Ariane is touted in an article by Andy Pasztor in today's Wall Street Journal with a new person singing its praises--Mike Griffin:

Mr. Griffin declared the launch system "probably the best in the world, very smooth and very impressive."

One quibble: there is an apple to orange comparison of the commercial launch business ($2.7 billion) to US national security space spending ($80 billion). Commercial space launch supports tens of billions in satellite products, services and content. A more relevant comparison would be to look at how much the Department of Defense spends on launchers. The total space budget for military and intelligence is in the $50 billion range. Launch costs presumably would comprise about 3-4% of that if they were more competition. I'm having a little trouble finding a good source of Pentagon launch spending budget figures, but I'm guessing it's in the 5-10% range.

Why is Ariane V impressive? It failed miserably on its first launch and put its payload into a poor orbit on the second launch.

The Atlas V on the other hand has had a perfect record (until this last launch and they still did not lose the payload) and is the only launch system with no catastrophic failures in a very long time.

I read recently that Arianespace significantly raised their prices with the EELVs no longer launching commerical payloads. The United Launch Alliance monopoly must be profiting enough off Uncle Sam that it avoids the rivalry of a competitive launch market.

Ariane 5 (not V) is impressive, because it has a string of 18 successful launches since 2003. Atlas 5 has never had more than 9.

See here and here.

John, that is an interesting point and indicates to me declining competitiveness in the launch market. Do you happen to recall where you read it?

I'm not John, but I happen to recall where I read it. It was Clark Lindsey's blog

Dennis, that was what, 10 years ago? I remember that Ariane had some 60% of the launch market when I was in grad school back in 2001. The Ariane 5 was also meant to be the lifter for the Hermes spaceplane. You have to admit that it took a bit of risk to decide to develop a capacity to launch two full-size comm sats at the same time (plus hitchhikers).

So now we've got a whole bunch of launchers in the 20-25 mt payload range: Delta 4, Atlas 5, Ariane 5, Proton, soon the Long March,and eventually the Falcon 9. Too bad NASA can't find a solution to its launch needs and has to design its own system.

Sam, I differ a bit on the apples vs. oranges comparison you note. The article notes that Ariane has its eyes on the human spaceflight market. This is the only U.S. market available for Ariane (other than sats, where it's doing just fine, thank you), as the $80Bn military and intelligence budget is out of reach "because of Arianespace's foreign ownership". So the $16Bn NASA budget is the only new-thing market they could hope to snag. The article also notes that the $80Bn is for both rockets and sats and other hardware.

In all a pretty thorough article.

Where do you get $50 billion for intel and military space? The article you link to quotes Theresa Hitchens, and she refers only to "$50 billion on space," which could include NASA.

In fact, most sources--and the only one really worth looking at is the Congressional Research Service--give the combined military and intelligence space budget at around $21-23 billion. Add NASA to that and you get to around $40 billion. You'd have to throw in a lot of other stuff to get to $50 billion whether you include NASA or not.

I read recently that Arianespace significantly raised their prices with the EELVs no longer launching commerical payloads.

That will come as a surprise to the folks at LMCLS, who continue to market the Atlas 5 commercially (they took over when Lockheed sold its stake in ILS but retained the commercial rights to the Atlas 5.)

Launch prices are up, though, across the board: a commercial GEO satellite launch that might have cost $70M or less a few years ago will cost $85-90M now, or more, depending on customer requirements. Demand is up compared to the doldrums of a few years ago and supply at the moment is constrained.

We're just talking about launcher ops. Shuttle is $4 billion out of $16 billion. Military and spy sats is ?? out of ??. Commercial is $3 billion out of $100 billion. If the denominator for military and spy satellites is $20 billion, $40 billion, $50 billion or $80 billion, the launchers are only as much as the budget lines for the EELVs. Whether the numerator's $1 billion, $2 billion, $5 billion or $8 billion, it's still not $80 billion.