Finally, the long-awaited European rocket headed for space.
At 3pm ET on Tuesday – a decade after the European Space Agency set in motion a plan for a powerful new vehicle to carry the continent’s ambitions into orbit – Ariana 6 lifted off from the launch pad at the European Spaceport in French Guiana. The vehicle reached orbit 18 minutes and 44 seconds after liftoff and about an hour later deployed a series of small satellites, after which the mission was deemed a success by its managers.
But an anomaly in the final phase of the flight caused Ariana 6 to deviate from its planned trajectory, rendering it unable to reach the necessary altitude to release its final payload. Officials at ArianeGroup, the French aerospace company that built the rocket, said it could take up to two weeks to analyze the data and determine what went wrong.
But Stefan Israel, chief executive of Arianespace, the company that operates the rocket, said the anomaly had “no consequences for subsequent launches”.
“We are fully on track to make a second start this year,” he said at a press conference after the start.
The rocket’s debut, after years of delays, was earlier greeted with cheers, whoops and cheers from ESA staff watching the liftoff and excited to see European nations regain domestic access to the final frontier, at least to some extent.
“It was a historic moment,” said Lucia Linares, ESA’s head of space transport strategy and institutional launches, before the final phase of the flight ended. “This is good for Europe. It’s also good for the world.”
Europe’s need to reach space — for climate monitoring, navigation satellites and exploration of the Moon, Mars and beyond — grows every year. A home-built rocket ensures that European missions will be prioritized on their own terms and that the continent’s space program will not depend on the favor of non-European companies or international partners.
“We really need Ariane 6,” said Toni Tolker-Nielsen, ESA’s director of space transport.
Critics of the Ariane 6 program, however, are not convinced the rocket will prove globally competitive in the long term, citing outdated technology and inflated costs beyond what was originally promised.
Before Tuesday, European nations had not had independent access to space since July 2023, when Ariane 5, the vehicle that preceded Ariane 6, flew for the last time. Another smaller ESA rocket, Vega-C, has been grounded since 2022 due to an in-flight failure.
In the past, many of the European missions flew on Russian Soyuz rockets. But Russia’s invasion of Ukraine led to a break in relations in 2022.
“Suddenly we were in a crisis, with no access to space,” Mr Tolker-Nielsen said. In the past year, key ESA missions have flown on SpaceX vehicles, including the Earth Cloud Aerosol and Radiation Explorer, two satellites of the Galileo navigation system and the Euclid space telescope. Hera, an ESA spacecraft that will visit a pair of asteroids, will be carried by SpaceX in the fall.
“When you don’t have it, you realize how important it is,” Mr. Tolker-Nielsen said of Europe’s way of getting to orbit and beyond.
Ariane 6 was built by ArianeGroup, a French aerospace company. This is the latest model in a family of rockets that have been in use since the 1970s.
The new rocket has a maximum height of 203 feet and is available in two versions. Ariane 62, with two boosters, has a maximum liftoff weight of 540 metric tons and is capable of carrying payloads of up to 10.3 metric tons to low Earth orbit. Ariane 64 has four boosters with a maximum liftoff weight of 870 metric tons and can carry up to 21.6 metric tons to low Earth orbit.
The latest version of the Ariane 5, by contrast, could carry payloads of about 20 metric tons to low Earth orbit, while SpaceX’s Falcon 9 can lift nearly 23 metric tons there.
ESA and Arianespace, a subsidiary of ArianeGroup, had aimed for a first flight by 2020, but technical challenges, the Covid-19 pandemic and an overly ambitious development schedule led to a four-year delay.
According to Philippe Baptiste, president of France’s National Center for Space Research, the delay was partly caused by lost technical knowledge because too much time had passed between the development of Ariane 5, which began in 1988, and Ariane 6 in 2014.
Ariane 5 “was a very good launcher and we held it back too long,” he said. The rocket has been one of the most frequently launched vehicles on Earth, but has recently been eclipsed by SpaceX’s Falcon 9, which offers comparable performance at a lower cost.
“We didn’t evolve at the right time, so we lost some capabilities in Europe,” Dr Baptiste said.
Compared to its predecessor, Ariane 6 comes with improvements, such as an upper stage powered by an engine that can be re-ignited up to four times. This makes it possible for missions requiring orbits of different altitudes to fly with a single rocket.
After the second re-ignition, Tuesday’s Ariane 6 flight began to deviate from its flight plan. The car’s auxiliary power unit, which helps re-boost the engine, is turned on for a third time, then immediately turned off as a safety measure. Due to this problem, the upper stage engine did not restart.
“We don’t know why it stopped,” said Martin Sion, CEO of ArianeGroup. “That’s something we’ll have to figure out when we get all the data.”
As a result, the upper stage will not be able to maneuver out of orbit to burn up in the Earth’s atmosphere and avoid contributing to the growing population of space junk, a goal that ESA is promoting with Ariane 6. Depending on the orbit, it could take years. until the vehicle naturally falls back to Earth.
“This is not a unique situation,” Mr. Zion said, adding that this is the scenario for many launch vehicles.
On Tuesday, ESA tested the capability of the two-booster model with a range of small missions from private companies, government agencies and research institutions. Some of the spacecraft, small CubeSats, were deployed in orbit around Earth, while others remained on board to collect data during the flight.
Two re-entry capsules were to be launched as a demonstration of technology that could return cargo from space. But due to the anomaly, the re-entry capsules were not released.
According to Mr. Zion, the main phases of the flight – which include getting off the ground and deploying the satellites – worked flawlessly. He said the final stage of Ariane 6 is a test of how the rocket’s upper stage behaves in microgravity.
“A lot of missions don’t have to be restarted in microgravity,” Mr. Zion said, stressing that the rest of the mission went according to plan. On future flights, “it’s a flexibility that we can use or not,” he added.
Still, problems in the final leg of Tuesday’s flight could add to questions about whether Ariane 6 will be competitive in the global space market.
In June, Eumetsat, the European government’s weather monitoring agency, moved the launch of a new satellite from the Ariane 6 to the Falcon 9. At the post-launch press conference, Mr. Israel responded to the situation.
“What was demonstrated in the first 18 minutes was absolutely enough to do a mission like this for Eumetsat,” he said.
Ariane 6 is also partially non-reusable, a key factor that lowered the cost of Falcon 9 flights and boosted SpaceX’s competitiveness.
“It’s just pure economics,” said Laura Forczyk, an aerospace industry analyst who founded aerospace consulting firm Astralytical. “If you’re throwing away your rocket after every use, it’s not going to be cost competitive.”
Unfortunately, she added, in many ways this makes Ariane 6 “already obsolete before it even becomes operational.”
Ariane 6 was expected to be 50 percent cheaper than other ESA rockets, although its cost has risen over the course of its long development. Officials from ESA and ArianeGroup have been tight-lipped about the total cost of the rocket.
Reusing rockets “is going to be a challenge for them in the long term,” said Clay Mowry, president of the International Astronautical Federation and former head of Arianespace’s U.S. affiliate. Still, “they’ve made great strides,” Mr. Mowry said, including increased ignition, vehicle flexibility and launch capability.
Walter Pelzer, director general of the German space agency, said he believes Europe will master reusability in the future, but he doesn’t think it’s the only factor that will dictate Ariane 6’s success.
“Whether a launcher should be reusable depends on the market,” he said, adding that the customers Arianespace is targeting for the Ariane 6 are different from those using the Falcon 9.
However long it takes a European rocket manufacturer to achieve reusability, the new rocket is booked until mid-2028, with 30 flights planned for various customers. That includes 18 launches for Project Kuiper, Amazon’s effort to build an internet satellite constellation in space that will try to rival SpaceX’s Starlink service.
After the inaugural flight, another Ariane 6 rocket was scheduled to fly in December. Six more launches were planned for 2025; eight were planned for next year, including ESA’s Plato mission, a space telescope that will search for exoplanets.
Despite the technical difficulties, Josef Aschbacher, ESA’s chief executive officer, expressed excitement and relief at the post-launch press conference.
“Today we launched Ariane 6 successfully,” he said. “This is a big milestone. Europe is coming back.”
