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A publicly funded agency isn’t going to win the economic race against SpaceX or other privately owned businesses. Ariane’s goal is to provide an independent alternative and bind talent. Their focus is reliability and precision (see JWST launch).
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It is now. But Ariane 5 started first over 25 years ago (first launch 1996) with only 5 failures since. It had no failures between 2003 and 2017. That’s a solid reliability record…
And they’re only trying first stage reusability, SpaceX has moved on to reusable second stages.
Technically speaking, AFAIK, it is some years now that Ariane has started a project about a partially reusable rocket
EDIT: Reading the article I think it is the same project? I assume I’m misreading your comment
Europe is so dependent on the US. It feels like a lot of things start in European labs but have to be brought to market in the US to get the funding.
Like most companies SpaceX benefitted enormously from NASA / public funding, whose greatest weakness was that it was at the whim of the US political system, which is evidently a complete failure. A multi-decade reusable rocket program was never on the cards with a continuously rotating gaggle of oligarchs changing funding and throwing spanners in projects. SpaceX was able to swoop in and hire all the top talent; thousands of engineers etc that chose the path hoping to join NASA.
It’s not that it can’t be done in Europe. It’s that America had the talent pool from the space race, plus a vulture capitalist plutocracy that guarantees higher profits and worse worker rights.
