Comment by varjag

I suspect the previous poster's metric of innovation was more along the lines of:

* developing the first meaningful fully-reusable first stage rocket, and continuing to develop it to the extent that no other launch systems are even in the same ballpark as regards cost, cadence, or mass to orbit

* developing, and continuing to develop, the only full-flow staged combustion rocket engine

* developing, and continuing to develop, a novel, completely-reusable, next-generation very-heavy-lift platform, before any of the competition have even caught with their previous generation

* (to your snarky point about explosions) demonstrating that moving fast, evolving designs quickly, and not being afraid to (be seen to) fail (in the short term, in the court of public opinion, etc.) in the pursuit of success is much better than the traditional conservative approach (e.g. NASA, Blue Origin, etc.)

I'm well aware that giving credit to anything related to Musk is increasingly difficult for some people at the moment, but let's give credit where it's due to SpaceX and its engineers.

Ariane 5 exploded with 4 satellites because they copy pasted code of the Ariane 4: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ariane_flight_V88

It's the most expensive bug in history. On the other hand, you are bringing up explosions of empty rockets that are launched as test, that's bad faith.

Look at the launch history and the Falcon 9 is simply more reliable than the Ariane 5:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falcon_9#Launch_outcomes

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ariane_5#Launch_statistics

I did not said it was a failure, I said, they do not have a "pretty good track record". ESA burn through EU money, and wont care to innovate as long as EU provide them unlimited money and dont pressure them. It's an ivory tower.

> It operates its own GNSS constellation.

Only 33 years later and mostly launched on Russian rockets, behind GLONASS and BeiDou.

> It is second only to NASA. Calling it a failure is ridiculous.

In what respect? Space? Certainly not, far behind the US and Russia and questionably competitive with China.

Economically? Behind US and China.

R&D? Behind US and China.

Manufacturing? Behind US and China.

You are refusing to recognise reality.

> It operates its own GNSS constellation.

Galileo did not start as an EU programme. China used to be member!

What other EU programmes did you have in mind? The EU's efforts not even seem comparable to the European Space Agency (which is not part of the EU) let alone NASA.

Full details here: https://www.esa.int/About_Us/Corporate_news/Member_States_Co...

Also, not all EU states are ESA member states.

Canada is on the ESA governing council, and takes part in projects.

In the context of Eu grants being discussed in this thread, its financing arrangements are very different from those, so its irrelevant to discussing the effectiveness or not of those.

If that is your metric, look up "ESA Hermes".

It was basically Dreamchaser, only in the 1980s, and cancelled.