
Europe says SpaceX “dominating” launch, vows to develop Falcon 9-like rocket - jseliger
https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/06/europe-says-spacex-dominating-launch-vows-to-develop-falcon-9-like-rocket/
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ChuckMcM
This is perhaps the key sentence in this article -- "... _European space firms
have acknowledged SpaceX 's success, previously they have indicated that reuse
is not a viable option for a continent that only launches five to 10 rockets a
year. It would not be sustainable for a European factory to build just one
rocket a year_ ..."

The thinking at the time was that when you don't have a lot of things to throw
into space, having a single rocket that can work all year long doesn't make
market sense.

The alternative though is actually quite different, if you _do_ have a rocket
you can use and reuse to do all of that traffic the launch provider can make a
lot more money because their operational costs get amortized over a number of
launches for a small number (as small as 1) rockets.

This is also why I worry about Blue Origin, while Bezos can fund it at
$1B/year on his own nickel, with the money being sucked out of the ecosystem
by SpaceX it makes the return on that investment less and less assured. (I
know Bezos probably doesn't care but for "normal" businesses it is a
consideration that has to be met in order to secure working capital)

If they execute well, SpaceX can do to launch providers what TSMC did to chip
fabs. Make it unviable to have your own fab if you're not doing billions of
chips a year.

The latest launch of the Falcon Heavy was pretty impressive in demonstrating
its capabilities (and I appreciated that they let us watch the center core
crash[1]), it showed it can do everything a delta 4 heavy can do and more
(which can't make ULA happy). Recovering two of the three cores is still a
pretty big cost savings as well.

What I see is a company in the lead where their lead is giving them additional
advantage which puts them farther ahead and increases the difficulty of
catching them harder and harder.

[1] I have always assumed that once they got the recovery working well they
would start pushing the envelope to see how far they could push it before the
thing couldn't take it. It is in those exercises where you extend the
capability by finding the latest weak point in the system.

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jseliger
This reminds me of the noise around the "European Google" project from a few
years back. It seems that waiting until a startup has major success, then
trying to copy it, doesn't work well.

