The director general of the European space agency, Josef Aschbacher, announced a new lag of the inaugural flight of the rocket. It will not take place before the fourth trimester 2023.
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Despite the displayed smiles, the time was for caution on Wednesday, October 19, at the headquarters of the European Space Agency (ESA) in Paris. The Director General, the Austrian Josef Aschbacher, announced a new lag of the inaugural flight of Ariane-6. It will not take place before the fourth quarter of 2023, provided that the test campaign takes place as envisaged. “It is a scheduled date and the program must still carry out a certain number of key stages successively and in due time so that this calendar remains valid,” he warned.
This is not the first postponement for the European rocket since the project was launched in December 2014. It was a question of quickly reacting to the offensive of Elon Musk who, with SpaceX, broke the prices launching by reducing them by more than 40 %. The new entrant put an end to the European-Russian duopoly formed by Ariane and Proton by changing the fundamentals of the market: high prices justified by the safety of flights.
Europeans then gave themselves six years to develop Ariane-6, more flexible with usage and especially 40 % to 50 % cheaper than Ariane-5. The inaugural flight was envisaged on July 21, 2020, the anniversary of the first steps of the man on the moon during the Apollo-11 mission of 1969.
Very quickly, however, with the first setbacks, this date was forgotten. The COVVI-19 pandemic aggravated the situation during the year 2020. Never mind, a new deadline was put forward for the end of 2021, also pushed back several months. But in the spring, unforeseen difficulties arose to which were added delays in the trials of firing of the upper floor of the rocket on the site of the German Space Agency (DLR) in Lampoldshausen.
Additional costs generated by delays
However, since Monday, October 17, the entire launcher has been assembled on its shot from the Guyanese space center in Kourou. This model will not fly, but will be used to test all the interfaces and communications between the rocket and its shooting step. The tests must make it possible to check the flight software, those of the control benches, as well as the filling and emptying operations of the tanks.
These new deadlines weigh down the cost of the program – it was initially estimated at around 4 billion euros. Daniel Neuenschwander, in charge of launchers at ESA, spoke of an additional cost of 600 million euros. States would have been committed for 400 million. It therefore remains to find 200 million by the next ESA ministerial conference, scheduled for November.
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