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Airbus Attacked By French Lawmaker For Talking To SpaceX
schwit1 (797399) writes A French lawmaker lashed out at Airbus for daring to consider SpaceX as a possible launch option for a European communications satellite. "The senator, Alain Gournac, who is a veteran member of the French Parliamentary Space Group, said he had written French Economy and Industry Minister Emmanuel Macron to protest Airbus' negotiations with Hawthorne, California-based Space Exploration Technologies Corp. for a late 2016 launch instead of contracting for a launch on a European Ariane 5 rocket. "The negotiations are all the more unacceptable given that, at the insistence of France, Europe has decided to adopt a policy of 'European preference' for its government launches," Gournac said. "This is called playing against your team, and it smacks of a provocation. It's an incredible situation that might lead customers to think we no longer have faith in Ariane 5 — and tomorrow, Ariane 6."
Uhhh, you realise that Ariane 5 has launched many many many missions successfully, and has a better reliability record than the US's launch vehicles, right?
SpaceX is in fact the untested upstart in this situation.
Yes, France's public transport system, for example is an example of the sort of failure that we, for instance in the UK, shudder at.
Cheap fares, efficient operation, a boon to the country and its people.
Ours in the UK, meanwhile engages in double-dipping (making shareholder profits while receiving public subsidy), has terrible roling stock and fucking high ticket prices that rise regardless of the economics of the country, all along with local monopolies(!!!!)
Those bloody French socialists and their incompetence!
Corporation, n. An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility. - Ambrose Bierce
Uh, give another go at history. The British army was the homeland army in the US and the actual resident armed force. Yours was a secession war that effectively created your national identity (or officialized it, depends on the point of view). The only real foreign attack you had on your soil was Pearl Harbor, and that wasn't an invasion.
There was this war in 1812 when the British and a bunch of natives from Canada burned down the White house. During the war the US did have enemy soldiers on US soil. But that war ended in a stalemate. One of the things that did happen, though, is that the US was discouraged from further attacks on Canada and it paved the way for Canada to become an independent nation while keeping British ties.