> At the briefing, O said that how ESA spent the money was more important that getting more funding, citing the development of launch services by SpaceX that, with support from NASA through commercial partnerships, eroded Europe’s once-dominant position in the global launch market.

> “There is not a revolution in the amount of money that is spent. The big game-changer is the emergence of the NewSpace sector,” he said. “If we go on with the same procurement policies, if we go on with the same constraints that we have today, if we go on with monopolies, if we go with hampering the emergence of NewSpace actors, we won’t make it no matter what the budget is.”

> He reiterated that point later in the briefing. “The overall efficiency of the euros that are spent today is very poor,” he said.

Cedric O is very critical of geo-return, arguing that it is wasteful, and undermines competition. Under geo-return spending choices are motivated more by politics, not by funding competitive companies and competitive designs. With geo-return ESA can't implement a competitive fixed price competition like CRS or Commercial Crew. O argues ESA needs structural reform, not more funds.

> At the briefing, though, he (The ESA Director General) said he was not considering doing away with geo-return altogether, arguing it was key to the increased funding ESA won at its latest ministerial meeting, called CM22, last November. “Geo-return is not a poison,” he said. “It’s serving us extremely well. We wouldn’t have gotten 17 billion at CM22 without geo-return.”

So the ESA Director General has made clear he isn't interested in reforming geo-return. That means any potential human spaceflight program is going to award the contracts based on politics, not based on the merits of the design or the company. This reaction from the Director General reminds me of empire building. He isn't interested in reform, he's interested in raising more funds from European countries, to increase the size of his empire.

As a European aerospace engineer I hate this so much.

Thanks for sharing.

>“There is not a revolution in the amount of money that is spent. The big game-changer is the emergence of the NewSpace sector,” he said. “If we go on with the same procurement policies, if we go on with the same constraints that we have today, if we go on with monopolies, if we go with hampering the emergence of NewSpace actors, we won’t make it no matter what the budget is.”

Well, yes, but also no. Europe is caught in a sort of "chicken or the egg" conundrum

The US was able to develop a vibrant commercial services sector largely due to the amount of money the government is spending. NASA's new budget will come in at around $27B and the US military is spending a roughly equivalent amount ($28.5B, which doesn't include everything) and that is up from $17B in 2021. That means there are a lot of big public money contracts available for companies to go after not just in terms of launch, but in all manner of space assets and services. That doesn't even get into the sort of private money investments like those from Amazon and other communications as well as remote sensing constellations like Planet Labs.

The ESA budget for 2022 is about $8B, which isn't terrible, but European military investment in the space domain is almost negligible compared to the US or China.

So yes, you can say that Europe needs to get a lot more efficient with the money it is spending and that may be true but I don't see how that can happen without fostering competition first. Who is going to bid on a European Commercial Crew program besides Arianespace? Europe doesn't have a Relativity Space, let alone a SpaceX, and if you think about it SpaceX won its first major commercial services contract to the ISS when it was around the same size as Relativity is now. If that didn't happen they never would have been in a position to bid on Commercial Crew. Arianespace will laugh if you try to make them sign a fixed price contract

Its not enough to just say "lets copy commercial crew, look at how cheap it was!" That ignores all the other NASA and military contracts SpaceX got (and delivered on) so they could reach the point where they could even build such a complex item as a human rated capsule at a reasonable cost.

Absolutely, Commercial Crew really started with CRS. SpaceX got a large contract in 2008, for a cargo capsule, when the company was just a couple hundred people. SpaceX didn’t do a crewed launch until 2020. There are multiple NewSpace European space companies comparable in size to SpaceX in 2008. PLD Space, in Spain, is an example I remember reading about. Or ESA could work with European subsidiaries of American companies. Rocket Lab has a New Zealand subsidiary that has launched rockets using American-built engines.

Yes, it would be dumb for Europe to go straight for crewed launches. But ESA can start with funding a capsule style cargo vehicle similar to Dragon. That wouldn’t even cost that much money. CRS is just a couple hundred million a year. That’s within ESA’s budget right now. ESA could also fund little space stations or space station modules. Those aren’t expensive either, if you make them barely bigger than a capsule. Then work up to a European crewed capsule a decade or more from now.

> So the ESA Director General has made clear he isn't interested in reforming geo-return.

A recent article on the geo-return policy written by ESA's DG sounds a lot more nuanced and promising, though:

> To enhance compatibility between geo-return and competition, the policy of geo-return should increasingly shift towards a ‘fair contribution’ principle, that is to adjust the contribution of each Member State according to the outcome of the industrial competitions and to the actual share gained by its industry in these competitions. Several ESA programmes, especially in close-to-market sectors such as telecommunications, are already built in this manner.

Source: Josef Aschbacher - "The competitiveness of ESA’s Geo-return policy", 20 Mar 2023.

ESA's problem is that, while it has 22 member nations, two of them provide more than half its funding and its primary contractor is majority owned by one of the two. It doesn't really matter what the Director General thinks of geo-return, he's ultimately beholden to ESA's member nations, and they're happy with it.

CRS is not that expensive on its own, but the ISS won't be around for much longer and it does cost a lot to maintain a crewed presence. In other words, Europe would be spending a lot on hiring Dragons/Starliners for crew plus the cost to orbit a new station, whatever that would look like, just in order to necessitate the need for a European CRS in the first place.

NASA seems to be going all in on commercial station(s). How that will work exactly is a bit of a mystery but there seems to be at least three (Axiom, Orbital Reef and Starlab) that seem fairly serious and are all getting some NASA funding. Mostly looks like private investment though. Looks like Airbus is a partner on Starlab so perhaps that is the one angling for ESA patronage the most. If that is the case, ESA wouldn't have control over the services contract since it would be commercially operated.

Its all interesting stuff but its still pretty early

>Arianespace will laugh if you try to make them sign a fixed price contract

And France would pitch an absolute fit if ESA tried to pick anyone other than Arianespace.

Well they might end up pitching a fit then lol. I have a feeling ESA is going to try and coax Sierra Nevada to Europeanize a few Dream Chasers and/or move some operations to Europe. Would still be launching on Ariane 6 so maybe it wouldn't upset the French too much

He's got a strong point though. Geo-return makes countries put funding forward. Without it, they won't (as much).

Also, lol at the idea that private space companies didn't use massive subsidies from NASA and the Pentagon to get started.

They did, but most of those subsidies have gone to ULA, Lockheed Martin, and Boeing. They didn’t go to the market leader, which is SpaceX. That was Cedric O’s point, that the money needs to be spent more efficiently.

Hm, yes they (also) did. Both directly and through subsidising or buying services from its clients. Some of which run by the same guy.

Buying a service from someone cheaper that you can source that service elsewhere is not actually a subsidy.

To an extent. If, for example, the funding drops to a half, and you get three times more efficient, ...

Ok, but that's theoretical math. In reality that effeciency actually needs even more money to be developed. Unless we just outsource it to the Americans.

Play whatever semantic games you want, loads of federal money went into developing the private tech instead of going to NASA or other federal tech funding. I'm not saying it was a bad bet, I'm saying is we can't just achieve the same results but adopting similar looking policies except without the money.

When deep space exploration ramps up, it’ll be the corporations that name everything.

Yes, but also no.

There is technological or process advancement savings for which this argumemnt might be made.

And then there is savings from not doing things in a knowingly financially inefficient but politically expedient manner.