This is so pathetic. Ariane Group has been managed by a former member of Arnaud Montebourg's team since 2013. The pathetic thing is that he is a history major with absolutely no minor in science whatsoever. Until very recently he has been saying out loud that reusable launchers were absolutely not a good idea and that Ariane's strategy with Ariane 6 was far better suited for the current space market.

Ariane 6 was supposed to make her maiden flight in July 2020, it has yet to leave a launchpad. But who cares, Ariane Group's CEO considers the project a success and has started to let go some of the engineers who worked on it. About 600 people are planned to leave throughout 2022 and this plan could concern up to 2300 people or close to 1/3 of Ariane Group's workforce. Surely the kind of atmosphere where people want to work on a project doomed from the start. There is absolutely no way they can come up with a reusable launcher as soon as 2026 like Bruno Le Maire's just announced.

Ariane Group is surely employing very skilled engineers, but the upper management is so politically inclined that they will not be motivated or funded enough to work on a launcher able to compete with Space X'.

It's high time engineers take back power at this company so useless weight can be let go instead of skilled workforce.

This is exactly the problem OSS (http://github.com/hbs/oss) is trying to solve!