France changes the companies to use its old Diamant shared launchpad
The French Guiana spaceport. The Diamant launchsite is labeled “B.”
Click for full resolution image. (Note: The Ariane-5 pad is now the
Ariane-6 pad, and the Soyuz pad is now controlled by rocket startup
MaiaSpace.)
France’s CNES space agency, which manages the French Guiana spaceport France owns, has now made some major changes in the rocket startups it will let share use of its old long unused Diamant launchpad.
In 2021, CNES opened a call for interest in a new commercial launch facility that it would build on the grounds of the old Diamant launch site at the Guiana Space Centre. On 25 July 2025, the agency announced seven companies that had been shortlisted: HyImpulse, Isar Aerospace, PLD Space, Rocket Factory Augsburg, Latitude, MaiaSpace, and Avio.
Since that announcement, Avio and HyImpulse have been removed from the list, with CNES offering no explanation. MaiaSpace voluntarily gave up its space after CNES, in September 2024, selected the company to assume control of the former Soyuz launch facility, now renamed ELM2.
The story today is that another new European rocket startup, Sirius Space, has been selected as a user of this pad. Thus, this shared launchpad will now be used by five companies, PLD, Isar, Rocket Factory, Latitude, and Sirius.
Of those five, the first three appear closest to launch, though only PLD intends to use this pad at present. Isar hopes to launch its Spectrum rocket from Norway’s Andoya spaceport on June 20th (after numerous scrubs). Rocket Factory has requested a launch license from the UK’s Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) to launch its RFA-1 rocket in July from the Saxavord spaceport on the Shetland Islands, but that remains to be seen, considering the CAA’s past slow behavior.
Meanwhile, PLD has committed €35 million to the Diamant site to prepare it for its own first launch of its Miura-5 rocket, presently expected before the end of 2026. How it will get reimbursed when those other companies begin using the launchpad facilities it built and paid for is not clear.
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Of the original seven, only MaiaSpace and Latitude were French. MaiaSpace has made other arrangements at Kourou that don’t involve a shared facility. The two companies deleted, Avio and HyImpulse, are Italian and German, respectively. Sirius, the company added, is French.
So we’ve gone from two of seven Diamant site sharers being French, to two of five. Evidence of creeping French chauvinism? Maybe not. Avio’s vehicles are all solid-fueled. HyImpulse’s is a hybrid. All of the others are liquid propellant designs. Isar’s Spectrum is LOX-propane, Sirius’s eponymous 1, 13 and 15 rockets are to be methalox. The other companies’ vehicles are kerolox designs. So it could be just that the two companies cut from the Diamant site were just not sufficiently similar to the others.
I have always thought France’s shared launchpad idea was a bad one, and these developments illustrate this. Notice how Isar and Rocket Factory are both launching elsewhere.
I am betting that in the end, this pad is going to be PLD’s, with others using it rarely if ever.
Wouldn’t surprise me at all if that is, indeed, how things eventually play out. Seems a bit like trying to put 5 pounds of rockets into a one pound bag.
And then there’s the actual pad configuration. Most of these vehicles are single-stick designs, but the Sirius 13 and 15 are to have two and four side-booster cores apiece, respectively. Sirius 13 is a Mini-Me Falcon Heavy and Sirius 15 looks like a Mini-Me Angara 5. Converting back and forth between single-stick and tri-core pad configurations at LC-39A was enough of a problem that SpaceX finally decided to leave the LC-39A Falcon pad in FH configuration permanently. I don’t think we can count on European pad designers to be more clever than SpaceX.