Re: German Space Agency Chief Johann Dietrich Woerner wants manned Ariane5 flights and an ESA Space Shuttle

In article <1180944065.738239.18540@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
Alex Terrell <alexterrell@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
If he wants that, the best way would be to buy the T-space program.
Nope... he undoubtedly doesn't want to
spend the next five years filling out US ITAR paperwork...

How effective would ITAR be? If say, EADS suddenly decided to do this,
and recruited the top 20 engineers from t-space to Germany? How long
would it take them to get to where t-space is now (i.e. not very far).

Depends on whether EADS made it a Big Corporate Project, or just put them
off in a building at Peenemuende :-) and gave them the resources they
needed and told them to get busy. Never underestimate how dysfunctional
the big European aerospace companies can be(*) if they try -- they take
second place to nobody, not even Lockheed Martin, in that department.

But EADS wouldn't have to recruit t/Space's guys; there are plenty of
competent rocket engineers in Europe. In fact, EADS wouldn't *want* to
recruit t/Space's guys, because unless they renounce US citizenship, the
US government thinks their brains are US territory no matter where they
are physically located, so ITAR applies to everything they do. And if
they ever want to go back to the US, they have to toe the line.


(* Most spectacularly, The Company Formerly Known As Galileo Industries,
which EADS is part of. G.I. was formed as a giant conglomeration to build
Europe's Galileo navsat system. Galileo's beginnings ran late, and ESA
realized that it had to launch something soon or Galileo's frequency
reservations would expire. So it put out an RFP for Giove -- a Galileo
pathfinder satellite, partly to get system testing work started and partly
to get the frequencies into use. ESA undoubtedly expected one bid, from
GI, and was acutely embarrassed to get a second one from the smallsat
folks at Surrey Satellite Technology... all the more so because SSTL came
in a whole lot cheaper than GI. The result was a political compromise:
SSTL got a small amount of money for Giove A, and GI got three times as
much for Giove B, justified as being "closer" to the final navsat design.
GI lost no time telling everybody that Giove A was a waste of money
because Giove B would naturally launch first. Well, Giove A was launched
18 months ago, on time and on budget, and Giove B is still on the ground
despite serious budget overruns. The claim is that it will launch at the
end of this year; ESA's confidence in this can be judged by the fact that
it recently gave SSTL a contract to build Giove A2 "just in case Giove B
has a launch failure". Around that time, Galileo Industries changed its
name...! )
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