Will Europe finally end its launcher crisis? The European Ariane 6 rocket is due to make its maiden flight on Tuesday 9 July, with a launch from Guiana Space Center (CSG) in Kourou. A launch window is scheduled to open at 8pm (Paris time) and last three hours. But preparations are starting well before that deadline. The European Space Agency has announced that the flight will not take place before 9pm, due to a technical problem. “minor”. Follow the launch in our live stream.
Eighteen “passengers” on board. For this first flight, Ariane 6 will not carry any major satellites from its customers. On board will be scientific experiments and microsatellites from universities, such as the PariSat Project of the École nationale supérieure de l’électroménager et de ses applications. In total, Ariane 6 will carry 18 “passengers”, including eight cubesats, small satellites the size of a shoebox, and a two-ton inert mass simulating the Galileo satellites, the European geolocation system, more precise than GPS.
THE Tank filling begins at 10 a.m. (local time). At 3 p.m. Paris time, the filling of the tanks with propellants – the liquid oxygen and hydrogen that power the Vulcain engine – is scheduled to begin. The slightest anomaly requiring physical intervention would then force the rocket’s tanks to be emptied. This would mean postponing the launch by 48 hours, according to Jean-Michel Rizzi, head of the Ariane 6 launch base for the European Space Agency.
A “share of risk”. According to ESA data, first rocket launches fail about half the time. This was the case for the first Ariane 5, in 1996. In total, the launcher has only failed twice in 117 launches. “It’s a first flight, there is an element of risk, we tried to reduce it as much as possible. (…) We are confident”assured Philippe Baptiste, CEO of CNES, the French space agency. This inaugural flight of Ariane 6 arrives four years late.
At what point can the flight be considered a success? An important first step is planned one hour and six minutes after takeoff, with the first satellites released, according to a launch timeline established by CNES. The success of this inaugural flight will only be complete with the successful fallback in the Pacific of the upper stage, at the end of the mission. This fallback will occur after a third relighting of the Vinci engine, the main innovation of Ariane 6. If everything goes as planned, the flight should last around 2 hours and 50 minutes in total.