by Europe’s new heavy lift rocket finally has a firm launch date.
The IS European Space Agency (ESA) Ariane 6 rocket from Arianespace will take its first mission to space no earlier than June 15, 2024, officials with the test team announced Thursday (Nov. 30). On board there will be a series of small satellitesincluding two from NASArepresentatives added by the live briefing.
After four years of delays for Ariane 6, progress is accelerating: a scale model of the heavy lifter rocket also ended a critical fire on the pad last week in Kourou, French Guiana – ESA director Josef Aschbacher said it was a major milestone.
“Assuming that everything nominally goes without a hitch, we expect Ariane 6 to have its inaugural flight between June 15 and July 31 next year,” Aschbacher said of the hot-fire test on the 23 November. He warned later in the meeting, however, that “it is rocket science, so it is to be expected that there may be one delay or another.”
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Ariana 5 launched a European spacecraft for more than 25 years, launching more than 100 missions between 1996 and 2003. Notable missions included the James Webb Space TelescopeJupiter’s Icy Moon Explorer (SU) and the Rosetta comet spacecraft, not to mention the dozen or so Galileo navigation satellites that give Europe its share GPS access.
Europe has indicated that it wants independent shipping access spacebut lately he has depended — like much of the industry — on it SpaceXwho sent the Euclid dark matter hunting mission July 1 (for example) after the launch of Ariane 6 started slipping.
Ariane 6 was designed in the early 2010s to meet a new generation of launch needs – lowering costs and sending more satellites to different orbits at the same time, for example – after the aging Ariane 5 design was retired in July in years. But numerous technical obstacles and the COVID-19 pandemic have hampered Ariane 6’s planned gate-opening mission in 2020.
“We were literally in crisis,” Aschbacher said of the gap, adding that poor communication about milestones and delays contributed to the problem. Today, however, regular and detailed reports are now available to ESA member states, the public and journalists following the Ariane 6 task force meetings.
“We have learned our lessons,” Aschbacher said, acknowledging the help of Arianespace, Ariane Group and France’s national space agency (CNES) in tackling issues as they arose. “We have sat together, and we have taken very clear action to overcome the crisis, as we call it. It was literally a crisis. We had to find out. And let me say that we did this together . This is not the case. Only ESA.”
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Lessons learned include providing more options for European shipping. Aschbacher highlighted the new ESA member state agreement announced at the European Space Summit in Seville, Spain on November 6 that will continue to improve access against SpaceX. He described it as a “paradigm shift” that will provide more opportunities for European companies, once more data is available.
The agreement includes short-term funding from CEC members for Ariane 6 and the new lighter launch Vega-C which has flown twice so far, both times in 2022. ESA has also promised to give more launches to private companies to explore options diversify and drive. minimum cost — before introduction reusable rockets in the 2030s or so.
Philippe Baptiste, president of CNES, praised the agreement, saying it will prepare Europe “for a future where we will have more competition, but also [with] more freedom for the industry and more responsibility for the same industry. This is a step forward.”
Related: Europe won’t have reusable rockets for another decade: report
For now, however, the spotlight is on Ariane 6 to perform well on its first flight. Happily, the hot fire test on November 23rd “worked perfectly”, and the data collected from the effort showed “the results are what we expect,” said Martin Sion, CEO of ArianeGroup, in the same briefing.
However, the test fell 44 seconds short of the expected milestone of 470 seconds (nearly eight minutes). Officials said it was due to a sensor that measures the amount of fuel remaining in the tanks that was using a “conservative” setting for the test conditions, and that the glitch should not have affected the flight.
The team is now preparing for two more Big Ariane 6 tests in the first part of December. An upper hot fire will take place at the Lampoldshausen site of the German Aerospace Center on December 7, to see how the stage will perform if a launch takes place in “degraded conditions.” A week later, on December 15, fuel loading will be tested in Kourou for somewhat non-nominal conditions as well, including a short ignition of the core stage engine.
In fact, all upcoming key tests of Ariane 6 will evaluate the launcher in “non-nominal scenarios”, Aschbacher added. Knowing that, and solid data from the hot fire test as well, gave ÍOS and the task force more confidence to announce the mid-June launch date. Meanwhile, Arianespace is expanding its launch demonstration of future flights with potential customers.
But not all guarantees; if something unexpected happens, the delay could extend even longer because “there is still a lot of work to be done,” CNES Baptiste said in French (translation provided by Space.com), describing measures such as the tests and assembly at the Ariane Group Factory that must be done before the big day.
Sion Arianespace added in French that more confidence will come when Ariane 6 passes a launch system quality review next year, to establish that the rocket is safe to launch.
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“It is fundamental to the reliability of the rocket. We know that is the hallmark of Ariane 5, and this reliability is essential for Ariane 6 – and what we have for our customers,” said Sion. “We won’t take shortcuts. A quality review can find problems that have been overlooked. It’s better to find them there, than during the first launch.
“It would be an assumption for us to say,” continued Sion, referring to the Ariane 6 launch campaign in general, “that all problems have been put behind us. (But) there are many behind us that think we can announce a date. . That’s the big change today.”
But if everything goes according to plan, Arianespace CEO Stéphane Israël added in the same briefing, the first commercial flight will be by the end of 2024 and “as many flights as possible in 2025.” Eventually, he said, Ariane 6 could be launching as many as 9 to 10 missions a year.
