The European Ariane 6 rocket will take off on July 9

The first flight of Ariane 6, which was to take place in 2020, has been postponed several times due to Covid-19 and development difficulties.

The inaugural flight of the European Ariane 6 rocket, which should give Europe back its independent access to space, will take place on July 9 from Kourou, in French Guiana, from where no launcher has taken off for a year, announced the European Space Agency (ESA) on Wednesday June 5. “Europe is coming back into the game. We are emerging from the pitcher crisis”ESA Director General Josef Aschbacher told AFP from the Berlin Air Show.

“The program was late, we all suffered from it, but it is Europe’s return to access to space and we are confident about the date” of July 9, added to AFP the president of the National Center for Space Studies (CNES), Philippe Baptiste. Initially planned for 2020, the first flight of Ariane 6 has been postponed numerous times due to the Covid-19 pandemic and development difficulties.

Europe has been deprived of its own access to space since the final flight of the Ariane 5 heavy launcher in July 2023 and the failure of the first commercial flight of the new Italian Vega-C rocket in 2022. Designed to face competition from American Space X launcher, the new European heavy launcher is versatile, with a re-ignitable upper stage allowing it to place several satellites in different orbits during the same flight.

Ariane 6 is “the same class as the Falcon 9 rockets” launched by Elon Musk’s company Space X, argued Josef Aschbacher. But unlike Space X’s rockets, the new European launcher is not reusable and “we have to work on it in the future”he added.

The Ariane 6 launch campaign started in April at the Guiana Space Center (CSG) in Kourou, Guyana, where the central body of the first Ariane 6 was installed on the ELA4 launch pad. “The last major step before the launch will be the dress rehearsal”detailed the ESA, without specifying the date.