back to article Europe's Vega C rocket cleared for launch tonight, first since 2022

Arianespace's Vega C is set to make a return to flight this evening, almost two years to the day after a second-stage failure doomed its previous launch. ESA's Vega-C rocket is complete on the launch pad at Europe's Spaceport and ready for liftoff, set for December 4 ESA's Vega-C rocket sits on the launchpad at Europe's …

  1. beast666 Silver badge

    ESA is not fit for purpose.

    1. The man with a spanner

      A blind assertion/opinion with absolutly zero attempt to justify or explain this belief.

      Go on, you can do better than that.

      1. Justthefacts Silver badge

        Ok then, as a former project manager and program manager who worked in the space industry for a couple decades, and worked on at least a couple of dozens projects contracted to ESA……ESA is not fit for purpose. Because:

        Georeturn policy distorts and destroys projects, both by adding pointless management overhead, but even more importantly determining bad technical solutions purely because of the “strength” (or indeed strength aspired to but not achieved) of the country which is pre-determined to win the contract for geo reasons.

        Prioritising “cool” hobby tech demos over either science, or developments likely to lead to commercial strength

        Outright fraud, where an ESA Technical Officer allocates funds to a particular technical direction, external companies do the work under contract so ESA gets the IP, then the ESA guy spins out the R&D to his own startup. Then ESA guys mates continue to give R&D contracts to ex-ESA guy; on the understanding that the carousel will continue when it’s their turn. Example: Jiri Gaisler and the LEON CPU!

        Insanely high management and proposal overhead. It typically costs about 10% of the total contract price just to write the bid. Galileo cost upwards of £40M in labour costs to *write the proposal*. In the end, there’s only one place that money can come from, which is the funding that you will get from ESA which is expected to fund the actual work but can’t be because it’s already been spent on doing the paperwork. If I had to pick a single reason why ESA projects often explode, genuinely it would be this: you always start 10% short of the money needed to do the job, so at some point there’s a bunch of testing which is necessary but won’t get done.

        And then there’s the cost of “management” through the contract, which is typically meetings, telcos, and paperwork again. Just to be clear, that’s not “paying the salaries of managers”…..that’s costed separately.

        There’s dozens of other reasons why ESA work is crap, but that should do for starters.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          I see your "bureaucracy is rampant in ESA" and raise you "successful rendezvous with comets, mapping the cosmic microwave background and landing on Titan". Any organisation that can do that gets a pass from me on not being 100% efficient with time or money. Serious take a look at this list and tell me they are not serving their purpose: https://www.esa.int/ESA/Our_Missions

          1. Justthefacts Silver badge

            I think that’s because you assume “not 100% efficient” probably means 50% efficient. Or surely 20% efficient.

            Actually I’ve worked on projects that ended up costing well in excess of €1bn, that we could have done on our own for under €50M. 5% efficient. But y’know, €1bn of somebody else’s money is a lot cheaper than €50M of your own. So, you do it their way, on their dime.

            And for every comet rendezvous mission, I’ll raise you - a Mars descent vehicle using a parachute designed by a company in Romania that had never made parachutes, using fluid dynamics software written in France from scratch (why?) by graduates who had no experience other than textbooks; and then literally never tested in reality (or rather, it failed when tested, so they had a consultant re-do it; and never re-tested). Did it work on Mars? Not surprisingly no, the spacecraft was toast.

            Or Aeolus, a mission that requires a spaceborne laser as the main component. Where ESA didn’t even think to specify that the laser should work in a vacuum, until it failed during test.

            I’ve got literally dozens of examples like that. This is not “slightly inefficient”.

            1. druck Silver badge

              Actually I’ve worked on projects that ended up costing well in excess of €1bn, that we could have done on our own for under €50M.

              I think we may have identified the common factor in many of those failed projects.

          2. Justthefacts Silver badge

            The science on ESA science missions is excellent. However, ESA don’t do the *science* and broadly have no expertise in it. That’s the Principal Investigators, ie university professors. Broadly speaking, most of the science *instruments* cost ESA nothing at all, that’s done under university grants. There are some exceptions, like the big telescopes. But the excellent bit is maybe 5% of the cost. 90% of the remaining is wasted “engineering”. So it would be relatively simple to have 10x as many *science* missions, with 10x science return, at really very little extra cost.

            For example: missions broadly fall into maybe three categories - “telescopes”, “landers”, and “specials”. Maybe you’ll be surprised to know that at an engineering level, once you’ve done enough mission analyses, all the “telescopes” (Euclid, Gaia, Plato, Cheops, Soho, even Cluster) are basically the same. The bits the scientists do is different, but the rest is just generic with tweaking. Similarly, all landers, comet chasers, Mars Orbiter etc are ultimately the same.

            The bit that ESA do, is mostly unnecessary overhead.

        2. Anonymous Coward Silver badge
          Boffin

          "Fit for purpose" depends on what you think its purpose is.

          Primary purpose being to distribute money to the chosen countries/companies - this it does so pretty well.

        3. Charlie Clark Silver badge
          Stop

          And in which country is it signficantly different? Pretty much every country considers space of "national" importance, is prepared to throw money at it and add riders that ensure priority for military use.

          Besides, ESA and Arianespace are related but not the same and Arianespace can be credited with developing international commercial launches.

          1. Justthefacts Silver badge

            Well first, with Arianespace, you mainly mean A5. That’s a 21-year old achievement. If you’re still putting 21yr old achievements on your CV, your career is dead. To go from Ariane1 to 5 took 24years. 5 to 6 took 21 years and counting, and 6 is not perceptibly different let alone better.

            As to national importance; bluntly this is just dual-use. Ariane primary purpose from French state POV is a long term subsidy from Europe allegedly “civil” but actually ICBM for Safrane. The relevance to this is that this has pushed for solid-fuel boosters past all common sense, and pushed reusable to the back of the queue (missiles don’t need to be reusable). These hidden agendas *matter* and have real negative consequences.

            If you want an ICBM program, and I do, we should do so and not cover it with Arianespace clothing. If you’d like both a racehorse and a peacock in your paddock, glueing feathers to a pony ain’t the way to do it.

            1. Charlie Clark Silver badge

              Like I said, are other countries that much different? Yes, we all know about SpaceX, but SES seems to be following the same tried and trusted path that was established in the 1960s.

              And ESA and NASA have a lot in common down to the politics, funding and the awarding of contracts. It's a miracle that anything gets built at all, and yet they stilll manage to get some very good stuff done. I'm not deeply au fait with the details but I seem to remember that it was about 10 years ago that it all went to hell in ESA and lots of projects went into stasis or were asked for very expensive overhauls.

              You can knock Ariane but, for a while, it held the most impressive record in reliability. Going forward, they will have to embrace both faster innovation and more private enterprise and cooperation with other agencies. I won't be holding my breath for great achievements, but I think things will improve.

              1. Justthefacts Silver badge

                “Are other countries much different” unfortunately roughly translates to “historically we’ve had a duopoly, so there’s no fair comparison to beat it with”. Yes, I think dollar-for-dollar ISRO is step-change different - not twice as efficient, more like 20x. There are currently half a dozen Chinese launchers which are in the last 1-2 years of development, which are *10 years ahead of Arianespace*. Europe has a major problem.

                I would agree with your statement “it all went to hell 10 years ago”, but that’s at the output level. The actual crisis “the system has been fully gamed, such that nobody cares any more purpose we’re launching it for, and all the real engineers left the industry to work on real programs”, happened circa 2000. It takes a decade to filter through from early R&D to operational programs, and a further few years until the actual missions fail.

                1. Justthefacts Silver badge

                  You can see exactly the same attitudes right now today in Airbus Space. I still talk to the guys. Their main telecoms line generating most of the revenue has been delayed from a 4yr year development to a 9yr development, and counting (I can reveal that, because it’s all in the Annual Report). They’ve made a €1bn charge for the delay. The whole company might be forced to merge with Thales. A third of them are going to lose their jobs, and it might be more. The situation is beyond catastrophic.

                  And you know how many of them care? None of them. Nobody goes into work early - most don’t even go into work at all. If you ask them “are you doing things differently now, or do you have plans to change, ”, the answer is no. These are senior guys, running the programs technically. There’s just *zero* interest. ESA give funding, they write the proposals as expected, do what they’re told, they go home. The fact that they may no longer sell any satellites is just “meh”. ESA/EU provides, or it does not provide. Shrug. And from what I see, it’s the same at Thales. In fact, the entire European sector is like that. When they say “supply chain issues” in the Annual Report, they mean “the manufacturer of every single component box, is staffed by people who DGAF because ESA still pays whatever, so nothing gets delivered less than five years late”

                  This is the outcome of two decades of the game. Maybe it’s the game that’s the problem, not the players.

        4. The man with a spanner

          Thanks Justthefacts for helping us understand. It makes for a better discusion.

    2. IGotOut Silver badge

      @beast101

      Your social score must be off the scale by now

      Congratulations.

  2. Eclectic Man Silver badge

    Fingers Crossed

    All the best for the launch, I hope all goes well. Rocket science isn't all satellites and space probes lasting 5x their design life.

  3. EricM Silver badge

    Launch postponed to Thursday 5 December 2024 at 22:20 CET

    Due to mechanical problems with ground equipment.

    1. stiine Silver badge
      Facepalm

      Re: Launch postponed to Thursday 5 December 2024 at 22:20 CET

      In Elon time that's 4:20pm EST. Good job ESA.

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