WASHINGTON — One chapter in European access to space got here to a detailed July 5 with the ultimate launch of the Ariane 5, but the start of the subsequent chapter faces additional delays.
An Ariane 5 lifted off from the European spaceport at Kourou, French Guiana, at 6 p.m. Eastern. The launch had been scheduled for June 16 but was postponed a day upfront after Arianespace concluded that three pyrotechnical transmission lines used for the separation of the rocket’s solid rocket boosters needed to get replaced. The corporate rescheduled the launch for July 4, only to delay it an extra day due to strong upper-level winds.
As with so many Ariane 5 missions, this launch, designated VA261, carried two communications satellites destined for geostationary transfer orbit. Nearly half-hour after liftoff, the rocket deployed Heinrich-Hertz-Satellit, a spacecraft built by OHB for the German Space Agency on behalf of other German government agencies. The three,400-kilogram satellite will test advanced communications technologies.
About three and a half minutes later, the rocket deployed the opposite payload, the Syracuse 4B satellite for the French military. The three,570-kilogram satellite was developed by a consortium of Airbus Defence and Space and Thales Alenia Space, using an Airbus Eurostar 3000 bus.
“It’s a hit for ‘Team Europe’ tonight with this last and final Ariane 5,” Stéphane Israël, chief executive of Arianespace, said on the corporate’s webcast of the launch after confirmation of successful payload deployment.
“Thanks for ArianeGroup, Arianespace and CNES. It was a beautiful launch, even whether it is the last one,” said Gen. Michel Sayegh, director of space programs for the French armaments agency DGA in the course of the launch webcast.
The launch was the 117th and final flight of the Ariane 5 over 27 years. The vehicle made its first, unsuccessful launch in June 1996, and suffered a partial failure on its second launch in October 1997 before an unqualified success on its third launch in October 1998. The rocket’s ability to hold two large geostationary communications satellites without delay made it a key vehicle for a few years within the industrial space industry during an era when geostationary communications satellites dominated the market.
The European Space Agency also often used the rocket for several science missions in addition to the launch of 5 Automated Transfer Vehicle cargo spacecraft to the International Space Station between 2008 and 2014. In perhaps the rocket’s highest-profile launch, it successfully launched the James Webb Space Telescope for NASA on Christmas Day 2021, delivering it on a trajectory so accurate it had the effect of significantly increasing the spacecraft’s lifetime by reducing the quantity of propellant needed for trajectory correction maneuvers.
“Ariane 5 is now over, and Ariane 5 has perfectly finished its work and really is now a legendary launcher,” Israël said. “But Ariane 6 is coming.”
Waiting on Ariane 6
Within the lead as much as the ultimate Ariane 5 launch, Arianespace has advertised a “spaceflight continuum,” of past and future rockets, but that continuum isn’t necessarily continuous. The Ariane 5 overlapped with the top of the Ariane 4 rocket, which made its last launch in 2003. ESA had originally planned for an analogous overlap between the top of the Ariane 5 and the introduction of its successor, the Ariane 6.
Nevertheless, the event of Ariane 6 has been affected by delays which have pushed out its first launch, once planned for 2020, by several years. In October 2022, ESA said it projected the primary launch to happen within the fourth quarter of 2023, nevertheless it is increasingly likely the launch will slip into 2024.
Executives with OHB, a supplier on the Ariane 6 program, said in an earnings call in May that they expected the primary Ariane 6 launch to happen in early 2024, and no later than May 2024. “I get an increasing number of confident we are going to see the primary launch of Ariane 6 early next yr,” Marco Fuchs, chief executive of OHB, said in the course of the call.
ESA and Arianespace have declined to supply an updated launch date for that inaugural mission. “Today it could be speculative to say a launch date,” ESA Director General Josef Aschbacher said during a press briefing June 29 after an ESA Council meeting in Stockholm. “We have now to undergo quite a few technical milestones over the summer period but I promise, after the summer in September, we are going to indicate a period which is the goal period for the Ariane 6.”
Those milestones include a hot-fire test of the Ariane 6 upper stage scheduled for July at a test facility in Lampoldshausen, Germany, which shall be followed by a second test in the autumn to check its performance in what ESA calls “degraded cases.” Assembly of the primary flight model of the Ariane 6 is planned to start in November in French Guiana, in keeping with an ESA update published June 8.