>>14361985Ariane5 is nearing EOL. Ariane6 is still expendable and still expected to cost upwards of half a billion Euros to launch. On top of that as ESA is transitioning between A5 to A6, they have no launch capabilities themselves and were relying on Soyuz, which is now DOA courtesy of Putin and his autism. ESA also has a hate boner for Elon cause the Falcon 9 basically neutered their gravy stream where other countries were relying on A5 to put payloads up. Outside of prestige launches, the world by and large and shifted over to SpaceX because they're cheaper, fly constantly, and are literally a magnitude order more reliable given that they've had a 100+ flights on the F9 core and 88 of those have been landed. On top of that, F9 keeps pushing the boundary of possible, where the latest flight leader is at 12 flights on the same core. SpaceX thinks they can reasonably get 25 flights minimum out of each core before wear and tear starts fucking with things that refurbishment may no longer be able to handle. SpaceX has 11 F9 cores available and 6 FH cores on hand to rotate between F9 and FH flights. Excluding FH launches, at 25 per, this means SpaceX can contract into their manifest another ~250 launches before their entire existing fleet reaches the assumed threshold of core failure; and each of these flights are $67M for 25T. A5's payload to LEO is 21T and it costs $177M. For each A5 flight, you can get 2.64 F9 flights to LEO, essentially guaranteeing you ~75-80T to LEO.
ESA can't compete and they bet the bank on A6 sustaining them and SpaceX failing instead of succeeding, succeeding immensely, and then pivoting to Starship once they were satisfied with the core F9/FH design. ESA is planning on their own F9 core, but that won't come online until 2030. ESA will offer a F9 copy at ~$75-100M, while SpaceX will offer Starship for $5-10M with 10x the upmass capabilities.
They. Are. FUCKED.
