How Europe screwed up its rocket program

KOUROU, French Guiana — First came the fire, then the roar and the rumble through the rainforest, and seconds later the four years of delay to Europe’s Ariane 6 were, for a moment at least, forgotten as the rocket disappeared into cloud.

Better late than never.

After leading the market for years with the Ariane 5 rocket, Europe’s governments, firms and spy agencies lost access to space over the last two years as a cocktail of disease, war, inflation and downright bad planning brought launches to a halt at Europe’s spaceport in French Guiana.

Into the void walked Elon Musk’s Space X. While the old Ariane 5 rocket became increasingly outdated and the program to build Ariane 6 sputtered, the American company further revolutionized the launcher business thanks to reusable rockets like its Falcon 9 that slashed costs.

Even though nearly €6 billion in subsidies have been pumped into the Ariane 6 program, there’s little chance of it defeating SpaceX.

The best case is that it offers a way for Europe’s satellites to reach orbit without having to pay Musk — but at a premium price.

“Ariane 6 is no longer competitive with Falcon 9, this we have to face,” said Toni Tolker-Nielsen, a Danish veteran of the European Space Agency (ESA) tasked with turning the struggling Ariane program around.

The maiden Ariane 6 mission may have worked — save only for the stalled third ignition of the upper stage for reentry — but it’s a long way from a success story.

Expensive, delayed and no longer cutting-edge tech. That description applies to Ariane 6 but also to swaths of Europe’s economy, with companies giving ground on solar panels, battery cells, electric vehicles, wind turbines and microchips to Asian and American rivals; that’s shown by the dearth of American-style tech giants.

“Because we hadn’t developed a new launcher in decades we lost some expertise,” said Philippe Baptiste, the president of France’s space agency CNES. “That is the same in many industrial fields in Europe.”

That makes the Ariane program an echo of a Europe that once led the world with speedy TGV trains and Concorde supersonic planes.

In its heyday, just a few years ago, Ariane 5 was a global workhorse for commercial and institutional missions, launching 113 times over nearly three decades. Even NASA agreed to ship its prestige James Webb telescope into space onboard the rocket in 2021 — a significant and symbolic show of support.

It flew its final mission last year, freezing Europe’s space ambitions for a year. POLITICO spoke to space officials past and present, both on and off the record, to find out what went wrong with Ariane 6.

Delays to Europe’s Ariane 6 were, for a moment, forgotten as the rocket disappeared into cloud. | Jody Amiet/AFP via Getty Images

Back to the future

When the plan for a future Ariane system — a three-stage heavy lift rocket — was agreed by space ministers at a summit in Luxembourg in 2014, the target was crystal clear: launch by 2020.

The rocket would be built by ArianeGroup, owned by Airbus and Safran, with France leading the work alongside Germany and Italy. Some 13 countries would contribute parts and know-how, making it a truly European mission.

From the start, the French pushed strategic autonomy as a grounding philosophy. The German response was characterized instead by what Jan Wörner, who ran the European Space Agency between 2015 and 2021 and is a former boss of Germany’s space agency, calls ungehinderter Zugang, or unhindered access to space.

That small difference was critical in thinking.

Realizing Ariane 5 could never compete with SpaceX’s fledgling Falcon, the options were to go with a cut-down German plan to invest in a midlife-extension of Ariane 5 with an improved upper stage and slightly cheaper launch cost, or to run with a French plan to build a whole new system.

In the end, ESA countries went with a third way, pushed by industry, to build a brand new rocket that would be roughly 50 percent cheaper to launch, and more agile in orbit, than Ariane 5.

The idea of copying SpaceX and making Ariane partly reusable was considered and rejected.

That decision haunts France’s Economy Minister Bruno Le Maire. “In 2014 there was a fork in the road, and we didn’t take the right path,” Le Maire said in 2020.

But just because it works for Elon, doesn’t make it good for Europe.

Once it’s up and running, Ariane 6 should have nine launches a year — of which around four will be for institutional missions, like government reconnaissance satellites and earth observation systems. The rest will be targeted at commercial clients.

Compare that to SpaceX. Fed by a steady stream of Pentagon and industry contracts, in addition to missions for its own Starlink satellite constellation, Musk’s company carried out a record 96 launches in 2023.

“It wasn’t that we just said reusability is bullshit,” said Wörner of the early talks around Ariane 6 in the mid-2010s, and the consideration of building reusable stages rather than burning through fresh components each mission. “If you have 10 flights per year and you are only building one new launcher per year then from an industrial point of view that’s not going to work.”

The plan was for the two-booster Ariane 62 to cost around €70 million per launch, while the heavier four-booster model called Ariane 64 would cost about €90 million.

But those forecasts now look wildly optimistic. The launch cost will be upward of €100 million, said Pacôme Révillon, CEO of consultancy Novaspace, though he noted there may be ways to cut prices by maximizing payloads.

For comparison, the rough industry estimate for the cost of a commercial launch with the Falcon 9 is $70 million.

While Caroline Arnoux, who runs the Ariane 6 program at Arianespace, talks up an “impressive” order book for the freshly flown rocket of 29 launches over the next three years, the early results of competition between her company and SpaceX aren’t promising.

Controversially, SpaceX is raking in €180 million to launch two European Galileo geo-navigation satellites, contracted for launch in the United States because of the Ariane 6 delays.

Meanwhile, Europe’s weather satellite operator EUMETSAT also decided just days before the maiden Ariane 6 mission to pay SpaceX to lug a weather satellite into orbit next year, reversing an earlier deal with Arianespace.

The EUMETSAT call came after SpaceX officials told them to make the switch before Ariane 6 launched for the first time, or risk ballooning costs to go later. “Fair game from SpaceX,” one space official said on condition of anonymity. “It’s all business.”

The response? A very European plea for protection and government aid. The EU and the European Space Agency are demanding rules for a “clear European preference,” Internal Market Commissioner Thierry Breton told a meeting of space wonks in January.

“Regaining our sovereignty in terms of access to space is imperative if the union is to remain a credible space actor,” said Breton.

Perfect storm

War and disease don’t mix well with rocket science.

When the Ariane 6 plan was hatched, the target was a 2020 launch and the cost of a launch slashed in half compared to Ariane 5. Then came the pandemic which throttled development and caused delays, made worse by soaring inflation and restrictions on movement.

That was followed by two more blows in 2022.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February destroyed the old relationship between the European Space Agency and Russia’s Roscosmos, which pulled out from its launchpad in French Guiana due to Western sanctions.

That upended ESA’s backup plan for continuing to launch using Roscosmos’ Soyuz rockets after Ariane 5 was phased out.

“Soyuz was the backup for Ariane 6, not Ariane 5,” said ESA’s Tolker-Nielsen. “That was what created the real crisis.”

Compounding the problems, in December 2022, a mid-size Vega C rocket failed, losing two satellites.

“Within a year we lost completely our access to space in Europe,” said Baptiste from CNES. “For France, this question has always been sensitive, but suddenly it was important for Europe.”

Next generation

If you can’t beat them, copy them.

Musk’s success in profiting from a free-market approach to space in the U.S. has prompted Europe to take a look at its own state-dominated model and push for reforms.

In November, space ministers meeting at an ESA summit in Seville launched a plan to contract out services for a return cargo mission to the International Space Station, and let industry decide how to get the job done. That’s a revolution from the current system where ESA uses complex geo-return rules under which countries get back contracts to the value that they contribute to each specific program at summits every few years.

Next up is rethinking how rockets are developed — again following the model that worked well for SpaceX. ESA is running a program to incubate rocket companies by handing funding, framework contracts for future missions and access to infrastructure at the spaceport in French Guiana.

The aim is to start fostering European startups in the same way SpaceX benefited from institutional support from NASA in its early days.

“The future of European access to space should look different,” said Jörn Spurmann, chief operations officer with Rocket Factory Augsburg, a German space startup. He argued that the EU and ESA should contract out launch services rather than pin everything on Ariane 6.

Other firms developing rockets include Spain-based PLD Space and Germany’s Isar Aerospace. Cracking open the market to new entrants is the only way to “catch-up with the leading space nations in the world,” Spurmann said.

It’s not clear if that injection of free-market ideas is enough to save Europe’s space sector anytime soon. Industry complains the ESA funding on offer is tiny, and Tolker-Nielsen says the benefits for such programs won’t become apparent until 2035 at the earliest.

Where once the business case for Ariane 6 was clear, now its argument rests on the geopolitics of space.

“No matter how you look at it,” French astronaut Thomas Pesquet said just before Ariane 6 blasted off. “[The rocket] is fundamental for Europe to have autonomous access to space.”

“Space has become so important that we simply can’t let others launch our own satellites,” he said.