Comment by rexskimmer
14 hours ago
They started developing this rocket in the late 2010s, way before the current US craziness (or the current level of craziness anyway). Independent access to space is always desirable for countries that can muster the resources, but this is just one of many companies that appeared back then as a response to SpaceX's initial success.
One would think that ze germans would be among the first to be conquering space with all that german engineering.
I don’t think Germany has favorable place for orbital launches.
For any failure you would need to have an ocean in the direction of launch.
Also not all orbits are equal because then you need more fuel etc.
It is silly to say every country has equal opportunity to go to space because space is only 100km up. That’s not how it works.
They are - but in cooperation with others. Parts of the Orion capsule of the current Artemis mission program are based on the German ATV, which is a capsule which was developed to supply ISS. On ISS there are German modules like Galileo. German Spacelab was a major component of many Space Shuttle missions. German companies like Zeiss provided optics and laser components for Apollo. To name a few, besides lots of satellites and other things. However after WW2 there were different political decisions, so that Germany won't build its own rockets, but German technology was key to Saturn V and Ariane rockets.
Aside from technology, Germany also got major control centers and mission planning capability in Cologne and Oberpfaffenhofen.
Most components are there, but not the political will to go on a national mission.
I mean, Operation Paperclip and Von Braun were central to the success of the Apollo program. The Soviets had a similar postwar-German-capture program, if I remember correctly.
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> One would think that ze germans would be among the first to be conquering space
After the horrors of WWII, Europe decided it would rather do things collectively than each country doing its own thing. This resulted in wonderful things like Concorde, fast rail, Airbus, and Ariane. Europe became more than the sum of its parts.
Is this sarcasm or do you still live in the 1980s?
Yeah this is just the effect of SpaceX showcasing "space launch is no longer the realm of government efforts only".
They kicked off the wave of commercial space launch - and now, it reached the EU too.
Eh, you can split us Europeans up into two camps; those who do not want to see the problem and those who couldn't look away.
The second camp saw the craziness when the later Bush was elected a second time.
one of those bush votes was to ensure he could clean up his own mess.
lmao what
I’m curious what you mean by this. At face value it seems like a weird rationalization but I get the sense I’m not reading this correctly.
I'd split it into 2 camps. Elites who realize Europe isn't a unified group or has a military strong enough for defense..
And people who get wet when France says they are going to send soldiers to Ukraine and it never materializes.
The general population has 0 understanding of international relations. It's the United States and China right now. Any other belief comes from someone who has read 0 international relations Realism books.
Its not that Europeans havent read Mearsheimer. its that for the best part of three hundred years the whole of Europe has been trying that same realist script until there was nothing left but total ruin across the entire continent. Europeans who created the EU knew about balance of power geopolitics so well, they created this slow bureaucratic mess specifically to stop Germany and France sliding back into the same old lethal habit. While clumsy positioning between the US and China is a headache in the present moment for Europe, compared to a tedious Union Europeans prefer reawakenings of 1914 in their backyard. Well at least so far.
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Realpolitik sorely lacking
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