Not really.
The lifecycle of an Ariane rocket is a function of a mega sized, heavily state funded European conglomerate, all within that conglomerate trying to achieve a singular goal that isn'y really the priority for anyone except for perhaps Arianespace (all 200 employees...). The nobody walks away happy compromise decisions leaders of the various direct entities come to on overall direction are simply the most informed they can be when they're made and are heavily based on a) funding and b) demand. Comparing to the Falcon 9 lifecycle, its most important to recognize that falcon had both a) a backstop of effectively unlimited funding PLUS the absence of any other competing corporate interests and b) the internal need to huck an unprecedented amount of *sugar* into space.
I don't believe it's the case that Falcon 9 had "
backstop of effectively unlimited funding". Falcon 9 came on the heels of the initial Falcon 1. The Falcon 1 program had enough to make it through 3 attempts to reach orbit, and failed all 3. In a last-ditch attempt. "
the SpaceX team assembled the fourth rocket using available parts in six weeks as a last chance for the company", and made it to orbit.
So Elon at that time did not have unlimited resources in to dump in to the company. As he said, "
At the time I had to allocate a lot of capital to Tesla and SolarCity, so I was out of money. We had three failures under our belt. So it's pretty hard to go raise money. The recession is starting to hit. The Tesla financing round that we tried to raise that summer had failed. I got divorced. I didn't even have a house. My ex-wife had the house. So it was a shitty summer."
That was 2008. Falcon 9 was already in the early planning/development stages at that point, as it would launch 2 years later in 2010. Things didn't really get to the point for Elon where he could pull a Bezos and dump endless cash into the company for another couple of years, and by that time the Falcon 9 had already been flying for some time.
While NASA did provide seed funding for Falcon 9,
"The overall contract award was US$278 million to provide three demonstration launches of Falcon 9 with the SpaceX Dragon cargo spacecraft. Additional milestones were added later, raising the total contract value to US$396 million."
That's hardly "unlimited", especially since, "
In 2011, SpaceX estimated that Falcon 9 v1.0 development costs were on the order of US$300 million. NASA estimated development costs of US$3.6 billion had a traditional cost-plus contract approach been used. A 2011 NASA report "estimated that it would have cost the agency about US$4 billion to develop a rocket like the Falcon 9 booster based upon NASA's traditional contracting processes".
a) ArianeGroup, very much like ULA, is a merger of two mega A&D corporations (its a relatively new entity FTR, but near as makes no difference the history is consistent with the point). Like Boeing and LM, Airbus and Safran are also publicly traded and have plenty of other priorities besides trying to design and launch rockets, and so internal funding is always a competition with other much more lucrative business units...not to mention shareholder demands. The state monies coming into the program--very much like various state funded activities in the US and around the world--come with some pretty specific expectations that aren't overly concerned with the commercial profitability (or not) of the product.
In other words, there's not a lot of opportunity for the decision-making leadership within Ariane to act on Big Think. It is in fact NOT at ALL that those people aren't capable of a new paradigm (in fact if you talk to them they all have aspired for A6 to be more than simply a better/upgraded A5), its that they simply aren't given the runway to execute on said paradigm.
b) Its worth reminding that there's an inflection point at which reusable rockets actually become a more cost effective idea than expendable. Much like everything ever in the history of volume anything, one needs to rightsize supply and demand. Just as there's no point in McLaren Automotive building a Toyota Corolla sized production line, there's actually not a lot of value in Ariane dumping $B's into significant reusability based on their and the global launch rates. It's worth highlighting again that, beyond Starlink, there really HASN'T been massive growth in global launch demand. F9 has been (more or less) continually growing, but largely at the expense of their competitors (A5 and to a degree Proton) declining.
Bottom line, Ariane simply doesn't have the ability to offset today's R&D with future launch cost savings of an internal mega constellation like SpaceX could, and that's the volume that's really needed to push their expendable/reusable inflection point to "duh, reusable". Beating the horse, finding mega dollar investors for mega space constellations is REALLY REALLY hard, because rich people out there whose job it is to make money on their investments have a hard time convincing themselves space is profitable.
(emphasis mine)
It's not a case of Falcon 9 and its reusability only being cost effective because SpaceX was willing to dump massive amounts of money in to it's ongoing use for Starlink. By the time Starlink first launched, Falcon 9 design had been bought and paid for nearly a decade. It's
Starship that Elon is helping to fund with ongoing revenue with Starlink launches from it's workhorse Falcon 9.
So you can't really draw the conclusion that without Starlink-level demand it's not economically viable to develop a reusable launcher to compete in the overall current market. Even without Starlink, the Falcon 9 would have been just fine in existing market, having been developed for a fraction of what traditional vendors would have spent, and being able to reduce operational costs significantly due to reusability.
Would they have been able to generate billions for Starlink? No. Would they have carved out a significant chunk of the market, and been quite profitable? Most assuredly.
Anyway, obviously Ariane is still in a bad way and especially given the decline of the GEO (where they're still reasonably competitive with Falcon) will likely be relegated to state funded launches...as it seems to be the future of a post-Kuiper ULA. It's fair to criticize their corporate structure for getting them to this place...and perhaps the point is that's the inevitable conclusion of such a conglomerate? But to not only blame it on the lack of "the people" within Ariane to lean into the future but to actually accuse them of sabotaging growth? No. It's not anywhere that easy.
What's going to be most interesting is to compare this Ariane story to what Rocket Lab and Relativity can do with their 5m vehicles. Both are small [mostly] singularly focused entities--exactly the opposite of Airbus and Safran. Both are relatively well funded and can certainly spend money much more efficiently than Ariane's bureaucracy hierarchy. Both have the upside (to some customers) of "they're not SX", so there's more than just price as a selling point. Rocket lab IS publicly traded, which could be a hiccup, though Pete has generally spent his windfall pretty wisely so there's some shareholder confidence there. Most importantly though, neither have internal demand for mass to orbit, and so they're going to have to be HYPER efficient on spending getting to market to have any chance at being financially sustainable.
arstechnica.com
