2023-11-04 06:30:15
The European Ariane-6 rocket on its launch pad, in Europe’s spaceport, in Kourou (Guyana), June 22, 2023. AFP PHOTO / ARIANEGROUP / S MARTIN
It’s a cruel anniversary looming. On December 2, 2014, destabilized by the sudden arrival of Elon Musk, who imposed himself on the launcher market by slashing prices, the Europeans reacted by deciding to design Ariane-6, a rocket capable of competing with the Falcon 9s of the billionaire. The objective was to achieve a first flight in July 2020.
Nearly nine years later, this is not the case. Worse, Mr. Musk’s company SpaceX dominates the market and imposes its rules. Since this fall, Europe no longer has access to space. Indeed, the last Ariane-5 took off in July and the tiling planned with its successor, Ariane-6, could not be carried out as planned due to accumulated delays. We will have to wait until 2024 for a first shot. The height of bad luck: the small Italian rocket Vega carried out its last launch in October, and the program for the next model, Vega-C, was suspended after an in-flight failure.
In addition to the techno-industrial difficulties of the Ariane-6 program and the cumbersome nature of the organization, political tensions have been added for two and a half years. Germany, one of the three main partners in the project led by the European Space Agency (ESA), alongside France, project manager of the program, and Italy, now wants to go it alone in this matter. spatial. It intends to put an end to the leadership of the French ArianeGroup in this area, by carrying out its own development of mini-launchers, which would compete with Ariane and Vega. To obtain this opening of competition, Berlin is putting pressure, threatening to no longer continue to finance the European launcher, which it considers too expensive and poorly managed.
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It is in this tense context that representatives of the twenty-two ESA member countries are meeting on Monday, November 6 in Seville (Spain). A crucial meeting for the first of two days of the Space Summit, which is held every six months in the country holding the rotating presidency of Europe – currently Spain – and which continues the next day, Tuesday, with a Union council dedicated to space.
The objective is to find a compromise allowing both to ensure the first ten years of operation of Ariane-6 and to prepare for the future, by opening the launcher market to competition. If the discussions are successful, a new page in European space history will be written, marked by a paradigm shift similar to that experienced by the United States with the arrival of private competitors like Elon Musk.
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