Major subsidies

That may sound like a commercial success, but Europe is likely losing money on each of those private missions.

Europe invested about 3.6 billion euros in the development of the Ariane 6 rocket and its launch site in French Guiana, but that’s not the end of it. The European Space Agency’s director general, Josef Aschbacher, has publicly confirmed that, based on nine flights a year, the European governments involved with the space agency will still need to subsidize each launch with between 32 million and 38 million euros per flight.

If we amortize the development costs with the ongoing subsidy, European taxpayers have put more than 100 million euros into each launch before the customer pays the rocket’s operator, Arianespace, anything.

Europe’s current goal is to fly the Ariane 6 rocket nine or 10 times a year, but given the growing global demand for launch and lack of capacity, there is some discussion about increasing the number of Ariane 6 rockets available.

Will ministers increase cadence?

In June, Aschbacher said Europe is on track to have the capability to launch Ariane 6 a total of 10 times next year, meeting the target set for Arianespace. However, he added that the agency is looking at various scenarios to increase that capacity to 12, 15, or even 20 launches a year.

Because the Ariane 6 rocket is expendable, Europe must increase production of all of the vehicle’s elements, from its solid-rocket motors to first-stage engines, in addition to upper stages and payload fairings.

Aschbacher said he hopes to have “clarity” from European ministers by the end of this year as to plans, if any, for scaling up production of the Ariane 6 rocket. The question for ministers may not be easy, however, because they will have to make investments in factories and other logistics to increase rocket production. And would it be worth doing that to meet growing commercial demand, if the only way to attract that demand is to heavily subsidize the price of its launch vehicle?

Ministers may decide that these funds would be better invested in the next generation of Ariane rocket that would incorporate at least partial reuse, and better compete with a growing number of reusable vehicles in the United States and China.

The decision by ministers later this year on whether to scale up capacity should reveal a lot about how they’re thinking about the long-term future of Ariane 6.