It's a very unfortunate situation. I don't understand why they didn't keep Ariane 5 going until 6 was ready - I've worked in the space industry (in the US) and customers would pay us ungodly amounts of money to not change something even when costs started rising because of old instrumentation, lack of knowledgeable and alive personnel, or our own suppliers going out of business/getting bought out and killing the product line we needed. They'd pay 2-3x the cost of a redesigned product (which would be subject to the same level of testing as the original) just to keep the old one, with the mindset that "it hasn't failed in 50 years so it won't fail now". I mean we're talking about measurements being made with pen plotters because they'd get angry that "something changed" if we sent them a digital plot taken on the same equipment.

Well they put their eggs into one Arianne 6 shaped basket, hoping that it won't delay much. It got delayed by a lot.

> I don't understand why they didn't keep Ariane 5 going until 6 was ready

It is not as if the US had no capability gaps. For a long long while they had to buy seats from Russia to get their astronauts to the ISS.

> we're talking about measurements being made with pen plotters because they'd get angry that "something changed" if we sent them a digital plot taken on the same equipment

That level of conservativism doesn’t sound entirely healthy to be honest.

>It is not as if the US had no capability gaps. For a long long while they had to buy seats from Russia to get their astronauts to the ISS.

There is a slightly different situation here, which is that the Space Shuttle was kinda... not that safe. I didn't like that either but for human rated spacecraft the requirements are all more strict, for good reasons. Unfortunately, those reasons are mostly things like Apollo 1, Challenger, and Columbia. But overall I think I agree.

>That level of conservativism doesn’t sound entirely healthy to be honest.

We weren't convinced it was either. Did you know they don't make parts for pen plotters anymore? Somehow the customer was surprised by this. We did manage to convince the right people there to allow the switch eventually but it was a struggle.

It’s not healthy. That’s how you end up with Boeing et al.