Arianespace is hemorrhaging money.

I agree Europe has been and is still quite strong at commercial satellites.

Satellites are a much bigger part of the space market than launchers, yet Europe seems to want to throw all of their subsidy money into commercially-disastrous launchers.

Europe built Orion's service module, which is flying right now. There are also a bunch of collaborations underway for earth science.

We're discussing Bruno Le Maire lumping the US in with China, it's right there in the headline and the article.

Europe also provided one of the JWST's instruments.

Susie launches on top of A64, so it expends the whole rocket other than Susie.

How would you compare it to Dream Chaser? Which is no longer a concept, I suppose.

European taxpayers got stiffed, too: that Soyuz launch pad in South America is now idle, and Arianespace appears to have had to give OneWeb some of their money back when Russia stopped launching OneWeb.

After meeting a guy who wanted to argue to the death that Russian-built rockets launched from Russian-built launch pads in Russian territory were European, I decided to stop worrying about that label.

> This is not a geopolitical rivalry that is being talked about.

How do you know what this French politician thinks?

Eutelsat is merging with OneWeb and will have 50% of the combined company.

Also the American and Indian rockets are only completing the first generation constellation. It is not expected that future generations will also launch on the same rockets.

Also that Florida factory is a 50/50 partnership between OneWeb and Airbus.

ESA/JAXA/ISRO/NASA do collaborate on a regular basis.

I'm pretty sure that the guy in this article doesn't agree with you.

Correct.

If you think about what the equinox means, you can understand why this happens only near the equinox.

GEO satellites are in constant sunlight except around the equinoxes, when they are in the shadow of the Earth for up to 72 minutes per day.

Apparently the US is just as threatening to Europe as China, in space.

Where do they find these "leaders"?

SES, a Luxembourgish-French company, owns Greg Wyler's pre-OneWeb constellation, O3b, which is in medium earth orbit.

12.6 kilograms of lander, that's amazing, might as well build a half-dozen while they're at it!

There are about a dozen more launch opportunities in the next 2 years. Seems like building small and risky landers like this would be worth doing twice.

Also for ITAR reasons -- RocketLab makes engines in California.

The Gateway station is supposed to provide such communications, but it's not necessarily available before Artemis 3.

People downvoted me for mentioning the small and inexpensive Chinese relay satellite, so I guess that's not a good solution.

NASA appears to use standards like "99% likely to achieve its primary science mission". There's no surprise when that means that the thing typically has a lifetime much longer than the primary science mission.

Yep, and the CLPS program is going to land maybe 10 uncrewed landers before the astronauts step out. Nice to see more effort on science than Apollo's footprints focus.

The Chinese relay satellite is only 450kg, how much do you think that cost?

Interesting to see how much power a toxic person can wield on Wikipedia vs Reddit -- on Wikipedia only prolific editors can be successfully toxic, whereas on Reddit, if you're a sub mod, you're good to go.