Reinventing the Ariane Program to Compete With the Americans

[unhappycamper]

http://watchingamerica.com/News/230515/reinventing-the-ariane-program-to-compete-with-the-americans/



While for years we had feared competition from emerging countries with their low labor costs, now we face competition from the United States and its ability to innovate.

Reinventing the Ariane Program to Compete With the Americans
Le Monde, France
By Jean-Yves Le Gall
Translated By Wade Halliburton
8 January 2014
Edited by Sean Feely

The three perfectly successful launches of the new American Falcon 9 launch vehicle developed and operated by SpaceX — a company founded in 2002 in a garage in California — pose many questions.

Indeed, it is the first time in history that a totally private company has successfully flown a space launch vehicle on its first try. What is more, this was performed with an approach at odds with what had been done previously.

These successful launches pose a challenge, especially considering SpaceX announced its desire to dominate this sector. This comes at a time when Europe has begun, at France's initiative, the development of the future Ariane 6 rocket, which aims to enter service at the beginning of the next decade and will therefore be competing with SpaceX launch vehicles.

~snip~

If one compares the SpaceX launch vehicle to its competitors, it differs in three major ways. First is its perfect adaptation to the launching of governmental payloads, including NASA and Department of Defense satellites. These make up a large part of SpaceX’s orders and even more of its income, to the extent that the U.S. government agrees to pay more for its own launches than what would be charged to commercial customers.