Sizing up the 5 companies selected for Europe's launcher challenge

4 months ago 14

Meh. We'll have to see if it's theater or an actual committment. I have a feeling this is more like Lucy going to tee up a football and then yank it away at the last moment. In this case, to just go with the incumbent launch provider and go through the motions of "competition". There's a lot of NIMBY and inertia to overcome.

I'm curious to see how this works out in practice.

ESA saying 'congrats Isar, you've possibly won $100m' and then saying to Germany 'Hey we would like you to give us $100m to give to Isar' seems ... odd. If Germany wanted to give them the money wouldn't they have done so already?

Also I wouldn't say this 'upends' the policy of geographic return. It's just implementing it from the opposite direction.

With the European Launcher Challenge, ESA is upending this policy by first selecting the launch contractors, then going to their home governments to secure funding for the program.

That looks a lot like geographic return. If PLD wins, but Spain decides that they can't fund it, what is going to happen?

The fact that ESA still wants to use geographic return with regard to funding it's a travesty.

If your company is from the countries with the smallest budgets (let's say Estonia), you are fucked.

Also, what happens if Orbex decides to outsource some work (or just buy some off the shelf parts) from Germany? Do the UK gets to ask Germany to pay for that? Is Orbex allowed to do that?

I’m a bit confused here. My understanding is that Arianespace (a wholly owned subsidiary of ArianeGroup) is a launch services company, not a rocket provider. In that role, they market launch services, procure rockets from multiple sources (Ariane 5/6 from ArianeGroup, Soyuz from RKTs Progress - a subsidiary of Roscosmos - and no longer offered, and Vega/Vega C from Avio), and actually perform the launches. ArianeGroup is a rocket provider, but they don’t directly market or launch their own rockets, just through their own subsidiary (to the extent that this difference matters).

The others mentioned in the article are (trying to be) rocket manufacturers who plan to market and launch their own rockets (except, I assume, MaiaSpace, a different subsidiary of ArianeGroup, that would use Arianespace as its launch provider?).

So who would these companies be competing with - Arianespace, ArianeGroup, or both? And how can MaiaSpace provide competition to ArianeGroup, since it is part of it, or (probably) Arianespace, since I assume it would use that (other subsidiary of ArianeGroup) for the actual launch services?

The Arianespace/ArianeGroup/MaiaSpace situation can’t really be called incestuous - they are all (unless I am very confused) just part of the same corporate structure.

these ESA clowns are selecting Maia-Ariane group to compete with Ariane group. are they stupido or si. 168mil for what. R&D, readiness, what. i am fed with nonsense producing eu equivalent of NASA.

This needs some clarification. The process works as follows:

The EU funding agency asks the national governments of EU member states how much they are willing to contribute to a specific program.
The national governments respond with an amount they are willing to provide for projects led by organizations in their country (typically, no more than 50% can be allocated to organizations in other EU countries).
The EU funding agency issues a "call for proposals."
The EU funding agency selects the winning proposals.
The EU funding agency, the proposing organization, and the respective national governments discuss the actual funding structure.

In this case, it is very likely that Germany, for example, committed to a contribution of €200 million. So, if two proposals are selected, the funding must be distributed such that the total remains below €200 million. This means that further discussions are necessary even after your proposal has been accepted for funding.

I'm eager to see what comes of this. These competitions are a proven successful paradigm, and this one has a lot of talent behind it.

This should also serve as our regular reminder that a more federalized Europe would be an undisputed global superpower! The EU is operating under silly Articles-of-Confederation-ass rules, and they still manage to be a terrifyingly effective economic and political force.

(For the non-American audience: the Articles of Confederation formed the original American governing document, which we immediately and only semi-legally shoved under the rug and replaced with the Constitution when we figured out that states needed a firmer guiding hand from Uncle Sam.)

With all respect to Steven, it's a bit silly to rank anything but MaiaSpace on top. French industrial policy is to have launch independence. After the fiasco trying to force Ariane 6 to use only French solids (and having to fall back to using a German liquid rocket core) and the abject commercial failure of Vega (using French solids for main propulsion), Maia is finally the step into the 21st century they need, and has at least a chance of commercial success.

The German startups are barely supported by their own government, and chasing a market (small expendables) that the world is largely moving on from. The fact that Isar detonated a rocket in Norway doesn't really make them ahead. Their best case is to get a few ESA contracts and use that to pay for developing a commercially viable recovery system, which would just bring them to be on par technologically with Maia.

PLD and OrbEx are literally left over X Prize teams that are somehow not dead. They will never get to orbit. Them getting awards here just shows how weak the European startup community is.

Really, this entire thing is ESA funding Maia while trying not to piss off the Germans. Geographic return is very much alive!

WRT geographic return - is that just an understanding amongst the member countries of how things work, or is that a codified part of ESA’s charter? That is, can ESA just change it, or would a change require agreement from the members states? Because as noted (by everyone), it looks like the only difference here is that they pick the vendor(s) first and then seek the funding from the matching geography.

Besides mind-boggling bureaucracy, ESA is quite handicapped by having to go all the way to South America to launch, so Shetland islands may not be horrible despite being far from the equator. I wonder if Canary Islands or something could possibly work (although Spain is unlikely to allow space launches to disrupt tourism industry)?