What To Know
- In the Jupiter room, the mission control tower located 17 km from the launch pad in Kourou in French Guiana, the calm of the operators contrasts with the excitement of a flight awaited for four years by the European space industry, the relief and then the applause of the European space officials.
- Without even waiting for the flight to be a success, the head of the American NASA Bill Nelson hailed on X “a giant step for @ESA with the first launch of its powerful new-generation rocket.
- After this first flight, it will take several months to analyze the data transmitted by the launcher’s multiple sensors before a first commercial launch at the end of the year, probably with the French military observation satellite CSO-3.
This success marks the return of autonomous access for Europe to space, but it will not be considered complete until the upper stage has fallen back into the atmosphere as planned, nearly three hours after the launch. “The mission is not yet over,” warned Martin Sion, the head of the manufacturer Arianegroup. In the Jupiter room, the mission control tower located 17 km from the launch pad in Kourou in French Guiana, the calm of the operators contrasts with the excitement of a flight awaited for four years by the European space industry, the relief and then the applause of the European space officials. “Nominal propulsion, trajectory in line with expectations,” announced the director of operations, Raymond Boyce, before the upper stage ignites to the applause of the room. “Calm piloting,” he then stated several times throughout the flight. Without even waiting for the flight to be a success, the head of the American NASA Bill Nelson hailed on X “a giant step for @ESA with the first launch of its powerful new-generation rocket.” “This evening, after ten years of uncertainty, Europe can say that it continues to play in the league of the great independent powers,” the French Minister of the Economy, Bruno Le Maire, congratulated himself from Toulouse. Despite the numerous ground tests and simulations carried out for months, there remained “a degree of risk” before the flight, according to Philippe Baptiste, the head of the French space agency. Historically, nearly half of the first rocket launches in the world have been failures, as in 1996 for the first Ariane 5, which nevertheless only experienced two failures in 117 launches.Ariane 6 rocket on its way to its first launch
Ramp up
To avoid the possible loss of valuable commercial satellites, the rocket, whose development was four years late, carried about ten university micro-satellites. It also carries two atmospheric re-entry capsules that will be released at the end of the mission, nearly three hours after takeoff. These capsules developed by the Franco-German start-up The Exploration Company and Arianegroup must prepare the space freighter that the ESA wants to equip itself with. Decided in 2014, Ariane 6 will be able to place satellites in geostationary orbit, at an altitude of 36,000 kilometers, like Ariane 5, as well as put constellations into orbit a few hundred kilometers from Earth. To do this, the upper stage of the rocket has the relightable Vinci engine, the main innovation of the launcher. During the flight, the Vinci engine was successfully ignited twice to bring the upper stage to the place where it released the “cubesats”, 1 hour 06 after takeoff. A final ignition of the Vinci should send it back into the atmosphere where it will fall back into the Pacific near Point Nemo, the place on the globe furthest from any land. This Ariane 6 flight was strategic for the Europeans if they want continue to exist in the face of the American giant SpaceX, which launches its reusable Falcon 9 rockets about twice a week. Since the last Ariane 5 flight a year ago, Europeans have no longer been able to put a satellite into orbit themselves: since the invasion of Ukraine, they no longer have access to the Russian Soyuz medium launcher, fired for ten years from Guyana, and the other European rocket Vega-C has been grounded since the end of 2022 after an accident. After this first flight, it will take several months to analyze the data transmitted by the launcher’s multiple sensors before a first commercial launch at the end of the year, probably with the French military observation satellite CSO-3. The challenge will then be to “succeed in increasing the rate” of flights, according to Toni Tolker-Nielsen: six are planned for 2025 and eight the following year. Ariane 6 has 29 flights in its order book, an “absolutely unprecedented success for a launcher that has not stolen,” recently congratulated Stéphane Israël, head of Arianespace, the company responsible for marketing and operating the rocket. However, the program recently suffered a severe setback: Eumetsat, the operator of European weather satellites, cancelled the launch of its MTG-S1 satellite planned on Ariane 6 in early 2025 at the end of June in favor of the American SpaceX, citing unspecified “exceptional circumstances.” A decision by an intergovernmental body of 30 European countries at the expense of the principle of European sovereignty that is “difficult to understand,” according to ESA head Joseph Aschacher.
