Model of the Ariane missile at the base in French Guiana
The European rocket “Ariane 5” will be decommissioned next week. It has achieved 27 years of achievements for the European space field, but it is currently facing a missile crisis in the context of intensified competition in the global space field.
The Ariane 5 missile, on its 117th and final space mission, is expected to launch Tuesday from Kourou, French Guiana, carrying a French military communications satellite (Syracuse 4b) and a German experimental satellite.
The launch of the missile was originally scheduled for June 16, but was delayed due to a defect in one of the propulsion engines, which has since been replaced.
Mary Anne Clare, director of the Guyana Space Centre, told AFP that the launch would be “full of emotion” for personnel at the centre, which has been associated with rockets for the past three decades.
Philippe Baptiste, chief executive of CNES, confirmed the rocket was “an amazing human adventure”.
The start of the “Ariane 5” missile was not smooth. It exploded after its first mission in 1996 and failed again in 2002.
Elf Gilbert, who was a rocket engineer at the time, said the accident caused “shock”.
“It took two years to return to space missions,” said the current technical director of the “Ariane Group”.
After the accident, the “Ariane 5” missile entered its golden age and achieved a series of successes. Galiber said that the failure of the missile launch “has a positive effect and makes us fully vigilant about the launch.”
The rocket has earned such a reputation for reliability that NASA has adopted it to launch the tens of billions of dollars of the James Webb Space Telescope.
After this Christmas 2021 launch, the rocket that sent the Rosetta space probe to comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko in 2004 and the Jupiter ice moon probe to Jupiter in April 2023 become very popular.
From a commercial point of view, the rocket is “an element of progress in European spaceflight,” said Daniel Neuschwand, director of space transportation at the European Space Agency.
Twelve countries participated in the manufacture of the heavy missile, which replaced the Ariane 4 and doubled its launch capacity, a competitive advantage that allowed Europe to gain a foothold in the communications satellite market.
Neuschwand said Europe also benefited from a “respite” from the United States, which monopolized the market for space shuttles.
“We are currently witnessing the opposite,” he added, as Europe finds itself with little independent access to space.
The reason is that Russia’s sudden cessation of the use of Soyuz missiles after the Ukrainian crisis in February 2022 led to reduced activity at the Koro base, which conducted only six launches in 2022, compared to 15 similar launches in the past year.
To add insult to injury, the first commercial launch of the Italian Vega-C missile in December 2022 failed, as well as the cumulative delays of the future Ariane 6.
difficult stage
The last launch of “Ariane 5” will be followed by many empty months, waiting at most for “Ariane 6” to take over at the end of 2023.
The Vega missile is expected to be launched once in September, and doubts remain over whether the Vega-C program will return by the end of the year after new flaws were discovered this week.
And designed the “Ariane 6”, which is more powerful and competitive than the “Ariane 5”, and its cost is equivalent to half of its predecessor, in order to face the competition in the missile field due to the dominance of the United States. fierce competition. The “SpaceX” company conducts more than one launch operation per week.
The European Space Agency has had to turn to Elon Musk’s company to launch its Euclid science mission and is unsure whether it will be able to secure a strategic extension of the EU’s navigation system, the Galileo probe.
“This is a difficult phase,” European Space Agency Director-General Joseph Ashbach said on the sidelines of the Le Bourget exhibition, stressing that stakeholders are “working very hard” so that Ariane 6 will be operational and Return to launch “Vega-C” program as soon as possible.
Ariane 6 qualification testing is well underway, with the missile unveiled on the launch pad ahead of a Vulcan 2.1 engine test run at Kourou’s “public test” on June 22.
The aerospace industry is not immune to layoffs either, with 190 of the 1,600 positions set to be eliminated because rockets don’t require a lot of manpower and require a lot of maintenance.