Europe’s new Ariane 6 heavy-lift launcher made its maiden flight on Tuesday 9 July from Europe’s Spaceport in French Guiana, more than four years behind schedule.
The Director General of the European Space Agency (ESA), Josef Aschbacher, felt that this successful launch of “Europe’s new generation of the Ariane family” effectively “reinstat[ed] European access to space”. He described the day as “historic” for his agency and for Europe.
According to ESA, the lift-off also provided an opportunity to demonstrate the functioning of the launch pad and ground operations at Europe’s Spaceport. According to the agency, the new dedicated launch zone will enable a faster turnaround of Ariane launches.
An hour and six minutes after lift-off, Ariane 6 placed the ten or so microsatellites (CubeSats) it was carrying into orbit, 600 km above the Earth. In the future, the launcher will be able to place satellites in geostationary transfer orbit, at an altitude of 36,000 kilometres, as well as constellations a few hundred kilometres from the Earth. To achieve this, the upper stage of the rocket has a re-ignitable Vinci engine, which was successfully ignited twice during the maiden flight to bring the upper stage to the place where it released the microsatellites. But the third ignition, which should have enabled re-entry into the atmosphere, failed to occur, sending Ariane 6 off course. The atmospheric re-entry of the upper stage, which was to land in the Pacific, did not take place. This deviation also prevented the release of two atmospheric re-entry capsules at the end of the mission, which would have allowed them to be disposed of cleanly and burnt up safely, leaving no space debris in orbit.
This difficulty shouldn’t jeopardise future launches. “The next flight models are already in production, and the stages of the second model will be shipped to the Guiana Space Centre this autumn for the first commercial flight of Ariane 6”, said Martin Sion, CEO of ArianeGroup, the launcher’s lead contractor, in a statement. Six flights are planned for 2025 and eight for 2026. In all, Ariane 6 has 29 flights in its order book. (Original version in French by Camille-Cerise Gessant)