Congratulation and great news ! For Europe, but also the world, space access is one of those frontiers we can (and I believe will) see truly opened in my lifetime and I find that truly awesome.
Interestingly there still seems to be a difference in approach between "few launch, expected to go well" in europe and "many launch as trial and error" in the US, with over countries falling somewhere in between those two limits, it's often seen as a threat here of "if we don't do more more often we won't make any progress" but ignoring the economical side (and I think it's fair, given than even with massive subsidies SpaceX is not financially viable until it feed itself through Starlink) it's been a remarkable series of year for new European vehicule launch success.
Also one thing I have to point:
> Europe now has sovereign access to space.
I understand what is meant here, and of course said company need to push that forward, but French Guyana is full french territory, it's not even a foreign territory. It's part of the EU (known as the outermost region of the European Union), EU law applies, it's citizens are EU citizens, EU citizens from other countries can freely move and work and live there ... It's technicaly more EU than Norway.
But less Europe than Norway, sure. Still, on the context of "sovereign access", I would argue both side of that coin have their attributes, and for long term sovereignty I would prefer EU territory instead of "inside-europe-Belarus" for exemple.
There is no Europe. When push comes to shove its all petty squabbles. That's the problem. This whole talk of sovereign European access is dead from the start because each Euro state has conflicting interests and no motivation to work together.
They refused to go full US of Europe and now we have the worst of both worlds. China is gonna eat us for brekky.
You have to be absolutely blind if you can't even read history going back just a few decades, which makes it evidently clear that we have more motivation to work together than pretty much any continent out there. Doesn't help that we all know that the two world wars we've had so far, has come from our continent, so yes, we have a lot of motivation to work together.
Another and more immediate concern is that anything which contains subcomponents/subsystems or parts from US origin companies runs into ITAR and MTCR [1] issues with the US federal government. There's a number of very complex European origin final aviation/aerospace industry products which are laden with US-origin components. I wonder about exactly how "non-US" this Isar rocket is.
I would put it as a much greater likelihood that the US would decide to mess with export-control permits for various subsystems than a theoretical scenario where they begin intercepting western European flagged cargo ships on the way from Europe to French Guiana.
Agreed, the moment we allowed MBDA to put some american component in our (French) missiles made with european allies (Scalp, Meteor), the US blocked our sales to Egypt because they wanted to sell their own instead, using ITAR, forcing us to fix it for the french version.
The US has repeatedly proven that ITAR is for them as much of a military thing as it is an economic one, and that they're willing to use it against allies. If we refuse to learn that lesson, it's on us not them.
> The US has repeatedly proven that ITAR is for them as much of a military thing as it is an economic one, and that they're willing to use it against allies. If we refuse to learn that lesson, it's on us not them.
I'm actually surprised anyone ever thought it was not a military thing.
Maybe I phrased it wrong, it's not my native language ? I meant it "it's not just a military restriction thing when they think there is military danger, it's an economic thing for when they can take advantage over a seller, and who the buyer is doesn't even matter".
I mean it's expected behaviour in one sense but in another it's becoming a bigger geopolitical risk to rely on the US for defence components/technology in the current world, the risk always existed, it's just shifted more one way.
There are a whole bunch of military suppliers across Europe who are in the same boat as MBDA.
Regularly, yes. On a lot of these sorts of products, nothing happens without governments making deals first. Mostly because governments have a need to make sure they get weapons too, not just money for the components they make.
Perhaps should be described as "sale is forbidden by default, but deals are common".
This goes 100% for either completed weapons, or components that can be directly used as a weapon, then you have "dual-use", and the less directly it's a weapon, the more free you are to do what you want.
Can you name any examples? European countries and the EU as a whole don't have an equivalent of the US's ITAR 'See-Through' rule, which lets the US control the usage of a system that has any US components.
I'm not aware of any sale of a US weapons system containing European parts being blocked by any European government. It has been done within Europe, but only for major components, such as Germany's blocking at one point of sales to Saudi Arabia.
But this is the one-component-is-the-weapon, with everything going in one direction version of such a rule. An F35 has 300,000 components from 19 countries, so you can imagine what a maze the agreements for that one are.
It's also not just about the weapons and the danger they pose. It's also about jobs. Know-how. And even the traditional "synergy" (you've designed helicopter blah, hence you make radio component so-and-so, so how about you manufacture NATO standard blah radios and antennas) and the occasional monopoly (it's kind of secret but there aren't many companies that can make the obvious alloy needed for the trust vectoring to name one obvious thing)
A quick Google search will find you plenty of European legislation. And you should look at those laws like the Belgian laws here, like they were a company "Values" document. That is certainly how the EU/Belgium (and other countries) react "by default", but specific treaties explicitly create exceptions to those rules between specific parties.
You missed the point. The example asked for was this:
"I'm not aware of any sale of a US weapons system containing European parts being blocked by any European government."
That would be something like "Belgium says the USA can't sell F-35s to Israel because the wings are Belgian-made" similar to how the USA prevents ASML from selling their machines to China.
Oh that's what you want. In the clusterfuck with the Turkey involuntary withdrawal from the F35 program half the treaties were renegotiated (you see, can't have any Turk produce weapons unless he's a "genius", that would not be fair. In other news: the Turkish definition of genius is mostly being the son in law of Erdogan [1])
I believe this agreement is part of the restructuring after that cluster... Note that the agreement is both about production and buying. [2]
"Finland has required extensive domestic participation, with industrial cooperation valued at a minimum of 30 percent of the contract price of procuring 64 F-35A fighters. Under the agreement, Finnish firms will produce the F-35’s forward fuselage structures, including components intended for export aircraft. The agreement also includes ..."
As to how the EU is involved: https://defence-industry-space.ec.europa.eu/eu-defence-indus... (ie. that's where you go to ask for loans to start a factory for making F35 components, they have a page listing the deals ... somewhere). Note that this is one of the EU institutions that isn't in the budget (well, the loans aren't). They're not spending tax money to make those loans, they're printing money to make those loans.
So the Finnish government is making this deal, including details on export (and this is obviously weapons exports).
How is it an example of European governments preventing American weapons from being sold? Are you saying the Finns unilaterally decided that Turkey can't have F-35s, even if the USA wants to sell F-35s to them?
You misunderstand. Everything is prevented by law, with the purpose to make any change in production involve negotiations with the government, who then negotiates weapons/jobs/local production/... Without those negotiations, and the resulting exceptions to the law nothing can be sold, even dual use items are restricted.
And, of course, the other side of that coin: weapons export regulation is Europe is not something that is meant to actually prevent weapons export. Rather it is used like a company policy: it makes sure everyone regularly has to give the government something they want.
Which is, to put it mildly, not how politicians present those laws.
No, you misunderstand. You keep talking about things irrelevant to the key point.
Look at the political pressure the USA puts on ASML in the Netherlands to prevent them from selling certain products to China because those machines contain some American parts.
The question is explicitly when the reverse has happened, not some general info about European weapon exports or legislation.
Things like Wassenaar Arrangement and MTCR(that applies to a lot of hobby stuffs I'm interested in) are multinational and global. The US implementation is the most painful, but they're like non-Linux unices, sameish in concept and not like first-worlders get free passes.
(And these regs aren't complete nonsense; the technologies regulated by these are useful for guided munitions. It just so happens missile technologies are fully commoditized by now and also happens to be immensely useful for totally peaceful purposes too)
These, again, are export control restrictions at the point of sale and transfer, and the US follows them too. It's not the same thing as what we're discussing regarding the US's changing requirements regarding systems that embed its components.
Note that dual-use items (which Wassenaar regulates) and MTCR are not the same as the US's ITAR 'see through' rule which it uses to block third party sales of systems that contain even small numbers of US components.
For dual-use items, the EU's Directive 2021/821 governs things and broadly authorises exports to the United States through EU General Export Authorisations (EUGEAs) that don't require individual approval.[0]
ITAR and EAR were built to keep U.S. military and dual-use technology from strengthening countries that could use it against the United States or its allies, like Europe
In theory the monroe doctrine, as it was originally written, requires the USA to remain neutral on existing colonies. It only prohibits the expansion of European colonies in the Americas.
Indeed. The interpretation that served as a justification for US interventionism came almost a century later (the Roosevelt Corollary in 1904).
In its original form, the Monroe doctrine declared attempts by European monarchies to reconquer the newly independent Spanish states to be an unfriendly act toward the US. It did not declare US domination over them, as it's commonly misunderstood nowadays.
Good thing is that that Trump will never manage to figure out where French Guyana is on a map. Or worst case there is a 50% chance he’ll invade (non French) Guyana.
French Guyana is occupied territory. That's pretty clear. And so it should be deoccupied and the locals will decide whether to use their land as "sovereign' launch port by Europeans.
French people should be occupied by Guyanans who have no historic connection to France. Apparently that makes sense to some people when it's the other way around.
You've said a lot of blanket statements that are completely wrong.
> Interestingly there still seems to be a difference in approach between "few launch, expected to go well" in europe and "many launch as trial and error" in the US, with other countries falling somewhere in between those two limits, it's often seen as a threat here of "if we don't do more more often we won't make any progress"...
Huh? You do know that Flacon 9 is by far the most reliable rocket of all time right? 99.5% vs 95% for second place. If you're talking about the development of rockets, than that's also wrong. The difference is mostly between new space (SpaceX, Blue Origin, China's aggressive startups) and old space (ULA, Northrop, etc).
One approach (new space) has saved NASA billions of dollars and has reduced price per kg by an order of magnitude. [1]
> ...but ignoring the economical side (and I think it's fair, given than even with massive subsidies SpaceX is not financially viable until it feed itself through Starlink) it's been a remarkable series of years for new European vehicules launch success.
SpaceX has had much less subsidies than any of it's competitor. Given how much money it has saved NASA, that have actually saved the public money. Go check how much a SLS launch costs :)
It's true that Starlink prints a lot of cash and it has enabled them to chase re-usability when no one else believed it, but the chinese are doing it. The world has moved on. Europe hasn't.
Meanwhile Ariane 6 is a failure by not even reducing costs compared to Ariane 5. Isar's new rocket has 1/20th the payload of a single Falcon 9 launch (which launches every 3-4 days).
If what Europe wants is to be able to say that they have sovereign access to space, then sure. But if they want to be genuinely competitive in the space launch market, they will need a drastically different attitude to launch.
> I understand what is meant here, and of course said company need to push that forward, but French Guyana is full french territory, it's not even a foreign territory.
Does French Guyana have a usable space rocket? Cause if not then you are completely missing the point of what "space access" means here. It's not about a spot from where to start the rockets. It's about being able to build them. No matter French Guyana or Norway or central Berlin.
And that's obvious to everybody including yourself, so why you opened the French-nationalist angle here with lots of angry messages with all sorts of politics is unclear to everybody watching.
1. Who is "they"? Isar Aerospace and Arianespace are distinct entities.
2. Isar Aerospace is the first fully private European company (a startup) to do this. Arianespace and the Ariane rockets have heavy state/ESA involvement.
3. It is the first launch to orbit from geographically European soil. French Guiana is politically part of France, but geographically obviously part of South America.
4. Why would everyone have to launch from the same place, in your esteemed opinion? Why are some US payloads launched from California, some from Florida, and soon some from Texas and Louisiana?
5. Norway is a lot closer to the rest of Europe than French Guiana is.
6. Why was SpaceX newsworthy, particularly on a startup-centric site, when NASA already exists?
> 2. Isar Aerospace is the first fully private European company (a startup) to do this. Arianespace and the Ariane rockets have heavy state/ESA involvement.
To go even further: ~60% of Ariane Group revenue is from the french state, for their nuclear launch system. The whole ariane space rocket is their side show, a way to reduce cost for France by getting the market to pay some of the R&D.
If that's correct, then yeah, I struggle to find much to be upset about with this list. $106M federal loan against what they've built feels, I don't know, about correct for a telecom. Light even. The tax abatement stuff sounds gross but not surprising.
(There are other forms of subsidy than this list would show, though! So, yeah, always going to be an argument.)
That's open question for humanity. I respect both sides of it but I am little more pro to residences in other planets as we are on tech breakthrough on limitation of Earth. Now, surviving means occupying other planets.
However, these are just my thoughts you can have different.
We still have a good few thousand years until we make the Earth anywhere close to as inhospitable as the second best planet in the Solar System - and probably much more than that before we run out of space on Earth.
It makes far more sense to colonize the Arctic, the Gobi desert, the peaks of the tallest mountains, and similar places here on Earth before even contemplating the colonization of Mars.
I have different take on this. We already shown significant decline in Fertility rate of whole world. Its right now 2.2 against nearly 5 in 1950s till 1970. 2.1 is replacement only. So, we are sorted there from occupying Glaciers,Mountains, etc.
Moreover, Average age of many countries are increasing. That might need support in near future. Migration is filling up that gap in Western world.
As per current prediction world population will peak around 2080s and then decline.
Problem is that decline. Since, Governments are working on selling futures (e.g. Bonds). We need new frontier to make things exciting for new generations up ahead.
People aren't making more children because they largely can't afford to, either in actual resources, or in time spent. And, unlike in a rural community, children don't have any "return on investment" - plus, you generally have to raise them alone even when they're no longer toddlers, rather than relying on an entire community to do it together.
There's no great mystery, and a colony on Mars will not change this even one iota.
> because they largely can't afford to, either in actual resources, or in time spent
But that's absolutely not true. People are so wealthy right now that they can afford practically an unlimited amount of children. The avoidance of having children is almost entirely shaped by the cultural environment and not economic environment.
> relying on an entire community to do it together
I am not sure that it ever was a case. "Relying on an entire community" to raise children generally meant that children were raised mostly by themselves.
> The avoidance of having children is almost entirely shaped by the cultural environment and not economic environment.
Cultural factors are certainly a part of it, but probably mostly in the sense that we are (rightfully, I believe) far less willing to let children die young or get maimed. But economic factors are a huge thing; I don't know where you live that you thing young people "can afford practically an unlimited number of children", but in most of Europe and the USA it is in fact impossible for the bottom 50+% of young couples to even support themselves, not to mention a child, on a single income. And it's also very hard to raise a child 0-4 in a city while working full time+.
> "Relying on an entire community" to raise children generally meant that children were raised mostly by themselves.
No. Children, historically, after they became capable of roaming around, were raised by grandparents, neighbors, their older siblings etc. Even when they were away from adults, they'd be roaming near the village in groups with older children.
> we are (rightfully, I believe) far less willing to let children die young or get maimed.
I don't think it matters at all. Of course, we are, but there is a huge gap between "not let children die young or get maimed" and what is happening with child raising now.
> but in most of Europe and the USA
bottom 50+% of young couples would have zero problems to support even 20 children per couple. How do I know it? Because in other parts of the world other people easily support like 5+ kids on 10+ times less amount of resources than this bottom 50% of young couples in the Europe and the USA have. So it is purely cultural phenomenon.
> were raised by grandparents, neighbors, their older siblings etc.
No, they (generally) weren't raised that way. Historically, "raised by grandparents, neighbors, their older siblings etc" mean that they were like 5% of the time "raising by grandparents, neighbors, their older siblings", and other 95% of the time raising by themselves (and maybe by neighbor's dog, best case scenario)
> Even when they were away from adults, they'd be roaming near the village in groups with older children.
I mean right now there is zero problems to raise 20 children per couple this way in the cities. Except for the cultural perception.
Apart from a gamma-ray burst, what do you imagine could happen to the Earth to make it as inhospitable as Mars?
Asteroid hits wouldn't come even close. The worse disease imaginable would not make the air as permanently dangerous to life as Mars' atmosphere is. So what exactly would motivate this move?
> These milestones are necessary to advancement of human race as we need new planets to occupy.
We can't even positively terraform Earth to stop the climate crisis here. Why does anyone think we need to be terraforming elsewhere? Just terraform here!!! Make the planet we are on more hospitable to human life!
It's not like we're running out of space, and the global population is about to start dropping.
I tend to share that position, but there's one counter argument that's not without merit at all: too much to lose. Even the worst climate change outcome would be less bad than the outcome of climate change plus some botched radical fix attempt could be.
Mars on the other hand, what's the worst that could happen? Someone writing the Coca Cola logotype across the red?
Thank you for your correction. That has been a nice addition to my German geography. It looks like the people of Munich really enjoy their river in a way we can't enjoy ours in the UK, due to pollution.
But the impact of an AFD win in that Bundesland would be terrible for the whole country. A bit long (45min) but this video from Simplicissimus goes into it in details: https://youtu.be/N2b1y9GAF48?si=1_L80z1PTXENkXy2
Why would it influence the voters in Saxony-Anhalt? The voters are mainly voting AfD because all the other old parties have failed them miserably since the reunification and they don't have any other alternative, because voting for the same parties expecting a different result/future would be insanity.
The east has never been economically very strong, it used to be huge feudal-style farms and a bit of high-tech industry (planes, optics, trains, electronics in the 1930s). Not too different from now. Then there was the GDR which made things much worse.
It's not really West Germany that caused the weak economy of the East Germany. The handling of reunification did suck, but you can't just will a strong industrial base into existence neither.
I would say they never got the stability to build a strong economic foundation. During Prussian times the port cities like Danzig and Köngisberg flourished and attracted the capital of eastern Prussia and after the WWII, they had to deal with the oppression from the soviets. The Soviets took whatever they can from the Eastern Germany and they just had to build everything from the scratch, unlike the west that got help from the other western countries like US/Marshal plan. Also when the Germany was partitioned whatever industrial base remained in the east moved to west or southern Germany because they didn’t wanted to be under socialism.
Even to this day the western German, especially the older ones considers the Eastern Germans as a second class citizens and there hasn’t been any significant investment in Eastern part to build an industrial base (except for in Berlin and its suburbs) by any government even though the west payed a tax (solidarity) especially for that.
> there hasn’t been any significant investment in Eastern part to build an industrial base (except for in Berlin and its suburbs)
Dresden is not a Berlin suburb. When it comes to investment in semiconductor industry, Dresden has likely seen more than the entire rest of Germany together.
The media has been struggling on how to word this. Danish media tried labeling it as "the first orbital launch from Europe. Which is wrong, because the Plesetsk Cosmodrome exists. It's also not the first orbital launch from the EU, because Norway isn't in the EU. Using "from western Europe" sound like your trying to hard to make it special.
"First commercial space company to successfully deliver satellites into orbit, from the European continent" is probably the most correct title while remaining fairly interesting.
Congrats to Isar Aerospace. If any nation in Europe that can start a new space frontier, that would be the Germans and I hope Isar would get strong support from the Bavarian state to be a neck-on-neck competitor to SpaceX.
>If any nation in Europe that can start a new space frontier, that would be the Germans
If that is true, then only because the company doesn't immediately have to fight Arianespace. It is France that has the strongest existing know-how and longest history in rockets, going further back than Arianespace. The gap between WW2 rocket development and now is so long that German history with rockets may as well not exist.
> The gap between WW2 rocket development and now is so long that German history with rockets may as well not exist.
And yet, all currently existing rocket designs capable of reaching (and staying in) orbit can trace their design back to the Aggregat 4 and the engineers (and slave labour) that built it.
There’s a huge difference between know how and the execution. What has France been doing since WWII? If they have the know how, shouldn’t they be at the same level as US now?
Meanwhile Germany had to deal with partition, reunification and now the biggest economy in Europe and also build an economic empire without firing a single shot. That’s why I said Germans would be the only nation that can actually execute the know how into being a frontier. Maybe France can actually learn a thing or two from the Germans on how to build an empire even after losing two world wars
Congrats to Isar but I think you don't understand the scale difference here and the immensity of what it would take to be a neck-on-neck competitor to SpaceX. The orders of magnitude of launch efficiency are... starting to become staggering.
Isar is a good fallback for sovereignty and national defense! But, if Germany wants to compete with SpaceX in earnest, they will need to re-orient a large portion of their national economy around it. They are raising something like $100 billion for their launch complex in LA currently.
Of course the cost structure for space companies is very different than for AI and electronics but Chinese companies have proven that they can achieve ~90% of what the bloated US companies are doing on a tiny fraction of their budget. Of course efficiency hasn’t been a priority in the EU for decades so unlikely they can replicate anything China is doing
I want to congratulate Isar Aerospace on this very minor accomplishment. As you all know we basically invented the spaceflight industry with the competition, and you’ve had another launch provider built on colonized land, so I guess it doesn’t count.
Feel free to go back to kvetching about EAR & ITAR.
Sincerely,
American Aerospace
P.S. For a better deal on mass to orbit see SpaceX
SpaceX is incredibly cheaper than Isar per pound, but if you only need a couple thousand pounds lifted, unless a RideShare or Transporter mission is available and suitable, you won’t by buying a SpaceX launch for $15 million.
> Incidentally, the early investment for Isar came from Bülent Altan, the Turkish ex-SpaceX guy who was in charge of the guidance system for Falcon-1, Falcon-9 and Dragon. [0]
It turns out that Altan was an angel investor in Isar, and then co-founded a VC firm that continued to invest in Isar, among other space orgs in Europe: https://alpinespace.vc/
Having lived in Germany I can confirm probably 90% of German startups mainly kebab and barbershops are run by Turks. Germans are just not very enterprising.
To be 100% clear, having to pay his 2021 $12B tax bill absolutely broke his brain, and he is now working to destroy peace and prosperity across the globe, to make sure such a thing never happens again.
While that is a fact, it's also a fact that pre-2021 Musk created two nexuses of engineering and entrepreneurial talent that completely changed the world.
I like variety of bread in Germany, but one of the problems is how quickly it goes mouldy. Even the cheap stuff I had as a student in Aberystwyth (coastal) from Lidl (German chain) didn't go off quite so fast so often.
Many Americans are in the middle of the death throes of empire the world is moving on and as an American. That’s fine with me Lake Ontario forever ha.ha.ha…
As an American, would say more than half our country actually agrees with you. Trumps approval rating has fallen to 39% while 58% disapprove. Yeah, a lot of us in the US are in just as much amazement as the rest of the world at the crazy and petty actions he takes.
So we’re just bidding our time, waiting until the midterm elections to weaken the right, and then afterwards, we’ll just be counting the days until he’s out of office. Hopefully he’ll be replaced with someone who is at least halfway competent - it amazes us how almost everything the touches gets completely screwed up
And i as an average European just want to say - we feel with you and all the others that are suffering through this. I don't know either what I could or would do if my own government went this route. I hope your institutions and the people's resilience will overcome this dark chapter of American history and build a better foundation on top.
>I hope your institutions and the people's resilience will overcome this dark chapter of American history and build a better foundation on top.
I hope we can scrape it all back to the bedrock foundations of our country before we rebuild anything. I don't want any foundation built on top of this festering layer of bullshit. I'm afraid we will still have foundation problems in the future if we don't examine the reasons why it failed this time and set the rebuilt country up with one less failure mode.
Let's do this once. As they say where I'm from "There's only two ways to do anything - do it right or do it over."
Thanks, it’s been a real trial, but we can the momentum shifting - when Trump is truly let loose, he’s his own worst enemy. And agreed, hope our institutions hold up too:)
> Trumps approval rating has fallen to 39% while 58% disapprove.
> Hopefully he’ll be replaced with someone who is at least halfway competent
That's the point. You've vote for this guy TWICE. So probably when we talk about 58% disapprove, those 58% disapprove him not because of what he's doing, but because he's doing it to little and to incompetently.
It is scary that you want to replace him with another Trump, but "at least halfway competent". Oh boy!
?
Don’t think I was implying I wanted to replace him with another far-right candidate, just someone who is competent in general.
But do agree that we did all voted for him twice, so saying that maybe this is actually what it means to be an American could hold some truth. Still, don’t think so, he’s clearly one of, or the most divisive person in modern American history. It seems like most people here either love him or hate him with every fiber of their being.
Literally every campaign promise he's went back on. So, "Saying that maybe this is actually what it means to be an American could hold some truth" I don't really think is accurate lol
I know a lot of folks who voted for the man, almost all of them would love for a competent alternative. Unfortunately, in the last election, neither were competent, so a lot of it was a coin toss.
Ah this is true too (seeing as I didn’t vote for him, it doesn’t bother me that he’s done the opposite of his campaign promises).
But as for competent alternatives during last election, would think a young, vibrant, thoughtful Kamala Harris would have done a better job - Still, if I’m being honest, I was not a big fan of hers even though I would have voted for her (was out of state during the last election and voting got too complicated). So, I can understand if this turned off voters.
… although, if you were referring to Biden, then yeah, truly neither were competent choices.
> Don’t think I was implying I wanted to replace him with another far-right candidate, just someone who is competent in general.
Maybe you are not. But what about other 58%? In the end, you have elected him twice, and it's not like the guy was pretending to be the other person. Trump did exactly what everyone have expected him to do, if only incompetently and ineffectively.
more than half is pretty unlikely. about a third is. the rest dont care or actively support trump
the election results speak for themselves. Trump got more votes than he did in 2016 - americans by and large saw his shitshow and decided they wanted more
For anyone interested in private space flight: Wild Wild Space documentary. Also a commentary about startups in general.
Separately, I've been wondering how uneven human progress is. I think we have come a long way in electronics (relays to vacuum tubes to transistor to … to an M5 chip) but in some other domains, like moving objects through space, we are basically mostly reliant on thrust generated by burning fuel (EV's are a genuine advance, but mostly due to battery tech).
Congratulations to those who have worked so hard to make this happen. I wish you continued success. It is great that they have realized both mission targets on their second flight attempt.
I think the more options there are for access to space, the more likely we are as a species to launch useful payloads that will help us understand how we fit in and how we can better manage our own situation. It is disconcerting to see the night sky fill with constellations of satellites but there is hope that they will be used for productive purposes.
I hope that one day we all can watch liftoff of a custom super-sized mildly-penis shaped luxury launch vehicle designed and equipped to take all of our wealthiest overlords to their new custom homes in their own gated compounds on Mars, or Venus, or in the quietest sector of Jupiter (rumored to be on the surface directly underneath the turbulence of the Great Red Spot. You heard it here first.)
146 comments
[ 0.23 ms ] story [ 20.9 ms ] threadInterestingly there still seems to be a difference in approach between "few launch, expected to go well" in europe and "many launch as trial and error" in the US, with over countries falling somewhere in between those two limits, it's often seen as a threat here of "if we don't do more more often we won't make any progress" but ignoring the economical side (and I think it's fair, given than even with massive subsidies SpaceX is not financially viable until it feed itself through Starlink) it's been a remarkable series of year for new European vehicule launch success.
Also one thing I have to point:
> Europe now has sovereign access to space.
I understand what is meant here, and of course said company need to push that forward, but French Guyana is full french territory, it's not even a foreign territory. It's part of the EU (known as the outermost region of the European Union), EU law applies, it's citizens are EU citizens, EU citizens from other countries can freely move and work and live there ... It's technicaly more EU than Norway.
But less Europe than Norway, sure. Still, on the context of "sovereign access", I would argue both side of that coin have their attributes, and for long term sovereignty I would prefer EU territory instead of "inside-europe-Belarus" for exemple.
You have to be absolutely blind if you can't even read history going back just a few decades, which makes it evidently clear that we have more motivation to work together than pretty much any continent out there. Doesn't help that we all know that the two world wars we've had so far, has come from our continent, so yes, we have a lot of motivation to work together.
Personally, living in the Baltics, even a flawed and somewhat fragmented Europe is better than being under a Russian boot.
So it's more of a "optimism and work towards a better future or perish" situation. That's an easy choice.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missile_Technology_Control_Reg...
I would put it as a much greater likelihood that the US would decide to mess with export-control permits for various subsystems than a theoretical scenario where they begin intercepting western European flagged cargo ships on the way from Europe to French Guiana.
The US has repeatedly proven that ITAR is for them as much of a military thing as it is an economic one, and that they're willing to use it against allies. If we refuse to learn that lesson, it's on us not them.
I'm actually surprised anyone ever thought it was not a military thing.
There are a whole bunch of military suppliers across Europe who are in the same boat as MBDA.
In hindsight the whole world should have planned for the "what if America goes Nazi" eventuality.
Perhaps should be described as "sale is forbidden by default, but deals are common".
This goes 100% for either completed weapons, or components that can be directly used as a weapon, then you have "dual-use", and the less directly it's a weapon, the more free you are to do what you want.
I'm not aware of any sale of a US weapons system containing European parts being blocked by any European government. It has been done within Europe, but only for major components, such as Germany's blocking at one point of sales to Saudi Arabia.
https://www.brusselstimes.com/153970/wallonia-faces-new-chal...
But this is the one-component-is-the-weapon, with everything going in one direction version of such a rule. An F35 has 300,000 components from 19 countries, so you can imagine what a maze the agreements for that one are.
It's also not just about the weapons and the danger they pose. It's also about jobs. Know-how. And even the traditional "synergy" (you've designed helicopter blah, hence you make radio component so-and-so, so how about you manufacture NATO standard blah radios and antennas) and the occasional monopoly (it's kind of secret but there aren't many companies that can make the obvious alloy needed for the trust vectoring to name one obvious thing)
"I'm not aware of any sale of a US weapons system containing European parts being blocked by any European government."
That would be something like "Belgium says the USA can't sell F-35s to Israel because the wings are Belgian-made" similar to how the USA prevents ASML from selling their machines to China.
I believe this agreement is part of the restructuring after that cluster... Note that the agreement is both about production and buying. [2]
"Finland has required extensive domestic participation, with industrial cooperation valued at a minimum of 30 percent of the contract price of procuring 64 F-35A fighters. Under the agreement, Finnish firms will produce the F-35’s forward fuselage structures, including components intended for export aircraft. The agreement also includes ..."
As to how the EU is involved: https://defence-industry-space.ec.europa.eu/eu-defence-indus... (ie. that's where you go to ask for loans to start a factory for making F35 components, they have a page listing the deals ... somewhere). Note that this is one of the EU institutions that isn't in the budget (well, the loans aren't). They're not spending tax money to make those loans, they're printing money to make those loans.
So the Finnish government is making this deal, including details on export (and this is obviously weapons exports).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sel%C3%A7uk_Bayraktar
[2] https://militarywatchmagazine.com/article/finland-leading-ma...
And, of course, the other side of that coin: weapons export regulation is Europe is not something that is meant to actually prevent weapons export. Rather it is used like a company policy: it makes sure everyone regularly has to give the government something they want.
Which is, to put it mildly, not how politicians present those laws.
Look at the political pressure the USA puts on ASML in the Netherlands to prevent them from selling certain products to China because those machines contain some American parts.
The question is explicitly when the reverse has happened, not some general info about European weapon exports or legislation.
(And these regs aren't complete nonsense; the technologies regulated by these are useful for guided munitions. It just so happens missile technologies are fully commoditized by now and also happens to be immensely useful for totally peaceful purposes too)
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wassenaar_Arrangement
2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missile_Technology_Control_Reg...
Note that dual-use items (which Wassenaar regulates) and MTCR are not the same as the US's ITAR 'see through' rule which it uses to block third party sales of systems that contain even small numbers of US components.
For dual-use items, the EU's Directive 2021/821 governs things and broadly authorises exports to the United States through EU General Export Authorisations (EUGEAs) that don't require individual approval.[0]
[0] https://policy.trade.ec.europa.eu/help-exporters-and-importe...
In its original form, the Monroe doctrine declared attempts by European monarchies to reconquer the newly independent Spanish states to be an unfriendly act toward the US. It did not declare US domination over them, as it's commonly misunderstood nowadays.
Is Inside-Europe-Norway not better then Belarus? I would consider us (norway) a stable and good partner to the EU.
Give us 25 years and we will join EU if it still exists:)
(Don't actually answer that I don't want to start a big off topic discussion, just saying if we want to be logically consistent...)
> Interestingly there still seems to be a difference in approach between "few launch, expected to go well" in europe and "many launch as trial and error" in the US, with other countries falling somewhere in between those two limits, it's often seen as a threat here of "if we don't do more more often we won't make any progress"...
Huh? You do know that Flacon 9 is by far the most reliable rocket of all time right? 99.5% vs 95% for second place. If you're talking about the development of rockets, than that's also wrong. The difference is mostly between new space (SpaceX, Blue Origin, China's aggressive startups) and old space (ULA, Northrop, etc).
One approach (new space) has saved NASA billions of dollars and has reduced price per kg by an order of magnitude. [1]
> ...but ignoring the economical side (and I think it's fair, given than even with massive subsidies SpaceX is not financially viable until it feed itself through Starlink) it's been a remarkable series of years for new European vehicules launch success.
SpaceX has had much less subsidies than any of it's competitor. Given how much money it has saved NASA, that have actually saved the public money. Go check how much a SLS launch costs :)
It's true that Starlink prints a lot of cash and it has enabled them to chase re-usability when no one else believed it, but the chinese are doing it. The world has moved on. Europe hasn't.
Meanwhile Ariane 6 is a failure by not even reducing costs compared to Ariane 5. Isar's new rocket has 1/20th the payload of a single Falcon 9 launch (which launches every 3-4 days).
If what Europe wants is to be able to say that they have sovereign access to space, then sure. But if they want to be genuinely competitive in the space launch market, they will need a drastically different attitude to launch.
[1] https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20200001093/downloads/20...
> I understand what is meant here, and of course said company need to push that forward, but French Guyana is full french territory, it's not even a foreign territory.
Does French Guyana have a usable space rocket? Cause if not then you are completely missing the point of what "space access" means here. It's not about a spot from where to start the rockets. It's about being able to build them. No matter French Guyana or Norway or central Berlin.
And that's obvious to everybody including yourself, so why you opened the French-nationalist angle here with lots of angry messages with all sorts of politics is unclear to everybody watching.
Yes: the Ariane rockets. "French Guyana" is part of France, which is part of the EU.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Guiana
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ariane_(rocket_family)
2. Isar Aerospace is the first fully private European company (a startup) to do this. Arianespace and the Ariane rockets have heavy state/ESA involvement.
3. It is the first launch to orbit from geographically European soil. French Guiana is politically part of France, but geographically obviously part of South America.
4. Why would everyone have to launch from the same place, in your esteemed opinion? Why are some US payloads launched from California, some from Florida, and soon some from Texas and Louisiana?
5. Norway is a lot closer to the rest of Europe than French Guiana is.
6. Why was SpaceX newsworthy, particularly on a startup-centric site, when NASA already exists?
To go even further: ~60% of Ariane Group revenue is from the french state, for their nuclear launch system. The whole ariane space rocket is their side show, a way to reduce cost for France by getting the market to pay some of the R&D.
Misinformation
If that's correct, then yeah, I struggle to find much to be upset about with this list. $106M federal loan against what they've built feels, I don't know, about correct for a telecom. Light even. The tax abatement stuff sounds gross but not surprising.
(There are other forms of subsidy than this list would show, though! So, yeah, always going to be an argument.)
i.e SpaceX gets it's cash immediately and the debtor is the Israeli launch company.
SpaceX has been trying to get federal subsidies for ages but has been failing.
As for the tax abatement, it's the exact tax abatement other companies have got in the past, not something custom created for SpaceX.
Unless Great Orange or his successor/s would start having ideas
Congratulation to the team.
These milestones are necessary to advancement of human race as we need new planets to occupy.
But, we needed clear path going forward. I am both pro to advancement but with caution kind of guy.
We absolutely do not
However, these are just my thoughts you can have different.
It makes far more sense to colonize the Arctic, the Gobi desert, the peaks of the tallest mountains, and similar places here on Earth before even contemplating the colonization of Mars.
I have different take on this. We already shown significant decline in Fertility rate of whole world. Its right now 2.2 against nearly 5 in 1950s till 1970. 2.1 is replacement only. So, we are sorted there from occupying Glaciers,Mountains, etc.
Moreover, Average age of many countries are increasing. That might need support in near future. Migration is filling up that gap in Western world.
As per current prediction world population will peak around 2080s and then decline.
Problem is that decline. Since, Governments are working on selling futures (e.g. Bonds). We need new frontier to make things exciting for new generations up ahead.
There's no great mystery, and a colony on Mars will not change this even one iota.
But that's absolutely not true. People are so wealthy right now that they can afford practically an unlimited amount of children. The avoidance of having children is almost entirely shaped by the cultural environment and not economic environment.
> relying on an entire community to do it together
I am not sure that it ever was a case. "Relying on an entire community" to raise children generally meant that children were raised mostly by themselves.
Cultural factors are certainly a part of it, but probably mostly in the sense that we are (rightfully, I believe) far less willing to let children die young or get maimed. But economic factors are a huge thing; I don't know where you live that you thing young people "can afford practically an unlimited number of children", but in most of Europe and the USA it is in fact impossible for the bottom 50+% of young couples to even support themselves, not to mention a child, on a single income. And it's also very hard to raise a child 0-4 in a city while working full time+.
> "Relying on an entire community" to raise children generally meant that children were raised mostly by themselves.
No. Children, historically, after they became capable of roaming around, were raised by grandparents, neighbors, their older siblings etc. Even when they were away from adults, they'd be roaming near the village in groups with older children.
I don't think it matters at all. Of course, we are, but there is a huge gap between "not let children die young or get maimed" and what is happening with child raising now.
> but in most of Europe and the USA
bottom 50+% of young couples would have zero problems to support even 20 children per couple. How do I know it? Because in other parts of the world other people easily support like 5+ kids on 10+ times less amount of resources than this bottom 50% of young couples in the Europe and the USA have. So it is purely cultural phenomenon.
> were raised by grandparents, neighbors, their older siblings etc.
No, they (generally) weren't raised that way. Historically, "raised by grandparents, neighbors, their older siblings etc" mean that they were like 5% of the time "raising by grandparents, neighbors, their older siblings", and other 95% of the time raising by themselves (and maybe by neighbor's dog, best case scenario)
> Even when they were away from adults, they'd be roaming near the village in groups with older children.
I mean right now there is zero problems to raise 20 children per couple this way in the cities. Except for the cultural perception.
Asteroid hits wouldn't come even close. The worse disease imaginable would not make the air as permanently dangerous to life as Mars' atmosphere is. So what exactly would motivate this move?
We can't even positively terraform Earth to stop the climate crisis here. Why does anyone think we need to be terraforming elsewhere? Just terraform here!!! Make the planet we are on more hospitable to human life!
It's not like we're running out of space, and the global population is about to start dropping.
Mars on the other hand, what's the worst that could happen? Someone writing the Coca Cola logotype across the red?
We are doing it right now. It just for some reason some people call it "climate crisis".
From a scientific perspective in case of the Earth "more hospitable to human life" = "warmer".
This is a huge achievement and every person involved should be very proud.
Please oblige me by not writing anything political in reply, let's just celebrate!
It's not really West Germany that caused the weak economy of the East Germany. The handling of reunification did suck, but you can't just will a strong industrial base into existence neither.
Even to this day the western German, especially the older ones considers the Eastern Germans as a second class citizens and there hasn’t been any significant investment in Eastern part to build an industrial base (except for in Berlin and its suburbs) by any government even though the west payed a tax (solidarity) especially for that.
Dresden is not a Berlin suburb. When it comes to investment in semiconductor industry, Dresden has likely seen more than the entire rest of Germany together.
Also Dresden is only one city and what about the rest of the former East German states?
> Europe now has sovereign access to space. [...] Customers around the world now have a sovereign launch option at their disposal.
They apparently try very hard to ignore Arianespace.
"First commercial space company to successfully deliver satellites into orbit, from the European continent" is probably the most correct title while remaining fairly interesting.
I apologise for the tactlessness, but it just made me think of Tom Lehrer's lyrics about Wernher von Braun:
> "Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down? That's not my department" says Wernher von Braun.
If that is true, then only because the company doesn't immediately have to fight Arianespace. It is France that has the strongest existing know-how and longest history in rockets, going further back than Arianespace. The gap between WW2 rocket development and now is so long that German history with rockets may as well not exist.
And yet, all currently existing rocket designs capable of reaching (and staying in) orbit can trace their design back to the Aggregat 4 and the engineers (and slave labour) that built it.
Meanwhile Germany had to deal with partition, reunification and now the biggest economy in Europe and also build an economic empire without firing a single shot. That’s why I said Germans would be the only nation that can actually execute the know how into being a frontier. Maybe France can actually learn a thing or two from the Germans on how to build an empire even after losing two world wars
A lot? I mean they were on the same level or above in the early 2000s.
Ariane was sort of the SpaceX of the 80s by commercializing and significantly decreasing the cost of space launches.
> from the Germans on how to build an empire
Yeah.. the German economy is in a remarkably great state these days.
well they exist in both US and Soviet at the time
Isar is a good fallback for sovereignty and national defense! But, if Germany wants to compete with SpaceX in earnest, they will need to re-orient a large portion of their national economy around it. They are raising something like $100 billion for their launch complex in LA currently.
Feel free to go back to kvetching about EAR & ITAR.
Sincerely,
American Aerospace
P.S. For a better deal on mass to orbit see SpaceX
a permanent self sufficient colony on antarctica is a bit more like it, but still pretty ambitious
> Incidentally, the early investment for Isar came from Bülent Altan, the Turkish ex-SpaceX guy who was in charge of the guidance system for Falcon-1, Falcon-9 and Dragon. [0]
It turns out that Altan was an angel investor in Isar, and then co-founded a VC firm that continued to invest in Isar, among other space orgs in Europe: https://alpinespace.vc/
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49583528
That might actually be Musk's greatest contribution.
While that is a fact, it's also a fact that pre-2021 Musk created two nexuses of engineering and entrepreneurial talent that completely changed the world.
So we’re just bidding our time, waiting until the midterm elections to weaken the right, and then afterwards, we’ll just be counting the days until he’s out of office. Hopefully he’ll be replaced with someone who is at least halfway competent - it amazes us how almost everything the touches gets completely screwed up
I hope we can scrape it all back to the bedrock foundations of our country before we rebuild anything. I don't want any foundation built on top of this festering layer of bullshit. I'm afraid we will still have foundation problems in the future if we don't examine the reasons why it failed this time and set the rebuilt country up with one less failure mode.
Let's do this once. As they say where I'm from "There's only two ways to do anything - do it right or do it over."
> Hopefully he’ll be replaced with someone who is at least halfway competent
That's the point. You've vote for this guy TWICE. So probably when we talk about 58% disapprove, those 58% disapprove him not because of what he's doing, but because he's doing it to little and to incompetently.
It is scary that you want to replace him with another Trump, but "at least halfway competent". Oh boy!
But do agree that we did all voted for him twice, so saying that maybe this is actually what it means to be an American could hold some truth. Still, don’t think so, he’s clearly one of, or the most divisive person in modern American history. It seems like most people here either love him or hate him with every fiber of their being.
I know a lot of folks who voted for the man, almost all of them would love for a competent alternative. Unfortunately, in the last election, neither were competent, so a lot of it was a coin toss.
But as for competent alternatives during last election, would think a young, vibrant, thoughtful Kamala Harris would have done a better job - Still, if I’m being honest, I was not a big fan of hers even though I would have voted for her (was out of state during the last election and voting got too complicated). So, I can understand if this turned off voters.
… although, if you were referring to Biden, then yeah, truly neither were competent choices.
Maybe you are not. But what about other 58%? In the end, you have elected him twice, and it's not like the guy was pretending to be the other person. Trump did exactly what everyone have expected him to do, if only incompetently and ineffectively.
… although, even we didn’t expect him to be as unhinged and impulsive as he has been. It’s been crazy here.
the election results speak for themselves. Trump got more votes than he did in 2016 - americans by and large saw his shitshow and decided they wanted more
Separately, I've been wondering how uneven human progress is. I think we have come a long way in electronics (relays to vacuum tubes to transistor to … to an M5 chip) but in some other domains, like moving objects through space, we are basically mostly reliant on thrust generated by burning fuel (EV's are a genuine advance, but mostly due to battery tech).
I think the more options there are for access to space, the more likely we are as a species to launch useful payloads that will help us understand how we fit in and how we can better manage our own situation. It is disconcerting to see the night sky fill with constellations of satellites but there is hope that they will be used for productive purposes.
I hope that one day we all can watch liftoff of a custom super-sized mildly-penis shaped luxury launch vehicle designed and equipped to take all of our wealthiest overlords to their new custom homes in their own gated compounds on Mars, or Venus, or in the quietest sector of Jupiter (rumored to be on the surface directly underneath the turbulence of the Great Red Spot. You heard it here first.)