Ariane's New Price Tag Is Bad News for Airbus, Great News for Boeing and Lockheed (and SpaceX)
Europe's Arianespace ("Ariane") has a problem, and its name is SpaceX.
Back in 2015, California Congresswoman Loretta Sanchez related a conversation she had had with a top exec at Airbus's (OTC: EADSY) struggling space subsidiary Ariane in which the exec jokingly asked Sanchez if she could find some way to "get rid of SpaceX," because otherwise it was going to drive Ariane out of business with its ultra-low launch prices. But SpaceX didn't go away. So one year later Ariane decided to take matters into its own hands.
To compete with SpaceX launch prices (currently $67 million for a Falcon 9 rocket launch), Ariane would introduce two new rockets: A medium-lift Ariane 62 costing $77 million to launch payloads comparable to what Falcon 9 can lift, and a heavy-lift Ariane 64 with twice the payload and a launch price of $126 million (so a price slightly cheaper than two Falcon 9 launches). Collectively, these rockets would be known as the "Ariane 6" family of rockets, replacing the company's existing Ariane 5 rockets, and would aim to cut the cost of Ariane's launches by at least 50% (from the $164 million cost of an Ariane 5 launch).
Source Fool.com
