First, a few spontaneous “wows” at the eruption of a deluge of fire on the horizon, then everyone falls silent, gobsmacked: the spectators who came to watch the first launch of Ariane 6 on Tuesday, from the terraces of the Jupiter room, at Europe’s spaceport in Kourou (French Guiana), did not miss a crumb. Eyes riveted on the rocket, its smoke describing an arc of a circle, before the powerful bolide vanished into the clouds, quickly, too quickly.
Inside the control center, imperturbable, Raymond Boyce, the director of operations, had continued to punctuate the silence with his flat voice: “Nominal trajectory.” Understand, “all is well.” The thrusters released, two minutes after takeoff, the public exults and applauds wildly. One word is now on everyone’s lips and we repeat it to ourselves, the enamored look of the first meeting: “Incredible.”
Aside from the fascination exerted by the elevation of a gigantic metal cylinder – 56 metres high for this first flight, but able to stretch over 62 metres –, the event marks, for Europeans, the regained autonomy of their access to space and the placing in orbit of their satellites, which they have lacked since the last launch of Ariane 5, in July 2023. It is official: the heavy launcher is now ready to compete with SpaceX’s Falcon 9, its main competitor.
Finally! Delays, particularly related to the Covid-19 pandemic, have prolonged the wait until exhaustion. “It’s a marathon for which the finish line has been pushed back regularly. We haven’t given up,” says Aline Decadi, Ariane 6 safety and security engineer at the European Space Agency (ESA). The teams are completely tired, but we wouldn’t trade this day for anything in the world.
All lights green
The show had begun before dawn with a curtain raiser: around 4:45 a.m. local time, the 90-meter-high gantry opened its doors to reveal the star on its launch pad to a select few. Two hours later, the building was slowly sliding on rails and a fine rain was showering the exposed launcher. No reason to worry Carine Leveau, director of space transportation at the National Center for Space Studies (CNES): “The launcher is not made of sugar.”
Throughout the day, weather experts instead watched for potential storms, which could damage the satellites’ onboard computers, and monitored high-altitude winds to prevent debris from falling on homes in the event of failure. “In French Guiana, conditions are extremely changeable, often with isolated storm cells, due to the hot and humid climate,” explains Anne-Sophie Chassagnou, a weather specialist at CNES.
But the lights have continued to be green. The takeoff was only delayed by an hour to better challenge the semi-final of the Blues, also broadcast at 9 p.m., 4 p.m. locally. “Huge congratulations to the teams who make possible what seems impossible,” tweeted the President of the Republic, Emmanuel Macron. Even the head of NASA, Bill Nelson, chimed in: “A giant step.”
“We are writing history”
During a flight of almost three hours, Ariane 6 was to circle the Earth twice on Tuesday. It was only after an hour that excitement took hold of the control room: the second stage had just reignited its Vinci engine after having shut it down, a technical feat that Ariane 5 could not achieve. It then placed in orbit a string of small satellites, cubesats, no bigger than shoe boxes. The succession was assured. “We are making history now,” said ESA Director General Josef Aschbacher. “It was fabulous, we are in tears, laughing. Europe is back in space,” added Toni Tolker-Nielsen, ESA’s Director of Space Transportation.
A small downside at the end of the evening when the European agency announced an anomaly at the end of the journey. It will now be necessary to analyze the flight data to see what did not work as planned. Then will come the first commercial missions: the placement of a military observation satellite by the end of the year, then others of Galileo, the “European GPS”, in early 2025. With an order book of around thirty flights, Arianespace expects a ramp-up in production in the coming years.
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