What do Ariane and Chinese car companies have in common?

[bxr140]

Blatant rip offs.

I mean, good for them for getting in the game, and if nothing else this is validation that Elon's instance on First Principals leads to ideal designs.

Europe unveils design of reusable rocket that looks a lot like a Falcon 9

 

[Cosmacelf]

If, a big if, they get it working, it’ll be obsoleted by Starship. The rest of the world always seems to be at least a technological generation behind Elon.

 

[bxr140]

If, a big if, they get it working, it’ll be obsoleted by Starship. The rest of the world always seems to be at least a technological generation behind Elon.

Well anyway, for the rest of us it's encouraging news.

Slightly more philosophic, I think it's wise to be a little more pragmatic about Starship (same goes for many of the things Elon says, but I digress...). SpaceX's dominance relies on other entities within the space industry--namely, customers--and they're not nearly as forward looking as Elon. F9 is such a huge success because its basically the exact same product you can buy from Ariane or ULA or KhSC, just way cheaper. Starship may be unique in its capability, but maximizing that capability requires a unique payload, and most of the space industry is run by businesspeople who are more discenrning than Elon about the relationship between profitable and unique. Most businesspeople are not willing to put all of their eggs in the basket of another company (especially one that is partially a competitor); nobody in the space industry is going to build an asset [that's time dependent] that can only launch on Starship.

IMHO it is a far future where most space assets might be best served by Starship as a launcher, thus it is a far future where other launchers will be obsoleted by Starship. I do see Starship being very successful BTW, but in a way analogous to the success of the 747 relative to other aircraft. IMHO the current 5m heavy launchers [or their descendants] will be the 737/a320 class of space lifters for quite some time.