The price of getting to orbit, officially
Europe has spent years trying to build a serious rival to SpaceX, and now the European Space Agency has done something oddly overdue: it revealed the price of an Ariane 6 launch. That’s a big deal in space, where pricing has usually felt a little like a restaurant with no menu and a lot of vibes.
Why this matters
Launch cost is the part of the space business that decides who gets invited to the party. If a rocket is too expensive, satellite operators, governments, and commercial customers go shopping elsewhere—and lately, that usually means SpaceX.
For Europe, this is less about one rocket and more about whether the region can build a launch market that actually competes on economics, not just national pride.
The Elon-sized elephant in the room
The headline pretty much says the whole thing: Europe can only compete on price if SpaceX lets it. That’s not literal, of course. But when one company has reset expectations for launch cadence and cost, everyone else has to fight uphill with a very expensive backpack.
Big picture: transparency is a start, but in space, the market doesn’t care about speeches. It cares about dollars per kilogram and who can get a payload up without making your CFO sweat.