ESA Changes Procurement Practices to try to Make Ariane 6 More Competitive

ESA has tossed aside one of its key spending practices — juste retour — in an attempt to produce a new Ariane 6 launch vehicle that can compete with cheaper ones offered by SpaceX and Chinese and Indian providers.

Juste retour (“fair return”) is the space agency’s way of spreading work around to companies in different nations in proportion to what national governments put into a program. The approach produced the highly reliable but expensive Ariane V, whose components and systems are produced throughout Europe.

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