[ohgodplsno]

Falcon 9 Success Rate - 173 / 184 (94%) - Most of it LEO Falcon 9 Max Payload - 22 tons LEO, 8 tons GTO when all the conditions perfectly align and then it still kinda sucks.

Falcon Heavy Success Rate - 5 / 5 (100%) - No track record Falcon Heavy Max Payload - 83 tons LEO, 26 tons GTO

Ariane 5 Success Rate - 110/115 (95.7%) - 7 to 10 tons GTO, Most of it GTO

Falcon Heavy's cost is still theoretical, when it has barely launched anything in orbit. Ariane 5 works, extremely well. Self flagellation about EU space tech serves no purpose.

[mlindner]

This is one of the most confused takes on EU launch that I've ever seen.

Your Falcon 9 success numbers are completely incorrect. The success rate is 100% on current models and overall having only 1 launch failure (or 2 if you count a pre-launch failure).

Falcon 9 launches primarily to LEO because that is where the market is. There are just very few satellites that want to go to GTO, but those that do generally launch on Falcon 9. It's launch costs are substantially less than Ariane 5, to the point that Arianespace is now thinking of rushing Ariane 6 to end of life sooner than planned to focus on a future reusable vehicle.

Falcon Heavy was primarily designed for the US DoD as it's primary customer.

[panick21_]

Wow this post is peak delusional nonsense.

Falcon family: 208/210 --> 99% (if you want to include AMOS its 98.57%)

> Falcon Heavy's cost is still theoretical

Its cost is unknown (so is that of Ariane 5), but its price is pretty well known. And costumers care about price and not cost.

> Ariane 5 works, extremely well.

Ariane 5 is end of live. It was incredibly expensive to the point where even Arianespace itself flew more missions with Russian rockets. It had a peak launch rate of 7 per year. Anybody with a brain has known Ariane 5 needs to be replaced since at least 10-12 years.

Outside of the Arianespace launched mostly Russian rockets, they just had a string of recent failures. Not to mention that they had issues with Ariane 5 that grounded the rocket for a very long time and the Swiss government had to provide emergency funding so they could make the launches leading up to Webb happen.

Arianespace will also consume more then 5 billion for the Ariane 6, a rocket that is mostly a slight upgrade over the Ariane 5 built with part that have been in development for a long time. This is more then the complete cost of the Falcon 1/Falcon 9/Falcon Heavy and reusability program have cost SpaceX.

The first step in improvement of European space is to not delude ourself of where we actually stand.

[nimos]

That Falcon 9 success rate is for the first stage boosters landing. The current gen of Falcon 9 is 149/149 for launch success which would be comparable to the Ariane stat.

Looking at both recently they basically have a 100% success rate.

[ralfd]

What are you counting here? Booster landing success rates? Then Ariane has a Zero here.

According to Wikipedia Falcon 9 Block 5 has a success rate of 100% (149/149) for launches.

Also I don’t understand your comment when the parent talked about commercial success and that American space companies are/will be cheaper than Ariane.