“Abbiamo bisogno del retrofit nucleare in Europa” | Thomas Jarzombek, CDU, è probabilmente l’unico politico tedesco dedicato allo spazio. Preoccupato per il potere di Elon Musk, chiede un ripensamento fondamentale.
https://www.wiwo.de/unternehmen/industrie/zukunft-der-raumfahrt-wir-braucheneine-atomare-nachruestung-in-europa/30162522.html
di Stabile_Feldmaus
11 commenti
__WirtschaftsWoche: Mr Jarzombek. Under Angela Merkel, you were the German government’s space commissioner. Since then, the gap between Europe and Germany and the USA and China has tended to grow. What does the next German government need to do to change this?__
Thomas Jarzombek: What Europe needs is firstly more ambition and secondly more competition. Just look at manned space travel: The USA dominates it, Russia dominates it, China dominates it, India dominates it. But Europe has not mastered it and does not even have the ambition to do so. We cannot afford this in the long term. Space will be a very important economic factor in the future.
__Is privatisation, as demonstrated by the USA, the right way forward?__
We can see from German rocket start-ups such as Isar Aerospace and Rocket Factory the dynamism that arises when there is competition. We see the opposite with the European satellite internet project Iris²: the project is becoming more and more expensive and progress is slow. The decision by Italy’s Giorgia Meloni to cooperate with Elon Musk’s Starlink is a result of this and a vote of no confidence in Iris².
__Let’s take a look at the German Armed Forces, almost all of their reconnaissance satellites are broken. Does more money in the defence sector need to go towards European space travel?__
I am convinced of that. And that doesn’t just apply to space, but also to areas such as drones and the Eurofighter. To be honest, I think that passing on almost all of the 100 billion in special funds for the Bundeswehr to US companies is an under-complex approach. I understand the need to achieve results quickly. It’s easier to get components off the shelf from the Americans than to develop things yourself. But especially when it comes to technologies relevant to sovereignty, such as drones and space travel, you have to utilise these military budgets. There is, for example, the keyword Responsive Space.
__What is that?__
The moment my satellites are compromised, there are crazy failures in this country. That’s why we need a rapid launch capability that allows us to launch a new satellite in 24 hours.
__And how would we get that?__
Our start-ups can provide it, but so can Ariane. With the M51, we already have a solid-fuel rocket that can be launched immediately at any time. So Ariane already has the technologies
I am in favor of this, but it needs to be understood that it will take at least 20 years for the results to show. China is said to fly to the moon only by 2030, and they are known for completing projects much faster than the rest of the world
Wait I’ve seen this one before, i know how it goes.
👏 nothing 👏 will 👏 happen 👏
I 100% agree that we need to invest much more in space and especially launch vehicles.
>dedicated space politician
Hope he dresses as elaborately as Padme Amidala.
If we took a look at planned or mixed economies in China in things as EV or industrialization we can testify that privatization is far from the only or even the best option in most cases.
https://youtu.be/UdurccnStSc?si=O4LHcl9DuLBL0jRZ
What is nuclear retrofitting? Only the title mentions it.
About IRIS2 being too expensive, it really isn’t. Starlink is amortized over many users. IRIS is not. But in exchange you get exclusive control. It’s a fundamentally different proposal.
About competition, the problem is that competition for him does not mean EU competition it means national champions. Not for naught, he only mentions RFA and Isar, instead of any other EU competitor. Almost as if only German companies mattered to Germany. That kind of blindness is why we have big, uncompetitive EU projects. Because if you go for small, you just end up with small, uncompetitive national projects.
Put more money in ESA and EUSPA with a clear mandate to grow competition, and drop georeturn from the former. And you will see actual EU competition. The rest is just arguing over who receives the wasted funds
I agree, unless Europe is willing to burn coal for power, we better start investing heavily into safe Nuclear power and Fusion, nothing else will be able to meet the future demand, solar is a meme, using solar for power is akin to using the wind to move a ship, we need something way more dense and powerful, scalable, that’s nuclear power.
People are commenting without mentioning that this press pops off every time there is NASA / SpaceX / Blue origin lunch. EU is more and more behind in the race and there are either only calls for funding or articles about how actually everyone else is stupid and it doesn’t matter anyway because…
Pretty much all EU projects have been lagging and there is basically an an astroturfing account “EUstronger” or whatever that is spamming this forum with unhelpful garbage everyday implying that EU is better than ever and should actually be adversarial with other powers.
Only way forward is to actually set a plan in place for domestic development of expertise in lunch vehicles which we are currently losing and to work with US partners on combined projects learning everything we can to catch up. I’m not saying rolling over but making sure we can cooperate and build. Going in alone into this competition will result in wasted money and being further behind in 10 years.
Good luck with that. A thriving space industry is impossible in Europe. It’s never going to happen, or at least not for another 50 years
Jarzombek mainly is a conservative party back office bureaucrat. He once was the government officer for aerospace affairs which was a lowly role with not that much impact. We’ve got an election in 5 weeks and his party is likely to win. From what I read between the lines here, he’s trying to lobby his party to get himself a raise.