After Ariane 5, ESA should probably award fixed price contracts to private European rocket startups rather than doing it together with Arianespace. But I suspect this wouldn't work well with EU funding, since those startups are only located in certain member states.
Direct funding is even worse. Why would Italy fund a German rocket startup? It seems money could only come from the respective state itself, not via ESA.
Italy and Germany pay ESA, ESA pays the contractors. But it's not like a layer of indirection means countries are magically unaware of where the money ends up
It's not like ESA raises taxes on its own to pay for stuff
I mean a more logic situation was if Italy and Germany both pay ESA, and ESA contracts the launch vehicle from Germany but maybe the space station module from Italy.
But one project often is to large a part of the budget so instead of doing it per project, the split each project into tiny pieces and hand that to each government.
However this is also changing a bit. For Ariane 6 they specifically went away from that and allow industry (Ariane Group) to ignore that to a certain extent.
reply