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I know this is a benign tweet but a part of me is fully subscribed to the narrative that this is the ESA throwing shade at NASA.

Just imagine how much more quickly and cheaply they could have gotten the 6 ready if they had used off-the-shelf components!

Arianespace is just slightly less porkbarrelly than SLS.

The main objective is to keep the European space industry ticking. Cost efficiency is secondary.

That's... Completely wrong. Ariane 6 is a very important program that's designed to keep ESA and Arianespace competitive on the commercial space launch market.

Cost efficiency is very much not secondary

Well this thing won't launch until 2024 at earliest, so not very good shade.

Then they are doing a bad job of it. Ariane 6 will still be far more expensive than a Falcon 9.

And Starship will blow both of them out of the water.

Yeah, that's one of many problems. Ariane should be the objective, not the means.