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Posted by bookmtn 15 hours ago

Private German rocket makes history, reaches orbit from European soil(www.space.com)
635 points | 342 commentspage 4
ETH_start 6 hours ago|
What Europe needs to do to spur its tech sector is lower taxes.

A 2018 study shows tax increases significantly reduce innovation. A 1% increase in the top marginal income tax rate leads to a 2% reduction in patents and inventors, while a similar increase in corporate taxes causes even larger declines.

The study is quite rigorous too:

https://open.substack.com/pub/maximumprogress/p/tax-cuts-and...

MadrasTh0rn 12 hours ago||
One can hope they can repurpose this to a shield for Ukraine
MisterMunchkin 15 hours ago||
How can it be the first European rocket? There’s the ESA! Are you telling me we have all these organisations and none of them have ever launched from their own continent?
loeg 15 hours ago||
Europe isn't on or remotely near the equator, which is somewhat favorable for launches.
smitty1e 14 hours ago||
> The German company Isar Aerospace launched its Spectrum rocket from Andøya Space Center in northern Norway today

To speculate, they could be targeting a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molniya_orbit

Achterlangs 15 hours ago|||
ESA launches French Guiana. Since it is cheaper to launch closer to the equator with the extra speed provided by the earth's rotation.
sisve 14 hours ago|||
For satellites that should be in Sun-synchronous orbit Andøy is a great place to launch from
artisinal 15 hours ago|||
Really comes in handy to still have a couple of colonies near the equator.

It's also better to have the massive amounts of emissions far away from your own population.

tristanj 14 hours ago|||
French Guiana is not a colony, it is a region of France. People who live there have the same constitutional rights as anyone living in mainland France.

It has the same status in France as Alaska does in the US.

artisinal 13 hours ago|||
That's legally true, but I think it misses the distinction between formal political status and the legacy of colonialism. French Guiana is an overseas department of France, and its residents have French citizenship and constitutional rights. But that doesn't mean the historical relationship was equivalent to mainland France, or that the effects of that history disappeared when the legal status changed.

The same point applies elsewhere: Guinea became independent from French colonial rule in 1958, but independence didn't magically erase the economic structures, institutions, and inequalities inherited from colonialism. Today, a large share of Guinea's population still lives in poverty despite the country's enormous natural-resource wealth.

So "it's not a colony" is correct as a matter of constitutional law. But using that fact to imply that colonial history is irrelevant to present-day economic and social conditions is a much stronger claim, and one that's harder to defend.

vladms 12 hours ago|||
While I agree with your analysis, would you think is the best to use the same generic term "colonialism" for both the situations in French Guyana and let's say Venezuela in the last year? I would prefer more words to differentiate a bit, but maybe that's just me.
scotty79 10 hours ago||||
How does it compare to Alaska? Wasn't it purchased as a colony from russians to exploit Alaskan gold with complete disreagrd for opinion of the native population?
mytailorisrich 2 hours ago|||
A better comparison is with Hawaii.
MYEUHD 9 hours ago||||
Alaska is a colony is well, and so is the rest of North America.

We don't think of the US and Canada as colonies because the vast majority of the native population was genocided.

peterfirefly 4 hours ago||
They mostly died from European diseases without ever meeting a European. It wasn't even planned or known by the European "visitors".
artisinal 9 hours ago|||
[flagged]
3938848484 13 hours ago|||
[flagged]
pjc50 14 hours ago||||
It's a colony even if it's legally part of France.

(Had to check: free movement does apply to Guianans, but in the other direction it's not part of Schengen)

sublimefire 12 hours ago|||
Ireland is not part of Schengen as well for example, it is because that is much harder to practically achieve for folks living on islands.
peterfirefly 4 hours ago||
Ireland is not part of Schengen because the UK never was (and they wanted to keep the Common Travel Area).
mytailorisrich 1 hour ago||||
France has only one citizenship, everyone holds the same French passport so everyone has the same freedom of movement within the EU.

It's not in Schengen, like most overseas territories in the EU, to limit illegal immigration into the EU (see Ceuta as well).

I don't thing the term "colony" holds. It is anachronic and refers to a system that no longer exists.

TFNA 14 hours ago|||
Guianans tend to get pissed off if outsiders suggest in any way that they are any different as a French region from l'Hexagone (the French mainland). Your banging on about colonies would not be well received there.
nephihaha 12 hours ago|||
For what it's worth, Metropolitan France used to claim Algeria wasn't a colony either.
peterfirefly 4 hours ago||
Becoming French was an amazingly good reward for being pirates and slave traders.
dopa42365 9 hours ago||||
A fully loaded Falcon 9 carries less kerosene than 1 (one single) A380. What level of concerntrolling is this?
BSDobelix 14 hours ago|||
>Really comes in handy to still have a couple of colonies near the equator.

>It's also better to have the massive amounts of emissions far away from your own population.

That's the dumbest comment i read since a long time, thanks.

hypfer 15 hours ago|||
> How can it be the first European rocket?

Not at all. You've missed the "Private" in the headline. And that it apparently is.

xixixao 15 hours ago|||
Article says Western Europe, but Norway is in Northern Europe.

“First rocket to launch from Europe outside Russia” would have been perfectly correct.

setopt 14 hours ago||
In the political sense, «Western Europe» is typically taken to be «NATO Europe», and «Eastern Europe» is «Warsaw Pact Europe». Which is different from a strict geographic definition.
sublimefire 12 hours ago||
That is also not correct anymore as Northern countries were reallocated to include the Baltics in UN as an example.
dmaa 15 hours ago|||
They launch from Guiana afaik
echoangle 15 hours ago||
French Guiana to be exact, which is a different country
tristanj 14 hours ago|||
Edit: Misread
globular-toast 14 hours ago||
They meant French Guiana is a different country to Guyana... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Guianas
nephihaha 12 hours ago|||
It isn't. Plesetsk is in European Russia and was built to prevent overreliance on Baikonur
jltsiren 11 hours ago||
You are thinking about Vostochny in Russian Far East. Plesetsk was an early ICBM launch site that started doing orbital launches in 1966. It was the busiest spaceport in Soviet times, and the cumulative number of orbital launches from Plesetsk still probably exceeds those from Florida.
nephihaha 1 hour ago||
No, I'm thinking of Plesetsk because it is in Europe. It is much nearer to Moscow than Baikonur is. Since the USSR broke up, this is even more the case.
mytailorisrich 15 hours ago||
The French used to launch their rockets from Algeria. Their first satellite was launched from there. Since then they moved to (French) Guiana.

The UK launched from Australia.

nephihaha 12 hours ago||
And Russia launches some rockets from Plesetsk, in Europe.
dermacentor 8 hours ago||
Why are they on X? As a European company, should they not be posting instead from W Social?
sgt 2 hours ago|
What's W social?
neya 9 hours ago||
> from European soil

When someone emphasizes nationalism a bit too much that's usually only because they don't have enough technical merit to talk about.

sinuhe69 9 hours ago||
No. It’s simply about accessibility and sovereignty. Even though the ESA can launch from French Guiana, the space port is an ocean-away from Europe! How much do you think that fact will affect the cost and the launch cadence for Europe?

Now they prove they can launch directly from Norway with their own production from Munich and elsewhere and that has immense potential for the future: much higher cadence, significant lower cost and always-on accessibility.

The only way, Europe can have a Starlink similar network is to launch from their own soil and reuse the first stage. Also from the perspective of security, launching spy and other military satellites from European soil is the only practical possibility in this political climate.

flohofwoe 4 hours ago|||
Europe is a continent, not a nation.
fsh 9 hours ago||
Launching far off the equator makes it more difficult and is therefore a bigger technological achievement.
ButlerianJihad 9 hours ago||
The selection of launch site takes the orbital inclination into account.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun-synchronous_orbit

The "Onward and Upward" cube sats were deployed to Sun-synchronous orbits, with a roughly polar inclination.

Similarly, launches from USSF Base Vandenberg take a southerly trajectory, so it can be used for orbits like that.

Rocket launches from continental Europe have been challenging because of the population centers, and the unpopularity of things exploding over their heads, and falling on their houses and businesses. USA and Russia have some quite ideal sites that avoid flying over populated areas.

fsh 5 hours ago||
You are still ~500 m/s short compared to launching on an equatorial orbit from the equator.
ButlerianJihad 3 hours ago||
Velocity is a vector, not simply a rate. Launches and orbits are three-dimensional.

What would be a great technological achievement would be launching from French Guiana (5.2° N) and then making a plane-change maneuver to achieve a polar orbit (90° inclination). All that bonus eastward velocity from the Earth's rotation would turn into a penalty they'd need to compensate for no reason, when they had a spaceport more suitable for that polar inclination.

Try this related concept: https://youtu.be/sod3ofdUYTw?si=U7dz_LcRQ0M44tAU

And the spherical cow jumps frictionlessly over the Moon!

Alien1Being 6 hours ago|
Really sad to see that Europe is so far behind.

Consider India, once single country vs all of Europe: 88 orbital launches successfully reached orbit using Indian built rockets starting in 1980.

This is out of 104 individual liftoffs.

Over 46 years of successful launches.

MrDresden 6 hours ago||
The fact not many launches happen from continental Europe has nothing to do with capabilities of the space industry or lack of expertise, but rather location.

Europe is far from the equator and densely populated so rocket launches from there are more costly, and failures can have a higher risk to life.

Arianne space has had 350+ successful missions after 45 years of operations, with most of those launching from overseas territories.

sirnicolaz 6 hours ago|||
Advancement of a culture is not only measured by rocket launches.
dfdydx 4 hours ago|||
I don't understand the one country vs all of Europe - given a fixed population, being united in a single country surely makes everything a bit more efficient than being split in many small countries? India is much bigger than "all of Europe".
gspr 5 hours ago|||
As a European, I'm glad functioning sewage systems took priority over an orbital launch capability.
twenty-fifty-ni 14 minutes ago||
> As a European

stopped reading there

glad you're all dying out

serial_dev 6 hours ago||
It’s the national equivalent of:

How long it takes you to ship this project? Two weeks.

And if you get help from Alice, Bob, and Charlie? Then it’s a year.