After potentially two launches this year, Arianespace aims for six Ariane 6 flights in 2025, eight in 2026, and 10 in 2027. “What has been achieved tonight allows us to go full speed with this ramp-up,” Israël said.
Sion was a bit more circumspect in his comments, saying that the capabilities Ariane 6 demonstrated with Tuesday’s flight cover what is required for the “largest part” of the rocket’s planned missions. Some of Ariane 6’s future launches, like those with Europe’s Galileo navigation satellites or Amazon’s Kuiper spacecraft, will use some of the upper stage’s long-duration capabilities ESA tested Tuesday.
“When you’ve got something that you don’t understand, you have to understand to see if it will have consequences,” Sion said. “But when we make a flight like the one we did today, what is important is to have clear objectives and to say, ‘OK, if we have made this, and this, and this, we are where we should be in order to authorize the next launches. And all that has been fulfilled.
“So it’s true that in the next days and weeks, when we have all the data, we will analyze to understand better what happened,” Sion said. “What is clear is that the APU, when we restart it in microgravity… we knew that the way it would behave would be different. But a lot of missions do not need to be restarted in microgravity. This is a flexibility that we could use or not.”
Nevertheless, the Ariane 6 achieved most of its objectives Tuesday. The Vulcain main engine and solid-fuel boosters worked. The Vinci engine worked. So did the brand-new launch pad for Ariane 6. The rocket’s guidance system appeared to function normally, something that ESA officials couldn’t say after the Ariane 5 rocket’s disastrous first flight in 1996, which ended in an explosion.
“We are relieved. We are excited,” Aschbacher said in a post-launch press conference. “This is a historic moment. An inaugural launch of a heavy launcher does not happen every year. It happens probably every 20 years, or every 30 years. The last one (for Europe) was about 30 years ago, and today we have launched Ariane 6 successfully, and this is a big milestone.”
Sion agreed, adding that he felt a “sense of relief” after Tuesday’s flight.
“But also a sense of pride for all the teams who have been working for this program, the thousands of rocket-makers from ArianeGroup, from all the European industrial partners, from 13 countries, who have been working tirelessly on this program to overcome these challenges. It has been a difficult program, and their work enables us today to see such a brilliant success.”
