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."

Comments

SpaceX vs. ESA

[nojayuk]

The Falcon 9 has flown four times IIRC; in two cases things went wrong -- on its first launch the orbital payload ended up rolling and yawing in the wrong orbit and on the fourth launch it lost an engine and couldn't deploy a secondary payload successfully and the mission was not a complete success. The Falcon Heavy is still to be completely assembled never mind actually flown.

The Ariane 5 in ES, GS and ECS configurations has 50 completely successful launches under its belt since the last failure back in 2002. It has a proven track record of delivering twice the payload of the Falcon 9 to LEO and twice the projected payload of the F9 v1.1 to GEO (since SpaceX has not yet attempted a launch to GEO).

Musk's comments sound like FUD to encourage sales of Falcon 9 launches, nothing more.

Re:SpaceX vs. ESA

[nojayuk]

The market SpaceX is competing in already has the Ariane as well as other commercial/military launchers like the Deltas, the HII-B and of course the venerable Soyuz (1700 launches and counting) which is a closer match to the Falcon 9's capabilities. They're playing catchup with their launch price being the big market attractor while they get the bugs out and improve their throw weight.

What would you be launching and where for 200 mill? A geosync DBS bird costs about 100 million shrinkwrapped for launch with insurance, load integration and launch costs pushing the total price up to about 400 million dollars US after it has been delivered to its final position in the GEO constellation.

Scientific and telecomms platforms can be put into LEO for a lot less, of course but there are a lot more boosters other than the Falcon 9 that can do this job; the Ariane's speciality is DBS launches, two at a time with a side-order of Space Station resupply and reboost ATVs delivering 6 tonnes plus of payload and fuel per shot in a 20-tonne vehicle (the first commercial DragonX resupply mission carried about 500kg of cargo and no fuel).

SpaceX still hasn't attempted even a test GEO launch of a single DBS/GEO payload and is incapable of putting the biggest such satellites in place -- INTELSAT 20 launched by Arianespace in August this year massed about 6 tonnes, a tonne more than the uprated Falcon 9 is expected to be able to put into GEO. The same launch also put a 3-tonne DBS into GEO making the entire launch load over 10 tonnes including ancillary materials, way above anything the Falcon 9 will ever be able to do.