Are engineers in Europe really less passionate about their job than those in the US? Personally, I'm skeptical. For sure, having a mission to go to Mars is cool, but just working on rockets alone seems like it should be exciting enough to inspire passion and hard work.
I would guess that European rocket engineers are, or could be, just as passionate, and work just as hard as those in the US. But what saps the passion of engineers is bureaucracy, inefficiency and mismanagement that slows them down and interferes with their work, and by most accounts, these problems infest the aeronautical industry, on both sides of the Atlantic.
SpaceX has managed to build a company that doesn't seem to suffer from these problems. From reading Elon Musk's biography, it doesn't sound to me like the SpaceX engineers are driven by some dream of landing on Mars, even if that's Musk's goal. Rather, they just have a no-nonsense, "get stuff done" attitude. They don't spend weeks doing tests when they can get them all done in one day. They don't spend millions of dollars buying outsourced components when they can build them better and cheaper themselves. They don't thoughtlessly replicate inefficient processes because that's how it's always been done, or it's done everywhere else in the industry.
Put Elon Musk and his management staff in charge of the ESA and I bet they'd install the same no-nonsense attitude in European engineers, and it would be Ariane that was delivering reusability before everyone else. As it is, let's just hope that the example SpaceX sets eventually pays off in changes to the way NASA, the ESA, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, etc. are run.
Although I think that the big US defense contractors would rather get out of spaceflight completely than match SpaceX's costs. Because if they can, then it proves they could have done it all along, and that they've been hugely overcharging the US government for years. And if they've been overcharging for access to space, it might make congress ask questions about all the other pork-barrel military contracts they get, and why they can't deliver those cheaper as well?
I would guess that European rocket engineers are, or could be, just as passionate, and work just as hard as those in the US. But what saps the passion of engineers is bureaucracy, inefficiency and mismanagement that slows them down and interferes with their work, and by most accounts, these problems infest the aeronautical industry, on both sides of the Atlantic.
SpaceX has managed to build a company that doesn't seem to suffer from these problems. From reading Elon Musk's biography, it doesn't sound to me like the SpaceX engineers are driven by some dream of landing on Mars, even if that's Musk's goal. Rather, they just have a no-nonsense, "get stuff done" attitude. They don't spend weeks doing tests when they can get them all done in one day. They don't spend millions of dollars buying outsourced components when they can build them better and cheaper themselves. They don't thoughtlessly replicate inefficient processes because that's how it's always been done, or it's done everywhere else in the industry.
Put Elon Musk and his management staff in charge of the ESA and I bet they'd install the same no-nonsense attitude in European engineers, and it would be Ariane that was delivering reusability before everyone else. As it is, let's just hope that the example SpaceX sets eventually pays off in changes to the way NASA, the ESA, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, etc. are run.
Although I think that the big US defense contractors would rather get out of spaceflight completely than match SpaceX's costs. Because if they can, then it proves they could have done it all along, and that they've been hugely overcharging the US government for years. And if they've been overcharging for access to space, it might make congress ask questions about all the other pork-barrel military contracts they get, and why they can't deliver those cheaper as well?