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Ariane 5 Has No Chance, Says Elon Musk
Dupple writes with some remarks by SpaceX founder Elon Musk, as reported by the BBC, on the Ariane 5 launch vehicle: Musk is anything but a disinterested party, but he has some especially harsh words for the ESA rocket: "'I don't say that with a sense of bravado but there's really no way for that vehicle to compete with Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy. If I were in the position of Ariane, I would really push for an Ariane 6.' Ariane's future will be a key topic this week for European Space Agency (Esa) member states. They are meeting in Naples to determine the scope and funding of the organisation's projects in the next few years, and the status of their big rocket will be central to those discussions."
DBS and other geosync birds are getting bigger and heavier for various reasons -- more propellant so they can stay in their orbit slot longer, more solar cells to drive stronger transmitters, more broadcast channels, more fail-soft backup gear etc.
At the moment the Falcon 9 can (theoretically) put a typical satellite maxing out at about 4 tonnes or so into GEO with the forthcoming V1.1 version increasing that to 5 tonnes. It can't lift the newer birds like INTELSAT 20 weighing over six tonnes as Ariane can (and has done).
Until the paper-exercise Falcon Heavy with its kludgey fuel-transfer-in-flight mode flies SpaceX can't compete with Ariane's proven lift capability. After that... SpaceX only has one customer pencilled in for Heavy and that's Intelsat in 2015. A 50-tonne to LEO lift capability fits few if any commercial niches today; even the Delta 4 Heavy is underused with its 23-tonne to LEO capability.
Of course the Falcon Heavy's main projected use is manned missions to the Moon and Mars but that assumes substantial and sustained funding for such a project in the trillion dollar range at a time when the focus for space exploration is turning more and more to capable robots and cheap expendable probes rather than spam-in-a-can.