France’s CNES Backs Space Station, Hedges Bets on Reusable Rockets

CNES President, Jean-Yves Le Gall:

“There is still a debate in Europe about this but I think we are going to continue to 2024,” Le Gall said. “That is our position now that the debate in Germany has settled a bit. We want a joint position with Germany.”

He went on to talk about Ariane 6, and how it will fit into the market it will enter when it starts flying:

Le Gall said it was not yet clear whether reusable launch vehicles would achieve their goal of further cutting launch costs. He suggested there was no urgency in developing a reusable rocket, and that the current state of Ariane 6 development has given designers more confidence that it will meet its design-to-cost goals.

“Today, given the objectives for Ariane 6, it seems the vehicle will be well-placed in the market. And if there is a further series of cost cuts in the market we’ll evaluate that when we see it,” Le Gall said.

“No urgency” to change the way you do things during the biggest moment of change the industry has ever seen is a quick way to render yourself irrelevant. Even ULA has shown a little urgency on this front.

Let’s give them the benefit of the doubt, and say that by 2020, when Ariane 6 is scheduled to fly, the full cost savings of reusability haven’t kicked in yet. Maybe at that point, Ariane 6 can be cost-competitive for 5 years or so. But is Ariane 6 a design that they can build on? Are there things they can do to it to cut costs even lower? Any roadmap from where Ariane 6 starts to reusability?1

The same thinking goes for ULA’s Vulcan. I’m firmly on the side of full reusability rather than some Rube Goldberg-esque partial reusability, but at least ULA has given themselves a roadmap for cost savings over the 2020s.

Either way, hoping your competition’s strategy doesn’t work out for them is not a viable strategy for success.

  1. The only thing to this end has been the proposed Adeline project, but there’s been little talk of it in over a year, and no mention of it in the statements here. ↩︎