This is a terrific illustration of comparative advantage and economies of scale.
If Europe and America could trade with trust, Europe could put these resources into space missions. (Or solar panels. Whatever.) SpaceX, meanwhile, would have more resources with which to scale Starship.
Instead we have inefficient duplication and diseconomies of scale. All so…idk, the Italians stop taking advantage of America...
I disagree. It is good to have more than one design. It is not exact duplication so alternative approaches are taken. We have more than one design if one proves flawed. We avoid creating a monopoly.
We could maximise economies of scale by having one car manufacturer that made a small number of models. No one would suggest that is a good idea.
Even the Soviet Union did not go to the extreme of having only one design for every possible product.
SpaceX has multiple designs generations ahead of anything in Europe in this category. (China is catching up, but it too is retracing Hawthorne's path.)
Themis is cool. But it's duplicating what SpaceX did fifteen to twenty years ago and what China has been working on for ten. Methalox, open cycle gas generator, steel tanks...there aren't any daring design decisions here. And there shouldn't be. This is a solved problem. (Again, that doesn't mean Europe shouldn't be solving it independently. But it's not innovating anything here.)
Consider an alternate universe where NATO isn't in shambles. Europe can use SpaceX for LEO. And in the meantime, it can focus on other designs, other categories. Maybe a different fuel. Maybe a novel engine. Maybe something entirely extra-atmospheric. Maybe it's a breakthrough in satellite design, or habitat science. Instead of replicating Falcon 1/9 and Raptor, there could be a genuinely new design.
We don't get that, because Europe has to secure its launch sovereignty. That is the cost.
> We could maximise economies of scale by having one car manufacturer that made a small number of models
Mature market. Multiple optima. See my comment on Airbus and Boeing. When you're pathfinding, you want multiple bets. When you're pursuing, R&D benefits from scale.
I think that often theres a difference in ability to put capital to work between the US and europe. Lots of innovative work has happened in Europe, but it often gets bought by US or Asian capital, or gets outcompeted by vastly more resourced US competitors, or just withers on the vine from a lack of investment.
Sabre seemed a really interesting space approach that failed from lack of funding.
> I think that often theres a difference in ability to put capital to work between the US and europe.
It’s because the EU is 27 different countries with different regulations while the US is 1. Some work is being done to fix this but remains to be seen if we can reach a point where we have unified capital markets instead of national ones.
That does not prevent something like this project happening which includes 23 different European countries, and not even through the EU.
The point of the EU is to provide unified markets, and capital flows pretty freely between major European economies (including those outside the EU) so I do not think that is it.
That is something that remains outside the EU's remit because it is military and decision lie in the hands of member states.
I was rebutting a claim that differences in regulations preventing capital flows. That is not true in general in our globalised world (capital clearly flows freely between many countries) and certainly not true in the EU.
It is possible that the EU loses somewhat from not having the central budget that the US federal government has which which to back big projects, but, in most cases, the bigger EU states are big enough to back most things (as is the UK) but will not do so. The lack of fiscal centralisation in the EU also affects its financial stability but I do not think that is directly related to this problem.
As for sixth general fighters, a number of smaller economies than Germany alone have or plan their own sixth generation fighters, or have done so (some programmes have merged). Again, a difference in attitude and priorities.
I think it is a difference of attitude. There is a lack of belief in big projects, particularly from the government - especially in the UK and Sabre is British.
It took 100 million to get to falcon 1, and the company was probably not viable until NASA gave space X the crs1 contract for >1billion...
And where did that initial money come from? Musks sale of PayPal shares, which he got when PayPal acquired his payments company... Would that have happened if he'd started his payments company in Europe? Would Compaq or an equivalent have been interested in paying for zip2, which provided the initial money to found x.com if he'd built zip2 in Europe?
Musk deliberately and intentionally moved to silicon valley, and I think a big part of the reason was almost certainly that the US is more prepared to invest money in these kinds of ventures.
You could argue the same with Boeing vs. Airbus. Why should Europeans build their own aircrafts? Today I think a lot of people are happy, that Airbus exists to compensate for the problems that Boeing has. Competition is good and will lead to better solutions in the long run.
While I don't disagree, Airbus's origin was more or less the opposite of that; it was a merger of existing aircraft manufacturers. Both Airbus's creation, and Boeing's merger with McDonnell Douglas _decreased_ competition, and arguably neither should have been allowed.
Not sure about Boeing and McDonnell Douglas, but for the many European aircraft companies that first cooperated under the Airbus name and then (much later) merged into a single company, there wasn't really an alternative (unless you consider bankruptcy an alternative). Even in the late 1960s, when the original A300 was designed, that task was more expensive than any individual European manufacturer could shoulder, and without a new product, they would have quickly faded into irrelevance.
You couldn't. Boeing and Airbus have pursued different strategies, both in design and production. There is very little actual duplication between their work. To the extent there is, it's in each de-risking different technologies and then the other, after seeing the results, rapidly catching up.
This is partly a reflection of commercial aviation being a relatively mature market. Both in the pace of required innovation (and regulation). And the fact that the difference between branching out and marching forward is difficult to know ex ante.
Put another way, the next steps in launch vehicles are relatively constrained. The goals aren't particularly unknown, just the path. For aviation, on the other hand, the goals are quite varied.
The economy of scale is the mechanism that provides the mutual economic benefit - the environment of trust is the political situation that facilitates economies of scale expanding beyond national borders.
This is simply a case of the classic efficiency vs resilience tradeoff. If you know where to look, you'll find instances of it absolutely everywhere, with some spectacular blowups when efficiency prioritization is mistimed and some very boring out-competition failures in the other case.
> simply a case of the classic efficiency vs resilience tradeoff
Absolutely. The point is when pursuing a proven technological forefront, there are benefits to being able to focus on efficiency. Moreover, scale expands solution space.
Not always. But high-throughput manufacturing allows SpaceX to pursue both efficiency and resilience in e.g. engine design in a way not possible if you're building engines one at a time. (You always have multiple engines in process, which enables a higher risk tolerance, which enables a higher feedback rate, which allows for faster and more-meaningful iteration.)
> All so…idk, the Germans stop taking advantage of us…
Other than this part, I thought you had it: comparative advantage makes everyone richer. You don't actually want both parties getting richer when your counterparty appears to have gone mad and might be about to stab you in the face.
No, access to space is too strategically important to ever delegate. It’s not something you can buy.
Even before the Trump debacle, the USA were extremely unreliable when it came to satellite images for exemple. Do you remember the fake images passed as Irak developing weapons of mass destruction? Because I certainly do.
Europe needs their own launcher in the same way it needs its own defence industry. It’s just sad that it took so long for some members to finally realise that provided they actually did.
> access to space is too strategically important to ever delegate
New York isn't "delegating" its space access to California, Texas and Florida. (Same as America never saw itself delegating shipbuilding to our Japanese and Korean allies.)
I'm not arguing Europe isn't acting rationally. Just that this is the cost of strategic independence. Everyone shares a burden of duplication and diseconomies of scale. It really isn't that long ago that NATO members--America included--didn't think that way.
Politics of division will end up with fragmentation. But yes, Europe does need its own space capability as part of its own military capability in order to remain an independent block without undue external pressure. Conversely, that subordinates the independence of countries within the block, which is why things like an "EU military" haven't got off the ground until now.
Yup. If that happens in America between states, it further underlines the argument. We're in a world where soveriegnty must be protected. But in this we lose the peace dividends of comparative advantage and economies of scale.
Duplication of effort is not an actual problem. Intense competition spurs progress far better than having more resources. And in the case of government programs — especially in Europe — more resources are often just wasted.
> US themselves are also propping up multiple companies for space deliveries
They're going after different markets with similar tech (mostly not working, to be honest) or trying different tech. Themis and Prometheus are entirely unoriginal designs. (Which is fine. Their point isn't to be innovative, but to be there, in Europe, where Trump can't touch them.)
There are incredibly cool, novel designs in Europe. But they can't see the light of day because these duplication projects soak up funding. (Again, as they probably must.)
If Europe and America could trade with trust, Europe could put these resources into space missions. (Or solar panels. Whatever.) SpaceX, meanwhile, would have more resources with which to scale Starship.
Instead we have inefficient duplication and diseconomies of scale. All so…idk, the Italians stop taking advantage of America...