Sure… Europe isn’t launching satellites for decades.
This isn’t about satellite launching, Europe does this from Guiana Space Centre in Kourou for a very long time.
This is about it being the first successfull orbital launch from a European location (so without all that nice free speed you get when going for an equatorial orbit and starting close to the equator eastwards) by a private start-up less than 8 years old. On their second try in total (people following such things might remember the huge amount of explosions Rapid Unscheduled Disassemblies starting rocket projects –privat or otherwise– tend to produce in the beginning).
people following such things might remember the huge amount of explosions Rapid Unscheduled Disassemblies starting rocket projects –privat or otherwise– tend to produce in the beginning
They generally don’t. SpaceX is pretty much the only company blowing up rockets on the regular. Everyone else actually does testing.
SpaceX is just worse but there were still a lot of explosions etc over the years. Ariane 5 for example used the tried and tested software of its predecessor… and failed rather spectacular mid-air when its higher accelaration paired with 16bit to 64bit conversion caused a buffer overflow.
Sure… Europe isn’t launching satellites for decades.
This isn’t about satellite launching, Europe does this from Guiana Space Centre in Kourou for a very long time.
This is about it being the first successfull orbital launch from a European location (so without all that nice free speed you get when going for an equatorial orbit and starting close to the equator eastwards) by a private start-up less than 8 years old. On their second try in total (people following such things might remember the huge amount of
explosionsRapid Unscheduled Disassemblies starting rocket projects –privat or otherwise– tend to produce in the beginning).They generally don’t. SpaceX is pretty much the only company blowing up rockets on the regular. Everyone else actually does testing.
SpaceX is just worse but there were still a lot of explosions etc over the years. Ariane 5 for example used the tried and tested software of its predecessor… and failed rather spectacular mid-air when its higher accelaration paired with 16bit to 64bit conversion caused a buffer overflow.
Or to quote what I consider a modern classic nowadays: “They say Space is hard…” *sing*
Sure, but the expectations of most launches is that they work. SpaceX is the only one which repeatedly expects to fail doing the same thing.