Themis (european Reusable Rocket) Is Assembled on Launch Pad

> It is good to have more than one design

SpaceX has multiple designs generations ahead of anything in Europe in this category. (China is catching up, but it too is retracing Hawthorne's path.)

Themis is cool. But it's duplicating what SpaceX did fifteen to twenty years ago and what China has been working on for ten. Methalox, open cycle gas generator, steel tanks...there aren't any daring design decisions here. And there shouldn't be. This is a solved problem. (Again, that doesn't mean Europe shouldn't be solving it independently. But it's not innovating anything here.)

Consider an alternate universe where NATO isn't in shambles. Europe can use SpaceX for LEO. And in the meantime, it can focus on other designs, other categories. Maybe a different fuel. Maybe a novel engine. Maybe something entirely extra-atmospheric. Maybe it's a breakthrough in satellite design, or habitat science. Instead of replicating Falcon 1/9 and Raptor, there could be a genuinely new design.

We don't get that, because Europe has to secure its launch sovereignty. That is the cost.

> We could maximise economies of scale by having one car manufacturer that made a small number of models

Mature market. Multiple optima. See my comment on Airbus and Boeing. When you're pathfinding, you want multiple bets. When you're pursuing, R&D benefits from scale.

You're talking about a different kind of redundancy. This was about parties who don't 100% trust each other.

> We have more than one design if one proves flawed.

One of the parties ends up with the right the design, the other will have a flawed design.

Absolutely. Healthy Competition helps to spur innovation and value value provided to the customer.

> access to space is too strategically important to ever delegate

New York isn't "delegating" its space access to California, Texas and Florida. (Same as America never saw itself delegating shipbuilding to our Japanese and Korean allies.)

I'm not arguing Europe isn't acting rationally. Just that this is the cost of strategic independence. Everyone shares a burden of duplication and diseconomies of scale. It really isn't that long ago that NATO members--America included--didn't think that way.

> Do you remember the fake images passed as Irak developing weapons of mass destruction?

I remember Colin Powell giving a presentation at the UN holding a glass vial of "proof" Irak had WMDs..

What a good thing he didn't drop it, otherwise they would all be "dead"..

While I don't disagree, Airbus's origin was more or less the opposite of that; it was a merger of existing aircraft manufacturers. Both Airbus's creation, and Boeing's merger with McDonnell Douglas _decreased_ competition, and arguably neither should have been allowed.

> You could argue the same with Boeing vs. Airbus

You couldn't. Boeing and Airbus have pursued different strategies, both in design and production. There is very little actual duplication between their work. To the extent there is, it's in each de-risking different technologies and then the other, after seeing the results, rapidly catching up.

This is partly a reflection of commercial aviation being a relatively mature market. Both in the pace of required innovation (and regulation). And the fact that the difference between branching out and marching forward is difficult to know ex ante.

Put another way, the next steps in launch vehicles are relatively constrained. The goals aren't particularly unknown, just the path. For aviation, on the other hand, the goals are quite varied.

> US themselves are also propping up multiple companies for space deliveries

They're going after different markets with similar tech (mostly not working, to be honest) or trying different tech. Themis and Prometheus are entirely unoriginal designs. (Which is fine. Their point isn't to be innovative, but to be there, in Europe, where Trump can't touch them.)

There are incredibly cool, novel designs in Europe. But they can't see the light of day because these duplication projects soak up funding. (Again, as they probably must.)

> simply a case of the classic efficiency vs resilience tradeoff

Absolutely. The point is when pursuing a proven technological forefront, there are benefits to being able to focus on efficiency. Moreover, scale expands solution space.

Not always. But high-throughput manufacturing allows SpaceX to pursue both efficiency and resilience in e.g. engine design in a way not possible if you're building engines one at a time. (You always have multiple engines in process, which enables a higher risk tolerance, which enables a higher feedback rate, which allows for faster and more-meaningful iteration.)

The economy of scale is the mechanism that provides the mutual economic benefit - the environment of trust is the political situation that facilitates economies of scale expanding beyond national borders.

... Wait, how would the US government block ESA from launching stuff? ESA has its own rockets, which launch from its own facility and which are not drastically more expensive than Falcon 9 (this is a _fairly_ recent change; Ariane 5 was far more expensive than 6).

That $5bn is a sunk cost, and Arianespace should be, within reason, able to deliver as many of them as ESA wants. My point is that it's not clear that ESA actually has a huge problem here; an Ariane 6 launch would appear to cost them similar to or less than a Falcon 9 launch does NASA (never mind a Falcon 9 Heavy, for which NASA pays about 200 million a shot; the bigger Ariane 6 variant sits somewhere between the two in role). This is a change from Ariane 5, which really was far more expensive (almost twice the cost).

Apples, oranges... Falcon proved new use cases for rockets and with the EU looking for alternative of Starlink, the EU now must cover the same use case as well without Trump in the supply chain.

Depends where geopolitics end up going wrong, more than they are already.

Drastic times call for drastic measures.

Because?

(but please refrain yourself for spreading FUT of how awful and autoritarian the EU is)

You don’t have to look that far afield - Canonical Software (Ubuntu) is headquartered in London.

Mainly yes, but I am not getting laptops at FNAC with SuSE pre-installed and 100% everything working under warranty.

Yes, on August 20: https://lkab.com/en/press/kiruna-church-has-found-a-new-home....