Despite everything, the new European Ariane 6 rocket has taken off carrying on its broad back the hopes of a continent.
Ariane 6 was presented for the first time (9 July), taking off from Europe’s spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana, at 3:01 p. m. EDT (7:01 p. m. GMT).
There’s a lot to expect from this debut: It came a year after the retirement of Ariane 6’s predecessor, the workhorse Ariane 5, which left Europe unable to launch giant satellites on local rockets.
“Ariane 6 will propel Europe into space. Ariane 6 will make history,” said Josef Aschbacher, Director General of the European Space Agency (ESA), today on the eve of the launch.
Today’s release was long overdue. Progression of Ariane 6 began in late 2014 and was initially planned for release in 2020, but the schedule was delayed due to technical and external issues, such as the COVID-19 pandemic.
These delays prevented Ariane 6 from overlapping with Ariane five, which flew 117 orbital missions between 1996 and 2023. The retirement of the Ariane five left Vega, a small satellite launcher, as the operational orbital rocket in the European stable.
This is not an appropriate scenario for European area officials, who do not need to rely on SpaceX’s workhorse Falcon nine and other foreign rockets to carry their giant payloads. So they were waiting for today’s release.
Ariane 6 “will guarantee our autonomy and guarantee in space and in all sciences, Earth observation, technological progress and publicity opportunities that this implies,” ESA officials wrote in a preview of today’s liftoff.
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The two-level Ariane 6 is built by the French company ArianeGroup and operated through its subsidiary Arianespace on behalf of ESA. The first level of the rocket is powered by a single Vulcain 2. 1 engine, a complex variant of the Ariane 5’s Vulcain 2, and its level is supplied with a Vinci engine, which is a new technology. (The Ariane level five carried either an Aestus or an HM-7B engine).
The Ariane 6 is available in two variants: the A62, which has two forged rocket boosters (SRBs), and the A64, which has four SRBs. The A62 and A64 can carry around 11. 4 tons (10. 3 metric tons) and 23. 8 tons. (21. 6 metric tons) in low-Earth orbit (LEO), respectively, according to ESA.
The latter figure is comparable to the payload capacity of Ariane 5. But the Ariane 6 will perform the task for about a fraction of the value of its predecessor, thanks to production innovations and other advances, officials said. European officials.
These values, however, are obscure; Arianespace has remained cautious about its flight costs, so we have estimates. Late last year, Ars Technica set the base value for an Ariane 5 launch at around €150 million ($162 million at current exchange rates), which would put the target value of an Ariane 6 project at 75 million euros (81 million dollars).
As Ars noted, this would make the new rocket “reasonably competitive” with the dominant launch vehicle on the market, the Falcon 9, which can be reserved for $67 million per flight. But that’s not all: ESA member states have pledged to subsidize the Ariane 6 for the song from €290 million to €340 million (US$314 million to US$368 million) per year until around 2031. The actual cost of the launch will likely be significantly higher than what Ariane 6 consumers pay.
The Falcon 9, as most people know, is partially reusable: its first tier returns to Earth to be retrieved, reconditioned, and flown again. But the Ariane 6, like the previous Ariane five, is consumable. The design resolution makes sense, given that the new rocket will likely fly at most about 10 times a year for the foreseeable future, ESA officials said.
“Our desire for release is so low that it wouldn’t make economic sense,” Toni Tolker-Nielsen, ESA’s director of space transportation, recently told SpaceNews, referring to reuse. “Therefore, we don’t want it at this time. “
Ariane 6 already has 30 flights scheduled, Tolker-Nielsen added, 18 of which will build Amazon’s new Kuiper satellite web constellation. The new rocket will most likely carry out one more project this year and then make up to six flights in 2025, 8 in 2026 and 10 in 2027, he said.
But that’s a little bold on ourselves. First, the rocket had to actually complete its first flight.
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Ariane 6 now has nine cubesats in orbit. All were effectively deployed 600 kilometers above Earth about 65 minutes after liftoff as planned, officials from the European area said in an online broadcast of today’s flight.
Two of those passengers form NASA’s Cubesat Radio Interferometry Experiment, or CURIE, which will try to find the source of the mysterious solar radio waves.
“This is a very ambitious and very exciting mission,” CURIE principal investigator David Sundkvist, a researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, said in a NASA statement. “This is the first time a radio interferometer has flown in space in a controlled way, making it a pioneer for radio astronomy in general. “
The other cubesats will perform a variety of jobs, ranging from reading Earth’s weather and climate to measuring high-energy gamma rays. You can read more about them ESA here.
There were also more clinical curtains on today’s flight, adding several experiments that remained attached to the top level of Ariane 6. The rocket was also intended to deploy two experimental re-entry pills at approximately two hours and 40 minutes of flight. The ships were meant to prove that they can make the fiery adventure back through Earth’s atmosphere.
However, this did not happen; The upper level of the Ariane 6 did not produce the fire expected to prepare for this final deployment. This was due to a failure of the auxiliary power unit (APU), a device that pressurizes the fuel tanks in upper-level flight and supplies greater thrust if necessary, according to ESA.
“At one point, we turned the APU. Se back on and then it shut down,” ArianeGroup CEO Martin Sion said today at a press conference following the launch of Array. “We don’t know why it stopped. That’s all we’re going to do. “”We have to figure out when we’ll have all the data. “
But that anomaly, which occurred in the “technical demonstration” phase of the project, doesn’t deserve to overshadow the overall good luck of the flight, he and other project team members said at the briefing.
“We are now perfectly on track to carry out a second launch this year, in 2024, for the French Ministry of Defense, and present the next missions,” said Stéphane Israel, CEO of Arianespace, during the press conference. This has no effect on long-term launches. ”
Editor’s Note: This story was updated at 7:45 p. m. m. Y on 9 July with news on the successful deployment of Cubesat, the Ariane 6 top-tier project and quotes from the post-launch press conference.
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Michael Wall is a senior space editor at Space. com and joined the team in 2010. He primarily covers exoplanets, spaceflight, and military space, but is known for dabbling in the field of space art. His book about the search for extraterrestrial life, “Out There,” was published on November 13, 2018. Before becoming a science writer, Michael worked as a herpetologist and wildlife biologist. He has a Ph. D. in evolutionary biology from the University of Sydney, Australia, a bachelor’s degree from the University of Arizona, and a graduate certificate in clinical writing from the University of California, Santa Cruz. To find out what his latest assignment is, you can follow Michael on Twitter.
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