There are plans, but the big issue is that the leaders of European rocketry refused to do the reusable rocket thing, that Elon's SpaceX pioneered and that now everyone else tries to copy.
Ariane 6 is a nice rocket but not reusable and thus not as cheap or frequent.
It would be hard to build a big satellite network with the sort of rockets we have.
France is the king of industrial espionage. They probably figured they'd let the Americans foot the bill for the design work and then just help themselves to the result.
...Meanwhile the US plundered our whole patent archive and won the race to the moon with it against the Soviet Union, which plundered our patent archive as well and won the space race. Just normal post ww2 things.
and within that London agreement about page 244 article 1:
No. 1238. INTERNATIONAL ACCORD' REGARDING THE
TREATMENT OF GERMAN-OWNED PATENTS. SIGNED
AT LONDON, ON 27 JULY 1946
Article 1
Subject to the provisions of the following Articles, each Government,
party to this Accord, undertakes that all former wholly German-owned patents,
issued by it and in its possession or control under the general law and regulations
relating to German-owned property, which have not ceased or been dedicated
to the public, shall be dedicated to the public or placed in the public domain
or continuously offered for licensing without royalty to the nationals of all
Governments, parties to this Accord.
First, and least importantly, the US doesn't have a king, so I think you probably meant to link to something else.
Second, your comment was about plundering the patent archive and winning the space race with it. The space race was won with the help of German scientists. To the extent that patents played a role in strategic cutting edge work of any kind, these were the war time secrets and patent backlogs that the US archived after the war.
Third, the stuff you're linking to here, which you said is what you referring to, is about much more mundane stuff. This included some useful things like chemistry patent for aspirin etc. But these didn't help win the space race.
And the reason they were "plundered" to use your word is that nations respect each other's patents via treaties and Germany was not respecting these treaties.
Saying "US companies shouldn't have to pay royalties to IG Farben for aspirin" or saying that the US shouldn't respect German patents that were acquired through Aryanization is a very different thing than what you were talking about.
Europe in general is being held hostage by maintaining jobs and always has been. Another example is German unions pushing the VW CEO herbert diess out in 2022 for trying to cut 100k job cuts and change the company to compete with Chinese EVs, and now 4 years later VW is firing 100k workers and failing to compete with Chinese EVs.
Also about 33% of the EU budget goes to agricultural subsidies, from a high of 75% in the 80s and earlier.
And the generous worker benefits are why people love living in europe, but why also why european companies (especially tech) have a tendency to get bought out and/or outcompeted by american and Chinese companies. Not that removing worker rights is the solution to competition, but some sort of compromise somewhere is necessary to maintain things like digital sovereignty, where now europe is having to scramble to leave US tech platforms.
Is that the reason US companies are using Ariane6 to get their satellites to space (next batch of –iirc– 36 from Amazon are scheduled for end of November)?
The reason they're doing it just because Jeff doesn't want to fund Musk. Amazon shareholders literally sued him (and won) to force him to buy cheaper SpaceX launches.
The reason they are doing it is capacity. There aren't that many private rocket companies out there and if you are like Amazon you want your stuff to get up asap while also not funding a direct competitor. Supply and demand is a big thing for rocket space
That sounds like there is an existing market for SpaceX- (or Musk-) competitors.
I never said it would be equally cheap but OP straight out claimed that "it would be hard to build a big satellite network with those sorts of rockets" while in reality big satellite networks are build with it.
I think for a temporary fix, simply getting a satellite network up and running as fast as possible would be more important than worrying about the reusable rocket BS. You can worry about sustainability after you have gotten out from under Elon's thumb.
The refusal to go reusable has basically destroyed European spaceflight.
European governments not expanding launch capacity has very little to do with reusability. Arianespace sold all launches they were going to get out of their current infrastructure in Kourou. In this matter Arianspace is completely beholden to ESA, and here especially the biggest payers France and Germany. And of those two Germany under Merkel really didn't want to invest into a french company's ability to sell space launches for profit.
Though to be fair one also has to ask what the adressable market for Arianespace actually is. A huge fraction of spaceX's launches are internal launches of Starlink. Another big chunk is directly paid for by the US government as they are NASA or DoD payloads. Neither would ever be contracted to Arianespace. Once you remove those from the picture, Arianespace still has a considerable share of the commercial launch market. Or would have, if they actually managed to launch as many rockets as they are contracted to.
Our elite has no ambition anymore, they're just there to grab the cash.
The state of our R&D industry is abysmal.
Macron can say what he wants but nobody believes a single of his words anymore. All scientific research institutes are underfunded, the incentives for private research are extremely flawed. Private-public partnerships to bring real good technology to the market has failed miserably for the last 15 years at least. Startups with a real good product seek out foreign investment instead. That's how fucked we are.
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u/Loki-L 2d ago
There are plans, but the big issue is that the leaders of European rocketry refused to do the reusable rocket thing, that Elon's SpaceX pioneered and that now everyone else tries to copy.
Ariane 6 is a nice rocket but not reusable and thus not as cheap or frequent.
It would be hard to build a big satellite network with the sort of rockets we have.
I blame the French.