There is a global push in space exploration these days, but one has to admit that America steals the headlines most of the time in this field. That goes for anything from new rocket designs to daring missions to other worlds, and it is caused by the fact that the U.S. invests and does the most to advance our species beyond the borders of our planet. But, from time to time, something great happens elsewhere, and we can’t help ourselves from taking a closer look.
Yet ESA has its own agenda, and from time to time it involves developing hardware capable of leaving our world. By that I mean rockets, obviously, and ESA’s most recent one, the Ariane 6, just took flight for the first time. A perfect opportunity for us, then, to have a proper look at a rocket that is not made by Elon Musk or NASA, yet works just as well.
First, a thing or two about how the rocket came to be. Although not as visible as its American counterpart, Europe has been at it launching stuff into space for a while now. It has done this mostly by using a family of rockets called Ariane, named after Ariadne, the daughter of King Minos of Crete in Greek mythology.
This family of rockets was born in the late 1970s with the Ariane 1. Since then, it has constantly grown to comprise a total of five versions. Europe’s higher-ups decided to build Ariane 6 back in 2014, and a year later they tasked a company named ArianeGroup with making it.
The goal of Ariane 6 was to allow Europe to take point “in the fast-changing commercial launch service market.” The task was too big for a single company, so ArianeGroup enlisted the help of hundreds of companies in 13 European countries. ESA handles the process of procurement and dictates the architecture of the overall launch system.
The resulting Ariane 6 is a rocket that stands 197 feet tall (60 meters) and weighs as much as 900 tons when fully loaded. It can be used to deliver both heavy and light cargo to a variety of orbits.
The rocket was built as a three-stage contraption: the first stage is made up of solid rocket boosters (either two or four of them, depending on the version), then comes the core stage, and finally, the upper stage.
The boosters and the core stage take care of the rocket’s flight in the first phase of each mission. The boosters are of the P120C variety, the same ones used to power the first stage of the Vega-C rocket of the European Space Agency.
The core is pushed up by a liquid-fuelled Vulcain 2.1 engine, a derivation of the powerplant used on the previous Ariane 5. Combined with the power of the boosters, it should generate some 135 tons of thrust in the first ten minutes of flight.
Finally, the upper stage, the one that actually reaches space, gets its kick from a Vinci engine that burns cryogenic liquid oxygen and hydrogen. The powerplant can be ignited multiple times, moving payloads to where they need to be in orbit.
On top of the rocket there is the fairing that contains the payloads. It comes in two sizes, depending on the mission: a smaller one measuring 46 feet (14 meters) and a larger one standing at 66 feet (20 meters). Both are made of carbon fiber-polymer composite and have a diameter of 18 feet (5.4 meters).
Photo: ESA
I said earlier the rocket comes in two versions, depending on the number of boosters that power it. In two-booster configuration the hardware is called Ariane 62, and it can deliver 4.5 tons of cargo into geostationary transfer orbit or 10.3 tons into low Earth orbit.
The larger, four-booster version called Ariane 64 is used to send 11.5Â tons into geostationary transfer orbit and 21.6 tons into low Earth orbit.
We’re talking about the Ariane 6 now because the rocket just had its first flight earlier this week. On July 9 it departed the specially constructed launch pad in French Guiana on a mission officially called VA262.
This was a demo flight, but it doesn’t mean it was all just for show. The rocket took up with it “a varied selection of experiments, satellites, payload deployers and reentry demonstrations” supplied by people and organizations from all across the continent.
The Ariane 6 is the precursor rocket to an even more daring project. Come the next decade, Europe will have at its disposal something called the Ariane Next, a two-stage solution that should open up even more opportunities for ESA’s space exploration efforts.
