Europe wants to return to the space competition with a new rocket to rival with space X. ESE strategy change
ARIANE 6 PHOTO satellite launcher: Julien de Rosa / AFP / Profimedia
The European Space Agency (ESA) is aimed at launching reusable rockets after Ariane 6 to recover the accumulated delays in relation to the US Spacex company, led by billionaire Elon Musk, said Josef Aschbacher, director of ESA, in an interview for AFP, taken by Agerpres.
“We have to recover the gap in a situation where we see that there is a dominant actor, Spacex, and enter the market with a relatively fast reusable launcher. We are on the right track to achieve this,” he said.
ESA pre -selected five companies this summer: Isar Aerospace (Germany), Rocket Factory Augsburg (Germany), Maiaspace (France), Orbital Express Launch (United Kingdom) and PLD Space (Spain) for its European project Launcher Challenge.
The five candidates will be proposed for financing at the ESA Ministerial Council, which will take place in November, in Germany, a strategic meeting, where the budgets and priorities of the European space industry will be decided for the coming years. “Finally, of the five, we will reduce the number to a smaller one, maybe two (…) or even less,” said Josef Aschbacher.
This project is meant to open the market for European institutional launches – until now reserved for large programs such as Ariane and Vega – in front of new private actors, who develop small reusable launchers. “At the same time with our decision to launch Ariane 6 and to relaunch Vega C, we also decided a paradigm change. The next generation of launchers will be very different,” said ESA director.
Ariane 6, an expensive rocket
The ARIANE 6 rocket, whose inaugural flight took place in July 2024 and has made two commercial launches so far, was conceived as an evolution of the ARIANE 5 model, targeting everything else the reliability of the institutional and commercial missions.
“Ariane 6 is an excellent rocket. It is very precise. We have made three launches, two others are foreseen before this year,” the director ESA recalled.
The next launch of the Ariane 6 rocket is scheduled to take place from the Kourou Space Center in French Guyana, on November 4, at 9:03 pm GMT: it will have to place the Sentinel-1D satellite for the European Copernicus program for the Earth.
Taking into account the number of launches provided for Ariane 6, the reuse of this launcher was considered an unprofitable short -term option. The addition of the reusable character would have been delayed even more the entry into operation of this heavy launcher, a key element of the sovereign access of Europe in space, from which our continent was private for one year.
However, Ariane 6 is criticized for its high cost in relation to reusable competitors, such as Falcon 9 rocket, developed by Spacex.
