What a refreshingly good and balanced piece of writing. Commiserations to Ariane and Airbus.

Needs to replace exasperated with exaggerated in the first paragraph.

I would choose exacerbated over either of these two

Unfortunate for Arianespace, seems like they’ve been in the news a lot in the past few years for partial or complete failures. In and of itself a brand new vehicle failing is not a big deal…although comparisons to F9 are not valid given the difference in engineering approach.

Concur with stance of author in terms of Isar dunking on a fellow space co. for a launch failure when they’re not even close to the launch pad. Everyone has 100% success when you don’t have a vehicle. Makes em look pathetic.

But I think that's largely due to how Europe manage their space program, NASA with sls doesn't make much better and in Europe we are really adverse to the growth of market competitors like SpaceX, rocket lab, relativity space ecc.

I don't feel it's right to point at Ariane as they're just a contractor that does and bring forward programs decided by ESA

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The problem is that Vega C wasn't pushing the envelope. It's a dead simple rocket using decades-old technology. It was not supposed to fail.

Failures are acceptable and expected when you're innovating.

I just came here to say the same thing.

Probably one of the best articles i have read in a while.

It is a good opinion.

His use of "exasperated" was not correct. He probably meant exacerbated.

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Probably meant to write that one

>I have been critical of the expenditure and timeline slips of institutionally-developed launch vehicles like Vega C and Ariane 6

Also, I'm pretty sure that Ariane 6 bears the drastically larger share of expenditure and timeline slips here. Vega C is relatively on schedule.

The fact that others have done it, in our world, doesn't make every problem solved for everyone, because others largely don't share information on space technology.

Arianespace itself has plenty of experience with solid rockets. It's no excuse.

I suspect the Vega team (20 launches, 18 successful) shared data with the Vega-C team... same team, with a decade of flight experience.