It will take patience to see Ariane 5 take off. The last flight of the European Space Agency’s launcher, whose takeoff was scheduled for Friday evening June 16 from Kourou, in French Guiana, has been postponed for at least two weeks. due to an anomaly, Arianespace announced Thursday.
“Non-conformities” have been detected on the control lines involved in the separation of the boosters from the rocket, Arianespace told Agence France-Presse, which will communicate a new launch date “at the end of June”.
“In accordance with security requirements, Arianespace has decided to postpone the deployment of the launcher,” the company responsible for operating European launchers said in a tweet. The transfer of the launcher to his launch pad in Kourou, before the launch, has been cancelled. This decision “is not out of the ordinary” and “is part of our reliability approach that has made Ariane 5 so successful,” according to Arianespace.
This 117th and final flight of the European rocket, which bids farewell after twenty-seven years of service, is to place a French military communications satellite (Syracuse 4B) and an experimental German satellite into orbit. “The launcher and the Heinrich-Hertz-Satellit and Syracuse 4B satellites are at the final assembly building in a stabilized configuration and in all the required safety conditions”, assures Arianespace.
Takeoff was scheduled for this Friday between 9:26 p.m. and 10:11 p.m. GMT from the Guiana Space Center (CSG). This final flight comes in a low period for Europe in space, almost deprived of independent access to space pending the relay of Ariane 6, while competition rages on the launcher market dominated by the American SpaceX.
At issue: the sudden end of the operation of Russian Soyuz rockets, following the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which plunged the activity of the Kourou base. A situation aggravated by the failure of the first commercial launch of the Italian light launcher Vega C, in December 2022, and the cumulative delays of Ariane 6, whose maiden flight will take place in the best of cases at the end of 2023. After the last flight of Ariane 5, there will be only one Vega launch left in September and a probable return to flight of Vega-C at the end of the year.
