Finally, the time has come: Europe’s long-awaited rocket is launching into space.
At 3 p.m. Eastern Time on Tuesday — a decade after the European Space Agency set in motion a plan for a powerful new vehicle that would carry the continent’s ambitions into orbit — Ariane 6 lifted off from the launch pad at Europe’s Spaceport in French Guiana. The vehicle reached orbit 18 minutes and 44 seconds after liftoff and about an hour later launched a batch of small satellites, with the mission being deemed a success by managers.
But an anomaly in the final phase of the flight caused Ariane 6 to deviate from its planned trajectory, preventing it from reaching the altitude needed to drop its final payload. Officials at ArianeGroup, the French aerospace company that built the rocket, said it could take up to two weeks to analyze the data and determine what went wrong.
But Stéphane Israël, the CEO of Arianespace, the company that operates the rocket, said the anomaly “has no consequences for subsequent launches.”
“We are right on track to do a second launch this year,” he said at a post-launch news conference.
The launch of the rocket, after years of delay, was greeted with applause, cheers and jubilation by ESA staff who attended the launch and were delighted to see European countries regain access to the final frontier, at least in some capacity.
“This was a historic moment,” said Lucía Linares, ESA’s head of space transportation strategy and institutional launches, before the final phase of the flight was completed. “It’s good for Europe. It’s also good for the world.”
Europe’s need to get into space — for climate monitoring, navigation satellites, and exploration of the Moon, Mars and beyond — grows every year. A rocket built at home ensures that European missions are prioritized on their own terms, and that the continent’s space program is not beholden to favors from non-European companies or international partners.
“We really need Ariane 6,” said Toni Tolker-Nielsen, ESA’s Director of Space Transportation.
However, critics of the Ariane 6 program are not convinced that the rocket will be globally competitive in the long term, citing outdated technology and higher costs than originally promised.
Before Tuesday, European countries had not had independent access to space since July 2023, when Ariane 5, the vehicle that preceded Ariane 6, last flew. Another smaller ESA rocket, Vega-C, has been grounded since 2022 after a failed flight.
In the past, many of the European missions flew on Russian Soyuz rockets. But the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 led to a rift in the relationship.
“Suddenly we were in a crisis, without access to space,” Mr Tolker-Nielsen said. Over the past year, major ESA missions have been flown by SpaceX vehicles, including the agency’s Earth Cloud Aerosol and Radiation Explorer, two Galileo navigation system satellites and the Euclid space telescope. Hera, an ESA spacecraft that will visit a pair of asteroids, will be launched by SpaceX in the autumn.
“When you don’t have it, you realise how important it is,” Mr Tolker-Nielsen said of a European-developed way to get into orbit and beyond.
Ariane 6 is built by ArianeGroup, a French aerospace company. It is the latest in a family of rockets that have been in use since the 1970s.
The new rocket has a maximum height of 203 feet and comes in two versions. Ariane 62, with two boosters, has a maximum liftoff weight of 540 metric tons and can deliver payloads of up to 10.3 metric tons to low Earth orbit. Ariane 64 has four boosters with a maximum liftoff weight of 870 metric tons and can deliver up to 21.6 metric tons to low Earth orbit.
In contrast, the latest version of Ariane 5 could carry a payload of about 20 tons to low Earth orbit, while SpaceX’s Falcon 9 can lift almost 23 tons.
ESA and Arianespace, a subsidiary of ArianeGroup, had planned to launch the first flight in 2020, but technical challenges, the Covid-19 pandemic and an over-ambitious development schedule caused a four-year delay.
According to Philippe Baptiste, president of the French National Centre for Space Studies, the delay was partly due to the loss of technical knowledge. There was too much time between the development of Ariane 5, which began in 1988, and Ariane 6 in 2014.
Ariane 5 “was a very good launcher, and we kept it too long,” he said. The rocket was once one of the most launched vehicles on Earth, but has recently been eclipsed by SpaceX’s Falcon 9, which offers similar performance at a cheaper price.
“We did not implement the evolutions at the right time, which caused us to lose some opportunities in Europe,” said Dr. Baptiste.
Compared to its predecessor, Ariane 6 has improvements, such as an upper stage powered by an engine that can be reignited up to four times. This makes it possible to fly missions requiring orbits at different altitudes on a single rocket.
It was after the second reignition that Tuesday’s Ariane 6 flight began to deviate from its flight plan. The vehicle’s auxiliary propulsion unit, which helps restart the engine, started up for a third time and then promptly shut down as a safety measure. Because of that problem, the upper stage engine did not reignite.
“We don’t know why it stopped,” said Martin Sion, CEO of ArianeGroup. “This is something we need to understand when we have all the data.”
This prevents the upper stage from deorbiting and burning up in Earth’s atmosphere, thereby preventing it from contributing to the growing space debris population, a goal ESA is pursuing with Ariane 6. Depending on the orbit, it could take years for the spacecraft to fall back to Earth naturally.
“This is not a unique situation,” Mr Sion said, adding that this is the scenario for many launch facilities.
On Tuesday, ESA tested the capabilities of the two-booster model with a series of small missions from private companies, government agencies and research institutes. Some of the spacecraft, small CubeSats, were launched into orbit, while others remained on board to collect data during the flight.
Two re-entry capsules were to be released as a demonstration of technology capable of bringing back cargo from space. However, due to the anomaly, the re-entry capsules were not released.
According to Mr Sion, the key phases of the flight — including take-off and satellite deployment — went smoothly. He said the final phase of Ariane 6 was a test of how the rocket’s upper stage behaves in microgravity.
“Many missions don’t need to restart in microgravity,” Mr. Sion said, stressing that the rest of the mission went according to plan. In future flights, “this is a flexibility that we can use or not use,” he added.
Still, the problems during the final leg of Tuesday’s flight could raise questions about whether Ariane 6 will be competitive in the global space market.
In June, Eumetsat, a European government weather monitoring agency, moved the launch of a new satellite from an Ariane 6 to a Falcon 9. During the press conference after the launch, Mr. Israel responded to this situation.
“What was demonstrated during the first 18 minutes was strictly sufficient to carry out a mission like the one for Eumetsat,” he said.
Additionally, the Ariane 6 is not partially reusable, a key factor that has reduced the cost of Falcon 9 flight and increased SpaceX’s competitiveness.
“It’s just pure economics,” said Laura Forczyk, a space industry analyst who founded the aerospace consulting firm Astralytical. “If you throw your rocket away after every use, it’s not cost-effective.”
Unfortunately, she added, this makes Ariane 6 “already obsolete in many ways, even before it is operational.”
Ariane 6 was expected to be 50 percent cheaper than ESA’s other rockets, although its price has risen over the course of its long development. ESA and ArianeGroup officials have been evasive about the rocket’s total cost.
Reusability of rockets “is going to be a challenge for them in the long run,” said Clay Mowry, the president of the International Astronautical Federation and former head of Arianespace’s U.S. subsidiary. Still, “they’ve made great strides,” Mowry said, including greater ignition, vehicle flexibility and launch capability.
Walther Pelzer, director general of the German space agency, said he is confident that Europe will master reusability in the future. However, he does not think it is the only factor that will determine the success of Ariane 6.
“Whether a launch vehicle needs to be reusable depends on the market,” he said, adding that the customers Arianespace has in mind for Ariane 6 are different from those using Falcon 9.
However long it takes for a European rocket builder to achieve reusability, the new rocket is booked through mid-2028, with 30 flights planned for various customers. That includes 18 launches for Project Kuiper, Amazon’s attempt to build a constellation of satellites in space that will attempt to compete with SpaceX’s Starlink service.
After the inaugural flight, another Ariane 6 rocket was scheduled for December. Six more launches were planned for 2025; eight were planned for the following year, including ESA’s Plato mission, a space telescope that will hunt for exoplanets.
Despite the technical problems, ESA CEO Josef Aschbacher expressed excitement and relief during the press conference after the launch.
“Today we have successfully launched Ariane 6,” he said. “This is a major milestone. Europe is back.”