Third Try’s the Charm for European Rocket

After two major launch failures that threatened Europe’s leadership of the satellite launch industry, the new Ariane 5 rocket scored a crucial success in a test flight from French Guiana on Wednesday.

The 1.6-million-pound rocket thundered skyward, carrying a 2.6-metric-ton mock-up of a telecommunications satellite and a 2.8-ton capsule designed to drop off at an altitude of 125 miles for later recovery in the Pacific Ocean.

The news service Agence France-Presse, quoting officials at the space center at Kourou, French Guiana, said the mission was a success. French President Jacques Chirac expressed his great satisfaction.

On its maiden flight in 1996, Europe’s newest rocket veered out of control and blew up in a fiery nebula over the South American rain forest. Test No. 2 went better in 1997--but a dummy satellite was inserted into orbit 5,600 miles too low.

So there were white knuckles and furrowed brows at the European Space Agency on Wednesday for the third and final shakedown mission of Ariane 5, intended to keep Europe in the vanguard of the commercial satellite launch market, worth an estimated $2.5 billion a year.

With its new 170-foot-high launcher, the 13-nation ESA, in which the French play a leading role, hopes to garner up to 60% of the expanding but increasingly competitive commercial launch market.

“The Ariane 5 is immensely important for the future of Europe in space,” John Logsdon, director of George Washington University’s Space Policy Institute, said in a telephone interview. “The credibility of European, and especially French, space technology rides on today’s launch.”

Already, an older series of Ariane rockets has enabled the ESA to secure about half of the 20 to 30 annual commercial satellite launches, industry experts say. In second place, with 20% to 25%, is Lockheed Martin, which has its Atlas line and the Proton through a joint venture with Russia. Then comes Boeing’s Delta, with about 10%.

“With Ariane 5, we’re going to retake a lap-length lead, but the competition is going to be ferocious,” predicted Jean-Marie Luton, president of Arianespace, the ESA’s commercial offshoot.

Development of the new European rocket began in 1985 and cost $7.2 billion. Ariane 5 is designed to lift payloads of 5.9 to 6.8 metric tons into geostationary orbit while packing twice the power of the Ariane 4.

The new rocket is meant to provide launch capability for low-altitude orbits as well as interplanetary space probes, and to lift the cargo vehicle that is to be the ESA’s contribution to servicing the international space station.

For Europe’s ambitions in space, “Ariane 5 is central,” Logsdon said. “Europe badly needs it to be a success.”

Andre Van Gaver, an ESA official involved with the Ariane program, has predicted that the new launcher and its upgrades will be able to operate for the next 25 to 30 years. Ariane 5 also is coming in time to cater to a new type of customer: cellular telephone and Internet operators that will require “constellations” of multiple satellites in relatively low orbits a few hundred miles above Earth.

The launch business, though, is changing so fast that it is hard to assess Ariane 5’s commercial chances. The Ariane is expected to have a launch cost of $110 million to $120 million. Arianespace’s U.S. competitors are now developing reusable rockets that should bring the price of a launch below $100 million. The Chinese, with their Long March boosters, also want a bigger piece of the international action.

“It’s a market where the veterans are well-established but costly, and where the newcomers still have to prove themselves,” one industry specialist told Agence France-Presse.

While Ariane 5 was on the drawing board, the largest commercial satellites have grown much bigger. Subsequent plans had to be drawn up for increasing the new launcher’s payload capacity to 9 metric tons in geostationary orbit by 2001, and to 12 metric tons by 2005.

The failure of the first Ariane 5 flight on June 4, 1996, was the worst disaster in European space history. The rocket tore itself apart 11,000 feet above the Kourou launch pad, and four uninsured research satellites worth $500 million were destroyed in the fireball.

An investigation found that a software problem was at fault: Guidance programs from the older Ariane 4 had been installed on the new launcher without any prior testing.

Nearly 18 months later, on Oct. 30, 1997, the second test of Ariane 5 left a mock communications satellite in a lower-than-ideal orbit that would have knocked two years off its 10-to-15-year life span.

Since those setbacks, “the necessary modifications have been made,” said Eric Dautriat, who is in charge of launchers at the French National Center of Space Studies, prime contractor for Ariane 5.

Cheered by Wednesday’s successful launch, ESA officials forecast there would be eight commercial missions of the launcher annually. They said four are already scheduled to begin in March or April.