> It is good to have more than one design

SpaceX has multiple designs generations ahead of anything in Europe in this category. (China is catching up, but it too is retracing Hawthorne's path.)

Themis is cool. But it's duplicating what SpaceX did fifteen to twenty years ago and what China has been working on for ten. Methalox, open cycle gas generator, steel tanks...there aren't any daring design decisions here. And there shouldn't be. This is a solved problem. (Again, that doesn't mean Europe shouldn't be solving it independently. But it's not innovating anything here.)

> We could maximise economies of scale by having one car manufacturer that made a small number of models

Mature market. Multiple optima. See my comment on Airbus and Boeing. When you're pathfinding, you want multiple bets. When you're pursuing, R&D benefits from scale.

> access to space is too strategically important to ever delegate

New York isn't "delegating" its space access to California, Texas and Florida. (Same as America never saw itself delegating shipbuilding to our Japanese and Korean allies.)

I'm not arguing Europe isn't acting rationally. Just that this is the cost of strategic independence. Everyone shares a burden of duplication and diseconomies of scale. It really isn't that long ago that NATO members--America included--didn't think that way.

> Do you remember the fake images passed as Irak developing weapons of mass destruction?

I remember Colin Powell giving a presentation at the UN holding a glass vial of "proof" Irak had WMDs..

What a good thing he didn't drop it, otherwise they would all be "dead"..

While I don't disagree, Airbus's origin was more or less the opposite of that; it was a merger of existing aircraft manufacturers. Both Airbus's creation, and Boeing's merger with McDonnell Douglas _decreased_ competition, and arguably neither should have been allowed.

> You could argue the same with Boeing vs. Airbus

You couldn't. Boeing and Airbus have pursued different strategies, both in design and production. There is very little actual duplication between their work. To the extent there is, it's in each de-risking different technologies and then the other, after seeing the results, rapidly catching up.

This is partly a reflection of commercial aviation being a relatively mature market. Both in the pace of required innovation (and regulation). And the fact that the difference between branching out and marching forward is difficult to know ex ante.

Put another way, the next steps in launch vehicles are relatively constrained. The goals aren't particularly unknown, just the path. For aviation, on the other hand, the goals are quite varied.

> US themselves are also propping up multiple companies for space deliveries

They're going after different markets with similar tech (mostly not working, to be honest) or trying different tech. Themis and Prometheus are entirely unoriginal designs. (Which is fine. Their point isn't to be innovative, but to be there, in Europe, where Trump can't touch them.)

... Wait, how would the US government block ESA from launching stuff? ESA has its own rockets, which launch from its own facility and which are not drastically more expensive than Falcon 9 (this is a _fairly_ recent change; Ariane 5 was far more expensive than 6).

That $5bn is a sunk cost, and Arianespace should be, within reason, able to deliver as many of them as ESA wants. My point is that it's not clear that ESA actually has a huge problem here; an Ariane 6 launch would appear to cost them similar to or less than a Falcon 9 launch does NASA (never mind a Falcon 9 Heavy, for which NASA pays about 200 million a shot; the bigger Ariane 6 variant sits somewhere between the two in role). This is a change from Ariane 5, which really was far more expensive (almost twice the cost).

Apples, oranges... Falcon proved new use cases for rockets and with the EU looking for alternative of Starlink, the EU now must cover the same use case as well without Trump in the supply chain.

Depends where geopolitics end up going wrong, more than they are already.

Drastic times call for drastic measures.

Because?

(but please refrain yourself for spreading FUT of how awful and autoritarian the EU is)

Yes, on August 20: https://lkab.com/en/press/kiruna-church-has-found-a-new-home....