The European Ariane 5 Rocket Takes its Final Flight, Highlighting Delay in Arrival of Successor Ariane 6

The European launcher Ariane 5 will take to the air for the last time on Tuesday around 23:30. After almost twenty years and 117 missions, the European Space Agency is discontinuing the rocket. But a successor is not ready yet.

With its final flight, the Ariane 5 rocket will carry a French defense satellite and a German communications satellite into space. The launch will take place from the European launch site Kourou in French Guiana.

The launch itself is not that exciting, except that this flight becomes the swan song of the Ariane 5 rocket. New copies are simply no longer made. So after this there will never be another Ariane 5 in the air.

The launcher is considered to be very reliable. Only two of the 116 flights failed. The rocket launched the James Webb space telescope, among other things.

This was done so efficiently and precisely that the telescope was able to save on fuel to arrive at the correct position. That fuel can now be used to keep the telescope in the right place, which means it can last a lot longer than expected.

Six launches per year

In 2005, the first successful flight with the current version of the Ariane 5 launcher took place. Since then, about five or six rockets a year have been launched by the French maker Arianespace.

With the penultimate launch, Ariane 5 carried the space probe JUICE into space. It will investigate possible traces of life near the moons of Jupiter.

In 2018, the last ten Ariane 5 missiles were ordered. When they were used up, successor Ariane 6 had to be ready. But that launcher is not yet available.

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Ariane 6 is delayed

The Ariane 6 rocket is said to be more than half the cost to launch than the Ariane 5 (around $170 million), but slightly more expensive than SpaceX’s Falcon 9 (almost $60 million). The SpaceX rocket can also be reused, something that is not possible with the Ariane 6.

He will probably fly for the first time next year at the earliest. And that while he was originally supposed to go to space in 2020. So now there is no connection in the phasing out of the Ariane 5 and the arrival of the Ariane 6.

This means that the European space agency ESA cannot launch anything with its own material for the time being and therefore has to move to the American SpaceX. Building a new Ariane 5 takes too much time. And the European alternative, the smaller Italian Vega C rocket, will be grounded for the time being. This is due to a failed launch that took place at the end of last year.

European ‘launch crisis’

ESA CEO Josef Aschbacher is fed up with the developments and the dependence on other continents for launches. In a LinkedIn message he recently wrote that Europe is in an “acute launch crisis”.

And that while developments in space travel are going fast. “We must act quickly so that we can compete in the space race and maintain strategic space independence,” he writes.

2023-07-04 10:04:00
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