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One of my worst fears was that this would happen to the James Web.

No offence but ESA and Europe really urgently need to go back to the drawing board. Vega failing, Soyuz gone for good and A6 struggling to gain customers.

Folks, its every red flying currently flying. If Europe wants to be a space power, it needs to ramp up private space with all speed possible.

Why? A5 is an extremely safe launcher

I don't know if they can right now, they need to focus on sectors they can actually be competitive in fast. Europe is in a critical phase at the moment and cant waste much time spreading thin.

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Ariane 5 is nothing special, it's had two failures in 115 launches. Falcon 9 has had 1 failure in almost 200 launches.

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Read the title, this was not an A5 launch but the 2nd of the new model small launcher "Vega C"

>A6 struggling to gain customers

Actually, that's the opposite problem. A6 has a lot of customers but it its first launch date keeps getting delayed and it will struggle to keep up as far as manufacturing is concerned.

Yes, I'm aware. JWST used A5 though, a tried and tested launcher with excellent reliability

Technically yes, as AMOS wasn't launching when everything exploded. Block 5 has had 0 failures out of over 100 launches, so its still better then Ariane 5

Sure. However, things still go wrong sometimes no matter how tried and tested they are.

Interesting. Where did you get this info from?

I work in the european space industry

Any more Euro pumped into Ariane6 and Vega C is double an Euro lost.

Not only do those rockets not meat the requirements for the near future, money spend on them is not spend on actual sensible rocket projects.

They keep doing this to themselves, putting themselves into a position where they can't take advantage of an opportunity they didn't plan for. They ridiculed the idea of using reusable boosters because they wouldn't be able to keep the production lines busy at the 12 launches a year they planned to do.

But the first launch of a new variant rocket (which this was) is notorious for mishaps. So many things are practically impossible to test without actually launching the rocket.

Right. I was just thinking of terrible accidents like with the space shuttle despite being thoroughly tested and tried. You just never know.

Lost? Have they looked in the cushions of the couch? That's where I usually lose stuff.

The Kuiper order is a huge opportunity and problem. A good problem, but a problem.

This isn't a good take on reliability. Ariane 5, Atlas 5, and Falcon 9 are reliable enough that it's impossible to accurately say which one is most reliable.

.... that doesn't exactly answer my question.

How are you supposed to compare reliability Other then comparing total missions to failures then?

These 3 rockets are reliable enough that you need a lot more launches to accurately measure their reliability. It's a statistics thing.

You can't claim they are reliable enough without actually launching them though. The shuttle managed near the same performance but it was not a reliable rocket.

So other then using the data we have, how are we supposed to compare them?

You mis-read what I meant with my comment. Another way of saying the same thing: They are so reliable that it's impossible to accurately say which one is most reliable.

One of my worst fears was that I’d wake up in bed with a Jim Webb from high school - a real dork!

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Why? Because no launch vehicle is infallible, and the JWT is one of a kind. Not exactly an irrational fear.

Because of how significant the payload is? How expensive it was, how plagued it was with delays and cost blow-outs? How is that not obvious? Even the most reliable rockets still have the occasional anomalies and flight failures, so for such a significant payload obviously the worst fear is that happening on that given launch..

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>So other then using the data we have, how are we supposed to compare them?

We can't. We can qualitatively say that all three are essentially 100% reliable launchers, you can't pick a winner with this data because the very few failures they had may very well have been statistical anomalies. Their failure rate is below the margin of error.

Now suppose you multiply everything by 10. For Ariane5 imagine we'd had 20/1150 failures instead of 2/115. And for F9 imagine we'd had 10/1550 failures instead of 1/155. That would give enough margin to safely determine that the difference between the two is statistically significant, i.e. not due to statistical anomalies but rather to an actual better performance for F9.

They're both something special. We are all aware of SX's achievements, the stats for both rockets are impressive and comparable.

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No offence but America has been hitchhiking to space on the Russian Soyuz for decades until a South African guy built Dragon. Only just now that Soyuz is suddenly off the table do you say Europe needs to get it's act together.

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Ok, let me start over. > They are so reliable that it's impossible

This part cant be proven without more flights. The Space Shuttle was supposed to be super reliable and had 2 failures in 135 flights, which is comparable to Ariane 5 or Falcon 9. However we know the shuttle wasnt actually reliable, but this was only learned after the fact. You cant argue reliablity with any credability unless you have a large enough data set, which we do not.

So, the only data we do have is the rockets flight record and any discoveries made during it. The current data supports the Falcon 9 and Ariane 5 being reliable, but its not currently enough to argue they actually are that reliable.

So, other then using what we already have, how are you supposed to compare launch vehicles reliability?

I don't disagree, my issue was with his claim they are super reliable while also saying we don't have enough data to say they are statistically better. The Shuttle was supposed to be super reliable and look what happened to it.

You're arguing about something I didn't say or mean. The entire sentence is what I meant. I'm not calling any rocket "reliable" in an absolute sense.

u/fabulousmarco appears to have read what I actually meant. I did not say the thing you're having an issue with.

If you want to talk about Shuttle, the fact that the SRBs were recovered several times with eroded O-rings before the Challenger "accident" kind of blows any statistical analysis out of the water.

The reliability of falcon 9 is especially impressive when you compare it to the launch failure rate of Elon’s tweets.

The problem appears to be you misreading what I meant, though it doesn't help i was hastily typing it out on my phone. I fully understand what you mean and never even actually said one rocket was more reliable. My original post was me pointing out he forgot a failure, and me then pointing out Falcon 9s perfect record if I arbitrarily specify Block 5.

The argument is happening because you haven't answered my question. If the rockets are reliable enough we need thousands of launches to get the required data set, how are you determining they are reliable enough to require said data set to compare?

They knew. Launched anyway, for political reasons.

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Decades? Incorrect unless decades mean something different where you are from.

Maybe it rolled under something.

The first American aboard a Soyuz was 1995. 27 years ago by my math.

Decades are 10 years where I'm from. What about you?

Between the car set and the center council if not in couch…

True. I interpreted the remark as you meaning it was the only way to space for nasa for decades. My bad!

NASA was still using it well beyond the point where it became unavailable, so whether they knew about it or not, the space agency funded by the leading Western economy wasn't prepared and had to fall back on a private company that it was lucky to be able to call upon.

SpaceX has done a lot for space exploration in general. Everyone relies on them, and neither Europe nor the US as geopolitical entities can claim credit for sustaining the ability to service the space industry. The entire industry needs to catch up.

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The next ones were 2000, 2001 and 2002. Still decades ago.

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It has everything to do with your comment. You said soyuz was identified as a problem long ago. I said NASA didn't do anything about it until they were forced to.

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The entire comment chain is in response to me saying americans have used soyuz for decades. You interjected about bartering and payments. Americans have used soyuz for decades. End of.

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I just found my toothbrush in the downstairs bathroom just moments after opening a new one. They should check there

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I'm not attacking the US. I'm responding to an american saying that European space agencies aren't doing enough to compensate for the lack of viable launch vehicles. Russia and the US built their space programs as the backdrop for dominating the other in the Cold War, and invested unprecedented public funds into doing so. The rest of the world is doing their best without war funds, and shouldn't be held responsible for the lack of viable launch providers. Especially when the lauch provider here is very reliable in general.

This is in response to someone attacking Europe. They started it.

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No, I'm refuting the sentiment.

u/fabulousmarco answered your question.

Here's the wikipedia article on the overall topic.

You dodged again. Im not asking about statistical probabilities. You said Falcon 9 and Ariane 5 are reliable enough we cant compare them without a thousand flights. How do you know that.

The US relied on Russia since 2011 (retirement of the Space Shuttle) to 2020. Wasn't even a decade.

Put another way, How do you know they are similar enough that a sample size of 1-200 isnt enough to determine which is more reliable.

The wikipedia page is an introduction to that exact topic.

how are you determining your p factor.

No, no. You misunderstand, the first American to hitch a ride was 1995. Not 2011, 1995.

But they didnt completely rely on Russians until 2011.

>Only just now that Soyuz is suddenly off the table do you say Europe needs to get it's act together.

Ariane 4 and 5 and Soyuz were mainstays of the commercial launch industry. Now its Falcon 9.

This latest failure means Arianespace and ESA barely have any comercial launch capability at a market price.

The US having a gap between Shuttle and Dragon has nothing to do with this.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ariane_6#Launch_contracts_and_scheduled_flights

Its all ESA other than Kuiper that went Arianespace and ULA despite the cost to snub SpaceX.

Hitch hiking implies you have no ride of your own. So no, America wasn't hitch hiking for decades. They did for 9 years though while working on building their own new rides. Anything prior to that isn't hitch hiking anymore than carpooling is hitch hiking. There's a vast difference between playing friendly and using more than your own ride, and having no option but someone else's ride.

Not to mention how you imply that we only used rides from them until dragon came online. We still send astronauts up on soyuz despite having dragon. It's just not hitch hiking which you either seem to have accidentally admitted or just were unaware America still uses soyuz.

based on the little bit of long range footage it was definitely rolling, just a wee bit faster and more violently than planned by the looks of it

>Only just now that Soyuz is suddenly off the table do you say Europe needs to get it's act together.

Or it could be that the Vega has had its 3rd failure. If only 1 of 8 launches had failed they probably wouldn't be saying that

The Vega launch system is not "Europe". It's a single launch vehicle. When a system has problems, you don't immediately start slinging mud at the entire continent it's based in.