SpaceX
SpaceX competitor Arianespace criticized for lackluster response to Falcon 9’s success
Best known for the commercial success of its Ariane 5 workhorse rocket, European aerospace cooperative Arianespace was heavily critiqued in the latest annual report from France’s Cour des comptes (Court of Auditors) for what is perceived as an unsustainable and overly cautious response to the swift rise of SpaceX’s affordable and reusable Falcon 9 rocket.
The Ariane 6 rocket is at least a year from launch, but already French auditors are asking how it's going to compete with SpaceX.https://t.co/7jCpGBrSXx
— Eric Berger (@SciGuySpace) February 6, 2019
First spotted and discussed by Ars Technica’s Eric Berger, the French auditor’s 2019 report featured a full volume – 1 of 30 – dedicated to Ariane 6, a prospective next-gen Arianespace rocket selected for development by the EU in 2014. Despite the fact that Ariane 6 is at least a full year away from its first launch, Cour des comptes is already questioning the rocket’s ability to successfully make headway into an increasingly competitive market, competition that has already had a direct and tangible impact on Arianespace’s Ariane 5 launch vehicle.
“More than 50% of Falcon 9’s lifetime launches occurred in the last ~12% (24 months) of the rocket’s operational career.”
While other competitors certainly do exist, the fact remains that that said increase in launch market competition can be almost singlehandedly attributed to the rapid entrance of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket onto the commercial launch scene. Despite major stumbles in 2015 and 2016 as a result of Falcon 9’s CRS-7 and Amos-6 failures, SpaceX appears to have dealt with the organizational faults that allowed them to occur, culminating in an auspicious launch cadence over the course of 2017 and 2018. While Falcon 9 has technically been flying since mid-2010, a full 38 of the rocket’s 64 successful launches were completed in the last 24 months, meaning that more than 50% of Falcon 9’s launches have occurred in the last ~12% of the rocket’s operational life.
Critically, a number of European nations settled on Ariane 6 as the successor to Ariane 5 in 2014, at which point Falcon 9 had launched just 13 times (7 times commercially) and SpaceX was more than 12 months away from its first successful rocket recovery and ~30 months from its first commercial reuse. To the credit of Arianespace and the EU nations that supported the prospective Ariane 5 successor, Ariane 6 may have actually been able to reliably compete with Falcon 9’s pricing if it had begun launching within 12-24 months of the 2014 decision to build it and if SpaceX had simply sat on its laurels and ended development programs.
“This new launcher does not constitute a sustainable response in order to be competitive in a commercial market in stagnation,” the auditor’s report states. The Ariane 6 rocket design is too “cautious,” according to the report, relying on mostly traditional technologies.
— Eric Berger (@SciGuySpace) February 6, 2019
Coasting on the race track
Of course, neither of those prerequisites to Ariane 6’s success occurred. SpaceX successfully reused the same Falcon 9 booster three times in just six months by the end of 2018, while Falcon Heavy is set to attempt its first two operational launches just a few months from now. Ariane 6 is still targeting a launch debut no earlier than (NET) 2020, while a handful of extremely limited reusable rocket R&D programs continue to limp towards nebulous targets with minimal funding. Meanwhile, thanks to Arianespace’s French heritage and the major financial support of French space agency CNES, Cour des comptes is in the right to be highly critical of a ~$3.9B rocket development program likely to cost France at least $600M before the first launch.
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- SpaceX has now been routinely reusing Falcon 9 rockets on commercial missions for nearly two years. (SpaceX)
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- As of January 2019, flight-proven Falcon 9 boosters have performed 19 commercial launches since March 2017. (SpaceX)
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- Nearly 60% of SpaceX’s 2018 launches were flown on flight-proven Falcon 9 boosters. (SpaceX)
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- Falcon 9 B1046 became the first SpaceX booster to launch three separate times in early-December 2018. (Pauline Acalin)
Once Ariane 6 is ready to launch, it’s aspirational pricing will all but guarantee an inability to compete on an even global playing field. Divided into two versions, A62 and A64, Ariane 6 will cost at least 75 million Euros (~$85M) for performance equivalent to SpaceX’s Falcon 9 in its reusable configuration (base price: $62M), while the heavier A64 variant – capable of placing two heavy satellites (11,500 kg) into geostationary transfer orbit – will cost at least 90 million Euros (~$102M) per launch. Admittedly, $102M to launch a duo of large geostationary satellites would be easily competitive with Falcon 9 with per-customer costs around $50M, but this only holds true if the imminent commercial introduction of Falcon Heavy (list price: $90M) is ignored.
However, the market for large geostationary satellites has plummeted into the ground in the last two years, over the course of which just 12 have been ordered. Arianespace thus faces a conundrum where its cheaper Ariane 62 rocket is already too expensive to compete commercially and the potentially competitive Ariane 64 variant is only competitive for a commercial launch market that has withered to barely a third of its nominal demand in just two years time. Acknowledged by France’s auditors (and noted by Mr. Berger), the most probable outcome for Ariane 6 is one in which the very existence of the rocket will be predicated upon continual annual subsidies from the European Space Agency (ESA) in order to make up for the rocket’s inability to sustain commercial orders beyond a handful of discounted shoo-in contracts.
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News
SpaceX Starship Flight 13 faces wrath of the Texas skies
SpaceX pushed Starship Flight 13 to Friday, blaming weather instead of the previous engine issues.
SpaceX called off Thursday’s launch attempt of Starship Flight 13, pushing the mission to Friday because of weather tied to Tropical Storm Bertha. The company confirmed the delay on X, noting “Now targeting Friday, July 24 for Starship’s thirteenth flight test, due to weather. A key objective for the flight test is to get clear imagery from the ground of Starship’s heatshield as it flies at a higher dynamic pressure during ascent, which won’t be possible with today’s weather conditions.”
This is the second delay for Flight 13 in two weeks. SpaceX first tried to launch the mission on July 16, but the countdown ended in an automated abort at T-0 when four of Super Heavy Booster 20’s 33 Raptor engines failed to ignite. Musk said at the time that two Raptors would need to be removed and replaced, as Teslarati reported. The company spent the following week destacking Ship 40 and Booster 20, swapping engines, and running leak checks before restacking the vehicle on Pad 2 Wednesday night, according to Spaceflight Now’s live coverage.
Unlike the engine problem, Thursday’s delay has nothing to do with the hardware. SpaceX wants clean footage of Starship’s heat shield captured from the ground as the vehicle flies through max dynamic pressure, something the storm’s cloud cover over South Texas would not allow. The company said visibility should improve for Friday’s attempt, with the same 90 minute window opening at 5:45 p.m. CT.
Flight 13 will be the second outing for the V3 versions of Starship and Super Heavy, following their debut on Flight 12 in May. The mission carries 20 production Starlink V3 satellites, the first time SpaceX has flown operational satellites rather than mass simulators on Starship. Six of those satellites are fitted with cameras to inspect the heat shield from a different angle during ascent, giving engineers a second data source beyond the ground imagery the weather is currently blocking.
Booster 20 will attempt a boostback burn and a splashdown landing burn in the Gulf of America, while Ship 40 follows a suborbital trajectory toward a landing in the Indian Ocean. The flight plan largely mirrors Flight 12, though the booster will run a more aggressive ascent burn after max Q this time, and the ship’s heat shield includes load sensing tiles meant to measure stress at the higher dynamic pressure SpaceX is targeting.
If Friday’s attempt succeeds, Flight 13 could be the last suborbital test in the program. SpaceX is already looking to push for an orbital flight on Flight 14.
In a striking revelation that underscores the lucrative crossover between Big Tech and space exploration, Alphabet Inc., Google’s parent company, disclosed a massive $94.1 billion equity stake in SpaceX following the rocket company’s blockbuster initial public offering earlier this year.
The disclosure came in Alphabet’s quarterly filing, marking the first time the long-held private investment has been publicly valued at market prices. Google was an early backer, investing alongside Fidelity in 2015 with roughly $500-900 million at a time when SpaceX was valued around $12 billion.
That bet has delivered extraordinary returns, roughly a hundredfold, transforming a strategic play on satellite internet and launch capabilities into one of Alphabet’s largest assets.
Google, $GOOGL, has said they hold $94 billion in SpaceX, $SPCX, shares after IPO.
— unusual_whales (@unusual_whales) July 23, 2026
Of the total holding, approximately $80 billion remains subject to short-term post-IPO lockup restrictions, preventing near-term sales. An additional $14.1 billion faces longer-term restrictions, extending into the third quarter of 2027. This structure limits immediate liquidity but protects against market volatility as SpaceX transitions into public trading.
The SpaceX position contributed significantly to gains in Alphabet’s broader investment portfolio, which also includes a major stake in AI leader Anthropic. Combined, these holdings helped drive nearly $100 billion in investment gains during the second quarter, providing a substantial boost to net income amid ongoing AI spending pressures.
Analysts view the disclosure as validation of Alphabet’s venture strategy beyond its core search and cloud businesses. The investment aligns with deeper ties, including reported multi-billion-dollar deals for AI computing capacity on SpaceX infrastructure. As SpaceX advances Starship flights, Starlink expansion, and ambitious Mars goals under Elon Musk, Google’s stake positions it to benefit from the commercialization of space.
For Alphabet, the windfall highlights how patient, forward-looking bets in transformative sectors can yield outsized rewards. While lockups temper short-term impact, the holding cements SpaceX as a cornerstone of Alphabet’s diversified portfolio in an era where aerospace, AI, and connectivity increasingly intersect. Investors will watch closely as restrictions lift and SpaceX’s public performance unfolds.
Elon Musk
Elon Musk handed Grok something no other AI company can get their hands on
Elon Musk says SpaceX will feed engineering data into Grok’s next model, avoiding restricted material.
Elon Musk said Tuesday that SpaceX will feed its internal engineering data into the next major training run for Grok, the AI model now folded into SpaceX following February’s merger. In a post on X, Musk wrote that SpaceX’s “massive corpus of world-class engineering data,” excluding anything restricted under U.S. arms export law, will be added during supplemental training of what he called the “2T run,” a reference to a roughly two trillion parameter model that would nearly double the parameters behind the latest Grok 4.5 that’s rolling out.
SpaceX’s massive corpus of world-class engineering data (excluding material blocked by ITAR) will be added during supplemental training of the 2T run.
This will dramatically improve Grok’s engineering capabilities. https://t.co/BbQEViFByn
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 21, 2026
The excluded material that Musk is referring to would fall under the International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR), which restricts export of technical data tied to defense and space hardware. That likely rules out propulsion specifics for Merlin and Raptor engines along with guidance and control details for SpaceX’s launch vehicles, but leaves manufacturing knowledge, materials science, and Starlink hardware design on the table.
The announcement extends a pattern that has been building since SpaceX’s Nasdaq debut in June, when the company went public with Grok and xAI’s Colossus supercomputer folded into the pitch to investors.
Days after that listing, SpaceX closed its $60 billion all stock acquisition of coding startup Cursor, giving xAI both enterprise software distribution and a stream of real world developer data to train on. Grok 4.5 launched July 8 running partly on that Cursor training data, with Musk describing it as roughly comparable to Anthropic’s Opus 4.7 but faster and cheaper to run.
Feeding SpaceX’s own engineering data into the next AI model follows the same logic Musk has applied across xAI’s sister companies. Tesla supplies real world driving data and manufacturing expertise, X supplies conversational data, and now SpaceX supplies aerospace engineering data built up since 2002.
Musk did not give a release date for the upcoming AI model, referred to elsewhere as Grok 4.6. He has said the two trillion parameter run is in its final training phase and expected to wrap this week.
SpaceX Starship Flight 13 faces wrath of the Texas skies
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