Major subsidies
That may sound like a commercial success, but Europe is likely losing money on each of those private missions.
Europe invested about 3.6 billion euros in the development of the Ariane 6 rocket and its launch site in French Guiana, but that’s not the end of it. The European Space Agency’s director general, Josef Aschbacher, has publicly confirmed that, based on nine flights a year, the European governments involved with the space agency will still need to subsidize each launch with between 32 million and 38 million euros per flight.
If we amortize the development costs with the ongoing subsidy, European taxpayers have put more than 100
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