<story><title>As the SpaceX steamroller surges, European rocket industry vows to resist</title><url>https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/07/as-the-spacex-steamroller-surges-european-rocket-industry-vows-to-resist/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>bosdev</author><text>&amp;gt; Truthfully, if Europe ever did develop a reusable rocket, one that could fly all the missions in a year, this would be unhelpful politically. What would the engine and booster factories sprinkled across Europe do if they built one rocket and then had 11 months off? The member states value the jobs too much.&lt;p&gt;It feels incredibly short-term to me. How many jobs will be created by opening up spaceflight at 1&amp;#x2F;100 the cost? How many new types of satellites, technology, human transport will be created?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>grecy</author><text>This mentality is what&amp;#x27;s holding back the establishment in &lt;i&gt;any&lt;/i&gt; field from doing anything radical. The status quo is worth trillions and trillions of dollars, and a lot of people will fight very, very hard to keep it that way, even when it&amp;#x27;s horribly inefficient, outdated and just plain stupid.&lt;p&gt;Electric cars? Nope, we&amp;#x27;ve invested too much in ICE R&amp;amp;D and need to pay it back over another 100 years.&lt;p&gt;Solar? Nope, we promised the private coal plants decades of profits.&lt;p&gt;Public Healthcare (In the USA)? Nope, waaaaaay too many billions being made on insurance.&lt;p&gt;etc. etc.&lt;p&gt;Which is why we need to ignore what the establishment things and just do our own thing whenever possible, or at least support anyone trying to go clean slate.</text></comment>
<story><title>As the SpaceX steamroller surges, European rocket industry vows to resist</title><url>https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/07/as-the-spacex-steamroller-surges-european-rocket-industry-vows-to-resist/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>bosdev</author><text>&amp;gt; Truthfully, if Europe ever did develop a reusable rocket, one that could fly all the missions in a year, this would be unhelpful politically. What would the engine and booster factories sprinkled across Europe do if they built one rocket and then had 11 months off? The member states value the jobs too much.&lt;p&gt;It feels incredibly short-term to me. How many jobs will be created by opening up spaceflight at 1&amp;#x2F;100 the cost? How many new types of satellites, technology, human transport will be created?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Tuna-Fish</author><text>This is not just about having makework jobs. In order for the engines to be both cheap an reliable, there needs to be continuous line production. An engine put together by workers who build rocket engines for their living is better than one built by people who make rocket engines 1 month of a year, and for the line to work properly there are limits on how slowly things can be built. This means that if your engine demand goes too low, the quality suffers or price skyrockets.&lt;p&gt;The financial basis of SpaceX reusability is conditioned on having access to a lot of launches, and increasing the market even further by making launches cheaper. If SpaceX ended up only doing 12 launches a year each year from now on, they would lose money from reusability instead of saving it, because they would have pay ~as much to maintain the Merlin line as they do today, and that is probably most of the cost of making rockets. In order for them to make bank, they need to be able to maintain the line, and grow launches to consume all of it. (Hence, StarLink.)&lt;p&gt;Alternatively, they can produce all the first stages they ever intend to make, a good enough stockpile of Merlins for the second stages, and then shut down the line and get paid for launches without the expense of making rockets. This is what I suspect they&amp;#x27;ll do, except that at that point they will not shut down the line but will change it to make Raptors instead. Both for Raptor engined upper stages on Falcon 9:s, and eventually BFR.&lt;p&gt;In any case, Arianespace probably doesn&amp;#x27;t believe they can raise the launch count enough for reusability to be useful.</text></comment>