ESA approves taking the Vega-C rocket away from Arianespace
The council that runs the European Space Agency (ESA) today approved a resolution that shifted ownership of the Vega-C rocket away from government-run Arianespace and giving it back to its builder, the Italian aerospace company Avio.
Arianespace and Avio have agreed that Arianespace will remain the launch service provider and operator for Vega and Vega-C launch services until Vega flight 29 (VV29), scheduled for the fourth quarter of 2025. For Vega-C launches following VV29, the customers who have already contracted with Arianespace will be offered the possibility to transfer their contracts to Avio as the new launch service provider and sole operator of Vega.
Arianespace will primarily focus with ArianeGroup on the Ariane 6 exploitation to best meet the customer needs.
The council also agreed with France’s plan to allow independent commercial rocket startups to launch from French Guiana. Control of that spaceport has also been taken from Arianespace and returned to its owner, the French space agency CNES.
Essentially, this decision ties Arianespace’s future to Ariane-6, which is likely to disappear once its present manifest of launches, mostly for Amazon’s Kuiper constellation, gets launched.
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The council that runs the European Space Agency (ESA) today approved a resolution that shifted ownership of the Vega-C rocket away from government-run Arianespace and giving it back to its builder, the Italian aerospace company Avio.
Arianespace and Avio have agreed that Arianespace will remain the launch service provider and operator for Vega and Vega-C launch services until Vega flight 29 (VV29), scheduled for the fourth quarter of 2025. For Vega-C launches following VV29, the customers who have already contracted with Arianespace will be offered the possibility to transfer their contracts to Avio as the new launch service provider and sole operator of Vega.
Arianespace will primarily focus with ArianeGroup on the Ariane 6 exploitation to best meet the customer needs.
The council also agreed with France’s plan to allow independent commercial rocket startups to launch from French Guiana. Control of that spaceport has also been taken from Arianespace and returned to its owner, the French space agency CNES.
Essentially, this decision ties Arianespace’s future to Ariane-6, which is likely to disappear once its present manifest of launches, mostly for Amazon’s Kuiper constellation, gets launched.
The support of my readers through the years has given me the freedom and ability to analyze objectively the ongoing renaissance in space, as well as the cultural changes -- for good or ill -- that are happening across America. Four years ago, just before the 2020 election I wrote that Joe Biden's mental health was suspect. Only in this year has the propaganda mainstream media decided to recognize that basic fact.
Fourteen years ago I wrote that SLS and Orion were a bad ideas, a waste of money, would be years behind schedule, and better replaced by commercial private enterprise. Even today NASA and Congress refuse to recognize this reality.
In 2020 when the world panicked over COVID I wrote that the panic was unnecessary, that the virus was apparently simply a variation of the flu, that masks were not simply pointless but if worn incorrectly were a health threat, that the lockdowns were a disaster and did nothing to stop the spread of COVID. Only in the past year have some of our so-called experts in the health field have begun to recognize these facts.
Your help allows me to do this kind of intelligent analysis. I take no advertising or sponsors, so my reporting isn't influenced by donations by established space or drug companies. Instead, I rely entirely on donations and subscriptions from my readers, which gives me the freedom to write what I think, unencumbered by outside influences.
Please consider supporting my work here at Behind the Black.
You can support me either by giving a one-time contribution or a regular subscription. There are five ways of doing so:
1. Zelle: This is the only internet method that charges no fees. All you have to do is use the Zelle link at your internet bank and give my name and email address (zimmerman at nasw dot org). What you donate is what I get.
2. Patreon: Go to my website there and pick one of five monthly subscription amounts, or by making a one-time donation.
3. A Paypal Donation:
5. Donate by check, payable to Robert Zimmerman and mailed to
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c/o Robert Zimmerman
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You can also support me by buying one of my books, as noted in the boxes interspersed throughout the webpage or shown in the menu above. And if you buy the books through the ebookit links, I get a larger cut and I get it sooner.
Do I understand this correctly?
1: Arianespace told the ESA that they needed more control of the manufacturing in order to make the Ariane VI competitive.
2: ESA gave them far too little control, so the new rocket is not competitive.
3: Arianespace is being rewarded for its foresight by losing control of virtually everything it does, except for the already-obsolete brand-new rocket.
Who didn’t they sleep with, resulting in the path to oblivion?
Edward: Actually you got a basic fact wrong. Arianespace resisted this shift to private enterprise. ArianeGroup, the joint partnership of Airbus and Safran, and the builder and owner of Ariane-6, demanded more control. ESA and the EU gave it to ArianeGroup, making Arianespace more irrelevant. In that deal ArianeGroup was given the freedom to pick its own subcontractors, rather than being forced to spread that work around within ESA. This reduced the costs quite a lot.
However, ArianeGroup also agreed with Arianespace officials that reusability was a pipe dream and wouldn’t work, so it designed Ariane-6 as an expandable rocket. Even with the above savings, it still left the rocket non-competitive in today’s market, as proven by the Eumetsat decision last week.
Do a search of Btb for ArianeGroup and Ariane-6, and look at posts from the 2014-2017 time period.
As for Arianespace, as ESA shifts more and more to relying on private independent companies, it becomes more and more irrelevant. Right now its only job is acting as the management of the French Guiana launch facilities as well as managing launches of Ariane-6 for ArianeGroup. Since France has taken back ownership of French Guiana from Arianespace, it could soon lose that responsibility as well (though I expect France to simply hire Arianespace to run things for it, at least for awhile).
Thank you, Robert.
It seems my memory fades, on this topic, although I do remember that they stuck to the widely held belief, at the time, that reusable boosters would prove to not be economically practical. Falcon 9 was already the low cost leader, but SpaceX had not yet demonstrated that refurbishment was economical, at least for the Falcon design.
Over at the Secret Projects Forum, there are all kinds of papers about winged RLVs that never got funding due to dullards who didn’t want to spend R&D.
That is an accusation that cannot be made against SpaceX on the Right or China son the Left.
Rocketry is either important to you, or it isn’t.
Europe has been stupid.