1 - Engineers and leadership didn't think landing would work that well
2 - The culture at ESA and Arianespace is to NOT have any failures. So they don't have the liberty to launch rockets that spectacularly explode. Even when experimenting, they are extremely risk averse.
3 - The same company builds ICBMs, so demonstrating reliability in civil launchers also asserts reliability for military equipment.
4 -The focus was reducing costs of Ariane5 and make a launcher with similar capability and cost to Russian Soyuz. I don't think SpaceX was the focus for the competition. They also wanted to get rid of the dual launches of Ariane5 and provide a launcher that could just do the large payload of those dual launches independently
You probably didn't intend to sound so racist. You participated in the process and you discriminated based on race? You aren't Indian, yet you still got hired?
Do you think pharma companies that develop this are going: "we will develop an X-Ray machine, and only Americans will pay for it"?
I would assume they try to get a profit anywhere they sell it. Which means $20 x-ray is a realistic profitable cost per x-ray. But the US healthcare is so broken that they manage to extract 10x more money out of it.
Imagine you're a French pharma company. You know the US is the richest country in the world and spends a quarter of its massive GDP on healthcare. When you put together R&D budgets, it makes sense that you plan to recoup most of your investment in the US, and that US FDA approval is one of your most important goals.
Of course they want a profit anywhere they sell it. But the calculation would change if the US health care system weren't so "messed up." You may not make the investment at all, because you couldn't recoup it over a reasonable timeline without the margins you get in the US.
The US rewards advanced medical tech development more than any other country. There are many things wrong with our system, and this might be related to some of them. But on its own, it belongs in the W column.
> spends a quarter of its massive GDP on healthcare.
isn't most of it for wasteful reasons.
>There are many things wrong with our system
Many people are saying this often, seems like people have just surrendered and submitted themselves to organized skillful abuse by such systems. Wish we have more cumulative willpower than present.
It also seem likely that opening an office outside of the USA may become an interesting alternative. Then your wage and your job may be at risk. If impact to you is how you evaluate things, it would seem like there's room for worries.
> It also seem likely that opening an office outside of the USA may become an interesting alternative. Then your wage and your job may be at risk. If impact to you is how you evaluate things, it would seem like there's room for worries.
There are a lot of people on this thread who don't understand how the law of supply and demand works.
This year, China will have their maiden flight for 2 new rockets CZ-5, CZ-7. Launched a new space station: Tiangong2, is making steady progress in their space program.
Russia is developing Angara-5, a new rocket that made its debut in 2014. Russia upgraded in 2016 its soyuz capsule and is working on a new design crewed vehicle.
Europe started developing its Ariane 6 next gen-launcher, following the success of its current Ariane 5.
Europe also landed on a comet earlier this year.
I am less versed in Japan launch schedules, but they also have a strong program.
During this time, US is developing reusable launchers that land on their launchpad.
Space is a global effort and every country is participating in this exploration. Each has strengths and weakness. For instance, USA can land rockets but cannot send crew in space.
There is no more a 'me versus them' situation in space development. Everyone works somewhat together. Russia sends US astronauts in orbit. US refuels the ISS with Cigna cargo. Antares engines are Russian RD-181. The service of the orion capsule is made in France and Germany. The Chinese spacecraft is derived from Russian Soyuz.
>There is no more a 'me versus them' situation in space development.
There absolutely is and frankly its the only thing that's ever worked - competition. Before it was between nation states and now it will be between corporations, which is going to be much more efficient. We are entering a new age of space travel here where nation states take a backseat to big centrally planned government programs, at least in the US.
There are two problems with using Falcon 9s as reusable missile.
First: missiles needs to be always ready. They need to fire as soon as needed. A rocket like Falcon 9 uses liquid oxygen which cannot be stored for long period of time. Nowadays most missiles uses solid fuel (as the ones used in the Shuttle boosters)
Second: A booster that lands is not immediately reusable. you need to refill it, replace the pyrotechnic chains, put back the payload on top of it, etc. During that time, your missile is at risk of being destroyed by an enemy counter measure.
Submarines dispatched around the globe are already packed with nuclear missile using solid fuel that can already destroy any place any time.
I think those are reasonable considerations in such a system. However I also believe that weapon systems all have strengths and weaknesses that are combined with other weapon systems to create a complete war fighting capability.
When you consider fueling options, its true that solid rocket fuel is a much better choice for a weapon system that is not re-usable. But when the possibility of re-use is there, the calculus changes. The US ICBM system is a "last resort" type system and as such doesn't have a good re-arming (or re-fueling) capability. But the reasons for that are that lobbing tens of megatons of nuclear fire over the horizon really means that there isn't going to be much left of civilization when you are done. When you consider the submarine fleet or the bomber fleet (the other two points of the nuclear trident) there is a lot of infrastructure and cost associated with refueling capability for the delivery platform which are planes and subs. Until SpaceX (and perhaps soon Blue Origin), there hasn't been a "reusable rocket" delivery platform and so refueling capability has never added value over non-refuelable solid systems.
Further, intercontinental missiles are not generally considered a conventional delivery mechanism because of their expense relative to their payload. They only made "sense" economically delivering nuclear weapons since the cost of a nuke was high, but its impact was also quite high, and so as a means of projecting force on a global scale it had high utility. But that changes too if your
"marginal cost" is the payload and fuel. It is a well understood process for creating LOX and LH2 on site, Kennedy space center already has that capability.
Your second point, about turn around time, is also a good thing to consider for any weapon system. For conflicts against enemies that don't possess and intercontinental capability, cycle time for firing from the Dakotas in the US can be quite long as it would require a conventional army to traverse a large portion of the US or Canada before it could get to the base. That is very expensive and hard to do. Thus even if it took a month between firings you would not be in any danger of being destroyed. But systems design also tells us that we can finesses long cycle times with parallelism, so a network of 30 bases could fire one chunk of payload once a day (once from each base) continuously. That is just a question of money.
But all of this sort of speculation simply reiterates the point around peaceful capabilities (resuable rocket boosters) which have very real strategic implications. And space (and NASA) are particularly compromised by this. The US rocketry program was lead by Werner Van Braun after all, who had been using his developing knowledge of rockets to bomb London from Germany. The entire early space program was simply a palatable cover activity for developing reliable ICBMs with systems so integrated that nearly all of the satellites the US flew into orbit used an ICBM rocket body to launch them. This history has influenced NASA policy since its inception, delicately walking the line between "It's Science!" and "It's Military Superiority" in the capabilities they researched and deployed. As private companies develop more of these capabilities they won't stop because "it could be dangerous" and the military will have the same problems it did when the semiconductor chip industry ran ahead faster than the military could. You have to reach a new place of understanding where "commercial tech" >> "military tech" for some definition of 'tech'.
One problem I find in fortran is that subroutines quickly have a lot of arguments. In this example, glint have 30ish. I have seen fortran subroutines in the aerospace industry with more than 100 arguments.
1 - Engineers and leadership didn't think landing would work that well
2 - The culture at ESA and Arianespace is to NOT have any failures. So they don't have the liberty to launch rockets that spectacularly explode. Even when experimenting, they are extremely risk averse.
3 - The same company builds ICBMs, so demonstrating reliability in civil launchers also asserts reliability for military equipment.
4 -The focus was reducing costs of Ariane5 and make a launcher with similar capability and cost to Russian Soyuz. I don't think SpaceX was the focus for the competition. They also wanted to get rid of the dual launches of Ariane5 and provide a launcher that could just do the large payload of those dual launches independently