Congratulations! An immensely important achievement, I’d say.
IMO, this success has a great implication for accessibility and sovereignty of the EU. Although ESA can launch from French Guiana, the spaceport is an ocean-away from Europe! That fact alone affects the cost and the launch cadence for Europe greatly.
Now they prove they can launch directly from Norway with their own production from Munich and elsewhere and that has immense potential for the future: much higher launch cadence, significant lower cost and always-on accessibility.
The only way Europe can have a Starlink similar network is to launch it from their own soil and reuse the first stage. Also from the perspective of security, launching spy and other military satellites from EU soil is the only practical possibility in this political climate.
> The only way Europe can have a Starlink similar network is to launch it from their own soil and reuse the first stage.
Unfortunately I'm not aware of any properly funded euro alternative to starlink that that has progressed beyond the conceptual stage. Even the Canadian company telesat is far behind and has a serious debt problem. The two separate "Chinese starlink" LEO networks being built right now are ahead of telesat in functional satellites in orbit.
The Canadian government recently promised 2.3 billion to telesat for polar area services. Realistically maybe some European nations might have the best chance of success by absorbing telesat and continuing to pay MDA to build the satellites for the network.
IRIS² looks on track? Granted, it is not a SpaceX competitor for consumer Internet. But it is an alternative for applications where reliance on SpaceX is not prudent.
Dont worry the US will hoodwink Europe back into be a compliant vassal of the Empire in a few years when they elect a democrat who pretends to be liberal and acting in good faith, probably AOC(ia).
Europe has had a space agency for a while now. So this story isn't "Europeans finally started to launch for space" but a private European company chose to launch from a continental location.
It's funny how we can't be celebrate a European achievement without trying to interpret it into relationship to the US.
It's not even the US in general, it's SpaceX specifically. Only the US and China have demonstrated reusable rockets, and only SpaceX demonstrated the actual reuse, the cadence and the economy of scale that it brings.
It means the laws of physics allow it, and anyone willing to invest the time and fiat to accomplish it can. This means the world will no longer need to rely on SpaceX for inexpensive lift to orbit through reusable first stages, which is objectively good. No different then China working towards obviating the need for ASML for EUV semiconductor manufacturing.
There are a lot more barriers to things in the real world. China has been dedicating immense effort and brainpower to cloning SpaceX, and they're still not especially close. I think a lot of us (certainly including myself) have no intuition for why this is, because we live in the software world where if you see something that is done then cloning it is generally just a matter of time and effort. But there's certainly some 'secret sauce' at SpaceX that does not seem easy to replicate.
That said I think this is awesome and hope the EU is able to make further advances. I have a very positive view of Musk, but the more competitors there are in space, the more likely we able to accelerate advances and efficiency in that domain. And I think everybody wins in that scenario.
> because we live in the software world where if you see something that is done then cloning it is generally just a matter of time and effort. But there's certainly some 'secret sauce' at SpaceX that does not seem easy to replicate
In software, thanks mostly to the open-source movement, we all have access to the same materials and manufacturing processes.
In manufacturing, there are huge differences in materials and processes that we need to account for. On the flip side, this can allow one to leapfrog the other rather than replicating them - it’s likely the next reusable Falcon 9-class vehicle will use a methalox engine that’ll be easier to maintain compared to Flacon 9’s kerolox ones. China has demonstrated a novel approach to vehicle recovery as well (in addition to landing legs). Future competitors will have access to materials current incumbents didn’t have and can’t easily adopt with their current supply chain.
People also forget SpaceX subverted a lot of the expectations for reusable rockets - they didn’t use parachutes, but opted to carry extra propellant for landing; they didn’t eject the engines, opting instead to reuse the whole stage; and they built landing barges because their rockets would launch towards the ocean, saving fuel for a boost back to the launch site. They also tested capsule landing using the launch abort rockets, but opted for parachutes and splashdowns instead. Still they keep all the RCS motors in the capsule, making their expendable service module very inexpensive in comparison to Boeing’s.
All these decisions point to proven mission architectures so that followers don’t need to explore architectures that were explored and dropped.
Just because you invest in it doesn't mean you end up with hugely cheap and scalable launch.
Europe has already invested far more in rocket then SpaceX did and isn't close.
If your capital efficiency is far lower, it might not be inexpensive. If you can get the scale because you don't have payloads, its going to be more expensive.
There is a incredibly long road between 'rocket can land' and 'cheap and scalable launch'. A long road most people don't see because its not as flashy as landing.
SpaceX was founded on making launches cheap. Arianespace only recently decided to develop reusable launch systems. Up to SpaceX demonstrating it was possible, the dominant approach to cheap launches was in making the expendable rocket cheap to manufacture. Nobody needs to be reminded the shuttle promised cheap access to space and failed at that.
Ariane 5 was the cheapest option available for a long time, now they're a bit behind. But the ESA is now working on reusable rockets too, it seems, with their Themis program.
> It's funny how we can't be celebrate a European achievement without trying to interpret it into relationship to the US.
It really isn’t funny. The US shat the bed and for now the repercussions are mainly being felt outside the US. When the US realises what it’s lost it’s going to be too late.
Oh we (the non idiots here) know full well what we lost. If Europe has a larger and more substantial science / technology community, that will just mean more trips/job offers in EU for me, so go Europe !
Britain’s Black Arrow could, but it launched from a RAF base in Australia. Definitely not continental Europe, but part of Europe if you consider it from the Eurovision point of view.
A real shame Britain abandoned their own research.
From a sovereignty perspective, does a launch from continental Europe actually matter when Arianespace/CNES/ESA has been launching from France for decades?
I do not think so, but anyway, it is definitely not a proof that we are further decoupling ourselves from the US, which is the claim made in the root comment. France has launched rockets from France for decades. Being an ocean away does not make Kourou reliant on the US.
I think the opposite because in this specific case we have the US which has the world's strongest navy, and the strongest navy by far in the Atlantic.
My opinion is that there is an implied reliance on the US "allowing" Europe to ship the rockets to Kourou and launch them there.
If our relations ever completely sour, the US might, for example, take over the shipping vessels going to Kourou, kinda like Europe takes over Russian shadow fleet vessels.
Now all of a sudden Europe has no means of launching rockets, except now it can launch to polar orbits. It might seem a stretch, but there is a non-zero chance that could happen, therefore it is better to have an alternative.
“Vulnerable to the US” can mean so many things that it practically loses all meaning. Even with a launchpad in continental Europe, they have many ways to interfere with this project, from disrupting the supply chain to carpet bombing the launch site.
But French Guiana is a geographically distant ex-colony, so there will always be a higher probability of future inaccessibility. Same applies to New Caledonia, Martinique, etc.
Although you're right about the history of French Guiana, using that term to put on the same level as New Caledonia is nonsense. (Same goes for Martinique.)
The sovereignty perspective here is the perspective of the sovereignty of the states that make up Europe not the sovereignty of the entity of the EU/Europe.
Though not every sovereign state has an army, see Iceland, Costa Rica, theoretically Japan, etc.
Well, there was Goddard, Korolev & quite a few others. But it could indeed have taken longer if the military implications were not clearly demonstrated by Von Braun.
Still, an interesting possibility of a fully civilian space program from the start & how it would look like & how it would be different.
Not only the military aspect. His staff literally were absorbed into the Russian sand US space programs. Von Braun himself famously designed the Saturn V.
>His staff literally were absorbed into the Russian sand US space programs.
Not really in case of the USSR. German group in Russia was isolated and Korolev didn't like competition. Soviet space program started by replicating German rocket, but once all production chains were created, it was off on its own course.
I highly recommend English translation of memoirs of Boris Chertok[0] to anyone interested in the history of Soviet space program.
That was just because the Russian's didn't trust "their" Germans as much as the Americans trusted "theirs". Operation Osoaviakhim was mostly about knowledge extraction, not about cooperation. The other difference was that the "Russian Germans" didn't go to Russia on their own will (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Osoaviakhim).
Once the knowledge was "extracted" the Germans were allowed to return though (good thing Stalin was already dead at that time).
Former Junkers engineer Brunolf Baade then went on to build the first and only German jet airliner for East Germany - which then of course was cancelled as soon as it was ready to enter production: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baade_152).
When the US government funded SpaceX, it was motivated in no small degree by a desire to not be permanently reliant on a geopolitical wildcard (Russia) for getting astronauts into orbit. Now that the US itself has become a geopolitical wildcard, savvy countries know that they need to seek out alternatives to SpaceX under more stable regimes.
Authoritarian dictatorships will always behave in seemingly irrational ways (from the perspective of sane politicians).
Dictators will always put their personal ambition and "career" first before their country's interests.
If Russia behaved rationally they would have made a deal with Ukraine (decades ago) that protected the rights of the Russian minorities in Ukraine and continued massively profiting from gas and oil exports into Europe.
Again, it's an "obsession" in the same way people can't look away from a three-legged dog.
Because you elected actors for president before. Because you had school shootings before. Because everything in the sky was always UFO to you, and everything on the ground either bigfoot or communists. Because you spread "democracy" that is shaped like bombs. Because you fund your own terrorists and drug cartels. Because you strong-arm world economies for non-reasons. Because you have nukes and eternal paranoia.
But yes, it did get much worse recently. Congratulations on noticing?
In what ways are you saying "Europe is absolutely obsessed with the US": politics, tech, capital markets, defense, economics, culture, cultural trends, unpredictability, something else? And how is that "obsessed" rather than "paying attention to"? Without you giving any specifics, can't tell if that is good-faith comment or trolling. For example US audiences are obsessed with Downton Abbey, or the Titanic, or the 15-minute city proposal, and Tarantino was obsessed with French names of McDonald's hamburgers, but noone built a broader claim on top of those.
What specific event and year were IYO the onset of what you're claiming?
You folks over the pond really do think we think about you that much don’t you, prior to Trump I didn’t give much of a shit what the US did (except when you were destabilising the Middle East but I guess everyone needs a hobby), was literally none of my business and I didn’t have to live there (fortunately).
Now we have to pay attention because what you always where in part is in full control and it’s essentially impossible to ignore.
I long for the days when we can go back to the happy place of ignoring your government day to day until it’s time for another Middle East intervention.
Til then and for the avoidance of any doubt, I loathe Trump, I don’t like the people in his government, I don’t like the people who voted for him and the ones who didn’t vote and could have, the only people in America I have any sympathy for is the ones who voted for anyone but him/this shit show, the rest of you got what you deserved and will continue to do so.
So with that as your president if you still believe in American Exceptionalism you can shove it.
You talk about it as if it's little cliques of students talking about each other in a cafeteria. It's not. It's a giant economy with a giant military that affects everyone's wellbeing.
What nonsense, most Europeans who are not politically super active might watch some US movies and consume things from the US like IPhones, but that doesn't mean obsessed. Most people are just mildly amused by US politics. You have serious selection bias if you think something else.
Perhaps, but most people don’t think about those things as US things. As for iPhones they were “designed in Cupertino” but made in China like almost everything else these days.
>It's because Europe is absolutely obsessed with the United States and obsessed with Americans.
Is this the new cope?
The USA is a Goliath on the world stage. The deranged tweets of your president move global markets and the next time Israel manipulates him into starting another war it might not be Iran, it might be Denmark, or Canada.
People pay close attention to the US not because they want to buy because they basically have to.
They started developing this rocket in the late 2010s, way before the current US craziness (or the current level of craziness anyway). Independent access to space is always desirable for countries that can muster the resources, but this is just one of many companies that appeared back then as a response to SpaceX's initial success.
> One would think that ze germans would be among the first to be conquering space
After the horrors of WWII, Europe decided it would rather do things collectively than each country doing its own thing. This resulted in wonderful things like Concorde, fast rail, Airbus, and Ariane. Europe became more than the sum of its parts.
They are - but in cooperation with others. Parts of the Orion capsule of the current Artemis mission program are based on the German ATV, which is a capsule which was developed to supply ISS. On ISS there are German modules like Galileo. German Spacelab was a major component of many Space Shuttle missions. German companies like Zeiss provided optics and laser components for Apollo. To name a few, besides lots of satellites and other things. However after WW2 there were different political decisions, so that Germany won't build its own rockets, but German technology was key to Saturn V and Ariane rockets.
Aside from technology, Germany also got major control centers and mission planning capability in Cologne and Oberpfaffenhofen.
Most components are there, but not the political will to go on a national mission.
I mean, Operation Paperclip and Von Braun were central to the success of the Apollo program. The Soviets had a similar postwar-German-capture program, if I remember correctly.
I'd split it into 2 camps. Elites who realize Europe isn't a unified group or has a military strong enough for defense..
And people who get wet when France says they are going to send soldiers to Ukraine and it never materializes.
The general population has 0 understanding of international relations. It's the United States and China right now. Any other belief comes from someone who has read 0 international relations Realism books.
Its not that Europeans havent read Mearsheimer. its that for the best part of three hundred years the whole of Europe has been trying that same realist script until there was nothing left but total ruin across the entire continent. Europeans who created the EU knew about balance of power geopolitics so well, they created this slow bureaucratic mess specifically to stop Germany and France sliding back into the same old lethal habit. While clumsy positioning between the US and China is a headache in the present moment for Europe, compared to a tedious Union Europeans prefer reawakenings of 1914 in their backyard. Well at least so far.
I would bet any amount that if you go to a random European city and stop 100 random people on the street you'd be lucky if one person has even heard of Mearsheimer. I think you're also overthinking how the EU got created. I don't think pre-EU Europe was on the brink of violence either. It was more IMO simplistic (but possibly correct, who knows) thinking that it's stronger (economically) as a block. A lot of present day Europe issues that might lead to bigger problems are potentially worse because of the EU.
The primary goal of this was to prevent another war by joining european economies together economically. It's not 'overthinking it'. It quite literally is the main reason and you can go and read the speeches from the politicians at the time to confirm this.
Heres a direct quote from the declaration itself
> The solidarity in production thus established will make it plain that any war between France and Germany becomes not merely unthinkable, but materially impossible.
The fact that the european powers (with the exception of russia) are largely at peace with each other and haven't had a major war with each other since the second world war is very unusual given european history.
Definitely far from my expertise but I think you're contradicting yourself.
I am talking about the formalization that is specifically the modern European Union. You are talking as if it's some inevitable consequence of earlier efforts.
> Europeans who created the EU knew about balance of power geopolitics so well, they created this slow bureaucratic mess specifically to stop Germany and France sliding back into the same old lethal habit.
I don't think anything you're saying is strengthening this statement that I had an issue with.
The Maastricht Treaty which is what created modern day EU was driven by other concerns, asking Gemini yields: "To answer your second question: No, everyday Europeans in 1992 were not primarily thinking about WWII.
By the time the Maastricht Treaty was being drafted, the public was reacting to a completely different era of history. They were focused on the collapse of the Soviet Union, the opening of Eastern Europe, and the need to compete economically with the United States and Japan in a rapidly globalizing world. The defining event on the public's mind was the Fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, not the end of WWII."
So you are right that the processes that eventually led to the formation of the EU started after WW-II due to concerns related to that war. But specifically the EU as it stands today with its current structure and agreements was not formed due to those considerations. Europe could have continued with the previous arrangements. At least that's my take and I don't think anything you're saying contradicts it. I'll admit to a certain lack of knowledge so happy to learn more about Europe pre-EU or why what I'm saying is still wrong.
EDIT: I guess one can see how the reunification of Germany was a factor that could have made people consider the world wars. That said the creation of the EU was a major change compared to previous arrangements.
EDIT2: When I read the EU site you linked to I get a strong sense of "backsplaining" as if it was written after the fact to appear like the EU was just part of a process that goes back to WW-II. The title says "History of the EU – 1945-59" but in 1945-1959 there was no EU. Didn't the term European Union only show up circa 1992? So this is perhaps the "history of Europe" but not the history of the European Union? I could be totally wrong. I am not European but I did live through these events and follow the news (well, not WW-II but the fall of the USSR, Germany's unification, and the establishment of the modern day EU). What's of interest to me in the context of this specific question/debate is what were the concerns of the Europeans and their leaders entering into the agreements that formed the modern day EU.
Coupled or uncoupled, an equal relationship between the US and the EU is much healthier. Europe should have an economy, military and industrial capacity similar to the US.
While in the current case I agree it is the path that should be taken, ideally I would prefer efficient relations, where people cooperate rather than having to duplicate everything because they don't trust their neighbor (should I make my bread because the baker might decide to poison me?!).
But having educated people everywhere is hard, so some people, because they don't get how some stuff works, they try to abuse friends and allies and make things worse (inefficient) for everybody in the process.
I've always assumed that the reason there aren't many launch sites in Europe because the booster stage falls back to Earth, and generally you want that to be over the sea. People get cross if rockets fall on their houses. If you're using the Earth's axial rotation as a helper that means launching heading east, and in Europe east is pretty much always over land. That's why most spaceports are either by an ocean (USA, Japan) or over a huge area of land no one lives in (Russia).
Then, it depends on what you need to do. A 3x cost if you deploy a strategic constellation is fine. A 3x cost if you want to launch huge payloads for a Mars trip (I know costs were for LEO, just giving an example) is probably uncompetitive.
They are right now, but if Japan can do it, and China can do it so can Europe and by the way, so can Australia, New Zealand and Canada they have the abilities they just have to have the will and if they haven’t learned anything recently, they better develop the will. Once again congratulations.
None of the countries you name is even close to SpaceX. Not even close. Their most ambitious prototypes are on par or behind the rocket SpaceX has been flying for a decade commercially.
The fact is that no one cares about reusability. Expendable rockets are cheap enough for governments and commercial entities alike, even for constellation launches. Starlink architecture only makes sense as a justification for the F9 launch cadence, and even then the actual satellites are managed as trains.
China and Japan have done it. You may not like the fact they have done it once or twice, they know how to do it from a technical standpoint and that’s only gonna grow in the future particularly China don’t act obtuse.
Except for the fact that SpaceX had a hard time getting any contracts at first because they were all going to Boeing and Lockheed Martin since the 1990s and even when SpaceX came to the market they had to compete at first with ULA and fact that they made it cheaper by orders by magnitude. Except for the fact that Musk almost went personally bankrupt trying to get SpaceX off the ground. Except for all those facts yea sure maybe... haha nope you're still wrong.
Yeah, I really hate this revisionism of Elon as an extremely wealthy apartheid emerald mine heir who was a dumb guy who happened to get lucky at paypal and then stole all his money from the government while operating a car and rocket company. There is plenty to criticize about him, but SpaceX dramatically decreased cost to orbit which had reliance on Russian technology at the time.
> extremely wealthy apartheid emerald mine heir who was a dumb guy who happened to get lucky at paypal and then stole all his money from the government while operating a car and rocket company.
> SpaceX dramatically decreased cost to orbit which had reliance on Russian technology at the time.
Both can be (and are) true at the same time. Elon hired/partnered the right people and didn't have capacity to mess all the companies he owned into oblivion. His main skill is bullshiting investors, the government and the public.
Musk was raised affluent in apartheid-era South Africa, his father had some connection to Zambian emerald trading/mining, and Musk's companies have benefited enormously from public contracts and policy. He's not stupid.
Musk has benefited enormously from public contracts and policy, but all the questionable ones are in Tesla (and especially originally solarcity, but that got folded into Tesla).
The government contracts that made SpaceX were all open bid, where SpaceX bid an better solution than anything that any of the established companies did, at literally half the price. Falcon 9 was a massive gift to the US government, in that it drove the entire industry to halve the prices they extracted from the government. Dragon was just as good.
That they also built a profitable launch company out of it just highlights how much of an outlier SpaceX is. They sold the US government a dollar for fifty cents, made a profit doing it, and ended up driving half the rockets already flying out of the business.
If I drive my German-made VW sedan on American roads - how many people consider it an American car, and wonder if Germany has a real car industry or not?
This took about eight years of work by a private company (funded by US VC and an ex-SpaceX leader). This wasn't an intentional decision to decouple from the US, if that's what you're implying, but a business decision.
Ariane is from the ESA, which is an organization under EU. The claim was that "EU is finally decoupling itself from the USA". My point is: the EU already has Ariane, for instance. It decoupled a long time ago.
I think we are stronger together. European technology has been critical to many important American space missions, and that should continue to be the case.
An ecosystem where we develop things independently is one where everyone loses.
Yes, definitely, but being together by choice instead of by necessity is vastly preferable.
Especially given that recent history has shown us that we're back to "power" being the only language spoken.
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Rel: The ecosystem thing.
I would challenge that, because if there's one thing where the US has had absurd leverage over the EU (and world, for that matter), then it's tech ecosystems.
A healthy ecosystem would not be owned by SV/US alone.
So right now, we're not really "strong together" but rather weakly dependent. That should be remediated, and decoupling like this is exactly the tool for that.
>Especially given that recent history has shown us that we're back to "power" being the only language spoken.
"Power being the only language spoken", never left in the first place in order to get back to it, it's how the world always worked and will always work.
Granted, power wasn't actually the "language spoken", but more accurately it was the stick ensuring the enforcement of the terms agreed within the "language spoken", a lesson as old as time that many in EU forgot after post-USSR collapse and now have to re-learn it, but at a heavy cost and with added interest.
"Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it", couldn't be more true.
Except its not actually obvious. The US achieved most when they worked mostly by themselves. And the recent explosion in US activity, specially SpaceX is also highly separated from Europe.
There is a very credible argument to be made that excessive cooperation leads to incredibly heavy overly political programs that are completely static and can't adjust because of international agreements.
That doesn't mean working together isn't good but they way they have been has been pretty questionably in many ways (along with a lot of space policy).
I dont think the EU is stronger when they get bullied and undermined by trump, or whichever american president decides to dust off trump's playbook in the future
I'd prefer to use this opportunity to talk about this as a success as well without this America decoupling nonsense doomer loop too.
Does anyone know if folks in Germany are posting about the huge ego and phallus shaped memes for this company doing something that SpaceX and Blue Origin were also doing? I'm guessing not, because the lens is "decoupling" and not "America bad" like so many felt inclined to report when our private companies were successfully launching rockets.
Anyway, congrats to the team at Isar. I like to celebrate these successes around the world as further space exploration, colonization, science, and economic development benefit us as a species and there is a lot of room for a lot of competitors.
A non-reusable launcher that can put small payloads into a Polar orbits only, due to launch site latitude and lack of an orbital bus. It's fairly 1960s stuff.
So what should they do nothing? They have to get started somehow if Japan and China can do it so can Europe, and I think long-term once again, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand won’t be far behind…
I think New Zealand is ahead. RocketLab was the second company in the world after SpaceX to get a privately developed launch vehicle to orbit, back in 2017. They've now had 86 successful launches from their NZ launch site.
The Taco section, with the way the present American administration has behaved. Most of our friends/allies are looking to protect themselves andbe prepared to go on without us. All it took was two years of buffoonery.
only four countries in the world have private/commercial space launch capacity, and SpaceX towers over everyone else so I'd say this is doing pretty alright compared to the rest of the world
As EV’s have shown, I don’t think they’re gonna be ahead for long and long-term the current technology is just a steppingstone because damaging the ozone layer can’t go on forever with the current technique being used something else. Better has to come forward.
Multiple European nations gaining their own independent launch capabilities will merely result in the sinking of ESA and ArianeSpace. Look forward to lots of infighting in the near future.
ESA is going to remain on the mission/payload side. ArianeSpace makes sense as a launch services provider handling everything that's not the rocket. ArianeGroup (the company that actually builds the rockets) will just become the French rocket company that will end up competing with the Italian and German ones.
Like most "small rocket companies" they'll come to the conclusion that they need bigger rockets to launch bigger payloads. Rockets that compete directly with Ariane 6. With some luck these will be reusable to, making Ariane 6 and ArianeSpace obsolete.
ESA and ArianeSpace will slowly but surely decay into obsolescence.
You seem to be confused about what organizations do what.
ESA neither launches or builds rockets. They are an end-user, and they own the launch infrastructure in Kourou. Both these roles will exist long after Ariane is gone.
Arianespace does not build rockets. It's a launch services provider, they purchase the rockets from other companies, handle all the logistics and manage the launchpad. It's in no way married to Ariane 6, and it has in the past and still does sell launches on multiple different rockets from different companies. There will be demand for these services even after Ariane the rocket is gone.
ArianeGroup is the company that builds Ariane 6. They are a complex co-owned project between Airbus and Safran, with workshare distributed between France and Germany. They make other things than the Ariane 6, notably the French SLBM. Eventually the Ariane 6 will go away, because it will be obsolete, but that will not necessarily mean that ArianeGroup will go under, because they have an another subsidiary called ArianeWorks developing a new rocket, called Themis.
Just for context, when Boeing completed the 747 Airbus wasn't even a thing. 5 decades later they have caught up in most categories and even surpassed in some. Who knows, maybe something similar will happen again?
Airbus did not come into existence out of nowhere. It is the result of merging some companies that had some ancestry going back to the time of aviation pioneers.
A good historical nugget is that the Americans got a huge leg up in the space race by importing the Germans who worked on the V-2 program.
Germans killed Soviets by the millions. If you were a German of value (like a rocket scientist) you were eager to surrender to the Americans before the Soviets could get their hands on you.
If you were the Americans, you distrusted the Soviets already, so it was a win-win.
Yes a good thing to point out, however the American initiative was more successful, was it not?
Largely because raw numbers aside, most of the top talent wanted to avoid the Soviets and thus the US was the only logical option. That is, part of what made the American job on this easier is top German talent anticipated some "Operation Osoaviakhim" (or worse) scenario and thus sought out the US as the only way to get out ahead of it.
von Braun made major contributions to NASA. My understanding is relatively speaking, the Soviets got the scraps. Not that it made no impact, but just to say the impact of the Germans on the American space program should not be understated, and I don't think it would be accurate to assess the fruits of these two competing operations as equivalent.
von Braun and others had a major hand in the Saturn V. Who did the Soviets manage to seize of equal caliber?
USA got the cream of the crop of the managers of the German missile program, while the USSR got the workers, who actually did the work with their hands and built the parts for the rockets. (One exception was Helmut Gröttrup, the head of the V-2’s guidance and telemetry systems.)
In fact, after the war the USSR has briefly reconstituted the manufacturing of V-2 in Germany, employing thousands of people, before transplanting this entire industry to the USSR. This dramatically lifted the level of Soviet manufacturing and relevant metallurgy.
von Braun's dissertation was on engine design and testing. But when he built the Redstone missile in the USA, he ordered the engine from a US company -- the engine which was already a generation ahead, compared to the imported German engines which the US engineers studied after the war.
Meanwhile, the Soviets have developed even better engines, completely on their own, though with the important parts built using the materials and the equipment brought from Germany.
So it is debatable whether having the German higher-ups and having a greater continuity with German design philosophy was a good thing or a liability.
It is less well known, but France have also imported a significant number of ex-Peenemunde engineers for their program. And their engines developed in a way different from both the American ones and the Soviet ones -- which definitively shows that although internalizing the German know-how was the starting point for everyone, it did not define the path of subsequent development.
Of course, the engines were not the whole story. The Germans took to the USA the advanced prototypes of the inertial guidance systems which were developed for the missiles that were supposed to come after the V-2. And the Soviets got Helmut Gröttrup. This did have its effects in both cases.
> USA got the cream of the crop of the managers of the German missile program, while the USSR got the workers
That's a bit oversimplified. The Russians got quite a few important scientists and engineers in other areas (aircraft design, nuclear physics, electronics, radar, optics), they just didn't make as good use of them as the US (e.g. the 'American Germans' essentially won the space race for the US).
great comment, just wanted to add a little: all three countries were pioneering rocketry in the 20-30s, more or less in equal measure.
I don't know why this WW2 rocket discussion happened to begin with, but people here don't seem to understand that there is no magical inherent technical skill which is unique and irreplaceable. Experience helps to speed things up, sure, but it can be acquired by any program given time and resources, with no talent blockers.
They got a leg up and still the Russians with Sputnik got into space first, on top of splitting Korea and winning in Vietnam and having the nuclear bomb fall into their lap and to top it off they appear to have the Manchurian candidate in the White House.
The Russians conscripted more German rocket scientists than the Americans got through Operation Paperclip, both programs were bootstrapped with German expertise. Americans got ~1,600, Russians more like 6,000.
With fairness to the Soviets, the USSR's reputation for rocket artillery was nearly as impressive as Germany's in WWII. The Allies had less experience scaling and deploying the technology, so they had more to gain by taking in the Peenemünde researchers.
> If you were a German of value (like a rocket scientist) you were eager to surrender to the Americans before the Soviets could...
Misleading. Pretty much all Germans were eager to surrender to the Western Allies - US/UK/France. That became the German government's official top priority in the closing days of the war, and Eisenhower threatened to seal the Western Front (to German soldiers and civilians fleeing the Soviets) when the Germans dragged their heels on his terms of surrender.
True, I just meant that if you had something of value (like rocket expertise) you would be more likely to get favorable terms. And you knew the Soviets would be extra interested in you. Thus the added "eagerness".
But yes the point is on the whole, Germans did not want to surrender to the Soviets. Germans didn't kill millions of American civilians. They didn't level American cities.
So, it was perfectly logical as Germany collapsed for any German to fear the retribution of the Soviet armed forces, who they had every reason to see as filled with a rage and a sense of purpose no American would have been able to contemplate.
For any unfamiliar with the history, Russia was a mass murdering machine in this era, vaporizing tens of millions of people, including Russians, in very short spans of time without even a second thought.
We all know Germans was. And some people would fling fecal allegations that “so was the US!”. No. German and Russian actions were categorically different than wartime casualties (even brutal, possibly criminal, wartime casualties like fire bombing heavily civilian enemy areas like Dresden)
For anyone actually unfamiliar with history, this is a gross exaggregation made with a sole purpose of equalizing nazi crimes with what happened in the soviet union.
History does not work this way, in the early modernity masses were cohesive and industrialized, and so were the crimes and atrocities.
Every developed country got to it, but what makes nazis different is that the regime was built with the sole purpose of commiting atrocities, hence the outstanding scale and character of the matter.
Congrats! How come European companies still haven't managed to match SpaceX's capabilities? Europe has an incredible talent pool, especially in aerospace, and some of the world’s best expertise in precision engineering, instrumentation, sensors, avionics, and other hard-tech subsystems. A huge amount of the expertise and supply chain for these components is concentrated in Europe.
So what are we missing? Is it mainly systems integration, manufacturing scale, risk tolerance, organizational structure, or the willingness to iterate as aggressively as SpaceX? It feels like Europe has many of the pieces needed to build world-class launch systems, but hasn't yet put them together at the same scale and speed.
Most of the US space launch startups have failed. And in Europe it is harder to even try.
There was a confluence of several factors which helped SpaceX to succeed, and not the least of these was the employee number one. For many years, Tom Mueller has been working in his free time on rather large liquid fuel amateur rockets, which he was building in his garage and which he was launching from some amateur rocketry facilities in the desert. In terms of regulation it was a relatively accessible hobby in the US. At the time Musk found him, he was working on the original "BFR" -- a very large liquid fuel amateur rocket. So the deal was to invest serious money into the project and scale the same no nonsense approach to a small orbital launch vehicle. They were in LA, the center of US aerospace manufacturing, so through Tom's professional connections and knowledge of who was who in the industry, they were able to source the necessary materials, components, and to find the key personnel for their company. Significantly, NASA has already spent probably a decade or more trying to get somebody to produce a cheap small launch vehicle. This did not directly affect SpaceX, but it did fund the R&D for example at Barber-Nichols, which enabled them to offer a turbopump for SpaceX engine at a much lower cost than it would have been possible otherwise.
At first, Musk and Co thought that they would be able to develop the rocket for a few million dollars. But even in the US regulatory environment it turned out that doing everything in compliance with regulations raised the costs to well over a hundred million dollars.
So, Tom's hobby + Musk's activism + industrial ecosystem in the area + NASA's prior support of component vendors + being at the right time to snag the International Space Station delivery contract were all important for SpaceX thriving where so many others have failed.
There are some (many?) European companies which are considered as least as much as a jobs program as anything else.
In 2018, Alain Charmeau (in)famously expressed frustration with SpaceX in an interview with Der Spiegel and rejected reusability with these words:
“Let us say we had ten guaranteed launches per year in Europe and we had a rocket which we can use ten times—we would build exactly one rocket per year,” he said. “That makes no sense. I cannot tell my teams: ‘Goodbye, see you next year!’”
A more recent example would be the Future Combat Air System (FCAS) project which was officially cancelled in June 2026, due to (?) industrial rivalry and leadership disputes, with a side order of politics.
Incidentally, the early investment for Isar came from Bülent Altan, the Turkish ex-SpaceX guy who was in charge of the guidance system for Falcon-1, Falcon-9 and Dragon.
Europe is a vibe based concept, a place can be European or not depending on the vibes. Even the east west central etc. are completely vibe based. Portugal for example is Eastern European country, meanwhile Romania is central according to some textbooks.
Something they might have is a lot of strain gauges around the rocket. They can tell if the rocket is bending and compressing (and how) -- but they are also essentially high-speed microphones. Valves make sounds (cause vibrations) and they are easy to spot if you have high-speed samples of your strain gauges. You can also triangulate distances if you have multiple strain gauges with synchronized high-speed samples.
It's good practice to dump data into several flash memories + transmit live. The live transmit is likely only a small summary of all the data that they capture -- distributed flash memory locations is a cheap way to increase the chances of getting useful data after a boom/crash (put them in orange water tight containers that can float + give them a beep-beep radio transmitter).
I wonder whether the Sámi people have been consulted or compensated for the use of their traditional lands as a rocket launch site. Given Norway’s long history of suppressing Sámi people and their land rights, I'd be interested to know how that was handled.
Just south of the launchpad lies Bukkekjerka, a protected Sami cultural monument. Prior to Christianity, sacrifices were made within a cave facing the sea. In most recent times, for the past half-century, there has been an annual open-air church service, which attracts many from across Andøya – perhaps even some who remember or even resided in the disappeared town of Haugnes.
FYI Norway is not in the EU. Whether they are European is a matter of perspective and I'm not touching that subject any further! Deutschland is in the EU.
Norway is as close as you can get without formally being a member. It's not just the EEA, it's also a member of essentially all EU programs that aren't closed off for non-member states. That Norway is European is not a matter of perspective.
Do you know any Norwegians? I don't have an opinion but many of my Norwegian relatives think the European thing is not just terminology and is a label from outside. Swedes and Fins too. [edit: I changed a fair bit of wording in the first few minutes of the post]
> Whether they are European is a matter of perspective
What? Scandinavia isn't part of Europe now? The "EU" is an organization, "Europe" is a continent. "European" includes everybody living in Europe (and yes, that even includes the Brits and most Russians).
Looking at a map Norway is on the same continent as Vietnam so that statement makes no sense. Please have some sort of context and understanding before making such statements. They "seem" to be part of Europe but they have historically wanted to have it both ways: one foot in one foot out. Go research it yourself I am probably totally wrong! HN comments are not a reference source.
There's a clearly defined border between the continents Europe and Asia.
I guess the confusion comes from thinking of "European" as some sort of cultural identity (which frankly doesn't exist, unless you only look at the last hundred years or so, and even that is generous), instead of the people living in the geographical region called "Europe".
I shouldn't have to explain this stuff. The Nordic countries are exceptionalist in my understanding from talking to them. It's an easy search to go down this rabbit hole. It's a little different from Catalan wanting to be independent but still European. This is not my area of knowledge I have just been exposed multiple times first hand. Where are my scando fin buddies to chime in? Lulz
The sooner Europe cuts itself off from the US crazy billionaires, the better - on all levels (software and manufacture processes are the two biggest issues). Today we already could see the US surrender team crawling up to dictator Putin. Enough is enough - agent Krasnov needs to be isolated.
Americans have to hope that the US will move past trumo and not repeat that mistake, but for europeans its most prudent to prepare for a world where such a corrupt wannabe distator doesnt have have that much leverage over them.
The US and europe would be stronger together if the US acted in good faith. Absent that, decoupling is the right choice
Germany also has a crazy Communist party that is more in the pocket of Russia than AfD is -- but somehow that is almost never mentioned, not even in German media. It's quite big and influential.
What Europe needs to do to spur its tech sector is lower taxes.
A 2018 study shows tax increases significantly reduce innovation. A 1% increase in the top marginal income tax rate leads to a 2% reduction in patents and inventors, while a similar increase in corporate taxes causes even larger declines.
How can it be the first European rocket? There’s the ESA! Are you telling me we have all these organisations and none of them have ever launched from their own continent?
French Guiana is not a colony, it is a region of France. People who live there have the same constitutional rights as anyone living in mainland France.
It has the same status in France as Alaska does in the US.
That's legally true, but I think it misses the distinction between formal political status and the legacy of colonialism.
French Guiana is an overseas department of France, and its residents have French citizenship and constitutional rights. But that doesn't mean the historical relationship was equivalent to mainland France, or that the effects of that history disappeared when the legal status changed.
The same point applies elsewhere: Guinea became independent from French colonial rule in 1958, but independence didn't magically erase the economic structures, institutions, and inequalities inherited from colonialism. Today, a large share of Guinea's population still lives in poverty despite the country's enormous natural-resource wealth.
So "it's not a colony" is correct as a matter of constitutional law. But using that fact to imply that colonial history is irrelevant to present-day economic and social conditions is a much stronger claim, and one that's harder to defend.
While I agree with your analysis, would you think is the best to use the same generic term "colonialism" for both the situations in French Guyana and let's say Venezuela in the last year? I would prefer more words to differentiate a bit, but maybe that's just me.
How does it compare to Alaska? Wasn't it purchased as a colony from russians to exploit Alaskan gold with complete disreagrd for opinion of the native population?
Guianans tend to get pissed off if outsiders suggest in any way that they are any different as a French region from l'Hexagone (the French mainland). Your banging on about colonies would not be well received there.
In the political sense, «Western Europe» is typically taken to be «NATO Europe», and «Eastern Europe» is «Warsaw Pact Europe». Which is different from a strict geographic definition.
You are thinking about Vostochny in Russian Far East. Plesetsk was an early ICBM launch site that started doing orbital launches in 1966. It was the busiest spaceport in Soviet times, and the cumulative number of orbital launches from Plesetsk still probably exceeds those from Florida.
No. It’s simply about accessibility and sovereignty. Even though the ESA can launch from French Guiana, the space port is an ocean-away from Europe! How much do you think that fact will affect the cost and the launch cadence for Europe?
Now they prove they can launch directly from Norway with their own production from Munich and elsewhere and that has immense potential for the future: much higher cadence, significant lower cost and always-on accessibility.
The only way, Europe can have a Starlink similar network is to launch from their own soil and reuse the first stage. Also from the perspective of security, launching spy and other military satellites from European soil is the only practical possibility in this political climate.
The "Onward and Upward" cube sats were deployed to Sun-synchronous orbits, with a roughly polar inclination.
Similarly, launches from USSF Base Vandenberg take a southerly trajectory, so it can be used for orbits like that.
Rocket launches from continental Europe have been challenging because of the population centers, and the unpopularity of things exploding over their heads, and falling on their houses and businesses. USA and Russia have some quite ideal sites that avoid flying over populated areas.
Velocity is a vector, not simply a rate. Launches and orbits are three-dimensional.
What would be a great technological achievement would be launching from French Guiana (5.2° N) and then making a plane-change maneuver to achieve a polar orbit (90° inclination). All that bonus eastward velocity from the Earth's rotation would turn into a penalty they'd need to compensate for no reason, when they had a spaceport more suitable for that polar inclination.
The fact not many launches happen from continental Europe has nothing to do with capabilities of the space industry or lack of expertise, but rather location.
Europe is far from the equator and densely populated so rocket launches from there are more costly, and failures can have a higher risk to life.
Arianne space has had 350+ successful missions after 45 years of operations, with most of those launching from overseas territories.
I don't understand the one country vs all of Europe - given a fixed population, being united in a single country surely makes everything a bit more efficient than being split in many small countries? India is much bigger than "all of Europe".
Congratulations! An immensely important achievement, I’d say.
IMO, this success has a great implication for accessibility and sovereignty of the EU. Although ESA can launch from French Guiana, the spaceport is an ocean-away from Europe! That fact alone affects the cost and the launch cadence for Europe greatly.
Now they prove they can launch directly from Norway with their own production from Munich and elsewhere and that has immense potential for the future: much higher launch cadence, significant lower cost and always-on accessibility.
The only way Europe can have a Starlink similar network is to launch it from their own soil and reuse the first stage. Also from the perspective of security, launching spy and other military satellites from EU soil is the only practical possibility in this political climate.
Europe has always had the Ariane family - it just wasn't really price-competitive and popular as of late.
> The only way Europe can have a Starlink similar network is to launch it from their own soil and reuse the first stage.
Unfortunately I'm not aware of any properly funded euro alternative to starlink that that has progressed beyond the conceptual stage. Even the Canadian company telesat is far behind and has a serious debt problem. The two separate "Chinese starlink" LEO networks being built right now are ahead of telesat in functional satellites in orbit.
The Canadian government recently promised 2.3 billion to telesat for polar area services. Realistically maybe some European nations might have the best chance of success by absorbing telesat and continuing to pay MDA to build the satellites for the network.
IRIS² looks on track? Granted, it is not a SpaceX competitor for consumer Internet. But it is an alternative for applications where reliance on SpaceX is not prudent.
Dont worry the US will hoodwink Europe back into be a compliant vassal of the Empire in a few years when they elect a democrat who pretends to be liberal and acting in good faith, probably AOC(ia).
This is a huge success, but it I think also tells us that the EU is further decoupling itself from the US. Slowly but steadily.
Which is obviously the right thing to do, but it's interesting that it's not just a hypothetical anymore.
Does it mean that?
Europe has had a space agency for a while now. So this story isn't "Europeans finally started to launch for space" but a private European company chose to launch from a continental location.
It's funny how we can't be celebrate a European achievement without trying to interpret it into relationship to the US.
Yes, they've had a space agency, but the only launchers are expensive legacy vehicles.
This launch is a move towards lower cost and more frequent launches, that in the US are provided by SpaceX.
It's not even the US in general, it's SpaceX specifically. Only the US and China have demonstrated reusable rockets, and only SpaceX demonstrated the actual reuse, the cadence and the economy of scale that it brings.
It means the laws of physics allow it, and anyone willing to invest the time and fiat to accomplish it can. This means the world will no longer need to rely on SpaceX for inexpensive lift to orbit through reusable first stages, which is objectively good. No different then China working towards obviating the need for ASML for EUV semiconductor manufacturing.
There are a lot more barriers to things in the real world. China has been dedicating immense effort and brainpower to cloning SpaceX, and they're still not especially close. I think a lot of us (certainly including myself) have no intuition for why this is, because we live in the software world where if you see something that is done then cloning it is generally just a matter of time and effort. But there's certainly some 'secret sauce' at SpaceX that does not seem easy to replicate.
That said I think this is awesome and hope the EU is able to make further advances. I have a very positive view of Musk, but the more competitors there are in space, the more likely we able to accelerate advances and efficiency in that domain. And I think everybody wins in that scenario.
> because we live in the software world where if you see something that is done then cloning it is generally just a matter of time and effort. But there's certainly some 'secret sauce' at SpaceX that does not seem easy to replicate
In software, thanks mostly to the open-source movement, we all have access to the same materials and manufacturing processes.
In manufacturing, there are huge differences in materials and processes that we need to account for. On the flip side, this can allow one to leapfrog the other rather than replicating them - it’s likely the next reusable Falcon 9-class vehicle will use a methalox engine that’ll be easier to maintain compared to Flacon 9’s kerolox ones. China has demonstrated a novel approach to vehicle recovery as well (in addition to landing legs). Future competitors will have access to materials current incumbents didn’t have and can’t easily adopt with their current supply chain.
People also forget SpaceX subverted a lot of the expectations for reusable rockets - they didn’t use parachutes, but opted to carry extra propellant for landing; they didn’t eject the engines, opting instead to reuse the whole stage; and they built landing barges because their rockets would launch towards the ocean, saving fuel for a boost back to the launch site. They also tested capsule landing using the launch abort rockets, but opted for parachutes and splashdowns instead. Still they keep all the RCS motors in the capsule, making their expendable service module very inexpensive in comparison to Boeing’s.
All these decisions point to proven mission architectures so that followers don’t need to explore architectures that were explored and dropped.
Just because you invest in it doesn't mean you end up with hugely cheap and scalable launch.
Europe has already invested far more in rocket then SpaceX did and isn't close.
If your capital efficiency is far lower, it might not be inexpensive. If you can get the scale because you don't have payloads, its going to be more expensive.
There is a incredibly long road between 'rocket can land' and 'cheap and scalable launch'. A long road most people don't see because its not as flashy as landing.
SpaceX was founded on making launches cheap. Arianespace only recently decided to develop reusable launch systems. Up to SpaceX demonstrating it was possible, the dominant approach to cheap launches was in making the expendable rocket cheap to manufacture. Nobody needs to be reminded the shuttle promised cheap access to space and failed at that.
Ariane 5 was the cheapest option available for a long time, now they're a bit behind. But the ESA is now working on reusable rockets too, it seems, with their Themis program.
> It's funny how we can't be celebrate a European achievement without trying to interpret it into relationship to the US.
It really isn’t funny. The US shat the bed and for now the repercussions are mainly being felt outside the US. When the US realises what it’s lost it’s going to be too late.
Oh we (the non idiots here) know full well what we lost. If Europe has a larger and more substantial science / technology community, that will just mean more trips/job offers in EU for me, so go Europe !
Have there been other rocket launches from continental Europe?
Britain’s Black Arrow could, but it launched from a RAF base in Australia. Definitely not continental Europe, but part of Europe if you consider it from the Eurovision point of view.
A real shame Britain abandoned their own research.
From a sovereignty perspective, does a launch from continental Europe actually matter when Arianespace/CNES/ESA has been launching from France for decades?
Doesn't it matter if this part of France is an ocean away?
I do not think so, but anyway, it is definitely not a proof that we are further decoupling ourselves from the US, which is the claim made in the root comment. France has launched rockets from France for decades. Being an ocean away does not make Kourou reliant on the US.
I think the opposite because in this specific case we have the US which has the world's strongest navy, and the strongest navy by far in the Atlantic.
My opinion is that there is an implied reliance on the US "allowing" Europe to ship the rockets to Kourou and launch them there.
If our relations ever completely sour, the US might, for example, take over the shipping vessels going to Kourou, kinda like Europe takes over Russian shadow fleet vessels.
Now all of a sudden Europe has no means of launching rockets, except now it can launch to polar orbits. It might seem a stretch, but there is a non-zero chance that could happen, therefore it is better to have an alternative.
> Being an ocean away does not make Kourou reliant on the US.
No, but it makes it vulnerable to the US.
“Vulnerable to the US” can mean so many things that it practically loses all meaning. Even with a launchpad in continental Europe, they have many ways to interfere with this project, from disrupting the supply chain to carpet bombing the launch site.
But French Guiana is a geographically distant ex-colony, so there will always be a higher probability of future inaccessibility. Same applies to New Caledonia, Martinique, etc.
Its not an ex-colony, its part of France and the EU.
It was a French colonial subject as recently as the 20th century.
Regardless, a launch facility within Europe seems much less riskier long term from a geopolitical standpoint.
Although you're right about the history of French Guiana, using that term to put on the same level as New Caledonia is nonsense. (Same goes for Martinique.)
There is no sovereignty perspective because Europe isn't even sovereign to begin with. For starters it doesn't even have a common army
The sovereignty perspective here is the perspective of the sovereignty of the states that make up Europe not the sovereignty of the entity of the EU/Europe.
Though not every sovereign state has an army, see Iceland, Costa Rica, theoretically Japan, etc.
Yes, but most of them in the early 1940s.
Orbital? Maybe not. Sub-orbital and ballistic? Absolutely.
Oh yes, I think everyone remembers Germany's ballistic rockets
"Don't say that he's hypocritical,
Say rather that he's apolitical.
'Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down?
That's not my department,' says Wernher von Braun."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TjDEsGZLbio
hehe, yes but if it wasnt for german rocket scientists the americans and russians would not have had space agencies (at least not that early)
Well, there was Goddard, Korolev & quite a few others. But it could indeed have taken longer if the military implications were not clearly demonstrated by Von Braun.
Still, an interesting possibility of a fully civilian space program from the start & how it would look like & how it would be different.
Kinda like in Wings of Honneamise.
Not only the military aspect. His staff literally were absorbed into the Russian sand US space programs. Von Braun himself famously designed the Saturn V.
>His staff literally were absorbed into the Russian sand US space programs.
Not really in case of the USSR. German group in Russia was isolated and Korolev didn't like competition. Soviet space program started by replicating German rocket, but once all production chains were created, it was off on its own course.
I highly recommend English translation of memoirs of Boris Chertok[0] to anyone interested in the history of Soviet space program.
[0] https://www.nasa.gov/history/history-publications-and-resour...
That was just because the Russian's didn't trust "their" Germans as much as the Americans trusted "theirs". Operation Osoaviakhim was mostly about knowledge extraction, not about cooperation. The other difference was that the "Russian Germans" didn't go to Russia on their own will (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Osoaviakhim).
Once the knowledge was "extracted" the Germans were allowed to return though (good thing Stalin was already dead at that time).
Former Junkers engineer Brunolf Baade then went on to build the first and only German jet airliner for East Germany - which then of course was cancelled as soon as it was ready to enter production: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baade_152).
> Does it mean that?
When the US government funded SpaceX, it was motivated in no small degree by a desire to not be permanently reliant on a geopolitical wildcard (Russia) for getting astronauts into orbit. Now that the US itself has become a geopolitical wildcard, savvy countries know that they need to seek out alternatives to SpaceX under more stable regimes.
>geopolitical wildcard
How is Russia a wildcard? What unexpected thing do you think Russia has done?
Authoritarian dictatorships will always behave in seemingly irrational ways (from the perspective of sane politicians). Dictators will always put their personal ambition and "career" first before their country's interests.
If Russia behaved rationally they would have made a deal with Ukraine (decades ago) that protected the rights of the Russian minorities in Ukraine and continued massively profiting from gas and oil exports into Europe.
> It's funny how we can't be celebrate a European achievement without trying to interpret it into relationship to the US.
It's because Europe is absolutely obsessed with the United States and obsessed with Americans.
Yeah, in the same way that as a home owner I’d be “obsessed” with my neighbour if he was showing a predilection towards arson.
I’d love to be able to go a day without having to see whatever the latest stupidity we’ll have to deal with the fallout from is, I really would.
This obsession started decades ago. Long before any recent politics. It's only gotten deeper and more intense recently.
Again, it's an "obsession" in the same way people can't look away from a three-legged dog.
Because you elected actors for president before. Because you had school shootings before. Because everything in the sky was always UFO to you, and everything on the ground either bigfoot or communists. Because you spread "democracy" that is shaped like bombs. Because you fund your own terrorists and drug cartels. Because you strong-arm world economies for non-reasons. Because you have nukes and eternal paranoia.
But yes, it did get much worse recently. Congratulations on noticing?
In what ways are you saying "Europe is absolutely obsessed with the US": politics, tech, capital markets, defense, economics, culture, cultural trends, unpredictability, something else? And how is that "obsessed" rather than "paying attention to"? Without you giving any specifics, can't tell if that is good-faith comment or trolling. For example US audiences are obsessed with Downton Abbey, or the Titanic, or the 15-minute city proposal, and Tarantino was obsessed with French names of McDonald's hamburgers, but noone built a broader claim on top of those.
What specific event and year were IYO the onset of what you're claiming?
You folks over the pond really do think we think about you that much don’t you, prior to Trump I didn’t give much of a shit what the US did (except when you were destabilising the Middle East but I guess everyone needs a hobby), was literally none of my business and I didn’t have to live there (fortunately).
Now we have to pay attention because what you always where in part is in full control and it’s essentially impossible to ignore.
I long for the days when we can go back to the happy place of ignoring your government day to day until it’s time for another Middle East intervention.
Til then and for the avoidance of any doubt, I loathe Trump, I don’t like the people in his government, I don’t like the people who voted for him and the ones who didn’t vote and could have, the only people in America I have any sympathy for is the ones who voted for anyone but him/this shit show, the rest of you got what you deserved and will continue to do so.
So with that as your president if you still believe in American Exceptionalism you can shove it.
Hope that was clear enough.
> You folks over the pond really do think we think about you that much don’t you
Yes? You talk about us waaaaay more than we talk about you. And not just since Trump.
You talk about it as if it's little cliques of students talking about each other in a cafeteria. It's not. It's a giant economy with a giant military that affects everyone's wellbeing.
In fact, until Trump 2 they rarely thought about you at all.
What nonsense, most Europeans who are not politically super active might watch some US movies and consume things from the US like IPhones, but that doesn't mean obsessed. Most people are just mildly amused by US politics. You have serious selection bias if you think something else.
Perhaps, but most people don’t think about those things as US things. As for iPhones they were “designed in Cupertino” but made in China like almost everything else these days.
>It's because Europe is absolutely obsessed with the United States and obsessed with Americans.
Is this the new cope?
The USA is a Goliath on the world stage. The deranged tweets of your president move global markets and the next time Israel manipulates him into starting another war it might not be Iran, it might be Denmark, or Canada.
People pay close attention to the US not because they want to buy because they basically have to.
Hackernews is slowly turning into the same primitive social networking shit as X, Threads, insta, Linkedin. Time to get off of it I suppose
It is still the opinion of a very selected group. Even the rants are worth listening to.
In particular, I’m loving the obviously British comments (I deeply admire their ability to give the classiest insults).
They started developing this rocket in the late 2010s, way before the current US craziness (or the current level of craziness anyway). Independent access to space is always desirable for countries that can muster the resources, but this is just one of many companies that appeared back then as a response to SpaceX's initial success.
One would think that ze germans would be among the first to be conquering space with all that german engineering.
> One would think that ze germans would be among the first to be conquering space
After the horrors of WWII, Europe decided it would rather do things collectively than each country doing its own thing. This resulted in wonderful things like Concorde, fast rail, Airbus, and Ariane. Europe became more than the sum of its parts.
They are - but in cooperation with others. Parts of the Orion capsule of the current Artemis mission program are based on the German ATV, which is a capsule which was developed to supply ISS. On ISS there are German modules like Galileo. German Spacelab was a major component of many Space Shuttle missions. German companies like Zeiss provided optics and laser components for Apollo. To name a few, besides lots of satellites and other things. However after WW2 there were different political decisions, so that Germany won't build its own rockets, but German technology was key to Saturn V and Ariane rockets.
Aside from technology, Germany also got major control centers and mission planning capability in Cologne and Oberpfaffenhofen.
Most components are there, but not the political will to go on a national mission.
I mean, Operation Paperclip and Von Braun were central to the success of the Apollo program. The Soviets had a similar postwar-German-capture program, if I remember correctly.
Not that similar
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49583883
Is this sarcasm or do you still live in the 1980s?
Yeah this is just the effect of SpaceX showcasing "space launch is no longer the realm of government efforts only".
They kicked off the wave of commercial space launch - and now, it reached the EU too.
Eh, you can split us Europeans up into two camps; those who do not want to see the problem and those who couldn't look away.
The second camp saw the craziness when the later Bush was elected a second time.
one of those bush votes was to ensure he could clean up his own mess.
lmao what
I’m curious what you mean by this. At face value it seems like a weird rationalization but I get the sense I’m not reading this correctly.
I'd split it into 2 camps. Elites who realize Europe isn't a unified group or has a military strong enough for defense..
And people who get wet when France says they are going to send soldiers to Ukraine and it never materializes.
The general population has 0 understanding of international relations. It's the United States and China right now. Any other belief comes from someone who has read 0 international relations Realism books.
Its not that Europeans havent read Mearsheimer. its that for the best part of three hundred years the whole of Europe has been trying that same realist script until there was nothing left but total ruin across the entire continent. Europeans who created the EU knew about balance of power geopolitics so well, they created this slow bureaucratic mess specifically to stop Germany and France sliding back into the same old lethal habit. While clumsy positioning between the US and China is a headache in the present moment for Europe, compared to a tedious Union Europeans prefer reawakenings of 1914 in their backyard. Well at least so far.
I would bet any amount that if you go to a random European city and stop 100 random people on the street you'd be lucky if one person has even heard of Mearsheimer. I think you're also overthinking how the EU got created. I don't think pre-EU Europe was on the brink of violence either. It was more IMO simplistic (but possibly correct, who knows) thinking that it's stronger (economically) as a block. A lot of present day Europe issues that might lead to bigger problems are potentially worse because of the EU.
You're just showing your ignorance and lack of knowledge about the history of the EU.
Whilst the EU in it's current form did not exist until 1993, it's predecessor the European Coal and Steel Community was formed in 1950 with the Schuman Declaration: https://european-union.europa.eu/principles-countries-histor...
The primary goal of this was to prevent another war by joining european economies together economically. It's not 'overthinking it'. It quite literally is the main reason and you can go and read the speeches from the politicians at the time to confirm this.
Heres a direct quote from the declaration itself
> The solidarity in production thus established will make it plain that any war between France and Germany becomes not merely unthinkable, but materially impossible.
The fact that the european powers (with the exception of russia) are largely at peace with each other and haven't had a major war with each other since the second world war is very unusual given european history.
Definitely far from my expertise but I think you're contradicting yourself.
I am talking about the formalization that is specifically the modern European Union. You are talking as if it's some inevitable consequence of earlier efforts.
> Europeans who created the EU knew about balance of power geopolitics so well, they created this slow bureaucratic mess specifically to stop Germany and France sliding back into the same old lethal habit.
I don't think anything you're saying is strengthening this statement that I had an issue with.
The Maastricht Treaty which is what created modern day EU was driven by other concerns, asking Gemini yields: "To answer your second question: No, everyday Europeans in 1992 were not primarily thinking about WWII.
By the time the Maastricht Treaty was being drafted, the public was reacting to a completely different era of history. They were focused on the collapse of the Soviet Union, the opening of Eastern Europe, and the need to compete economically with the United States and Japan in a rapidly globalizing world. The defining event on the public's mind was the Fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, not the end of WWII."
So you are right that the processes that eventually led to the formation of the EU started after WW-II due to concerns related to that war. But specifically the EU as it stands today with its current structure and agreements was not formed due to those considerations. Europe could have continued with the previous arrangements. At least that's my take and I don't think anything you're saying contradicts it. I'll admit to a certain lack of knowledge so happy to learn more about Europe pre-EU or why what I'm saying is still wrong.
EDIT: I guess one can see how the reunification of Germany was a factor that could have made people consider the world wars. That said the creation of the EU was a major change compared to previous arrangements.
EDIT2: When I read the EU site you linked to I get a strong sense of "backsplaining" as if it was written after the fact to appear like the EU was just part of a process that goes back to WW-II. The title says "History of the EU – 1945-59" but in 1945-1959 there was no EU. Didn't the term European Union only show up circa 1992? So this is perhaps the "history of Europe" but not the history of the European Union? I could be totally wrong. I am not European but I did live through these events and follow the news (well, not WW-II but the fall of the USSR, Germany's unification, and the establishment of the modern day EU). What's of interest to me in the context of this specific question/debate is what were the concerns of the Europeans and their leaders entering into the agreements that formed the modern day EU.
Isn’t Mearsheimer a crank these days anyway?
Realpolitik sorely lacking
Even the "educated" people on HN have literal incorrect understanding.
It's a difficult problem to solve.
Coupled or uncoupled, an equal relationship between the US and the EU is much healthier. Europe should have an economy, military and industrial capacity similar to the US.
While in the current case I agree it is the path that should be taken, ideally I would prefer efficient relations, where people cooperate rather than having to duplicate everything because they don't trust their neighbor (should I make my bread because the baker might decide to poison me?!).
But having educated people everywhere is hard, so some people, because they don't get how some stuff works, they try to abuse friends and allies and make things worse (inefficient) for everybody in the process.
“Speak softly and carry a big stick”. A Europe that is internally powerful can conduct trade in the fair and liberal way that matches its ideals.
Ideally, yes. But when the baker is running around with a red hat renaming lakes, you have to start kneading if you have any sense.
It’s frustrating to share a planet with poison-pouring bakers and other primates, really, when you see what humanity could be
I've always assumed that the reason there aren't many launch sites in Europe because the booster stage falls back to Earth, and generally you want that to be over the sea. People get cross if rockets fall on their houses. If you're using the Earth's axial rotation as a helper that means launching heading east, and in Europe east is pretty much always over land. That's why most spaceports are either by an ocean (USA, Japan) or over a huge area of land no one lives in (Russia).
The EU already had quite a bit of non-EU spaceflight capability, both in terms of rockets and launch sites.
I think you meant non-US?
Although Ariane's rockets are wildly expensive and uncompetitive compared to SpaceX.
They are more expensive but the figures I have seen are 3x for Ariane 5 and 2x for Ariane 6 (source : https://spacenexus.us/guide/space-launch-cost-comparison).
Then, it depends on what you need to do. A 3x cost if you deploy a strategic constellation is fine. A 3x cost if you want to launch huge payloads for a Mars trip (I know costs were for LEO, just giving an example) is probably uncompetitive.
Any 2x or 3x cost for the same thing is uncompetitive in a free market.
They are right now, but if Japan can do it, and China can do it so can Europe and by the way, so can Australia, New Zealand and Canada they have the abilities they just have to have the will and if they haven’t learned anything recently, they better develop the will. Once again congratulations.
New Zealand has already done it. Rocket Lab may have rebranded as American but it still builds and launches from NZ every few weeks
None of the countries you name is even close to SpaceX. Not even close. Their most ambitious prototypes are on par or behind the rocket SpaceX has been flying for a decade commercially.
The fact is that no one cares about reusability. Expendable rockets are cheap enough for governments and commercial entities alike, even for constellation launches. Starlink architecture only makes sense as a justification for the F9 launch cadence, and even then the actual satellites are managed as trains.
China and Japan have done it. You may not like the fact they have done it once or twice, they know how to do it from a technical standpoint and that’s only gonna grow in the future particularly China don’t act obtuse.
Cost decreases with scale. Spacex was also wildly expensive, it grew up thanks to government assistance
This is an inaccurate simplification
Except for the fact that SpaceX had a hard time getting any contracts at first because they were all going to Boeing and Lockheed Martin since the 1990s and even when SpaceX came to the market they had to compete at first with ULA and fact that they made it cheaper by orders by magnitude. Except for the fact that Musk almost went personally bankrupt trying to get SpaceX off the ground. Except for all those facts yea sure maybe... haha nope you're still wrong.
> it grew up thanks to government assistance
Please give an example of gov assistance that was not a open contract to every private launch company in the US
Yeah, I really hate this revisionism of Elon as an extremely wealthy apartheid emerald mine heir who was a dumb guy who happened to get lucky at paypal and then stole all his money from the government while operating a car and rocket company. There is plenty to criticize about him, but SpaceX dramatically decreased cost to orbit which had reliance on Russian technology at the time.
> extremely wealthy apartheid emerald mine heir who was a dumb guy who happened to get lucky at paypal and then stole all his money from the government while operating a car and rocket company.
> SpaceX dramatically decreased cost to orbit which had reliance on Russian technology at the time.
Both can be (and are) true at the same time. Elon hired/partnered the right people and didn't have capacity to mess all the companies he owned into oblivion. His main skill is bullshiting investors, the government and the public.
Musk was raised affluent in apartheid-era South Africa, his father had some connection to Zambian emerald trading/mining, and Musk's companies have benefited enormously from public contracts and policy. He's not stupid.
Musk has benefited enormously from public contracts and policy, but all the questionable ones are in Tesla (and especially originally solarcity, but that got folded into Tesla).
The government contracts that made SpaceX were all open bid, where SpaceX bid an better solution than anything that any of the established companies did, at literally half the price. Falcon 9 was a massive gift to the US government, in that it drove the entire industry to halve the prices they extracted from the government. Dragon was just as good.
That they also built a profitable launch company out of it just highlights how much of an outlier SpaceX is. They sold the US government a dollar for fifty cents, made a profit doing it, and ended up driving half the rockets already flying out of the business.
He benefits enormously from the government but then acts like he doesn’t.
No because of reduction of bureaucracy. ESA is the prime example of 1 engineer to 50 managers culture.
No, counterintuitively Ariane is non-EU. It launches from South America
French Guyana is part of the EU, actually, in spite of being in South America. (Colonialism!)
Curious fact: France's longest border is with Brazil.
EU outermost region to be exact.
Last time I checked, France was part of the EU
If I drive my German-made VW sedan on American roads - how many people consider it an American car, and wonder if Germany has a real car industry or not?
I think having more distribution in launch locations and more provider options will ultimately be a net positive in the long run.
This took about eight years of work by a private company (funded by US VC and an ex-SpaceX leader). This wasn't an intentional decision to decouple from the US, if that's what you're implying, but a business decision.
Are we forgetting about Ariane?
Ariane is an expensive legacy rocket.
Launched from South America, not Europe.
Ariane is from the ESA, which is an organization under EU. The claim was that "EU is finally decoupling itself from the USA". My point is: the EU already has Ariane, for instance. It decoupled a long time ago.
I don't thin ESA builds Ariane or any production launchers for that manner - Arianespace does.
ESA is a separate entity to the EU.
(When the UK left the EU it was able to remain in ESA because of this separation.)
It's from the European part of South America.
I think we are stronger together. European technology has been critical to many important American space missions, and that should continue to be the case.
An ecosystem where we develop things independently is one where everyone loses.
Yes, definitely, but being together by choice instead of by necessity is vastly preferable.
Especially given that recent history has shown us that we're back to "power" being the only language spoken.
__
Rel: The ecosystem thing.
I would challenge that, because if there's one thing where the US has had absurd leverage over the EU (and world, for that matter), then it's tech ecosystems.
A healthy ecosystem would not be owned by SV/US alone.
So right now, we're not really "strong together" but rather weakly dependent. That should be remediated, and decoupling like this is exactly the tool for that.
>Especially given that recent history has shown us that we're back to "power" being the only language spoken.
"Power being the only language spoken", never left in the first place in order to get back to it, it's how the world always worked and will always work.
Granted, power wasn't actually the "language spoken", but more accurately it was the stick ensuring the enforcement of the terms agreed within the "language spoken", a lesson as old as time that many in EU forgot after post-USSR collapse and now have to re-learn it, but at a heavy cost and with added interest.
"Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it", couldn't be more true.
Always is such a strong word.
> I think we are stronger together
That's pretty damn obvious to everyone with a half of brain, yet here we are being pulled apart.
Except its not actually obvious. The US achieved most when they worked mostly by themselves. And the recent explosion in US activity, specially SpaceX is also highly separated from Europe.
There is a very credible argument to be made that excessive cooperation leads to incredibly heavy overly political programs that are completely static and can't adjust because of international agreements.
That doesn't mean working together isn't good but they way they have been has been pretty questionably in many ways (along with a lot of space policy).
I dont think the EU is stronger when they get bullied and undermined by trump, or whichever american president decides to dust off trump's playbook in the future
I think the stronger together argument implies good faith co-operation on both sides
Yeah. Exactly. Thats not a guarantee anymore
The opinion of american billionaires is driving this.
If they haven’t gotten the message yet, they never will congratulations, plan on doing more because you’re gonna have to.
It is indeed a huge success but it also underlines how far ahead the rest of the world is.
I'd honestly rather like to use this opportunity to talk about that this is a success than returning to our regularly scheduled doomer loop.
A rocket launched into orbit from Norway. That's insane progress and worth celebrating.
I'd prefer to use this opportunity to talk about this as a success as well without this America decoupling nonsense doomer loop too.
Does anyone know if folks in Germany are posting about the huge ego and phallus shaped memes for this company doing something that SpaceX and Blue Origin were also doing? I'm guessing not, because the lens is "decoupling" and not "America bad" like so many felt inclined to report when our private companies were successfully launching rockets.
Anyway, congrats to the team at Isar. I like to celebrate these successes around the world as further space exploration, colonization, science, and economic development benefit us as a species and there is a lot of room for a lot of competitors.
You know.. the things I get flagged for, and then you post stuff like this.
I'm not even sure what to make out of that dismissal opener other than that you've apparently didn't like whatever I wrote.
> That's insane progress and worth celebrating.
A non-reusable launcher that can put small payloads into a Polar orbits only, due to launch site latitude and lack of an orbital bus. It's fairly 1960s stuff.
So what should they do nothing? They have to get started somehow if Japan and China can do it so can Europe, and I think long-term once again, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand won’t be far behind…
I think New Zealand is ahead. RocketLab was the second company in the world after SpaceX to get a privately developed launch vehicle to orbit, back in 2017. They've now had 86 successful launches from their NZ launch site.
That's essentially what they have done for military/defense.
The United States saves the day. France pretends they are in charge with grand speeches.
I was close to a European immigrant and 2 things she was shocked about:
How rich the United States was. Even our poor had more than her upper middle class family had.
How people in the United States do not take 2 hour coffee and cigarette breaks.
Is this the joke section of the comments?
The Taco section, with the way the present American administration has behaved. Most of our friends/allies are looking to protect themselves andbe prepared to go on without us. All it took was two years of buffoonery.
Utter bullshit.
only four countries in the world have private/commercial space launch capacity, and SpaceX towers over everyone else so I'd say this is doing pretty alright compared to the rest of the world
As EV’s have shown, I don’t think they’re gonna be ahead for long and long-term the current technology is just a steppingstone because damaging the ozone layer can’t go on forever with the current technique being used something else. Better has to come forward.
Multiple European nations gaining their own independent launch capabilities will merely result in the sinking of ESA and ArianeSpace. Look forward to lots of infighting in the near future.
ESA is going to remain on the mission/payload side. ArianeSpace makes sense as a launch services provider handling everything that's not the rocket. ArianeGroup (the company that actually builds the rockets) will just become the French rocket company that will end up competing with the Italian and German ones.
Like most "small rocket companies" they'll come to the conclusion that they need bigger rockets to launch bigger payloads. Rockets that compete directly with Ariane 6. With some luck these will be reusable to, making Ariane 6 and ArianeSpace obsolete.
ESA and ArianeSpace will slowly but surely decay into obsolescence.
You seem to be confused about what organizations do what.
ESA neither launches or builds rockets. They are an end-user, and they own the launch infrastructure in Kourou. Both these roles will exist long after Ariane is gone.
Arianespace does not build rockets. It's a launch services provider, they purchase the rockets from other companies, handle all the logistics and manage the launchpad. It's in no way married to Ariane 6, and it has in the past and still does sell launches on multiple different rockets from different companies. There will be demand for these services even after Ariane the rocket is gone.
ArianeGroup is the company that builds Ariane 6. They are a complex co-owned project between Airbus and Safran, with workshare distributed between France and Germany. They make other things than the Ariane 6, notably the French SLBM. Eventually the Ariane 6 will go away, because it will be obsolete, but that will not necessarily mean that ArianeGroup will go under, because they have an another subsidiary called ArianeWorks developing a new rocket, called Themis.
I think being a competitor in a market doesn't mean you're 'decoupling' from it, rather you're on equal footing.
The french always had Ariane??
The Ariane is as much German as it is French. It is considerably Italian too.
This is incorrect, ArianeGroup is mostly french, it's a joint venture between Airbus and Safran.
Avio does the Ariane SRBs & it is an Italian company.
It's another 50% joint venture?
o/
Why is this a sign of decoupling? Is any EU technological development decoupling?
Just for context, when Boeing completed the 747 Airbus wasn't even a thing. 5 decades later they have caught up in most categories and even surpassed in some. Who knows, maybe something similar will happen again?
Airbus did not come into existence out of nowhere. It is the result of merging some companies that had some ancestry going back to the time of aviation pioneers.
Almost nothing starts from 0, its not a very smart idea to ignore generations of experience and wrong decisions.
Tesla also started with musk joining already well working EV startup, didn't it.
Nothing was "started" by him joining. Name was the same and they were already producing car(s). He did bring his skills for fraud and puffery though.
A good historical nugget is that the Americans got a huge leg up in the space race by importing the Germans who worked on the V-2 program.
Germans killed Soviets by the millions. If you were a German of value (like a rocket scientist) you were eager to surrender to the Americans before the Soviets could get their hands on you.
If you were the Americans, you distrusted the Soviets already, so it was a win-win.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Paperclip
This went both ways https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Osoaviakhim
Yes a good thing to point out, however the American initiative was more successful, was it not?
Largely because raw numbers aside, most of the top talent wanted to avoid the Soviets and thus the US was the only logical option. That is, part of what made the American job on this easier is top German talent anticipated some "Operation Osoaviakhim" (or worse) scenario and thus sought out the US as the only way to get out ahead of it.
von Braun made major contributions to NASA. My understanding is relatively speaking, the Soviets got the scraps. Not that it made no impact, but just to say the impact of the Germans on the American space program should not be understated, and I don't think it would be accurate to assess the fruits of these two competing operations as equivalent.
von Braun and others had a major hand in the Saturn V. Who did the Soviets manage to seize of equal caliber?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wernher_von_Braun
USA got the cream of the crop of the managers of the German missile program, while the USSR got the workers, who actually did the work with their hands and built the parts for the rockets. (One exception was Helmut Gröttrup, the head of the V-2’s guidance and telemetry systems.)
In fact, after the war the USSR has briefly reconstituted the manufacturing of V-2 in Germany, employing thousands of people, before transplanting this entire industry to the USSR. This dramatically lifted the level of Soviet manufacturing and relevant metallurgy.
von Braun's dissertation was on engine design and testing. But when he built the Redstone missile in the USA, he ordered the engine from a US company -- the engine which was already a generation ahead, compared to the imported German engines which the US engineers studied after the war.
Meanwhile, the Soviets have developed even better engines, completely on their own, though with the important parts built using the materials and the equipment brought from Germany.
So it is debatable whether having the German higher-ups and having a greater continuity with German design philosophy was a good thing or a liability.
It is less well known, but France have also imported a significant number of ex-Peenemunde engineers for their program. And their engines developed in a way different from both the American ones and the Soviet ones -- which definitively shows that although internalizing the German know-how was the starting point for everyone, it did not define the path of subsequent development.
Of course, the engines were not the whole story. The Germans took to the USA the advanced prototypes of the inertial guidance systems which were developed for the missiles that were supposed to come after the V-2. And the Soviets got Helmut Gröttrup. This did have its effects in both cases.
> USA got the cream of the crop of the managers of the German missile program, while the USSR got the workers
That's a bit oversimplified. The Russians got quite a few important scientists and engineers in other areas (aircraft design, nuclear physics, electronics, radar, optics), they just didn't make as good use of them as the US (e.g. the 'American Germans' essentially won the space race for the US).
great comment, just wanted to add a little: all three countries were pioneering rocketry in the 20-30s, more or less in equal measure.
I don't know why this WW2 rocket discussion happened to begin with, but people here don't seem to understand that there is no magical inherent technical skill which is unique and irreplaceable. Experience helps to speed things up, sure, but it can be acquired by any program given time and resources, with no talent blockers.
They got a leg up and still the Russians with Sputnik got into space first, on top of splitting Korea and winning in Vietnam and having the nuclear bomb fall into their lap and to top it off they appear to have the Manchurian candidate in the White House.
Take a deep breath.
Sorry you had to import nazis to get into orbit :shrug:
If you can't see those points, you need to take several deep breaths.
The Russians conscripted more German rocket scientists than the Americans got through Operation Paperclip, both programs were bootstrapped with German expertise. Americans got ~1,600, Russians more like 6,000.
With fairness to the Soviets, the USSR's reputation for rocket artillery was nearly as impressive as Germany's in WWII. The Allies had less experience scaling and deploying the technology, so they had more to gain by taking in the Peenemünde researchers.
> If you were a German of value (like a rocket scientist) you were eager to surrender to the Americans before the Soviets could...
Misleading. Pretty much all Germans were eager to surrender to the Western Allies - US/UK/France. That became the German government's official top priority in the closing days of the war, and Eisenhower threatened to seal the Western Front (to German soldiers and civilians fleeing the Soviets) when the Germans dragged their heels on his terms of surrender.
A relatively brief treatment can be found here - https://history.army.mil/portals/143/Images/Publications/cat...
True, I just meant that if you had something of value (like rocket expertise) you would be more likely to get favorable terms. And you knew the Soviets would be extra interested in you. Thus the added "eagerness".
But yes the point is on the whole, Germans did not want to surrender to the Soviets. Germans didn't kill millions of American civilians. They didn't level American cities.
So, it was perfectly logical as Germany collapsed for any German to fear the retribution of the Soviet armed forces, who they had every reason to see as filled with a rage and a sense of purpose no American would have been able to contemplate.
For any unfamiliar with the history, Russia was a mass murdering machine in this era, vaporizing tens of millions of people, including Russians, in very short spans of time without even a second thought.
We all know Germans was. And some people would fling fecal allegations that “so was the US!”. No. German and Russian actions were categorically different than wartime casualties (even brutal, possibly criminal, wartime casualties like fire bombing heavily civilian enemy areas like Dresden)
For anyone actually unfamiliar with history, this is a gross exaggregation made with a sole purpose of equalizing nazi crimes with what happened in the soviet union.
History does not work this way, in the early modernity masses were cohesive and industrialized, and so were the crimes and atrocities.
Every developed country got to it, but what makes nazis different is that the regime was built with the sole purpose of commiting atrocities, hence the outstanding scale and character of the matter.
The Soviet Union was far worse at the time (both before and after the existence of Nazi Germany). It got a lot better after Stalin's death.
Congrats! How come European companies still haven't managed to match SpaceX's capabilities? Europe has an incredible talent pool, especially in aerospace, and some of the world’s best expertise in precision engineering, instrumentation, sensors, avionics, and other hard-tech subsystems. A huge amount of the expertise and supply chain for these components is concentrated in Europe.
So what are we missing? Is it mainly systems integration, manufacturing scale, risk tolerance, organizational structure, or the willingness to iterate as aggressively as SpaceX? It feels like Europe has many of the pieces needed to build world-class launch systems, but hasn't yet put them together at the same scale and speed.
Most of the US space launch startups have failed. And in Europe it is harder to even try.
There was a confluence of several factors which helped SpaceX to succeed, and not the least of these was the employee number one. For many years, Tom Mueller has been working in his free time on rather large liquid fuel amateur rockets, which he was building in his garage and which he was launching from some amateur rocketry facilities in the desert. In terms of regulation it was a relatively accessible hobby in the US. At the time Musk found him, he was working on the original "BFR" -- a very large liquid fuel amateur rocket. So the deal was to invest serious money into the project and scale the same no nonsense approach to a small orbital launch vehicle. They were in LA, the center of US aerospace manufacturing, so through Tom's professional connections and knowledge of who was who in the industry, they were able to source the necessary materials, components, and to find the key personnel for their company. Significantly, NASA has already spent probably a decade or more trying to get somebody to produce a cheap small launch vehicle. This did not directly affect SpaceX, but it did fund the R&D for example at Barber-Nichols, which enabled them to offer a turbopump for SpaceX engine at a much lower cost than it would have been possible otherwise.
At first, Musk and Co thought that they would be able to develop the rocket for a few million dollars. But even in the US regulatory environment it turned out that doing everything in compliance with regulations raised the costs to well over a hundred million dollars.
So, Tom's hobby + Musk's activism + industrial ecosystem in the area + NASA's prior support of component vendors + being at the right time to snag the International Space Station delivery contract were all important for SpaceX thriving where so many others have failed.
> So what are we missing?
There are some (many?) European companies which are considered as least as much as a jobs program as anything else.
In 2018, Alain Charmeau (in)famously expressed frustration with SpaceX in an interview with Der Spiegel and rejected reusability with these words:
“Let us say we had ten guaranteed launches per year in Europe and we had a rocket which we can use ten times—we would build exactly one rocket per year,” he said. “That makes no sense. I cannot tell my teams: ‘Goodbye, see you next year!’”
https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/05/ariane-chief-seems-f...
from the original
https://www.spiegel.de/wissenschaft/technik/alain-charmeau-d...
A more recent example would be the Future Combat Air System (FCAS) project which was officially cancelled in June 2026, due to (?) industrial rivalry and leadership disputes, with a side order of politics.
Probably the biggest thing is that capital in the EU is far more conservative.
Incidentally, the early investment for Isar came from Bülent Altan, the Turkish ex-SpaceX guy who was in charge of the guidance system for Falcon-1, Falcon-9 and Dragon.
Very interesting, thanks.
It looks like he was an angel investor in Isar, and then co-founded a VC firm that continued to invest in Isar: https://alpinespace.vc/
I'd rather see something owned by the people, not private.
Plesetsk is also european soil.
Europe is a vibe based concept, a place can be European or not depending on the vibes. Even the east west central etc. are completely vibe based. Portugal for example is Eastern European country, meanwhile Romania is central according to some textbooks.
Yeah, Romania being central Europe - impossible nonsense. Because Czech Republic is in central Europe!
Portugal is not Eastern European and it would be incredibly rare for Europeans to identify it as such. Have you been to Europe in your life?
It's mostly a meme https://old.reddit.com/r/PortugalIsEastEurope/
They're using "Europe" as political shorthand for Western Europe
Yeah, just like Toronto is American soil
Kourou as well, although maybe a different definition of European.
Would maybe call it European territory but not soil. But yeah, as you say it's how you define it.
> "The findings identified an unintended opening of the vent valve
How do they figure things like this out, after a rocket goes "boom"?
Something they might have is a lot of strain gauges around the rocket. They can tell if the rocket is bending and compressing (and how) -- but they are also essentially high-speed microphones. Valves make sounds (cause vibrations) and they are easy to spot if you have high-speed samples of your strain gauges. You can also triangulate distances if you have multiple strain gauges with synchronized high-speed samples.
It's good practice to dump data into several flash memories + transmit live. The live transmit is likely only a small summary of all the data that they capture -- distributed flash memory locations is a cheap way to increase the chances of getting useful data after a boom/crash (put them in orange water tight containers that can float + give them a beep-beep radio transmitter).
Telemetry?
I wonder whether the Sámi people have been consulted or compensated for the use of their traditional lands as a rocket launch site. Given Norway’s long history of suppressing Sámi people and their land rights, I'd be interested to know how that was handled.
In this house we believe the first Neanderthal did not consent
The first thing that came into my mind was the fragile ecosystem up there. All considered this doesn't sound like a very thoughtful process.
And of course as pointed out elsewhere, Norway isn't even EU. I wonder how happy people were if rocket launches were done in rural Western Europe.
Did the Sami compensate the Indo-Europeans they displaced?
Interesting:
https://www.cryopolitics.com/2022/10/06/on-norways-auroral-e...FYI Norway is not in the EU. Whether they are European is a matter of perspective and I'm not touching that subject any further! Deutschland is in the EU.
Norway is as close as you can get without formally being a member. It's not just the EEA, it's also a member of essentially all EU programs that aren't closed off for non-member states. That Norway is European is not a matter of perspective.
Do you know any Norwegians? I don't have an opinion but many of my Norwegian relatives think the European thing is not just terminology and is a label from outside. Swedes and Fins too. [edit: I changed a fair bit of wording in the first few minutes of the post]
Norway is even more European than Canada and Israel!
Despite not being in the EU, Norway is European without the slightest doubt.
> Whether they are European is a matter of perspective
What? Scandinavia isn't part of Europe now? The "EU" is an organization, "Europe" is a continent. "European" includes everybody living in Europe (and yes, that even includes the Brits and most Russians).
Looking at a map Norway is on the same continent as Vietnam so that statement makes no sense. Please have some sort of context and understanding before making such statements. They "seem" to be part of Europe but they have historically wanted to have it both ways: one foot in one foot out. Go research it yourself I am probably totally wrong! HN comments are not a reference source.
There's a clearly defined border between the continents Europe and Asia.
I guess the confusion comes from thinking of "European" as some sort of cultural identity (which frankly doesn't exist, unless you only look at the last hundred years or so, and even that is generous), instead of the people living in the geographical region called "Europe".
You heard it here first folks, 'Norway is no more European than Vietnam.'
Lol. Yah this is not a great discussion. My point is that I don't get to decide if Norway is Europe. Keep me out of this!
I shouldn't have to explain this stuff. The Nordic countries are exceptionalist in my understanding from talking to them. It's an easy search to go down this rabbit hole. It's a little different from Catalan wanting to be independent but still European. This is not my area of knowledge I have just been exposed multiple times first hand. Where are my scando fin buddies to chime in? Lulz
Interesting that it uses Propane fuel and "weaves" the rockets with carbon composite.
Isar Aerospace launch into orbit [video] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ss1DUqLjecc (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49580325)
Thanks for that video. Super cool that they got pro streamers NSF involved.
Really interesting that they will be launching from Canada as well.
Really beautiful with the rocket shining brightly upon the mountains as it lifts off
This is such a breath of fresh air
Not for the Sami people who have to inhale the rocket exhaust blast.
Istar's Spectrum rocket does not use RP-1 (kerosene), like Falcon 9 and Electron, which burns very dirty.
They are using liquid propane, which burns extremely cleanly, especially when combined with their liquid oxygen.
There is a lot of noise, but that should be the only pollution generated by this launch.
Oops, correct spelling is Isar.
Congrats! didn't know german has this ability before.
Yeah in general it’s good advice to not existentially challenge the Germans.
Made with imipolex g?
Fantastic job!
i was under the impression that the closer you launch from the equator, the less sustained force you need. wrong?
Right. You get a free ~1000mph from the equator.
Depending on the inclination - not much help to launch into a polar orbit for example.
The Germans also launched the first rocket to make it to space on June 20th 1944, though it wasn't privately made.
Space, yes. Orbit, no. From what I understand, orbit is much harder to achieve. Pedantic, but still.
o/
The sooner Europe cuts itself off from the US crazy billionaires, the better - on all levels (software and manufacture processes are the two biggest issues). Today we already could see the US surrender team crawling up to dictator Putin. Enough is enough - agent Krasnov needs to be isolated.
I don’t think America is so far gone. We have issues sure, but I for one still believe that we can be better.
Trump be damned, Europe and America are stronger when they work together.
Americans have to hope that the US will move past trumo and not repeat that mistake, but for europeans its most prudent to prepare for a world where such a corrupt wannabe distator doesnt have have that much leverage over them.
The US and europe would be stronger together if the US acted in good faith. Absent that, decoupling is the right choice
Or maybe Europe just thinks if you can't beat 'em, join 'em:
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/05/world/europe/germany-afd-...
Germany also has a crazy Communist party that is more in the pocket of Russia than AfD is -- but somehow that is almost never mentioned, not even in German media. It's quite big and influential.
Idk, to me it looks like the German green party is very anti Russian...
o/
What Europe needs to do to spur its tech sector is lower taxes.
A 2018 study shows tax increases significantly reduce innovation. A 1% increase in the top marginal income tax rate leads to a 2% reduction in patents and inventors, while a similar increase in corporate taxes causes even larger declines.
The study is quite rigorous too:
https://open.substack.com/pub/maximumprogress/p/tax-cuts-and...
One can hope they can repurpose this to a shield for Ukraine
How can it be the first European rocket? There’s the ESA! Are you telling me we have all these organisations and none of them have ever launched from their own continent?
Europe isn't on or remotely near the equator, which is somewhat favorable for launches.
> The German company Isar Aerospace launched its Spectrum rocket from Andøya Space Center in northern Norway today
To speculate, they could be targeting a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molniya_orbit
ESA launches French Guiana. Since it is cheaper to launch closer to the equator with the extra speed provided by the earth's rotation.
For satellites that should be in Sun-synchronous orbit Andøy is a great place to launch from
Really comes in handy to still have a couple of colonies near the equator.
It's also better to have the massive amounts of emissions far away from your own population.
French Guiana is not a colony, it is a region of France. People who live there have the same constitutional rights as anyone living in mainland France.
It has the same status in France as Alaska does in the US.
That's legally true, but I think it misses the distinction between formal political status and the legacy of colonialism. French Guiana is an overseas department of France, and its residents have French citizenship and constitutional rights. But that doesn't mean the historical relationship was equivalent to mainland France, or that the effects of that history disappeared when the legal status changed.
The same point applies elsewhere: Guinea became independent from French colonial rule in 1958, but independence didn't magically erase the economic structures, institutions, and inequalities inherited from colonialism. Today, a large share of Guinea's population still lives in poverty despite the country's enormous natural-resource wealth.
So "it's not a colony" is correct as a matter of constitutional law. But using that fact to imply that colonial history is irrelevant to present-day economic and social conditions is a much stronger claim, and one that's harder to defend.
While I agree with your analysis, would you think is the best to use the same generic term "colonialism" for both the situations in French Guyana and let's say Venezuela in the last year? I would prefer more words to differentiate a bit, but maybe that's just me.
How does it compare to Alaska? Wasn't it purchased as a colony from russians to exploit Alaskan gold with complete disreagrd for opinion of the native population?
Alaska is a colony is well, and so is the rest of North America.
We don't think of the US and Canada as colonies because the vast majority of the native population was genocided.
They mostly died from European diseases without ever meeting a European. It wasn't even planned or known by the European "visitors".
It's a colony even if it's legally part of France.
(Had to check: free movement does apply to Guianans, but in the other direction it's not part of Schengen)
Ireland is not part of Schengen as well for example, it is because that is much harder to practically achieve for folks living on islands.
Ireland is not part of Schengen because the UK never was (and they wanted to keep the Common Travel Area).
Guianans tend to get pissed off if outsiders suggest in any way that they are any different as a French region from l'Hexagone (the French mainland). Your banging on about colonies would not be well received there.
For what it's worth, Metropolitan France used to claim Algeria wasn't a colony either.
Becoming French was an amazingly good reward for being pirates and slave traders.
A fully loaded Falcon 9 carries less kerosene than 1 (one single) A380. What level of concerntrolling is this?
>Really comes in handy to still have a couple of colonies near the equator.
>It's also better to have the massive amounts of emissions far away from your own population.
That's the dumbest comment i read since a long time, thanks.
> How can it be the first European rocket?
Not at all. You've missed the "Private" in the headline. And that it apparently is.
Article says Western Europe, but Norway is in Northern Europe.
“First rocket to launch from Europe outside Russia” would have been perfectly correct.
In the political sense, «Western Europe» is typically taken to be «NATO Europe», and «Eastern Europe» is «Warsaw Pact Europe». Which is different from a strict geographic definition.
That is also not correct anymore as Northern countries were reallocated to include the Baltics in UN as an example.
They launch from Guiana afaik
French Guiana to be exact, which is a different country
Edit: Misread
They meant French Guiana is a different country to Guyana... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Guianas
It isn't. Plesetsk is in European Russia and was built to prevent overreliance on Baikonur
You are thinking about Vostochny in Russian Far East. Plesetsk was an early ICBM launch site that started doing orbital launches in 1966. It was the busiest spaceport in Soviet times, and the cumulative number of orbital launches from Plesetsk still probably exceeds those from Florida.
The French used to launch their rockets from Algeria. Their first satellite was launched from there. Since then they moved to (French) Guiana.
The UK launched from Australia.
And Russia launches some rockets from Plesetsk, in Europe.
Why are they on X? As a European company, should they not be posting instead from W Social?
What's W social?
> from European soil
When someone emphasizes nationalism a bit too much that's usually only because they don't have enough technical merit to talk about.
No. It’s simply about accessibility and sovereignty. Even though the ESA can launch from French Guiana, the space port is an ocean-away from Europe! How much do you think that fact will affect the cost and the launch cadence for Europe?
Now they prove they can launch directly from Norway with their own production from Munich and elsewhere and that has immense potential for the future: much higher cadence, significant lower cost and always-on accessibility.
The only way, Europe can have a Starlink similar network is to launch from their own soil and reuse the first stage. Also from the perspective of security, launching spy and other military satellites from European soil is the only practical possibility in this political climate.
Europe is a continent, not a nation.
Launching far off the equator makes it more difficult and is therefore a bigger technological achievement.
The selection of launch site takes the orbital inclination into account.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun-synchronous_orbit
The "Onward and Upward" cube sats were deployed to Sun-synchronous orbits, with a roughly polar inclination.
Similarly, launches from USSF Base Vandenberg take a southerly trajectory, so it can be used for orbits like that.
Rocket launches from continental Europe have been challenging because of the population centers, and the unpopularity of things exploding over their heads, and falling on their houses and businesses. USA and Russia have some quite ideal sites that avoid flying over populated areas.
You are still ~500 m/s short compared to launching on an equatorial orbit from the equator.
Velocity is a vector, not simply a rate. Launches and orbits are three-dimensional.
What would be a great technological achievement would be launching from French Guiana (5.2° N) and then making a plane-change maneuver to achieve a polar orbit (90° inclination). All that bonus eastward velocity from the Earth's rotation would turn into a penalty they'd need to compensate for no reason, when they had a spaceport more suitable for that polar inclination.
Try this related concept: https://youtu.be/sod3ofdUYTw?si=U7dz_LcRQ0M44tAU
And the spherical cow jumps frictionlessly over the Moon!
Really sad to see that Europe is so far behind.
Consider India, once single country vs all of Europe: 88 orbital launches successfully reached orbit using Indian built rockets starting in 1980.
This is out of 104 individual liftoffs.
Over 46 years of successful launches.
The fact not many launches happen from continental Europe has nothing to do with capabilities of the space industry or lack of expertise, but rather location.
Europe is far from the equator and densely populated so rocket launches from there are more costly, and failures can have a higher risk to life.
Arianne space has had 350+ successful missions after 45 years of operations, with most of those launching from overseas territories.
I don't understand the one country vs all of Europe - given a fixed population, being united in a single country surely makes everything a bit more efficient than being split in many small countries? India is much bigger than "all of Europe".
It’s the national equivalent of:
How long it takes you to ship this project? Two weeks.
And if you get help from Alice, Bob, and Charlie? Then it’s a year.
As a European, I'm glad functioning sewage systems took priority over an orbital launch capability.
Advancement of a culture is not only measured by rocket launches.