The commercial launch industry both sides of the Atlantic is in a mess. But Europe could have more to lose if it does not get its act together
Almost 80 years after Robert Goddard launched the first liquid-propellant rocket, and 35 years after Stanley Kubrik created 2001: A Space Odyssey, it is hard to comprehend the mess the space industry on both sides of the Atlantic has got itself into, requiring hundreds of millions of dollars of state support just to survive.
The commercial air transport industry can put some of the blame for its parlous condition on factors outside its control, including terror attacks and the SARS virus. But the commercial space industry largely has only itself to blame. Overcapacity fuelled by over-optimism has brought satellite and launcher manufacturers to the brink of extinction. The overambitious business plans of the telecommunications sector in the 1990s are mainly to blame, causing manufacturers to invest and expand when they should have been consolidating and streamlining like the rest of the aerospace industry.
The crisis has come to a head, precipitated - in Europe, at least - by December's failure of the Ariane 5 ECA launcher on its first flight. The uprated booster is Arianespace's latest weapon in the intense competition for the commercial launch market - able to launch two large satellites simultaneously and so undercut its US rivals. The failure has brought Europe's space plans tumbling to Earth, like a launch tower built of cards.
In the USA, the collapse of the commercial satellite market has been cushioned by the growth in military space business. Manufacturers that invested in new boosters to meet the expected boom in commercial demand have restructured their businesses around military launches, but still struggle to make money. As a consequence, the two major US launch providers, Boeing and Lockheed Martin, have been discussing combining their competing businesses into a joint venture to reduce costs.
Europe does not provide Arianespace with a steady subsistence diet of military launches, and the loss-making company's commercial competitiveness is staked to the Ariane 5 ECA. The booster's failure, therefore, has had a fundamental effect on European space, bringing public attention to a crisis across the sector, and not just in launch vehicles. Deadlock on beginning the Galileo navigation-satellite programme has simply compounded the problems.
Europe's response to the Ariane failure is to "Europeanise" the programme, wresting control from France's cash-strapped space agency CNES. If ministers approve the rescue plan this week, the European Space Agency will take over responsibility for Ariane development and EADS will become the single prime contractor, selling ready-to-fly launchers to Arianespace. ESA will pick up most of the cost to redesign and requalify the Ariane 5 ECA, EADS has agreed to cut the launcher's price by 30%, and governments will cover Arianespace's overheads until the company is profitable.
This may reek of subsidy, but is little different to the situation in the USA, where the US Air Force helped pay for development of the latest launchers from Boeing and Lockheed Martin, and is helping pay the companies' overheads, at least until the commercial market recovers. The USA should not complain too loudly about Europe rescuing Arianespace. Nor should Europe look too enviously at the flow of defence research, development and procurement dollars into the US space industry. It has a remedy, and is making a merry mess of it.
In the absence of a strong military market, it is civil projects like Galileo on which Europe's space industry will depend. Dismissed as unnecessary duplication by the USA, Galileo is Europe's alternative to the global positioning system. The project has been mired in controversy from the outset, but has persevered for one compelling reason. Some time in the future, position, velocity and timing information from satellites will be fundamental to how we live - and Brussels does not want the infrastructure of everyday European life to depend on a US-owned and controlled constellation.
Galileo is a far-sighted technological project, but near-sighted political thinking threatens it with extinction. First Germany and Italy fought over who controls it. Now Spain is blocking the release of ESA funding because it objects to the German and Italian agreement to share programme control. Galileo must begin soon, or Europe will lose its orbital slots. And if Europe loses Galileo, it will lose more than independence from GPS. It will lose a programme, jointly funded by ESA and the European Union, that could be the model for future civil space initiatives. It will lose a programme that the European space industry needs, badly. Or it will forfeit the space race, perhaps forever.
Source: Flight International
