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Ariane Chief Seems Frustrated With SpaceX For Driving Down Launch Costs (arstechnica.com)
schwit1 shares a report from Ars Technica: Like United Launch Alliance, the [France-based] Ariane Group faces pricing pressure from SpaceX, which offers launch prices as low as $62 million for its Falcon 9 rocket. It has specifically developed the Ariane 6 rocket to compete with the Falcon 9 booster. But there are a couple of problems with this. Despite efforts to cut costs, the two variants of the Ariane 6 will still cost at least 25 percent more than SpaceX's present-day prices. Moreover, the Ariane 6 will not fly until 2020 at the earliest, by which time Falcon 9 could offer significantly cheaper prices on used Falcon 9 boosters if it needed to. (The Ariane 6 rocket is entirely expendable). With this background in mind, the chief executive of Ariane Group, Alain Charmeau, gave an interview to the German publication Der Spiegel. The interview was published in German, but a credible translation can be found here. During the interview, Charmeau expressed frustration with SpaceX and attributed its success to subsidized launches for the U.S. government.
When pressed on the price pressure that SpaceX has introduced into the launch market, Charmeau's central argument is that this has only been possible because, "SpaceX is charging the U.S. government 100 million dollar per launch, but launches for European customers are much cheaper." Essentially, he says, launches for the U.S. military and NASA are subsidizing SpaceX's commercial launch business. However, the pay-for-service prices that SpaceX offers to the U.S. Department of Defense for spy satellites and cargo and crew launches for NASA are below those of what other launch companies charge. And while $100 million or more for a military launch is significantly higher than a $62 million commercial launch, government contracts come with extra restrictions, reviews, and requirements that drive up this price.
When pressed on the price pressure that SpaceX has introduced into the launch market, Charmeau's central argument is that this has only been possible because, "SpaceX is charging the U.S. government 100 million dollar per launch, but launches for European customers are much cheaper." Essentially, he says, launches for the U.S. military and NASA are subsidizing SpaceX's commercial launch business. However, the pay-for-service prices that SpaceX offers to the U.S. Department of Defense for spy satellites and cargo and crew launches for NASA are below those of what other launch companies charge. And while $100 million or more for a military launch is significantly higher than a $62 million commercial launch, government contracts come with extra restrictions, reviews, and requirements that drive up this price.
Falcon 9 FT payload to LEO: 22,800 kg
Ariane 64 payload to LEO: 20,000 kg
A64 launch cost: 90 million Euro = US$106 million
Even at $100 million, SpaceX is charging the U.S. government less than Ariane would be.
SpaceX's success is a mix of factors. Part of it is that they did take a good design approach - combining both reusability and disposability and mass production into a single rocket line. Many identical (or near identical engines per rocket), and many rockets produced, means a very large number of engines, meaning you get good at making them, cheaply. Very similar upper and lower stages, and again a large number of rockets, means - again - you get good at making them cheaply, and can quickly go through development iterations. Any accidents in the development process, while painful, only take out a single disposable launch vehicle and its payload (accidents are much more painful for obligate-reusable rockets). Eventually you get a good, cheap-to-manufacture rocket with a lot of flight hours. If you can then have that same rocket then become reusable... the game is changed.
Most new "game changer" designs have called for just one of the above philosophies. OTRAG, for example, was based around the idea that mass production of identical stages as cheaply as possible. It was to have terrible performance (and certainly no reusability), but be so cheap to make that it would overcome this. Skylon, on the other end was to go high-tech and be so affordably reusable that you could use it like an airplane. OTRAG, for its part, would have been inherently limited in its ability to lower launch costs (if at all) due to the veritable skyscraper of stacked stages you have to build, which are trashed each time. Skylon would have gotten almost no mass production benefits, a much slower learning curve, and any accident would have taken out a launch vehicle that is not cheaply replaceable. SpaceX's choice of the middle ground rather than going hard toward either philosophical extreme really seems to have been the wise choice.
That of course doesn't mean that SpaceX's approach is the only one that could have worked. For example, I kind of like the idea of launching rockets as floating spar platforms. It means you have to build them capable of withstanding saltwater exposure (more restrictive alloy and design selection) and deal with engine-water interactions at launch. But it means you have no diameter restrictions due to overland transport (make it as big as you want!), nor any pads to damage if something goes wrong - just tow, fill, and go. As an example. But what matters is, SpaceX's approach turned out to be a good one. And this combined with the "we can't fire people" environment that its competition operated in, once SpaceX had crossed that capital moat, the writing was on the wall.
Give a boy a gun and you arm him for a day. Teach him how to make a gun, and the whole metaphor breaks down.
BFR is a privately funded next-generation reusable launch vehicle and spacecraft system developed by SpaceX
SpaceX Payload Fairing Survives Despite Missing Recovery Net by 'a Few Hundred Meters'
In-orbit refueling
The last time I had an ARPA contract, we had to hire a part-time accountant just for that one contract. We had 6-7 developers total. There really is a vastly increased compliance and accounting responsibility when you have a government contract vs. a commercial one. This is in part because so many people have ripped off the government that they have to check everything.
Bruce Perens.