| 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. |