It’s the end of an era. After twenty-seven years fueling the European Space Agency (ESA) project, the Ariane 5 rocket made its last flight on Wednesday and left two military satellites in orbit 36,000 kilometers from Earth: one French and one German. Ariane 6 is in the line of succession, but its inauguration is delayed and should not happen before 2024.
The 117th and last flight of the Ariane 5 took place at 10:00 p.m. this Wednesday from the European spaceport of Kourou, in French Guiana. The launch had already been postponed twice this year: once due to problems with the rocket’s pyrotechnic lines, which have been replaced in the meantime, and another due to bad weather conditions.
This latest flight went smoothly, having been watched by hundreds of onlookers, including French Justice Minister Christiane Taubira.
To the AFP news agency, the director of the French Guiana Space Center, Marie-Anne Clair, affirmed that the last flight of Ariane 5 was “charged with emotion” for the teams of Kourou, or the place where the launches of this firefight took place. 30 years.
Although it became a reliable rocket, Ariane 5 got off to a rocky start: Its maiden flight exploded moments after liftoff in 1996.
In 2022, another explosion. Engineer Herve Gilibert, who was working on Ariane 5 at the time, said it was a “traumatic experience”.
At the end of 2021, Ariane 5 launched NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, which went into space to discover the secrets of the universe.
In April this year, he launched the European Space Agency (ESA) Juice spacecraft, which went to Jupiter to explore the icy moons.
ESA’s head of human and robotic exploration, Daniel Neuenschwander, says Ariane 5 was “the spearhead of Europe’s space activities.”
Europe relies on Russian Soyuz rockets to launch heavy-lift missions into space, but Russia has blocked space cooperation with Europe in response to sanctions imposed over the war in Ukraine, which began in February 2022. very limited: it fell from 15, in 2021, to six, in 2022.
Space launches have been dominated by billionaire Elon Musk’s American company SpaceX, whose rockets are now deployed once a week. With no other options, ESA was forced to use Space X’s Falcon 9 to launch the Euclid Space Telescope on July 1, 2023.
ESA will use a SpaceX rocket to launch the EarthCARE observation mission satellites. It is also unclear how the agency will launch the next round of satellites for the European Union’s global navigation system. Earlier this month, ESA chief Josef Aschbacher acknowledged that these are “difficult times” but stressed that everyone is “working hard” to launch the next-generation Ariane 6 rocket – which was scheduled for 2020 – and the Vega-C.
In 2022, ESA and Arianespace had announced the maiden flight of Ariane 6 for this year, but everything indicates that it should not be possible. On June 8, ESA scheduled vehicle assembly and a first overall ground test for November, so the Ariane 6’s maiden flight should not take place before 2024.
Source: TSF
