| Yes. I have code in space that was funded by ESA and launched on a Falcon 9. If you count the ISS then SpaceX is a launch partner and is probably our best bet in the near future for shuttling people and cargo (plus the ATV). ESA is basically open to partnering with them, there is a statement somewhere about them looking into reusable systems. It's politically tricky because part of ESA'S remit is to contract with member states and increase capacity in Europe: you buy into ESA, ESA throws you bones in the form of tender opportunities. I believe it's also reasonably fair, so they make sure that contracts go to everyone. That also means that most of the big ticket contracts go to companies like Airbus and Ariannespace. Airbus would lobby pretty hard if ESA started spending big money in the US. Though you can see how that worked out for Boeing. A lot of these contracts are big and multiyear, projects using specific launch partners are designed around fairing capacities and so on. We don't necessarily need roscosmos for a lot of this, plenty of launches are done using Ariane rockets from Kourou. SpaceX isn't publicly listed so the vast majority of people here don't own any. It's not like TSLA. Finally on monopolies - ESA already doesn't really build much itself, most of the hardware is built by private companies. NASA is the same, though they have a bit more in house capacity than ESA. Apollo and the Space Shuttle were spread out to a huge number of US contractors (people like Lockheed Martin, Rockwell and Northrop Grumman). Orion/SLS? Not built by NASA, built by boeing, rocketdyne and others. SpaceX has had remarkable success precisely because they disrupted existing launch platforms that were failing to innovate fast enough. In a monopoly, users don't have choice which is not the case here - there's Blue Origin, ULA, Ariane, etc. |