Elon Musk Is Earth's Number One Disruptor
How Elon Musk’s rocket company SpaceX beat Boeing to become a $28 billion aerospace juggernaut, CNBC
“SpaceX has upended the rocket industry, making founder Elon Musk the world’s most disruptive space pioneer. The visionary entrepreneur is bent on building giant low-cost reusable rockets and spaceships that can be used to colonize humans on Mars. In the process, he is helping to catalyze a private space exploration industry in the United States while outmaneuvering mammoth aerospace companies like Boeing. SpaceX is the No. 1 company on the 2018 CNBC Disruptor 50 list, announced Tuesday.”
Ariane chief seems frustrated with SpaceX for driving down launch costs, Ars Technica
“With this background in mind, the chief executive of Ariane Group, Alain Charmeau, gave an interview to the German publication Der Spiegel. The interview was published in German, but a credible translation can be found here. During the interview, Charmeau expressed frustration with SpaceX and attributed its success to subsidized launches for the US government.”
Ariane and Charmeau are in quite a pickle, telling Der Spiegel protectionism is necessary or their production could be halted later this summer if key contracts aren’t secured. It’s their own doing; complacent when times were flush, and targeting a non-reusable version of Falcon 9 with Ariane 6 just as re-use hit. Now they’re a decade behind and scrambling.
The CEO of Arianespace is complaining about subsidized competition? Really? What do we hear next? That Mr. Trump isn’t happy about how much people use twitter?
Better than the Vogons is our Elon.
Change or die m’effers.
I love the bar chart in the first article showing commercial launch market share over the past several years. SpaceX came out of nowhere and is now dominating the market. Absolutely disrupting the commercial launch industry.
There is another interesting in that chart. It’s hard to see, since the bars for other service providers float around, but Europe isn’t doing too badly. They have a fairly flat, 30-40% market share. Russia has fallen down to under 10%. Some of that many be their reliability issues, and I wonder how the chart bookkeeps a Soyuz flying out of Kourou. But I think it’s interesting that Ariane’s market share hasn’t fallen further.
ESA will always use the Ariane, as will any payload linked to an EU government owned entity. So they always will have a minimum amount of traffic even if they are priced higher than what SpaceX is offering.
ESA has flown spacecraft on Russian launch vehicles, and I’m currently watching a Falcon 9 launch a joint US-German scientific spacecraft. So it isn’t quite as absolute as you suggest. But, yes, there is a strong tendency to buy locally. It might even be something agreed to in writing; I’m not sure about that, but it wouldn’t be unprecedented.
True, for joint missions it makes sense to use other launch vehicles when they are available.
Does that count as commercial in this article? The caption to the bar chart says “Global Commercial Market Share”.
Arianespace is a provider of commercial launch services, so it’s as commercial as NASA hiring SpaceX to launch a satellite or to fly cargo to the ISS.
So government purchased counts. Works for me.
Wow, you’re right. Also, I didn’t expect to see Russia squeezed out so much.
Http:\\http://www.VOGONS.org
There may be a subtlety that is being lost here. Not a big fan of Ariansapce but… Theirs is not a market lead model. Theirs follows the US DOD/ULA model: guaranteed, independent space access. IF you view his comments in that light then they are consistent. Europe really needs an internal competitor to them to get any efficiency. The US has it now at last. How long till SpaceX buy ULA though?
Think no one will buy ULA. They don’t have anything that other companies will need that can not be developed by those companies. Plus ULA have legacy costs that is unattractive.