Not a lot of information here. Not sure who they are planning on working with.

Though this image in the article:

https://thenational-the-national-prod.cdn.arcpublishing.com/resizer/yV2MdcI2s1hAsBUXHr3MkCvM9Lo=/800x0/filters:format(jpg):quality(70)/cloudfront-eu-central-1.images.arcpublishing.com/thenational/7Z5UVOJD6JBHPIFXD7HWWPJAXI.jpg

Reminded me of this image

https://shortyawards.imgix.net/entries/8th/glow_shortys_header_expanse-1.png?auto=format&fit=crop&h=300&q=65&w=500&s=f18123e0d4c53b04e661fe44a25083f3

Congratulations, you have managed to list 8 of the 10 largest economies by nominal GDP.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nominal)

With ROK and Saudi replacing Italy and Canada.

I believe the scientists think there is a good reason that anyone space faring could work it out. It was designed to be decoded. But also that no one is going to find it, it was more a mixture of the thought process and setting a precedent to ensure that we think about who will find our exo solar system probe in the future (or what was the future for them)

My personal "hot take" is we need to move from bespoke components to batch production of modules that can be fitted out for specific tasks and fitted together to build the station. I think the idea of designing and building everything is an idea for $100 million launches not $10 million, the paradigm we are supposed to be aiming for. I think these are all really Old Space in new livery. I think the New Space station is still to be designed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ariane_6#Launch_contracts_and_scheduled_flights

Its all ESA other than Kuiper that went Arianespace and ULA despite the cost to snub SpaceX.

>Only just now that Soyuz is suddenly off the table do you say Europe needs to get it's act together.

Ariane 4 and 5 and Soyuz were mainstays of the commercial launch industry. Now its Falcon 9.

This latest failure means Arianespace and ESA barely have any comercial launch capability at a market price.

The US having a gap between Shuttle and Dragon has nothing to do with this.

No offence but ESA and Europe really urgently need to go back to the drawing board. Vega failing, Soyuz gone for good and A6 struggling to gain customers.

Folks, its every red flying currently flying. If Europe wants to be a space power, it needs to ramp up private space with all speed possible.

Jonny Kim

SEAL, Harvard Doctor, astronaut.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonny_Kim

Inspire people to believe what can be achieved.

It would take a couple of hundred thousands of years for self replicating machines to be at every star in the galaxy. Size of the galaxy only really applies to single points.

If they exist they are either already here or have zero interest in other societies.

The thing is whatever the answer is it has to be a general one, it has to be every technological society follows the same path and does not explore.

>With the Universe

The only aliens we will ever contact will be in this Galaxy. Its the only place that is plausibly close enough. If they are frequent in the Galaxy, they are frequent everywhere. If they are infrequent in this Galaxy they are likely so many galaxies far away that their messages would only reach us from a long long time ago and be beyond faint.

Rare Earth hypothesis. Early on in this people realised that if aliens exist they would have been here long time ago. Science fiction authors like AC Clarke wrote books about aliens leaving watchers (The Sentinel ) and scientists like Fermi asked why they were not here with von Neumann machines.

I think that all other explanations have to have additional parameters such as a generalised desire not to communicate or a generalised desire to leave some societies isolated. It just violates the principle of parsimony for anything else to be the most likely explanation.

> And assuming that money wasnt an issue

To reiterate one of the most well understood elements of why its expensive "too space", the cost of fuel for a rocket is often 1% or below. Most of the cost comes from the design, capital costs of machinery, land rent etc and other fixed costs such as the labour input for fabrication.

The more you build and launch rockets the cheaper it gets.

So in terms of getting large amounts to other planets, it would be expensive with current launch costs, but could easily be much cheaper by buying large bulk number of launches on launch vehicles optimized for reuse or cheap fabrication rather than to squeeze the maximum mass to orbit out of a vehicle that will launch 100ish times over 20 years.

Life as we know it depends on several things including heavy elements that are cerated in stars so generally found in newer star systems and it requires a distinct lack of nearby supernova so the early galaxy would have been a likely nightmare. The order vs disorder is in the background of this, but its not really a tool for examining the more fine grained ways that matter is created and live emerges.

Magnetic fields polarise light. We would see it with ease. They also have no effect on most elements. There are a lot of reasons this is not the case, including observing the bending of spacetime caused by the dark matter. That is down to gravity.

China does not work like the US, the US allows and encourages partners to build significant portions of the infrastructure. Part of Orion is built by the ESA.

China would need to find a whole new way of doing things. And Russia would need to largely self finance. Nauka was mostly built and took them decades.

We will see how ambitious both are once metal starts getting cut.

Same as with all the new space startups. I will believe it when I see the hardware being fabricated.

>China declared its openness to international partnerships for ILRS and deep space missions at the International Astronautical Congress (IAC) in Paris in September, but Russia was not mentioned in the plans.
The omission of China’s main partner was likely due to sensitivity to the fallout from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, but the situation poses a dilemma for China in its attempt to broaden its cooperation.

Of the space faring nations, US is out, ESA, JAXA and ROK are all in with Artemis. India is pushing its own program. Russia is in a state of what ever Russia is in at the moment.

There may be someone like Iran or Brazil who might pay for some experiments but most of the big budget nations are all tied into flying with the US now.

Musk? You are being over taken by RocketLabs and the other small launch systems will not be that far behind. You are in the wrong paradigm. ULA survives as its custom built for the DOD\NRO work. Everything that is not cheap and agile will die.

If Musk disapears tomorrow you will only be a few years beyond instead of more than a decade.

Vega should have been the warning. Its not a statist industry anymore.

>The US didn't fly them for free. And lest we forget the interlude between 2011 and 2020 where the US was reliant on Soyuz "Because the US wouldn't pay for it". Stones and glass houses.

Liar. The US paid for Shuttle, paid for CrewDev, paid for Ares I and Orion. The gap was down to changing priorities mandated by the politicians and speed that what they paid for was delivered by the commercial sector.

I am not sure what your point is related to space beyond a childish tantrum about "USA bad". But its reddit, the best way to win an argument is being uneducated and angry.

>It's like living with a dog. The dog can be really friendly with you and help you with stuff and defend you - but it can still turn around and bite you.

An emotive analogy that once again betrays no understand of trade relation of international politics.

> this is why the US slammed the door on Britain after they finished the Manhattan Project

Really its a far more complex picture than that. Churchill delayed making it a joint project until the US was so far ahead there was little to share. By then a few specialists joined the team for things like the shaped charges on the plutonium bomb but they had little impact.

You are likely thinking of the Peierls calculations the UK gave to the US in 1940 as part of the Tizard mission, but then the UK went its own way for several years not realising the sheer scale of what the US was doing.

You are all over the place. The US has been flying European astronauts since Ulf Merbold in 83. Europe does not have its own because it wont pay for it.

You seem to know that little about the topic you think you are an expert.

>The idea that space is infinite makes no sense to me

Your intuition evolved as a primate on the African veldt. It views the world at speeds of a few 10s of kmh and distances of a few kilometres at best. The visible Universe alone's size is so far beyond comprehension of intuition there is no point to it, we cannot use intuition to think about the nearest star to our solar system, let alone distant galaxies.

To think about the size and shape of the Universe requires years of slowly building up the knowledge to think abstractly about physics and distance.

I do not wish to discourage you but point out this is but the first step on a long journey.

>Until America decides we aren't, and then we're all in the shit.

The US typically is friendly with us until we get in the way of their business interests or show any kind of deviation from US foreign policy.

This is a real low level understanding of international relations. There have been big rifts with the US in parts of Europe over many issues. Yet the over all relationship is probably the closest set of relationships in world history. It has a long history, really starting with the Atlantic Charter in 1942 but both have strongly stood for a rules based world order built around free trade and democracy for all the post war years.

Europes economy is about the same size as the USs, its technical skills are on a par if Europe wants to have its own human rated space vehicle, then it can pay for it instead of the endless paper studies like Hermes and half hearted team ups with Russia like Orel.

> and randomly slap us with tariffs because supposedly we're a threat to American industry.

Battles over tarrifs and subsidies are as old as the relationship. Europe is no slouch in defending its own corner, but compare that to the way the non western world interacts.

You seem to have more emotions than reasons.

In the same way Boeing is a competitor to Airbus so SpaceX is a competitor to Arianespace.

Just to emphasises ESA build part of the Orion space craft. This is not a geopolitical rivalry that is being talked about.

Europe is still mentally competing with ULA, its industry (other than OneWeb) is still built around communications being single large geostationary satellites. It is paying for a decade of laboured, unimaginative responses to an industry that was moving from statist to more free market orientated.

There will be numerous component manufacturers who will have an active future in space. But until they realise it is not a new generation of rockets, but a paradigm shift in how space is being commercialised, they will be flat footed and atrophying.

Its not 2005 anymore.

Not a movie but the BBCs "The Space Race" is a docudrama that focusses on von Braun and Korolev and the race to the Moon.

They landed a Starship on Earth after doing an extreme manoeuvre. They land Falcon 9 boosters on Earth all the time.

With its much weaker gravity Id think that most of the difficulty is hitting a safe spot. With 1/6 gravity and no atmosphere the physics of the landing seem much much easier.