European rocket politics are complicated by the “geographic return rule,” which states that each member nation must receive a proportional amount of contracts to the amount of funding it contributes to the space agency. “With the dawn of New Space and the delays in Ariane 6 launcher development, an ongoing debate has emerged about whether geo-return is consistent with the competition and competitiveness that is needed in Europe’s space industry,” Aschbacher wrote in March.
Someone asked me to sanitize some ancient comments on the blog today, and in the process of doing so, I perused some other posts from that era, and ran across this.
It wasn’t obvious at the time, but it was an historic post in this blog, because it led to all of my essays at The New Atlantis. I don’t know (or at least don’t remember) how Adam found out about it, but he contacted me to argue about/discuss the topic, and he ended up asking me for an essay, which resulted in this (not sure why it’s 404ing and I had to go the Wayback Machine, but I’ll tell the current editor about it).