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  • Hacker News
  • Congrats! How come European companies still haven't managed to match SpaceX's capabilities? Europe has an incredible talent pool, especially in aerospace, and some of the world’s best expertise in precision engineering, instrumentation, sensors, avionics, and other hard-tech subsystems. A huge amount of the expertise and supply chain for these components is concentrated in Europe.

    So what are we missing? Is it mainly systems integration, manufacturing scale, risk tolerance, organizational structure, or the willingness to iterate as aggressively as SpaceX? It feels like Europe has many of the pieces needed to build world-class launch systems, but hasn't yet put them together at the same scale and speed.

    by num42
  • This is an article title that needs a ton of caveats (the ESA launch site in French Guiana is indeed part of the European Union, and Russia's Plesetsk Cosmodrome is within continental Europe). Nonetheless the underlying achievement is impressive, and it's very good to see more private operators competing in space flight
    by swiftcoder
  • Plesetsk is also european soil.
    by blini-kot
  • Just for context, when Boeing completed the 747 Airbus wasn't even a thing. 5 decades later they have caught up in most categories and even surpassed in some. Who knows, maybe something similar will happen again?
    by pbkompasz
  • Isar Aerospace launch into orbit [video] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ss1DUqLjecc (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49580325)
    by ChrisArchitect
  • A good historical nugget is that the Americans got a huge leg up in the space race by importing the Germans who worked on the V-2 program.

    Germans killed Soviets by the millions. If you were a German of value (like a rocket scientist) you were eager to surrender to the Americans before the Soviets could get their hands on you.

    If you were the Americans, you distrusted the Soviets already, so it was a win-win.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Paperclip

    by godwinson__4-8
  • This is a huge success, but it I think also tells us that the EU is further decoupling itself from the US. Slowly but steadily.

    Which is obviously the right thing to do, but it's interesting that it's not just a hypothetical anymore.

    by hypfer
  • Congratulations! An immensely important achievement, I’d say.

    IMO, this success has a great implication for accessibility and sovereignty of the EU. Although ESA can launch from French Guiana, the spaceport is an ocean-away from Europe! That fact alone affects the cost and the launch cadence for Europe greatly.

    Now they prove they can launch directly from Norway with their own production from Munich and elsewhere and that has immense potential for the future: much higher launch cadence, significant lower cost and always-on accessibility.

    The only way Europe can have a Starlink similar network is to launch it from their own soil and reuse the first stage. Also from the perspective of security, launching spy and other military satellites from EU soil is the only practical possibility in this political climate.

    by sinuhe69

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