2023-07-04 03:45:09
Transfer of the Ariane-5 rocket to its launch pad, in Kourou (Guyana), May 30, 2023. S. MARTIN
The countdown has started again at the Guiana Space Center in Kourou. After a first postponement, on June 16, then a second, on July 4, due to too violent wind at altitude, if all goes well, Wednesday July 5 (between 7 p.m. and 8:05 p.m. in Kourou, i.e. July 6, between 2 a.m. and 3:05 a.m., in Paris), an Ariane-5 rocket will take off, carrying with it two satellites, one for observation – Syracuse 4B, for the French Armament General Directorate –, the another in telecommunications – Heinrich-Hertz, on behalf of the German Space Agency.
In the Jupiter control room, the atmosphere will be all the more tense for this placing in geostationary orbit at 36,000 kilometers from the Earth as it is the last flight of this launcher. This 117th launch will put an end to twenty-seven years of existence, marked by more than eighty consecutive successes.
This latest mission takes place at a pivotal moment in space history. Reserved for decades for major American, European, Russian or Chinese public institutions, access to space was shaken up by Elon Musk with SpaceX ten years ago. In 2013, the American billionaire suddenly imposed himself in the launches, to the point of becoming the reference.
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Its advance is accelerating today, boosted by the development of services linked to the Internet and 5G, which require the sending of thousands of small satellites in low orbit 500 kilometers from the Earth to provide the links. Thus, by projecting one hundred launches this year, its Falcon 9 rocket will achieve almost as many as Ariane-5 throughout its career. This almost makes you forget that the European rocket was for more than twenty-five years the queen of space against its American competitors Delta (Boeing), Atlas (Lockheed Martin) and Russian Proton.
Ambitious goals
In 1985, even before the Ariane-4 rocket launched its first flights, the European Space Agency (ESA) decided to think about the next model. More ambitious, with the aim of putting large satellites into orbit and also to carry out manned flights. During this meeting in Rome, a pre-study was launched at the same time as two other projects, Hermès, a shuttle capable of carrying five astronauts, and Columbus, a space station moving 400 kilometers around the Earth. “Of these three major programs, only that of Ariane-5 went to the end”says Jean-Marc Astorg, director of strategy at the National Center for Space Studies (CNES).
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