Ariane-6’s first launch now likely delayed again, until 2024
According to officials from the German company OHB, which makes parts of Europe’s new Ariane-6 rocket, its first launch will not take place before the end of this year, as presently scheduled by Arianespace, the commercial arm of the European Space Agency (ESA).
In a May 10 earnings call, executives with German aerospace company OHB predicted that the rocket will make its long-delayed debut within the first several months of 2024, the strongest indication yet by those involved with the rocket’s development that it will not be ready for launch before the end of this year.
“It’s not yet launched, but we hope that it will launch in the early part of next year,” said Marco Fuchs, chief executive of OHB, of Ariane 6 during a presentation about the company’s first quarter financial results. A subsidiary of OHB, MT Aerospace, produces tanks and structures for the rocket. Later in the call, he estimated the rocket was no more than a year away from that inaugural flight. “I am getting more and more confident we will see the first launch of Ariane 6 early next year,” he said. “I think we are within a year of the first launch and that is psychologically very important.”
These delays seriously impact many projects of ESA and other European companies. Ariane-6 was originally supposed to launch by 2020, overlapping the retirement of its Ariane-5 rocket by several years. Ariane-5 now has only one launch left, presently scheduled for June. Once that flies, Europe will have no large rocket available until Ariane-6 begins operations. This situation is worsened for Europe in that its other smaller rocket, the Vega-C, failed on its last launch and has not yet resumed operations.
It is not surprising therefore that many European projects have been shifting their launch contracts away from Ariane-6 to SpaceX and others. It is also not surprising that there is now an increasing move in Europe to develop new competing private rocket companies, rather than relying on a government-owned entity like Arianespace.
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
According to officials from the German company OHB, which makes parts of Europe’s new Ariane-6 rocket, its first launch will not take place before the end of this year, as presently scheduled by Arianespace, the commercial arm of the European Space Agency (ESA).
In a May 10 earnings call, executives with German aerospace company OHB predicted that the rocket will make its long-delayed debut within the first several months of 2024, the strongest indication yet by those involved with the rocket’s development that it will not be ready for launch before the end of this year.
“It’s not yet launched, but we hope that it will launch in the early part of next year,” said Marco Fuchs, chief executive of OHB, of Ariane 6 during a presentation about the company’s first quarter financial results. A subsidiary of OHB, MT Aerospace, produces tanks and structures for the rocket. Later in the call, he estimated the rocket was no more than a year away from that inaugural flight. “I am getting more and more confident we will see the first launch of Ariane 6 early next year,” he said. “I think we are within a year of the first launch and that is psychologically very important.”
These delays seriously impact many projects of ESA and other European companies. Ariane-6 was originally supposed to launch by 2020, overlapping the retirement of its Ariane-5 rocket by several years. Ariane-5 now has only one launch left, presently scheduled for June. Once that flies, Europe will have no large rocket available until Ariane-6 begins operations. This situation is worsened for Europe in that its other smaller rocket, the Vega-C, failed on its last launch and has not yet resumed operations.
It is not surprising therefore that many European projects have been shifting their launch contracts away from Ariane-6 to SpaceX and others. It is also not surprising that there is now an increasing move in Europe to develop new competing private rocket companies, rather than relying on a government-owned entity like Arianespace.
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
Bob, isn’t Ariane 6 being developed by a private consortium, not a government entity? As I recall they explicitly refused to proceed unless they held control over the government. Of course it’s a mute point since soon thereafter these private brainiacs chose to pursue a 100% expendable design claiming reusability was infeasible despite SpaceX already achieving regularized Falcon 9 re-use, so the effort was doomed to fail financially regardless.
MDN: You are correct. ArianeGroup owns Ariane-6, and got that ownership by refusing to do it unless ESA gave it. The result is undoubtly a more efficiently-made rocket that costs less than Ariane-5.
However, ArianeGroup also abided by ESA’s preferred design. It didn’t independently conceive Ariane-6 in order to compete best on the market. It built Ariane-6 to the basic specifications ordered by the ESA. Thus, it was not reusable, which means while cheaper than Ariane-5 it remains far too expensive to successfully compete, which means it has had difficulty garnering customers.
I wonder if this last lack has also contributed to the delays. Having lots of customers would have encouraged development. Having few means less capital to work with.
Two points 1) Europe has been dominated by Socialists since after WW2. They do NOT believe in private enterprise. After eighty years of being in control, they are not going to change their spots 2) Much of Europe, if not all, is guided by a philosophy known as Dirigisme (From the Latin Dirigo “To guide” or “To steer”). “Dirigisme or dirigism (from French diriger ‘to direct’) is an economic doctrine in which the state plays a strong directive (policies) role contrary to a merely regulatory interventionist role over a market economy.[1] As an economic doctrine, dirigisme is the opposite of laissez-faire, stressing a positive role for state intervention in curbing productive inefficiencies and market failures. Dirigiste policies often include indicative planning, state-directed investment, and the use of market instruments (taxes and subsidies) to incentivize market entities to fulfill state economic objectives.” Neither bode well for Europes future efforts in space
Dirigisme also has the same root as the English adjective “dirigible”, or steerable. This term was originally used to describe a steerable airship or “dirigible balloon”, then finally shortened to just the noun “dirigible”.
A “dirigible” then became synonymous with rigid-framed airships, or Zeppelins, as opposed to non-rigid blimps, which confusingly enough, were also fairly dirigible!
Looks to me like a bad idea to replace the Ariane 5, which made a perfect launch of the JWST and has super top reliability track record. Very expensive payload owners will prefer it because of that, the extra launch cost is well worth it for them. It has a market nische there.
Ariane 6 will be delayed and then one of the first launches will fail as usual and it will take a decade to get a nice reliability track record, even if it turns out to be as good in that respect as its predecessor Ariane 5, which is pretty speculative.
So the argument for it is that it will have somewhat lower per-launch costs. But it will still be far from competitive visavi Falcon 9. And the development costs have to be paid off. The real reason for Ariane 6 is to feed money into Airbus and others involved in developing something wich isn’t better than what is already available. The aim is to consume money, not to create wealth.
With Europe’s low level of industrialization and lack of skilled engineers, it is a gamble to try to pull off a project like developing a space launcher. We in Europe must be realistic and adapt to our deliberate de-industrialization and de-education. Our only competitive hope is lowly paid unskilled labor in assembly industries that don’t require any modern infrastructure for energy and transports. Permanent high inflation and exchange rate depreciation is our only way forward now! As countries like Indonesia and Iran develop their wealth, Europe might compete for taking over their least paying jobs.
Sweden for example has 4 ,000,000 people in the work force, and 800,000 in working age who are analphabets, i.e. grown-ups who cannot read or write in any language. And the number of analphabets is increasing by several thousands a month at an accelerating rate. Analphabets will be the majority in a couple of decades. We have to look at how some countries in Africa have coped with an economic and societal situation very much like that in Europe. Unfortunately, Europe is not endowed with any natural resources of significance (even Norwegian oil is tiny on the global scale) and is located in a distant corner of the globe where no one has any errand passing by while going to some attractive place. So forget about developing launcher rockets!
MDN and Robert,
It seems to me that ArianeGroup is in a similar situation as Lockheed (was it merged with Martin Marietta then?) and Boeing were in the middle 1990s when the U.S. Air Force wanted the two companies to make heavy lift launch vehicles. Government specified what they wanted and the companies made them, but the specifications made no consideration for what commercial satellite companies would want in a launch vehicle, only what government wanted. As I like to say, when we let government be in charge, all we get is what government wants.
Commercial companies were saying, by then, that what they really needed were launch vehicles that could put payloads in low Earth orbit for $2,000 or less per pound. At that time, it cost about $10,000 per pound for most launch vehicles around the planet. Because the U.S. launch companies were focused on their government customer (a virtual monopsony), commercial companies were hiring Arianespace’s launch vehicles, because they were optimized for taking satellites to geostationary orbit, a popular orbit for most of the commercial companies of the 1980s and 1990s. The Ariane rockets were profiting* from U.S. commercial satellite makers and many of the world’s commercial satellite operators, because the U.S. launch industry wasn’t eager to market their rockets to them.
Because the Space Shuttle had almost destroyed the market for other U.S. launch vehicles, Ariane rockets prospered on the commercial satellites that at that time could not find enough U.S. launchers at a more reasonable price than Arianespace was offering. Arianespace thrived for three decades, until SpaceX came along and undercut them, catering to the desires of the commercial satellite companies. SpaceX also pointed out to the government that the Falcon rockets were suitable for many of their needs, too. As I like to say, when We the People are in charge, we get what we want.
If ArianeGroup can gain as much freedom from government dirigisme (what a wonderful word) as the U.S. launch companies have gained, then they may have a chance to thrive again.
_________
* “Profit” is not a well chosen word, as the Ariane rockets have been subsidized by Europe for their entire existence. They have yet to make an actual profit. This is consistent with the mindset that you both, MDN and Robert, had been expressing in your comments.