2023-06-10 17:09:45
After 27 years of good and loyal service to the European space industry, the Ariane 5 launcher will say goodbye on Friday to Kourou, where it all began.
It is from French Guiana that a page in European space history will turn. Next Friday, at 6:26 p.m., the famous Ariane 5 rocket will make its farewell flight as part of the 117th and the launcher’s last campaign.
The objective of this ultimate mission, the VA261is D’send two satellites into orbit. The first, the French Syracuse B, will serve the cmilitary communications for the Directorate General of Armaments. The second, the German Heinrich-Hertz-Mission, will be used for civilian purposes.
Inaugurated for the first time in 1996the Ariane 5 launcher has an impressive success rate: out of 116 flights, 111 were successful, i.e. a reliability of 96%. The last mission that placed the JUICE space probe into orbit is the latest example of the success of this launcher.
The day before the launch, Thursday 15, Ariane 5 will leave the launcher integration building (BIL) to join the final assembly building (BAF). He will fly away the next day for one last adventure, before giving way to his successor, Ariane 6with new features: an upper stage with a re-ignitable engine, offering great flexibility in payload capacities and target orbits, as well as a significant reduction in the cost of access to space. The assembly of the new launcher is scheduled for November 2023, according to the National Center for Space Studies (CNES).
Among European launchers, Ariane 5 is the only one capable of sending heavy payloads into distant orbits, which are used to position satellites. And this unique specificity risks being missed by the European Space Agency (ESA), because the new Ariane 6 launcher, supposed to be operational since 2020, continues to postpone its inauguration. Europe will therefore suffer a capacity hole of a few months in this register, since it is impossible to continue using Ariane 5: the launcher is not reusable, and the last batch of ten rockets was validated in 2018.
In the meantime, the ESA will either have to postpone some of its flights, or call on non-European service providers, in the United States with SpaceX (Falcon 9) or in Asia.
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