Europe’s new Ariane 6 rocket has finally taken to the skies, carrying the hopes of an entire continent on its back.
The Ariane 6 launched for the first time today (July 9) from Europe’s Spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana, at 3:01 p.m. EDT (19:01 GMT).
The stakes were high for this debut: it came a year after Ariane 6’s predecessor, the workhorse Ariane 5, had been retired, leaving Europe unable to launch large satellites on home-built rockets.
“Ariane 6 will propel Europe into space. Ariane 6 will make history,” Josef Aschbacher, the Director General of the European Space Agency (ESA), reported this today via X in the run-up to the launch.
A brand new rocket
Today’s launch has been a long time coming. Development of Ariane 6 began in late 2014 and was originally scheduled for launch in 2020. However, the schedule was delayed due to technical issues and external issues, such as the COVID-19 pandemic.
The delays meant that Ariane 6 could not overlap with Ariane 5, which flew 117 orbital missions between 1996 and 2023. With the retirement of Ariane 5, the Vega, a small satellite launcher, was the only operational orbital rocket in Europe.
That was not an acceptable situation for European space officials, who did not want to rely on SpaceX’s workhorse Falcon 9 and other foreign rockets to launch their big payloads. So they waited anxiously for today’s launch.
Ariane 6 “will ensure our guaranteed, autonomous access to space – and all the science, Earth observation, technology development and commercial opportunities that come with it,” ESA officials wrote in a preview of today’s launch.
Related: The history of rockets
The two-stage Ariane 6 is built by the French company ArianeGroup and operated on behalf of ESA by its subsidiary Arianespace. The rocket’s first stage is powered by a single Vulcain 2.1 engine — an evolved version of the Ariane 5’s Vulcain 2 — and its upper stage has a single Vinci engine, which is a new technology. (The Ariane 5’s upper stage had a single Aestus engine, or HM-7B.)
The Ariane 6 comes in two variants: the A62, which has two strap-on solid rocket boosters (SRBs), and the A64, which has four SRBs. The A62 and A64 can carry about 11.4 tonnes (10.3 metric tons) and 23.8 tonnes (21.6 metric tons) to low Earth orbit (LEO), respectively, ESA says.
That latter figure is comparable to the payload capacity of the Ariane 5. But the Ariane 6 will do the job for about half the price of its predecessor, thanks to manufacturing improvements and other developments, European officials said.
Those prices are unclear, however; Arianespace has been coy about per-flight costs, so we only have estimates. Late last year, Ars Technica put the base price of an Ariane 5 launch at around 150 million euros ($162 million U.S. at current exchange rates), which would put the target price of an Ariane 6 mission at 75 million euros ($81 million U.S.).
As Ars noted, that would make the new rocket “fairly competitive” with the dominant launcher on the market, the Falcon 9, which can be booked for $67 million per flight. But there’s more to the story: ESA member states have committed to subsidizing Ariane 6, to the tune of between 290 million and 340 million euros ($314 million to $368 million U.S.) per year through about 2031. So the actual cost per launch is likely to be significantly higher than what Ariane 6 customers pay.
The Falcon 9, as most people know, is partially reusable: the first stage comes back to Earth for repair, refurbishment and refurbishment. But the Ariane 6, like the Ariane 5 before it, is expendable. This design decision makes sense, given that the new rocket is likely to fly up to 10 times per year for the foreseeable future, ESA officials have said.
“Our launch needs are so low that it wouldn’t make economic sense,” Toni Tolker-Nielsen, ESA’s director of space transportation, recently told SpaceNews, referring to reusability. “So we don’t really need it at the moment.”
Ariane 6 already has 30 flights scheduled, Tolker-Nielsen added, 18 of which will help build out Amazon’s new Kuiper satellite internet constellation. The new rocket will likely fly one more mission this year, then scale up to six flights in 2025, eight in 2026 and 10 in 2027, he said.
But that is getting ahead of ourselves. First, the rocket had to successfully complete its debut flight.
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A debut with 9 satellites
The Ariane 6 carried nine cubesats into orbit today, all successfully deployed 370 miles (600 kilometers) above Earth about 65 minutes after launch as planned, European space officials said during a webcast of today’s flight.
Two of these passengers make up NASA’s Cubesat Radio Interferometry Experiment (CURIE), which is attempting to pinpoint the source of mysterious radio waves from the Sun.
“This is a very ambitious and very exciting mission,” said CURIE principal investigator David Sundkvist, a researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, in a statement from NASA. “This is the first time anyone has flown a radio interferometer through space in a controlled way, and so it’s a pathfinder for radio astronomy in general.”
The other cubesats will do a variety of work, from studying Earth’s climate and weather to measuring high-energy gamma rays. You can find out more about them here via ESA.
There was also more scientific equipment on today’s flight, including several experiments that remained attached to the Ariane 6 upper stage. The rocket was also scheduled to deploy two experimental reentry capsules, approximately two hours and 40 minutes into the flight. These two craft were to demonstrate that they could survive the fiery journey home through Earth’s atmosphere.
However, that didn’t happen; the Ariane 6 upper stage failed to complete the burn designed to set up that final deployment. This was due to a failure of the auxiliary power unit (APU), a device that pressurizes the upper stage’s fuel tanks during flight and provides extra thrust when needed, ESA said.
“At some point we restarted the APU. It restarted and then it stopped,” ArianeGroup CEO Martin Sion said today in a press conference after the launch. “We don’t know why it stopped. This is something we need to understand when we have all the data.”
But this anomaly, which occurred during the “tech demo” phase of the mission, should not overshadow the overall success of the flight, he and other members of the mission team said during the briefing.
“We are now perfectly on track to do a second launch this year, in 2024, for the French Ministry of Defense, and to do the next missions,” Arianespace CEO Stéphane Israël said during the press conference. “So it has no impact on the next launches.”
Publisher’s Note: This story was updated at 7:45 p.m. ET on July 9 with news of the successful deployment of cubesats, the Ariane 6 upper stage problem, and quotes from the post-launch press conference.