Europe’s new Ariane 6 rocket blasted off on its maiden flight on Tuesday, thundering away from the European Space Agency’s forested launch site in French Guiana to restore Europe’s access to space.
Faced with increasingly stiff international competition, the European space agency sees Ariane 6 as critical to rebuilding and maintaining a foothold in low and beyond Earth orbit, launching European military satellites, science missions, navigation and communications satellites and other commercial payloads.
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“Ariane 6 will power Europe into space,” said ESA Director General Josef Aschbacher in a presentation on X. European space transport ecosystem.”
Despite cloudy weather and rain in the area, the 183-foot-tall hydrogen-fueled Vulcain 2.1 rocket’s main engine came to life at 3 p.m. EDT, followed seconds later by the ignition of two solid-fuel boosters, each producing 787,000 pounds of thrust.
Ariane 6 majestically rose into the sky above the combined 1.9 million kilograms, breaking the calm of the evening at the Guyana Space Center and putting on a spectacular show, much awaited by government and industry officials, launch site personnel and local residents.
Disappearing behind the clouds, the two strap-on boosters caught fire and collapsed two minutes after liftoff. The main engine Vulcain 2.1, producing 308,000 pounds of push, continued to burn for another five minutes before it, well, died and the stage collapsed, plunging back into the atmosphere where it was expected to break up.
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The second stage of the rocket then continues its ascent into space. After two firings of the re-startable, hydrogen-fueled Vinci engine, the upper stage reached an initial orbit of 360 miles, one hour after liftoff.
For its first flight, Ariane 6 carried several small payloads provided by ESA, NASA, industry, research institutes and students. Among the nine deployable satellites are two small experimental re-entry capsules designed to test new heat shield technology, and two NASA “cubesats” built to study radio waves emitted by powerful solar flares.
Three upper-stage machine fires are planned during the two-hour, 40-minute mission.
If telemetry confirms a successful first flight, a second launch is planned before the end of the year. Six flights are booked for 2025, eight flights in 2026 and 10 in 2027. After completing the current backlog, European space managers expect to maintain a “steady state” of nine launches per year.
“A huge leap forward for @ESA with the first launch of a powerful next-generation rocket—and with @NASAsun scientific instruments onboard,” said NASA Administrator Bill Nelson in a post on X. “Together with our international partners, we are leading a new era of space exploration. “
The launch of Ariane 6 is an important milestone for the 13-nation European Space Agency, the main contractor ArianeGroup, the French space agency CNES, which built the launch pad, and Arianespace, the consortium that sells and manages Ariane flights.
Rocket dwellers, that is Ariane 5retired last year after 117 flights, including the 2021 launch of the James Webb Space Telescope. Ariane 6 is roughly comparable to Ariane 5, but uses updated components and is expected to cost 40% less to build and operate.
But not like that SpaceX, which dominates the launch market today with reusable first stage and payload fairings, Ariane 6 is fully expendable and no components are recovered. Toni Tolker-Nielsen, ESA’s director of space transportation, recently told Space News that “our launch needs are so low that (reusability) is not economically feasible.”
“We don’t really need it at this point,” he said. “But when we will launch often in the future, we need to be reusable for economic reasons. The second reason for reuse for European launchers is sustainability. We need to have a circular economy in 10 or 20 years, we need to be sustainable.”
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Ariane 6 was originally expected to fly in 2020, but a number of economic and technical obstacles combined to delay the maiden flight by four years.
Meanwhile, a joint program with the Russian space agency Roscosmos – launching a medium-lift Soyuz rocket from French Guiana – collapsed after Russian invasion of Ukraine. Adding insult to injury, Europe’s tiny Vega-C rocket was grounded after its second failed launch.
So, since Ariane’s final flight last July 5, Europe has not had its own rocket to launch European payloads. Indeed, at least four satellites scheduled to fly on European launchers were instead carried into orbit on SpaceX Falcon 9 rockets.
“You don’t want to depend on anyone, and that’s why all spacefaring countries want their own access to space,” said Lucia Linares, director of space transport strategy and institutional launches for ESA, in comments cited by Nature magazine.
Two variants of the Ariane 6 are planned: one with two string boosters, the Ariane 62, and a more powerful version, the Ariane 64, with four string boosters. Various payload fairings are available to accommodate various payload sizes.
Tolker-Nielsen says that this “modular” system makes sense from a European point of view.
“This is a perfect system because Ariane 62 is replacing the Russian Soyuz, and Ariane 64 is replacing Ariane 5,” he said. “So it covers all our needs. Ariane 6 could be the European workforce for the next 15 to 30 years.”
