of the Ariane 5, and the Russian Soyuz rocket off the market due to the war in Ukraine, Europe finds itself in the embarrassing position of having to rely on SpaceX to get some of its most valuable missions [arstechnica.com] into orbit.
Finally, there is the cost issue. The goal of reducing operations costs by 50 percent has dropped to 40 percent. And now, citing inflation, European officials say those cost cuts are not sustainable. In fact, the Ariane 6 rocket's primary contractor, ArianeGroup—which is co-owned by Airbus and Safran—is asking for a significant subsidy to operate the rocket. It wants 350 million euros a year [arstechnica.com], which would essentially wipe out any cost savings from going to the Ariane 6 rocket.
So Europe has spent a decade and many billions of euros developing the Ariane 6 rocket, but all it has gotten them to date is a gap in the capability of launching satellites to orbit. This has ratcheted up tensions heading into Seville this week.
