- July 11, 2024
- Posted by: admin
- Category: Emilio Cozzi
The new ESA rocket lifted off for the first time on July 9th. Along with it, hopes of competing on the international stage have been revived, despite criticisms regarding delays, costs, and design.
BY EMILIO COZZI
The Vulcain 2.1 engine and the two P120C boosters roared, but on Tuesday, July 9th, it was the hopes of much of Europe that propelled Ariane 6 beyond the sky. Although the Vinci engine, the second stage’s propellant, did not perform nominally, reigniting twice out of the three planned times, everyone at the Kourou spaceport in French Guiana celebrated: the European Space Agency, the French agency (CNES), Arianespace, and the long list of clients waiting for the new space vehicle to prove it works (and that it now becomes fully operational). Because it is always with bated breath that one watches a rocket take off for the first time.
A year after the last flight of Ariane 5, July 9, 2024, may have marked the beginning of a new chapter in space history: Europe now has a vehicle that allows autonomous access to space, one of the “heavy” types capable of carrying up to 21.6 tons to low Earth orbit and 11.5 tons to geostationary orbit. Not only that: Ariane 6 will also serve as a bridge for the significant leap toward the Moon, to deliver cargo and experiments in support of the Artemis program and for a Europe-made initiative, fueled by renewed enthusiasm after recent years, where the outlook was – it must be said – tinged with shades of gray. Once fully operational, ESA promises that Ariane 6 will guarantee ten to twenty flights each year. An unthinkable number until recently: to reduce the time between missions and increase launch opportunities with smaller vehicles, the Centre Spatial Guyanais has undergone significant renovation, with new structures now towering amidst the rainforest. Among them, the large mobile launch pad on the horizon of the Amazon forest.
The engines of Ariane 6, the Vulcain 2.1, the Vinci, and the solid fuel boosters (made in Italy by Avio), will enable new goals. The orbits, certainly, but with the Moon and human transport on the horizon.
A long struggle
Claiming that the development of Ariane 6 has been straightforward would be an understatement; the new launch system took off four years later than planned, a delay due to technical problems, redesign of some parts, testing slowdowns, and in the final stages, even ground system issues. And although the journey intersected with a pandemic, 2020 should have been the debut year. Instead, further delays ensued, with increased costs causing growing criticism.
The new vehicle promised to be more economical and competitive against the pricing power of SpaceX. An objective translated, at the ESA Council in Seville in November 2023, into additional funds allocated for new “continental” vehicles: up to 340 million euros annually for Ariane 6 and 21 million for Vega C, another notable absentee after the December 2022 failure, which is hoped to return to flight by the end of the current year. The funds are and will be spent to “cover part of the additional production costs, largely due to significant inflationary pressures in the Eurozone over the past two years.” More public resources, therefore, for a vehicle that initially aimed to dominate the market without additional state funding and, nonetheless, to offer prices (per kilo and per launch) in a tight competition with SpaceX. Another promise that, in the decade between the project’s approval at ESA and the July 9th launch, became impossible to keep.
The (difficult) comparison with SpaceX
To put things in perspective, the most significant example remains the Euclid space telescope: ESA had to launch it with a Falcon 9, spending 70 million euros. Transporting it into orbit with an Ariane 62 would have cost 90 million. In the configuration with four boosters, Ariane 64 is comparable to a Falcon 9 but with a price around 115/130 million euros per launch. Thus, the cost per kilo is nearly double.
The new subsidies will help lower the cost to keep Ariane 6 competitive. Critics, and there are many, see this as the perfect assist to label the new European heavy launcher as an evolution but certainly not a revolution, let alone the necessary leap to compete in a market transformed in the last decade. Designed with modularity over reusability, Ariane has no reusable components, a feature with which SpaceX has disrupted the entire sector; however, defenders note that Elon Musk’s company can offer competitive prices because it receives subsidies in another form – as we wrote here – by selling launch services to NASA and the Defense Department at much higher prices.
The only way to silence the detractors will be for Ariane 6 to maintain the reliability assured by its predecessor, whose most glorious achievement was the precise delivery, celebrated by NASA, of the valuable James Webb Space Telescope, a space observatory costing 10 billion dollars. And all this while, in the medium to long term, a newly inaugurated paradigm shift should lead to abandoning the duopoly of Arianegroup and Avio and fostering the growth of other private actors with innovative solutions.
In the meantime, Ariane 6 enjoys trust already granted by significant clients, who even before validation have created a unique backlog for a rocket that has never flown into space: 30 orders, including institutional launches and commercial contracts, 18 of which are for the deployment of Amazon’s Kuiper broadband internet mega-constellation.
The horrendous years of European space
There are two episodes that capture the atmosphere surrounding Ariane 6’s debut. According to a report (not denied) by the French newspaper Le Monde ten days before the “décollage,” one of the 30 clients, in effect, dropped Ariane 6 and Arianespace (the European company that commercializes Ariane and, until July 5th, Vega flights) to “jump” to a Falcon 9. And not just any company or entity, but a European institution: Eumetsat, the intergovernmental organization managing the European weather satellite network.
The withdrawal occurred without even knowing the outcome of the first flight, for what Eumetsat Director-General Phil Evans called “exceptional circumstances,” without specifying why the Mtg-S1 satellite, an advanced gem, will take off in 2025 atop a SpaceX rocket and not an Ariane 6. Understandably, the news was not well received by European space leaders, starting with CNES head Philippe Baptiste and ESA Director-General Josef Aschbacher.
Secondly, in response to the conclusions of the last ESA-EU Council in May, Asd Eurospace, an association grouping the main European companies in the sector, felt the need to highlight that things are not going well. Touching on a sore spot: “The low volume of European institutional markets” compared to competitors whose markets “are several times larger than the European one and mostly restricted (i.e., not accessible to non-national operators).”
It is not new that the continental industry asks governments to increase the demand for space services, to give oxygen and impetus to a sector, particularly launchers, which is struggling and which, in fact, enables various sectors not directly related to extraterrestrial activities. Instead, Europe, momentarily without autonomous access to space, had to turn to SpaceX to launch important, even strategic satellites: Cosmo-SkyMed, Euclid, Galileo, EarthCare. Next time it will be for Hera, a crucial mission for planetary defense. Then, perhaps last but not least, it will be Eumetsat’s satellite. Hopefully, it will be the end of the crisis.
The task of Ariane 6 will be to ignite a light in these horrendous years with its engines. To prove to everyone that it was not born already old.