Ariane 6 will make its first satellite launch in 2026 under its gigantic contract with Amazon, following its third and fourth missions scheduled for the end of the year, Arianespace announced on Thursday, October 16.
The European rocket, which has already made two commercial flights since its commissioning, on March 6 with a military satellite and on August 13 with a meteorological vehicle, must carry out its next mission on November 4, always from Kourou, in French Guiana, and put the Sentinel-1D satellite into orbit for the European Copernicus Earth observation program.
On Thursday, Arianespace, responsible for the marketing and operation of the European launcher, revealed that after this third launch, “the last mission of the year (…) will put into orbit a pair of Galileo satellites”, the European satellite navigation system. This operation, whose precise date will be announced approximately a month in advance, “will be carried out with a version with two thrusters (Ariane 62),” Arianespace said in a statement.
On the other hand, the next mission, in 2026, will use the version with four propellants, called Ariane 64, equipped with a cargo capacity in low orbit doubled to 21.6 tons, to put into orbit “satellites of the high-speed constellation of Amazon’s Kuiper Project,” the company stressed, without yet indicating a date.
“Useful for the future”
This will be the first of the 18 launches planned in the contract signed between Arianespace and Amazon, announced in April 2022. The company was one of the three selected by Jeff Bezos’ company to launch a total of 3,236 satellites into low Earth orbit, at an altitude of about 600 km, and is the only non-American one. In mid-September, Arianespace had revised down the number of Ariane 6 commercial launches in 2025 from five to four, but promised to roughly double this number in 2026.
Amazon’s weight in the Ariane 6 order book – half of the thirty launches booked so far – has fueled fears that a launcher designed to guarantee European space sovereignty is dependent on a foreign commercial customer.
Arianespace maintains that the experience of the Kuiper launches will be “useful for the future”, with a view to the launch of the Iris² constellation, a flagship EU project that aims to guarantee secure and sovereign connectivity and whose deployment is planned from 2029.
Source: BFM TV
