Ariane 6 maiden flight slowdown deals a blow to Europe's ambitions

The European Space Agency (ESA) has announced the terrible news from its director general, the Austrian Josef Ashbacher: the maiden flight of its new Ariane 6 launcher has been delayed yet again and will not take place "until the last quarter of 2023". 

The newly announced slowdown means that ESA runs the certain risk of leaving Europe without much of its space access capability. Ariane 6 is the successor to Ariane 5, whose production lines are already shut down and of which only three launchers remain manufactured and contracted. One will fly in December with two communications satellites and a meteorological satellite, a second in February with a French military secure communications satellite, and the last is scheduled for 5 April, with the European space probe JUICE, which will study Jupiter and its satellites.  

So from April until the Ariane 6 maiden qualification flight scheduled for late 2023, and provided it is a success, Europe will be six months without a heavy space transportation capability. ESA will only have the small Vega-C, which has only flown once and whose payload capacity - between 1.4 and 2.5 tonnes, depending on the orbits - is a far cry from that of Ariane 6, at between 5 and 11.5 tonnes.

This means that the plans of the head of ESA's Launcher Division, Swiss Daniel Neuenschwander, who was responsible for managing and funding the Ariane 6 programme to the tune of 4 billion euros, have collapsed. It was intended that at least a dozen Ariane 6 flights would remain after Ariane 6's entry into service, in order to overlap launches between the two... and it didn't happen. What happened? 

When ESA gave the green light to the development of Ariane 6 at its December 2014 summit of ministers in Luxembourg - recalls a veteran national industry executive - the aim was to obtain a launcher for development "as quickly as possible, based on technologies already proven in orbit, although with some important improvements", says a veteran national industry executive, "at an attractive cost for the commercial and institutional sector, at half the price of Ariane 5", with each launch costing around 150 million euros.

Studies in the 2000s showed that to guarantee European continuity of access to space, a disposable, non-reusable vector was required, "above all reliable, modular, versatile, capable of carrying out missions to all orbits with different configurations to adapt to market evolutions". And so the Ariane 6 project was born.  

Once the development contract with the prime contractor, ArianeGroup, was signed in December 2015, ESA has been announcing the Ariane 6 liftoff for 2020, 2021, 2022, early 2023 and now six months later. This is a setback for the private entities and official organisations that were confident that the new vector would be available from next summer. But major difficulties have been encountered, especially in the development of the two cryogenic liquid-fuelled engines - Vinci and Vulcain-2.1 - that power the first and second stages of Ariane 6, whose tests and ground trials have not yet yielded the desired results.

In addition, the planned liftoff at the end of 2023 has limitations. It will take place, says the Agency's director general, provided that "three critical milestones" have been passed in the first quarter of next year. The first is the "successful completion" of tests on the reignitable Vinci rocket engine that powers the Ariane 6 upper stage, a test campaign that began on 5 October at the German Aerospace Agency's (DLR) engine evaluation centre in Lampoldshausen. 

The second threshold to be crossed is to begin ignition testing of the powerful Vulcain 2.1 engine that powers the main stage with Ariane 6 installed on its launch pad in French Guiana. And the third is to pass the qualification review of the complete launch system by the end of March. Quite an exam. 

With an order book totalling 29 launches as of 19 October, Stéphane Israël, the CEO of Arianespace - the French company focused on marketing Ariane rockets - believes that this volume of contracts is "very solid for a launcher that has not yet flown". And he is right. But loyalty has begun to wane.

Some of the companies and institutions that have committed to Ariane 6 are beginning to have doubts that it is the right instrument to position their satellites in space. "Those whose business or activity does not allow them to wait are already looking for an alternative. On the other hand, those who can wait, will keep their contract," reflects a Spanish space sector executive. And that is what is already happening, either overtly or covertly.

The first organisation to abandon its commitment to Ariane 6 is ESA itself. The accumulation of delays and the fact that the first launch is scheduled for the end of 2023, at the earliest, has led the recently held Council of the European Agency to decide that the HERA scientific satellite, which should take off on 8 October 2024 aboard an Ariane 6, will do so on its most direct competitor: the Falcon 9 rocket of the US company SpaceX, owned by the tycoon Elon Musk. This is not possible with Russian rockets because Vladimir Putin has paralysed cooperation with the EU and the countries that have imposed sanctions on the Kremlin over the war in Ukraine. 

According to German Günther Hasinger, the Agency's science director, HERA's launch "cannot afford delays". The probe is due to be in the vicinity of the trajectory of the 163-metre diameter asteroid Dimorphos on 28 December 2026, in order to scan the crater and the effects of the impact of NASA's DART probe on 26 September.  To reach the asteroid 11 million kilometres from Earth, "HERA will fly on a Falcon 9," confirmed ESA's director general.

Among the remaining 28 launches already committed, there are some that are unlikely to make it into US hands. This is the case of the 3.5-tonne CSO-3 satellite, whose launch into orbit completes the new constellation of French high-resolution electro-optical spies, consisting so far of CSO-1 and CSO-2, launched in December 2018 and December 2020, respectively.  

CSO-3 is currently scheduled to take off at the end of 2023, but is not expected to do so until Ariane 6 has demonstrated in several previous flights that it is reliable enough to position such a secretive and costly military spacecraft in space. The Directorate General for Armaments, headed by Emmanuel Chiva, is responsible for the platform and will wait as long as necessary. 

The delay also affects the Australian communications satellite Optus 11, which is scheduled to be launched into orbit in the second half of 2023. And the European meteorological organisation EUMETSAT, whose two Meteosat Generation III satellites are scheduled for 2024 and 2025. And also the European Union and its Galileo navigation constellation. ESA's project manager, the Spaniard Javier Benedicto, maintains that Ariane 6 "is our preferred option". But that does not prevent him, he said, "from looking for launch options outside Europe". 

Was ESA wrong to opt for a disposable rocket like the Ariane 6 and not a reusable one, like Elon Musk's Falcon 9? The national space sector professionals consulted say no. Among them is Víctor Rodrigo, who for 27 years was head of CRISA, a Spanish company specialising in advanced electronics for launchers and satellites, now part of Airbus. Currently an independent consultant to ESA and the European Union, Rodrigo maintains the view that "first you have to develop a good, disposable launcher and, if you want it to be reusable, that comes later". Despite its ups and downs, the Agency is in both areas.