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Ariane is already not competitive at the moment, and the reliable is not that different. Look at the insurance premium and its clear that the estimated reliability is not that large. They have massively exhilarated Ariane 6 because they know they simply can not compete with the Ariane 5.

Also Ariane is only a viable competitor because they don't need to compete on cost. If Arianespace had to finance the Ariane 6 by themselves they would not be close to competing with SpaceX.

Blue Origin prices are unknown so far.



For a small to medium size satellite, Ariane is actually currently 2 million USD per launch cheaper than SpaceX.

Around 60 vs. 62 million.

And you get an order of magnitude better reliability.

This might change in the next years, but for now, it's not changing.


Interestingly enough, if you look at the Ariane manifest you can see that they're having a hard time finding satellites to fly in the "lower berth". Meanwhile, SpaceX's comsat launches are mostly heavier sats that won't fit into the "lower berth".


Yes, it’s especially interesting how basically all of the smaller satellite launches have moved to the – at the moment – more expensive and less reliable SpaceX, leaving Ariane without small satellites to launch.


You have it backwards. Most of SpaceX's commercial comsat launches are big enough that Ariane would charge 90 million euros to launch.




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