(Are we allowed to add to these before 1 Jan?)
Europe* An ever-worsening deadlock between France and Germany begins to seriously impede the development phase of Ariane-6;* At least one payload is lost whilst flying on a Soyuz-Fregat with the cause being unequivocally due to poor quality control on the part of the Russian vendor;* The advanced re-entry vehicle program hits a sandbank and is postponed indefinitely due to political, bureaucratic and engineering issues;* SNC announce firm plans to launch DreamChaser on a crew-rated Ariane-6 derivative; different parts of ESA confirm or deny the story.
We've already begun seeing fewer launches webcast and broadcast. At some point that will mean that a failure will occur on a major launch so that we'll never see the replays. It will seem as if it never happened, like the Falcon 1.
You keep repeating that SpaceX is hiding the falcon 1 failures ...
China* There are one or two crewed flights this year;* Crewed spaceflight plans continue to be ambitious but lacking in funding and detail;
Quote from: Ben the Space Brit on 12/20/2014 04:09 pmEurope* An ever-worsening deadlock between France and Germany begins to seriously impede the development phase of Ariane-6;* At least one payload is lost whilst flying on a Soyuz-Fregat with the cause being unequivocally due to poor quality control on the part of the Russian vendor;* The advanced re-entry vehicle program hits a sandbank and is postponed indefinitely due to political, bureaucratic and engineering issues;* SNC announce firm plans to launch DreamChaser on a crew-rated Ariane-6 derivative; different parts of ESA confirm or deny the story.ARV is already dead. ESA chose to develop a service module for Orion instead.
Quote from: hektor on 12/23/2014 11:04 pmQuote from: Ben the Space Brit on 12/20/2014 04:09 pmEurope* An ever-worsening deadlock between France and Germany begins to seriously impede the development phase of Ariane-6;* At least one payload is lost whilst flying on a Soyuz-Fregat with the cause being unequivocally due to poor quality control on the part of the Russian vendor;* The advanced re-entry vehicle program hits a sandbank and is postponed indefinitely due to political, bureaucratic and engineering issues;* SNC announce firm plans to launch DreamChaser on a crew-rated Ariane-6 derivative; different parts of ESA confirm or deny the story.ARV is already dead. ESA chose to develop a service module for Orion instead.Buying Orion or DreamChaser probably would be the quickest way for the ESA to get it's own capability to launch crews into space.Though if Dream Chaser flies on an ESA rocket it'll probably fly on Araine 5 first since Araine 6 is still several years away.Second would be mini DC on Soyuz out of Guiana.Which might actually be the easiest and cheapest option of all since Soyuz is already crew rated.There would be some irony seeing a state of the art spacecraft riding on a booster that had it's origins in the 1950s.Though there is little of the original R7 in the Soyuz that flies today.
Europe* An ever-worsening deadlock between France and Germany begins to seriously impede the development phase of Ariane-6;